Here’s How Vitalik Buterin Sees The “Endgame” For Ethereum 2.0
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, laid out his vision for ETH 2.0 in a blog post earlier this week titled “Endgame.”
With 2022 just around the corner, the launch of Ethereum 2.0 is increasingly anticipated by the community. It will be one of the most important upgrades to any blockchain as it will see the Ethereum network move from the energy-intensive proof of work to proof of stake mechanism. This will also come with additional perks for the blockchain such as scalability and cheaper transaction fees.
There already is a set roadmap for getting to this point and it has hit major milestones, apart from some delays with some upgrades. However, there have always been mini-additions to the roadmap along the way, with the most recent one coming from the founder Vitalik Buterin himself.
In a new blog post Buterin writes about building trustlessness and censorship resistance to levels by his accepted standards. In order to get there, he presented a “plausible roadmap,” with several surprises, including a proposed second-tier of staking using fewer network resources.
One of the main bottlenecks of these ‘big blockchains’, as Buterin puts it, is their large block sizes, which allows the blockchain to be able to only accommodate a limited number of nodes at a time to run fully participating nodes that create blocks. To overcome this issue, the founder lists out four things that can be done.
The “endgame”
To meet accepted standards for trustlessness and censorship resistance related to Ethereum 2.0, Buterin detailed a “plausible roadmap” to achieving this.
Starting with a second staking tier that will lower resource requirements for block validation. Buterin proposes transactions get split into (100) buckets, with a Merkle or Verkle tree root following each bucket.
As these “tree root” processes allow for large-scale data verification by someone who only has the tree’s root, the idea is to increase proof efficiency, thus scalability.
“The transactions in a block are split into 100 buckets, with a Merkle or Verkle tree state root after each bucket. Each second-tier staker gets randomly assigned to one of the buckets. A block is only accepted when at least 2/3 of the validators assigned to each bucket sign off on it.”
Buterin also talked about employing roll-up/privacy technology, such as fraud proofs and zk-SNARKs, for an added layer of security on top of the bucket system.
Ethereum Layer-2 platform Polygon is due to host the zk Summit this Thursday, in which they plan to reveal a significant announcement to do with zero-knowledge technology.
The co-founder sees value in introducing data available sampling (DAS). This essentially offers a light version of the blockchain, meaning block validation can happen without keeping a complete record of the entire blockchain.
To improve censorship resistance, Buterin proposes the creation of secondary transaction channels to handle block validation on a distributed basis.
In this setup, block production is centralized, but block validation is trustless and decentralized.
When is a finalized ETH 2.0 coming?
There are two major stages left for the completion of the move to Ethereum 2.0. These two stages are The Merge and the introduction of Shard Chains into the network. The Merge is when the Ethereum mainnet finally “merges” with the Beacon Chain – which is already live, signaling the end of proof of work on the network.
The introduction of Shard chains in the network will enable Ethereum to scale more efficiently by expanding its capacity to process transactions and store data. This final part will be rolled out in multiple stages with more features added over time.
The Merge and the addition of Shard chains are both scheduled to happen in 2022.
