The next generation of the Ethereum blockchain has been in the works for years, but it is finally about to materialize. According to an Ethereum Foundation blog post, Ethereum 2.0 will now launch on December 1, instead of January 3, 2021 as originally planned. The upgrade will see the blockchain transition from a Proof-of-Work (PoW) model to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), in which participants tie their cryptocurrency to the network as collateral. For the Ethereum 2.0 launch to go live, 16,384 validators will need to stake a minimum of 32 Ether (the cryptocurrency that underlies the network), worth approximately €12,800 at current market rates. Reaching that number will trigger the launch of the Beacon Chain, an infrastructure that will facilitate failover, in what is being described as the Ethereum 2.0 genesis event. “We have hardened Ethereum 2.0 as much as possible with simulated test environments, formal verifications, and audits,” said Joe Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and CEO of ConsenSys. "We are very happy to see the community galvanize around the first phase of Eth2, with real value now 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 most important first step. The most significant change is that the consensus mechanism behind the Ethereum blockchain will change from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), which is generally considered a more efficient and energy-efficient way. to maintain the network. A basic way of describing the difference is that in a PoW system, one unit of computing power is equal to one unit of mining power. However, under PoS, one unit of value guarantees one unit of mining power to the validator. Both systems are designed to encourage network maintenance while ensuring that data stored on the blockchain cannot be tampered with. The second main improvement is the introduction of sharding to the Ethereum network (although this will happen as part of a later phase), which means that only a portion of the nodes need to perform a given transaction, significantly increasing performance. grid. In the past, Ethereum has been criticized for its lack of scalability that would allow it to compete with legacy systems. For context, Visa is believed to process around 1.700 transactions per second (TPS), while Ethereum 1.0 can only handle a paltry 25 TPS. However, by effectively dividing the network into lanes, the maximum number of TPS processed by Ethereum 2.0 can be increased by magnitudes. Via CoinDesk