V God's speech is here! Everything you want to know about Ethereum 2.0 is here

Source: CSDN

On August 8, the "2020 Ethereum Technology and Application Conference China" was successfully held. CSDN founder and chairman, Geekbang Venture Capital founder Jiang Tao, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, Unitimes, Unicorn Era founder Jiang Yingying, CSDN vice president, token economy initiator Meng Yan, DeFi Labs founder Dai Shichao, PChain founder Cao Feng, Wanxiang Blockchain Lab head Du Yu, Force Protocol CEO & ForTube co-founder Lei Yu and other 26 heavyweights attended the conference, attracting thousands of developers to pay attention and gather online to participate in this technology feast. Ethereum founders, Ethereum core researchers and several top industry founders conducted in-depth analysis of DeFi, smart contracts, industry applications and other aspects, bringing developers a unique technical discussion.

At the conference, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin responded to the current status and launch issues of Ethereum 2.0, and based on the development of Ethereum 1.0 to date, he sorted out the progress and optimization that the Ethereum ecosystem has made in the past five years. In addition, this speech also deeply analyzed the challenges faced by Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0 and future development plans.

During his speech, Vitalik also called on more developers to understand and learn Ethereum-related technologies and participate in its construction, making Ethereum a more valuable platform for developers.

In order to gain a deeper understanding of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin's plan for the Ethereum ecosystem, this article summarizes the essence of Vitalik Buterin's speech during the live broadcast of the "2020 Ethereum Technology and Application Conference China". How did Ethereum grow from a geek community to the "king of public chains" in 5 years? Where is Ethereum 2.0 going? What are Ethereum's plans for the future? How will it grow with developers? With these questions, let's get closer to Ethereum and listen to what Vitalik Buterin has to say.

5 years of development, innovation is the direction we insist on

On July 30, 2020, Ethereum celebrated its fifth birthday. The Ethereum project began in late 2013, when Vitalik Buterin published the first version of the Ethereum white paper and formed the Ethereum team. In 2014, ETH crowdfunding was carried out. After a long development process, the Ethereum blockchain was finally officially released on July 30, 2015. Since then, Ethereum has had its first genesis block and released the first smart contract on the chain, including some games and simple applications.

Smart contracts can not only accomplish a variety of small things, but also support very important projects, such as the prediction market platform Augur, which recently released its V2 version on Ethereum. Ethereum started from this.

Along with rapid development comes the test of the market. In March 2016, Ethereum experienced its first hard fork, the "Homestead Fork", which was the first major change to the Ethereum protocol. Although the actual changes were not significant, mainly a few optimizations were made to the protocol, it showed that the Ethereum protocol still maintained an innovative trend and continued to move forward.

The reality is far more cruel than expected, and Ethereum is facing challenges one after another. DAO was the first big application on Ethereum. Basically, anyone can put their ETH into the smart contract. At the same time, anyone who puts ETH into the smart contract can vote on the direction of the funds. This is the large-scale DAO - a decentralized autonomous organization.

However, how to ensure the security of smart contracts is still a difficult problem for technicians. At this time, DAO was hacked by malicious attacks. Faced with huge losses and countless doubts, in order to reverse the impact of the DAO hack at one time, the DAO fork occurred a month later. It must be said that the blockchain fork fundamentally saved everyone's tokens.

In 2017, both ETH and ETC existed as independent blockchains. At that time, many people were interested in Ico, and the rise in lco prices attracted great public attention, but from a technical point of view, the most exciting thing was the Ethereum "Metropolis" version and hard fork. "Metropolis" and hard forks provide support for some advanced cryptographic operations, from elliptic curves to elliptic curve pairings, and privacy solutions have begun to develop.

At this time, a demonstration project called Zcash was established on Ethereum, which was the first attempt to seek a privacy solution on Ethereum; in addition, the Aztec project was also trying to combine privacy and scalability through the zero-knowledge protocol Plunk. Hard forks make all this possible.

Improve efficiency

By the end of 2017, people were very interested in using the Ethereum network, and transaction volume increased sharply, exceeding 1 million transactions per day for the first time. With the rapid development, the network gradually became unable to cope with the capacity. At this time, the daily block volume was about 6000, and the daily uncle block volume increased to 2000. This means that the number of uncle blocks was 1/3 or 1/4 of the total block volume, which can be seen as very inefficient. Since then, the client has made some major improvements in efficiency. Therefore, even though the network is now used 10 times more than before, the uncle block rate has dropped to the same low level as a few years ago.

