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Recap
In our previous article (How Proof-of-Stack Consensus Works in Ethereum), we covered how the Proof-of-Stack consensus is used in Ethereum.
In this article, we discuss the roadmap for implementing version 2 of Ethereum.
Implementing Ethereum 2.0 roadmap
The Ethereum community intends to fundamentally address Ethereum scalability issues with the release of Ethereum 2.0. It is a massive undertaking to incorporate all these scaling techniques into Ethereum.
The following diagram shows the Ethereum’s roadmap to the Serenity release, Ethereum 2.0:
It is going to be a phased approach since there are too many moving parts. Some are foundational capabilities that need to be done early to facilitate the move to sharding and the pure PoS consensus protocol, the Casper CBC. The following list explains each phase:
- Phase 0, PoS beacon chain without shards: This is the first step to establish a foundation for moving to the PoS and supporting the shards. Ethereum 2.0 consists of a central beacon chain along with a certain number of shard chains. So, this phase starts to introduce a central system chain called the beacon chain. Its main responsibility is to store and manage the registry of validators. The beacon chain is like a side chain to the Ethereum 1.0 main chain, and acts as the bridge to transition from the Ethereum 1.0 PoW chain to the Ethereum 2.0 PoS Chain. It is unclear if the Ethereum 1.0 PoW chain will continue to play the main- chain role or switch to side-chain role for the beacon chain to be the main chain, once the Ethereum 2.0 is fully functional.
In this phase, someone can be a validator by making a one-way 32 ETH transaction to a deposit contract on Ethereum 1.0. Once the required activation balance is reached, and the deposit receipts are processed by the beacon chain, it will be added to the validator activation queue. Activation as a validator happens after a queuing process. Exit is either voluntary or done forcibly as a penalty for misbehaviors.
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The RANDAO contract is included in this phase, which enables validators to create random numbers (RNG) in block proposals, and organize into proposers and attestation committees from the output of the RNG, and creating crosslinks for stubbed shards.
- Phase 1, Basic sharding without EVM: Phase 1 will focus on the construction, validity, and consensus of the data of these shard chains. As we discussed earlier, the proposer’s role is to package all transaction data as blobs, trunk the blobs into trunks, and create a Merkle tree out of the transaction data. They will be collated in shards without transactions. The proposer notarizes the collations with its own signature.
- Phase 2, EVM state transition function: Phase 2 is primarily concerned with various EVM-level improvements in the Ethereum full node, including eWASM as the next generation Ethereum virtual machine. Some other topics, including account abstraction, stateless model, and storage rent, are under evaluation.
- Phase 3, Light client state protocol: Phase 3 is primarily concerned with the transaction execution and executor’s role in the system, and with the light client protocol for the state-minimized execution model, where the cost of validation is pushed away from on-chain validators onto off-chain executors.
- Phase 4, Cross-shard transactions: Phase 4 was intended for supporting cross shard transactions, including synchronous and asynchronous cross shard communication models.
- Phase 5, Tight coupling with main-chain security: Phase 5 will address issues and needs with data availability proofs, internally fork-free sharding, and manager shards.
- Phase 6, Super-quadratic or exponential sharding: Phase 6 is the one intended to bring everything together and to enable Ethereum transition from PoW and one main chain to PoW and sharding. There are many sharding related researches and ideas, and any of them may come up and influence some of the future phases.
Next Article
In our next article (How to work with Decentralized Data and Content Storage in Ethereum), we discuss how to work with decentralized data and content storages like IPFS or BigChainDB in Ethereum.
This article is written in collaboration with Brian Wu who is a leading author of “Learn Ethereum: Build your own decentralized applications with Ethereum and smart contracts” book. He has written 7 books on blockchain development.
