Blockchains’s rise over the last few years has been huge. A whole new industry of software developers, innovators, and entrepreneurs are building products on Blockchain. Despite its success, it is still a growing technology. But to keep growing Ethereum need to address a lot of key issues.
Ethereum 2.0 is a series of improvements and updates designed to solve the scaling problem of Ethereum. In our article “Ethereum 2.0 explained” we will show everything you need to know about Serenity. The following list shows the key feature of the Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap.
“Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap” – Content:
- Plasma
- Ethereum Casper
- Beacon Chain
- Aggregate Signatures
- Sharding
- eWASM
- What is Ethereum Serenity?
- Ethereum 2.0 Release Date
- “Ethereum 2.0 explained” – Conclusion
Plasma
Plasma is one of Ethereums scalability solutions. For example Ethereum is currently able to make 13-15 transactions per seconds. That is a really low capacity. Especially if you consider that visa is currently processing 20.000 transactions per second. So if cryptos like Ethereum wants to replace visa and act as digital cash, it needs to scale up its capacity.
Plasma can help to improve the transactions per second. It is a technique for conducting off-chain transactions while relying on the Ethereum blockchain. Thus, it still has the same level of security. While solving different problems, they all take operations away from the Ethereum “main chain” and perform them on the “off chain” instead. Learn more about Plasma.
Ethereum Casper
Most Blockchains rely on proof of work for consensus. As a result, you have a lot of people with a lot of computing power pointing that power to the network. So they make it costly if someone wants to be a bad actor. But because a lot of computing power gets lost, proof or work is really wasteful. It also burns a lot of electricity.
So Casper was developed to solve the proof of work problem. With Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum tries to stop the waste of computing power and electricity. There are two types of implementations. The first one is called Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) the other one is called Correct Buy Constructions (CBC). FFG is a combination of proof of work and proof of stake. CBC is a completely new concept of proof of stake. Learn everything about Casper in detail.
Beacon Chain
The beacon chain is a brand new proof-of-stake blockchain. It runs parallel to the current Blockchain and tries to solve the scalability problem.
A smart contract will allow validators to take part in the proof-of-stake protocol. Therefore they have to make a deposit of exactly 32 Ether, for example. When validators deposit into the smart contract, they put it on the beacon chain. So maybe they become active validators and will take part in the proof-of-stake protocol. The beacon chain will randomly select validators for block proposal and votings. This random sampling in the beacon chain is important. As a result, it stops validators colluding and influencing the system. Learn everything about Beacon Chain.
Aggregate Signatures
If each vote was a transaction, the blockchain would have to process all the votes step by step within a tight time period. This puts a limit on the number of validators that can take part. The more validators that can participate the better because it improves security.
Aggregate signatures work like a petition. So the petition is sent to each validator, who applies their signature in support. To reduce the load on the main chain these petitions are sent off-chain and only fully built-in the blockchain when the petition has enough support. Learn all about Ethereum Validator.
Sharding
Sharding is also part of Ethereum 2.0. It can realize the performance gains necessary to scale. So every PC that runs on the Ethereum blockchain has to process the transactions in a special order. Despite the fact that the network runs on thousands of PCs, different transactions cannot be processed at the same time. For example, the current Ethereum blockchain is one big single chain of blocks that have to process all transactions step by step.
Sharding is like adding new chains to process more transactions. So each shard is a separate blockchain with its own state and transaction history. But all shards also share the same proof-of-stake consensus with the beacon chain. The registered validators on the beacon chain will then become a global pool of validators. Thus, they validate blocks on the beacon chain and the shards. But this is just a simple explanation, learn everything about Sharding in detail
eWASM
Smart-contracts are one of the most interesting parts of Ethereum. With them, you can create great DApps and even more. Ethereum smart-contracts are currently written in Solidity or Vyper and compiled into the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) code. As a result, every node executes this code. So the faster the EVM can execute the code the better. But this leads to a lot of problems.
Thus, to solve these problems, eWASM replaces EVM. eWASM is based on WebAssembly (WASM). Thus, this change will make a huge difference in how many transactions can be processed and added to a block. Therefore, eWASM can increase transaction throughput. As a result, the network will also be more secure, supports more languages and can be portable. Learn everything about eWASM.
What is Ethereum Serenity?
Serenity is a fundamental update from Etheruem. It combines the above key features to solve the scaling problem. This enables Ethereum to process transactions faster and to compete with today’s financial services like Visa. As a result, Ethereum can finally be applied in the broad industry.
Ethereum 2.0 Release Date
Ethereum 2.0 will not be released in Q2 as planned.
So Eth 2.0 developer announced that they are 95% confident that they will launch it in 2020. They also said that everything else is considered a huge failure.
Danny Ryan, Justin Drake, and Vitalik Buterin are still confident, that the release will happen this year. They also said that the coming month should feature one major update for Ethereum: Staking Contracts. We can, therefore, assume that Ethereum 2.0 will be released at the end of the year.
“Ethereum 2.0 Explained” – Conclusion:
Serenity will be able to support massive on-chain transaction throughout while balancing decentralization and security. Therefore, Blockchain technology has the potential to develop an infrastructure for the world’s transfer of value. It also has the potential to be a platform for a new economic system and global collaborations. So be ready for the big changes.
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