Today, the most pressing problem to be solved on the Ethereum chain is the Ethereum scale growth problem - the size of the chain, that is, the total size of the Ethereum blockchain and its state. Smart contract data is the smart contract code corresponding to each account. The Ethereum chain is growing continuously. Recently, the Gas limit has increased from 10 million to 12 million, and the growth rate is still accelerating. Although we have ways to allow users to store less data, the overall development trend will not change, and severe challenges still exist.

Currently, one of the tasks of the 1.x project is to solve this problem and prepare a scalability project, because the size of the blocks on the existing ETH 1 chain cannot be continuously increased. Once this is done, various security issues caused by centralization will soon appear. The short-term solution is called roll-ups technology. Roll-ups technology is a scalability technology. The concept was first proposed in an article on the research forum in 2018. In short, roll-ups is a hybrid solution between the first-layer system and the second-layer system of ETH. The idea is based on the second-layer system, such as the lightning network, state channels, and plasma. They put all data off-chain and all operations are performed off-chain to improve scalability and minimize the use of blockchain.

However, these second-layer projects will lead to various complex problems, because processing various applications is much more complicated than processing simple transactions. This brings more challenges. Roll-up still needs to use blockchain to restore important data in Roll-up. Each transaction on the chain occupies about 10 to 20 bytes, which is already a very small number, because most transactions currently exceed 100 bytes.

In addition, in terms of computing, the verification process of transactions occurs off-chain rather than on-chain. Users use zk-snark to save proof of knowledge, fraud proof or other complex technologies and verify transactions off-chain. Therefore, blockchain storage can replace nodes on Ethereum to store large amounts of data and perform large amounts of computing. Nodes on Ethereum only need to store a small amount of data and do no computing. This technology can increase scalability to 2,500 transactions per second, and there are already projects using this technology on the mainnet. Among them, Loopring and Zksync are currently the two largest projects, and more such projects will be launched in the future.

Ethereum 2.0

Ethereum 2.0, since 2014, the definition of Ethereum 2.0 has undergone many evolutions, improvements and upgrades. The core is Ethereum 2.0 sharding and proof of stake: Proof of stake is a consensus mechanism and an alternative to proof of work. Its goal is to increase the energy efficiency of the Ethereum protocol and eliminate the need to issue large amounts of ETH as rewards. In order to increase the security of the Ethereum blockchain, it is no longer necessary to process every transaction on the blockchain through each node. A simple shard can meet the needs of Ethereum. In the sharding system, each node only needs to process about 1% of the transactions, which may be even less in the future, perhaps reaching 0%, 1% or 5% in the future, which greatly increases the capacity of the blockchain.

Ethereum's proof of stake is based on the Casper FFG protocol and the LMD GHOST extension. If you want to learn more about Casper FFG, you can read the relevant papers; if you want to learn more about GHOST, you can go to the website vitalik.ca and read an article titled "A Casper CBC Tutorial" published by Vitalik, which mentions what LMD GHOST is and how it works. Its core is to combine the advantages of two different consensuses.

In the past 20 to 30 years, there has been a lot of academic research on protocols such as Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus and 1/3 fault tolerance, such as PBFT. This consensus itself has many benefits, but if chain-based consensus is used in protocols such as Bitcoin and currently Ethereum, it has the additional advantage of combining the advantages of chain-based consensus and traditional BFT consensus as much as possible.

Ethereum 2.0 started this kind of research in 2014 and as part of 2.0, the first proposed protocol was a slasher, the earliest proposal for the proof-of-stake algorithm. The first paper on sharding was published in 2016, and then a paper on the current proof-of-stake Casper FFG was published in 2017. It can be seen that there have been a lot of theoretical research on sharding of proof-of-stake between 2014 and 2017.

In 2018, the development of ETH 2 officially began, including writing the ETH 2 specification, ETH 2 client and then implementing the Ethereum 2 protocol in software, including the Prysmatic project, Lighthouse Nimbus Teku project and some other clients. It is necessary to write the ETH2 specification and the code that will run in 2020, by combining the Gasper paper, LMD, GHOST and Casper FFG.

ETH2’s Phase Development

In June 2020, the Phase0 multi-client testnet was released. This is the first testnet that includes more different clients. All different implementation protocols of Ethereum 2.0, at least Phase 0, the first phase of the Ethereum 2 protocol, can be the first to run smoothly. We look forward to launching the Ethereum 2 protocol mainnet later this year. The advantage of ETH 2 lies in its higher TPS, that is, higher transactions per second.

ETH 2 can achieve about 5,000 transactions, and with the roll-ups and sharding expansion based on it, it can achieve the goal of processing up to 100,000 transactions per second. If the issuance of ETH is reduced, the security of proof of stake will be higher. Therefore, the number of ETH released or issued in each block is 4.7 million per year. After proof of stake, it will be reduced to 0-2 million, and generally maintained at around 500,000.

Anyone with more than 32 ETH can participate in staking and become a proof-of-stake node. ETH 2 is divided into multiple phases. If the first phase, phase 0, is a proof-of-stake change, there will be no sharding, only a proof-of-stake chain, and it will be separated from the existing ETH 1 chain.

In the first phase, the proof-of-stake chain added data sharding, so it does not yet support sharding of transactions, only data publishing; in phase 1.5, ETH 1 and ETH 2 are merged here. After the merger, proof of work is no longer required and the proof-of-work chain is stopped. In phase 2, adding sharding to the transaction process is Ethereum's long-term roadmap.

Currently, Ethereum's short-term scalability upgrade can be achieved through 1.x. ETH 1.x is crucial for ETH 2 and the merger of ETH1 and ETH2 chains. After the preparation of phase 0, multi-client and test networks are completed. More security audits and smart contracts storing ETHer will be moved to the ETH 2 network, optimized and then merged to Phase 1.

At this stage, long-term efforts will eventually lead to the realization of Ethereum 2.x, providing scalability improvements, security improvements, and other improvements to ETH 2 after its launch. Most of the research has already started, but there are still various challenges.

challenge

Regarding the challenges faced, Vitalik first said that the testing process was very difficult. He wanted to find and eliminate all bugs and discover as many problems as possible before launching the mainnet. He hoped that Phase 1 would be simpler than Phase 0. He needed to implement Phase 0 and develop and test Phase 1.

At the same time, there are still many problems when merging ETH 1 and ETH 2. Combining the two requires combining existing applications on ETH 1 with the ETH 2 chain, and transferring all applications from the ETH 1 chain to the ETH 2 chain. This is a very complicated process, and the process needs to be thoroughly refined and possible problems must be fully tested.

Unfortunately, there are still many unknowns about the economics of proof of stake, and the difference between conventional technology and economics is that conventional technology can be tested, but economic principles cannot be tested. Because economics studies how people behave, the only thing we can do is to build a system where there are people with economic incentives and make them operate strictly in the way we want ETH 2 to work.

There are many things that cannot be predicted before the proof of stake system is officially launched. Only when people participate in it can we see how it works, which is why it is carried out in stages. In order to reduce risks, first make sure that proof of stake works, then make sure that sharding works, then combine ETH 1 and ETH 2, and then fully enable sharding. Therefore, take the benefits of ETH 2 and Ethereum seriously in each stage.

Conclusion

Finally, Vitalik told the majority of Ethereum developers: If you are building applications, you must be facing scalability issues. Each transaction consumes Gas. In the past month and a half, the price of Ethereum has remained high. If you are looking for ways to optimize your application, Roll-ups and Zk Roll-ups are highly recommended. For now, if you want to stake in Phase 0, you can stake in Phase 1. Roll-up expansion will definitely go further. Everyone in Ethereum knows that applications are facing severe challenges, and they are actively working to find solutions.

Regarding the progress of Ethereum 2.0, Vitalik Buterin said: "Phase 0 staking is about to begin. I am very excited and look forward to participating in it. I hope you are as excited as I am. Even if we can easily build applications with higher scalability in two years, we will definitely encounter other challenges. If you are using ETH 2, or building applications on ETH 2, or using Ethereum, you can learn about the relevant progress, think about the future development direction, and how to use it for yourself."

As more and more core developers join the development of the blockchain ecosystem, we look forward to Ethereum working with developers in the future to continue to grow into a more valuable platform and community.

Link to this article: https://www.8btc.com/article/632964
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