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The next generation of the Ethereum blockchain has been in the works for years, but is finally coming to fruition.
According to an Ethereum foundation blog post, Ethereum 2.0 will now be available on December 1, instead of January 3, 2021 as originally planned.
The update will see the blockchain transition from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model, in which participants tie their cryptocurrency to the network as collateral.
For the launch of Ethereum 2.0 to take effect, 16,384 validators will need to stake a minimum of 32 ether (the cryptocurrency behind the network), which is worth around $ 12,800 at current market rates.
The encounter with this figure will trigger the launch of the Beacon Chain – infrastructure that will facilitate the transition – in what is described as the genesis event of Ethereum 2.0.
“We have strengthened Ethereum 2.0 as much as possible with simulated test environments, formal verifications and audits,” said Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of ConsenSys.
“We are incredibly excited to see the community galvanize around the first phase of Eth2, now with real value at stake.”
Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 will be rolled out in stages over the next few months, but the launch of the Beacon chain is the first critical step.
The most significant change is that the consensus mechanism underlying the Ethereum blockchain will move from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which is generally considered a more effective and efficient means of maintenance from the point of view. energy point of view the network.
A key way to describe the difference is that, in a PoW system, one unit of computing power equals one unit of mining power. Under PoS, however, a unit of value ensures a unit of mining power for the validator.
Both systems are designed to incentivize network maintenance while ensuring that data stored on the blockchain cannot be tampered with.
The second major improvement is the introduction of sharding into the Ethereum network (although this will happen as part of a later stage), which means that only a portion of the nodes need to validate a given transaction, thereby dramatically increasing the network throughput.
In the past, Ethereum has been criticized for lacking the scalability that would allow it to compete with legacy systems. For context, Visa is thought to process around 1,700 transactions per second (TPS), while Ethereum 1.0 can only handle a meager 25 TPS.
By effectively dividing the network into lanes, however, the maximum number of TPS processed by Ethereum 2.0 can be increased in magnitude.
Through CoinDesk
