- The core developers of Ethereum have agreed to Vitalik Buterin’s proposal for a faster transition from Eth 1.0 to Eth 2.0.
- With the activation of phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0, the security of the Ethereum 1.0 network could increase.
The Ethereum developer community has not yet agreed on a fixed date when Ethereum 2.0 will be launched with phase 0. Many comments currently point to the summer or the third quarter. Despite this uncertainty about the launch date, development continues to make great progress.
In a recent Eth2.0 Implementation Call 31, the core developers of Ethereum agreed to implement the accelerated transition from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0 according to a proposal by Vitalik Buterin. This accelerates the move to the Beacon Chain and requires in particular “stateless clients”, but no “stateless miners” and no web assembly, and will therefore require much less code restructuring.
The ‘stateless clients’ procedure allows the validators to avoid downloading the two ETH1 and ETH2 nodes. According to Buterin, Eth 2.0 can thus be run from machines with limited resources. In a discussion on Reddit Vitalik described:
Requiring every validator to run the full eth1 node would be a significant burden. Right now we’ve worked hard to make the total eth2 state size under 1 GB so that you can do everything in RAM and so that the requirements can be lower than the eth1 system today; completely coupling the two would reverse those gains, and hence lower the accessibility of eth2 staking considerably.
A new release of the Ethereum 2.0 specifications (network operating rules) has also been published on GitHub. Version V.0.10.0 is a major release focusing on the integration of the IETF BLS standards into the Eth2 specification.
Ethereum 2.0 Phase 0 spec v0.10.0 has been released.
This is the version that will now go to audit and be the base for the multi-client testnet. https://t.co/1bJK8Me1vX
— eric.eth (@econoar) January 11, 2020
Increased security through Ethereum 2.0
After the activation of Ethereum 2.0, phase 0, the security of Eth 1.0 is increased due to the Finality Gadget feature. Analyst Alex Stokes believes that the Finality Gadget makes the network much more secure, since with Eth 2.0 a transaction can only be reversed if one third of the staked ETH is burned.
In 18 months…
— David L. (@DavidL_BTC) January 12, 2020
As Stokes explains in a Medium post, the Finality Gadget uses the Phase 0 consensus of Ethereum 2.0 to increase the security of Eth1.0. Thus Eth1.0 could benefit from the launch of the new beacon chain, as Stokes writes:
If we can feed Ethereum 1.0 block data into Casper’s “finality engine”, then we can utilize the enhanced security of the proof-of-stake protocol on the existing proof-of-work network.
The idea behind the Finality Gadget is to exploit the finality of the Casper proof-of-sake consensus protocol. In phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0, the validators of the Beacon Chain generate the finality of the transaction data. A retroactive change is only possible if as 1/3 of the validating ETH is controlled, as Stokes writes:
Assuming a healthy level of 10M ETH participating in the system, a successful attack would result in the burning of around 3.3M ETH which at the time of writing is a cost of over $600M.
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