While Ethereum is facing stiff competition from Layer 1 blockchains (Solana, Sui, etc.) that enable transactions to be carried out very quickly and at low cost, part of its community is working hard to evolve its base layer.
Researcher Justin Drake, who officiates at the Ethereum Foundation, presented a proposal on Tuesday in Bangkok at DevCon (one of the world's biggest events on the subject) that he calls "Beam Chain", which some have been quick to present as "ETH 3.0".
Beam Chain, what is it? It is an upgrade to its consensus layer that would aim to speed up the creation of new transaction blocks every 4 seconds (currently, there is a block every 12 seconds). It would exploit many innovations that the Beacon Chain (the current consensus chain) does not support, including zk-SNARKs, a type of cryptographic proof that applies zero-knowledge protocols.
Thus, Ethereum could operate as a zkEVM natively, as is the case with the most technologically advanced layer 2s, such as ZkSync or Linea . This could speed up transaction processing considerably, as network validators would no longer necessarily need to re-execute all the transactions in the blocks they receive and would therefore simply have to verify a mathematical proof that attests to their validity.
What we need to understand is that the Beacon Chain is already 5 years old and could be replaced by a more competitive technology.
Is this a major change to the roadmap? No, these developments have already been announced in the roadmap presented by Vitalik Buterin from 2022. Justin Drake's proposal, on the other hand, is to bring forward the development of certain developments that were scheduled for later. This is due to the greater maturity of developers with regard to technologies that were previously considered too new.
>> Read also - The major challenges awaiting Ethereum
What does this change for validators? Overall, the finality time would be reduced, but above all this would make it possible to create nodes at 1 ETH, compared with 32 at present. Such a change would further promote the decentralisation of the network, without compromising on the speed of the blockchain during consensus.
Would a hard fork be necessary? Most structural updates to Ethereum require a hard fork, meaning that users will have to choose to opt for new software if they wish to continue using the same protocol. A consensus of the community will therefore be required to adopt this proposal.
What would this change for layers 2? The Ethereum community has made the choice to favour the development of secondary layer solutions, known as "layers 2", in order to relieve the main blockchain of several operations and offer modest fees for those who use them, while benefiting from the security of layer 1 Ethereum.
The Beam Chain update could make Ethereum more efficient, but given the rapid development of the ecosystem it will still be necessary for a large number of transactions to be handled by L2s.
>> Read also - Layers 2 Ethereum: State of play and challenges
What the experts say : Interviewed by The Big Whale at Devcon in Bangkok, Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin (CEO of Consensys, the US company behind the development of layer 2 Linea) stressed the benefits of this upgrade: "We're very excited about this proposal. After being in a divergence phase that brought us scalability, but also fragmentation, this convergence phase towards the principle carried by zkEVMs will allow our ecosystem to look like a coherent esemble, for software developers and users. "
Is it really relevant to talk about "ETH 3.0"? According to Justin Drake, it's not appropriate, but the community seems to be taking up this name, which has the merit of being very powerful. As a reminder, what we call "ETH 2.0" is the current version of Ethereum since its migration to the Proof of Stake consensus algorithm, the implementation of which extended from the end of 2020 (launch of the Beacon Chain) to September 2022. It succeeded the mining mechanism, which relied on the expenditure of energy via computer processing power to validate transactions.
What timetable? If the community could agree on the merits of this proposal (a discussion could extend throughout 2025), the code could begin to be written by 2026, paving the way for a lengthy testing phase and then a production release by 2029-2030.
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