What is the upcoming beacon chain in Ethereum 2.0?

Yesterday, ConsenSys researcher Ben Edgington posted that the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain is expected to launch on Saturday.

Ethereum 2.0 intends to solve the consensus and scalability issues of Ethereum, while the Beacon Chain (Beacon Chain) is a new concept based on the consensus issue, and the Shard Chains (Shard Chains) are proposed based on the scalability issue.

Today Dabai will share with you some popular science about what is the beacon chain and what functions the beacon chain has. the

01 What is the beacon chain?

Beacon chain, the English name is Beacon Chain, Beacon, which means lighthouse, signal buoy. It is actually the core of the Ethereum 2.0 system.

The Beacon Chain is a brand-new proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, which aims to solve the consensus problem, while the purpose of the Shard Chains is to solve the scalability problem of Ethereum.

The transaction volume on the Ethereum chain increased by 45.84%: Golden Finance News, according to OKLink data, as of 2:00 pm, the number of active-zce addresses on the Ethereum 24h chain exceeded 660,900, a month-on-month increase of 8.84%; the transaction volume on the chain was nearly 6.4508 million ETH, a month-on-month increase of 45.84%; the current recommended Gas fee is 104.66Gwei, a month-on-month decrease of 10.11%. [2021/1/7 16:38:43]

The reason why the shard chain can solve the performance problem is that it is equivalent to processing transactions through multi-slice technology, which improves the efficiency and performance of the system. The following figure shows the structure diagram of the beacon chain and the shard chain, where the beacon chain is in The coordination layer is responsible for coordination and management, while the shard chain is in the data layer and is responsible for the data part.  

Exclusive｜Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract address has received 33349ETH, the progress is 6.36%: Golden Finance News, according to OKLink data, as of 14:00, the Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract address has received 33349ETH, a distance of 524288 ETH The minimum requirement to start the Ethereum 2.0 genesis block is 6.36% complete.

The number of active-zce addresses on the Ethereum 24h chain exceeded 530,500, a month-on-month decrease of 13.78%; the transaction volume on the chain was nearly 4.1902 million ETH, a month-on-month increase of 12.84%; the number of on-chain transactions exceeded 1.1427 million, a month-on-month increase of 0.58%.

The current Ethereum recommended Gas fee is 69.71Gwei, an increase of 92.78% month-on-month, and the number of unconfirmed transactions is nearly 82,100. [2020/11/6 11:50:34]

In the picture we can see, why do we need the beacon chain?

The beacon chain is like a core backbone, supporting and connecting each shard chain.

News | The Reserve Bank of Australia conducted a simulation test of running a CBDC in the Ethereum network payment system: On January 16th, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) recently revealed that it simulated the use of the central bank in the Ethereum network-based wholesale payment system. Digital Currency (CBDC), to investigate the possibility of central bank digital currencies. (Bitcoinist)[2020/1/16]

In fact, the beacon chain is the core that injects vitality into the entire Ethereum 2.0 system, and is responsible for commanding and coordinating all participants in the system. So what can it do?

02 What can the beacon chain do?

First of all, this chain is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, which allows verifiers to participate in the pledge system and replace miners as chain builders. That is to say, the list of verifiers and the tasks of shard verifiers are managed on the beacon chain.

Analysis | Cumberland Research: The market pays too much attention to the Ethereum Constantinople hard fork: According to cointelegraph, a report recently shared by Cumberland Research shows that the market is too concerned about the Ethereum Constantinople hard fork and Serenity upgrade, Overshadow an important upgrade. According to the report, the inability of the Ethereum network in its current state to support millions of DAPPs and the inflexibility of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) architecture would exacerbate those problems with any further delay in ETH’s transition to full PoS. [2019/2/7]

How can I become a validator of the beacon chain?

First, you need to send a deposit (32 ETH) to a contract on the current Ethereum main chain, and then after a series of audit checks, you will receive an electronic receipt (event in the Ethereum smart contract), this The receipt is equivalent to a VIP card. With this card, you have the verification qualification and become a verifier. If you are "active-zce", you may be selected as a block proposer.

After becoming a validator, the beacon chain will arrange tasks for you.

It will randomly assign you to one or two shards for verification. We know that under the proof-of-work mechanism, that is, on our current Ethereum main chain, miners generate the next block through mining, but under the proof-of-stake mechanism, there is no mining, and the next block is generated by Validators are selected. This choice is random and cannot be controlled by a verifier, which also reflects the characteristics of decentralization.

If you are not very "active-zce", after the beacon chain assigns you to a shard, you need to select a new block with other validators of the shard.

Then the block proposer of this shard will collect transactions for this shard and include these transactions in the block selected by the verifiers just now, although since you are not the proposer of the block, there is no The power to include transactions into new blocks, but you, as a validator, can verify that the block proposer is acting properly during this process.

If you perform well and do what you are supposed to do as a validator, you will be rewarded. On the contrary, if you violate the rules, you will be punished. The penalty is to deduct a part of your 32 ETH deposit. When the deposit is lower than 16 ETH Once the coins are released, the beacon chain will remove you from the list of validators.

If one day you don’t want to be a validator anymore, the ETH you pledged plus the rewards you got and minus the Ether you deducted due to punishment will not return to your previous Ethereum main chain, but will be stored into a shard chain.

In addition to managing validators, the beacon chain also needs to store some attestation (Attestation).

We know that the current Ethereum blockchain stores the data information of our usual asset transfer and other transactions, but the beacon chain is different from the current Ethereum main chain, which stores a series of calculated strings.

The generation of this string is based on a hash operation in the computer. It is like in life, after you put the beans into the soymilk machine for processing, you cannot judge the shape and size of the previous beans based on the soymilk you get. And if you add one more bean, the soy milk you get will change a lot. You can't determine which particle in the soy milk your bean is. This soymilk machine is like a hash algorithm, which cannot pass the hash algorithm. The result is to deduce what it looked like before hashing, and as long as the data before hashing changes a little, the result after hashing will change a lot.

In the beacon chain, the verifier verifies and signs a transaction, such as a transfer transaction, and then hashes it into a string, and stores the string in the beacon chain. At this time, the string represents a The advantage of doing this is that you don’t have to dig into which shard the transaction happened in.

Once the state in the shard changes (for example, a small change in the balance of an account), the verifier will report this change to the beacon chain. Therefore, the beacon chain tracks the changes of the shards in real time, and also establishes the connection and communication between the shards.

03 Summary

Generally speaking, the beacon chain is like a signal light, directing various behaviors of the system and storing a large amount of authentication data. But this kind of command is decentralized. For example, the voting behavior of participating validators is determined by the validators themselves, and the beacon chain cannot be controlled.

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