Resources
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Live Blockchain Courses
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Articles and Tutorials on Blockchain Technology
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- History and Evolution of Blockchain Technology from Bitcoin
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- A beginner Guide to Blockchain Technology
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- How Digital Signature Works In Blockchain
- The role and types of consensus mechanism in blockchain
- How Proof-of-Work Consensus Works in Blockchain
- How Proof of Stake Consensus works in Blockchain
Articles and Tutorials on Ethereum and Solidity
If you like to learn more about blockchain development in Ethereum with Solidity, reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended:
- Review of Architecture and Components of Ethereum
- Comprehensive Blockchain Ethereum Developer Guide from Beginner to Advance Level
- How to Write Ethereum Smart Contracts with Solidity in 1 hour
- Review of Architecture and Components of Ethereum
- How Ethereum Manages Accounts
- How Ethereum Manages Transactions
- How Smart Contracts Work in Ethereum
- How Ether and Gas Work in Ethereum
- How Ethereum Virtual Machine works
- How address and wallet work in Ethereum
- How mining works in Ethereum
- List of Tools and Technologies in Ethereum Ecosystem
- Review of challenges in distributed systems
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- Horizontal Scaling versus Vertical Scaling in Distributed Systems
- How to Scale up Ethereum Blockchain Applications
- Review of scaling solutions for Ethereum
- How to Manage Ethereum State Channel with Raiden
- How Plasma Chains Work in Ethereum
- How Sharding and Gasper work in Ethereum
- How Proof-of-Stack Consensus Works in Ethereum
- A roadmap for Implementing Ethereum 2.0
- How to work with Decentralized Data and Content Storage in Ethereum
- How Decentralized Messaging with Whisper Works in Ethereum
- Review of Infura for Ethereum Development
- Review of Infura Ethereum API
- How to Use Remix with Infura for Ethereum Development
- How Ethereum Client API Works
- How Ethereum IPFS Storage Works
- How to Install and Start Ethereum IPFS Storage
- How to Run Ethereum IPFS Storage
- How to Work with Ethereum Swarm Storage
- How to Install Ethereum Swarm Storage
- How to Handle Ethereum Messages with Whisper
- Review of Popular Ethereum Smart Contract Libraries
- Review of Private and Permissioned blockchain
- How to Set up a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain
- How to Run Geth on a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain
- How to Build a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain with Mining
- How to Run Geth on a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain with Mining
- How to Create an Account on a Local Private Ethereum Blockchain
- How to Use Ethereum Optional Flags with New Chains
- Review of Ethereum Options for Development and Testing
- Review of Ethereum Developer Chain Options
- Review of Ethereum API and Console Options
- Review of Ethereum Networking Options
- Review of Ethereum Transaction Pool Options
Articles and Tutorials on Hyperledger Family
If you like to learn more about blockchain development with Hyperledger, reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended:
- Introduction to Hyperledger Architecture, Projects, Tools and Libraries
- Complete Review of Hyperledger Fabric Architecture and Components
- Hyperledger Fabric for System Administers versus Developers
- How to use Prometheus and Grafana to monitor Hyperledger Fabric
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Fabric on AWS
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install and work with Hyperledger Sawtooth
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Burrow on AWS
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Iroha on AWS
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Indy and Indy CLI on AWS
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Install Hyperledger Seth and Docker on AWS
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Configure Hyperledger Sawtooth Validator and REST API on AWS
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Build Transaction Processor as a Service and Python Egg for Hyperledger Sawtooth
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Deploy Ethereum Smart Contracts with Hyperledger Burrow
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Create Cryptocurrency Using Hyperledger Iroha CLI
- Blockchain Developer Guide- How to Explore Hyperledger Indy Command Line Interface
- Blockchain Developer Guide- Comprehensive Blockchain Hyperledger Developer Guide from Beginner to Advance Level
- Introduction to Hyperledger Sawtooth Blockchain Development
Articles and Tutorials on R3 Corda
If you like to learn more about blockchain development on Corda , reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended:
Articles and Tutorials on Other Blockchain Platforms
If you like to learn more about blockchain development in other platforms, reading the following articles and tutorials is highly recommended: