On November 27, 2020, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared the theme of “Update of Ethereum 2.0” at the first BLOCKCHAIN service network BSN Global Technology Innovation and Development Summit in Wuhan, Hubei Province.
The full text is as follows:
Everybody is good! Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to speak at BSN Global Tech Innovation Summit. I want to give you a quick update on ethereum 2.0: what’s new to Ethereum 2.0, where it’s going, and how it’s relevant to blockchain users, especially ethereum enterprise users who are building projects with BSN.
First, I’d like to share with you an exciting milestone: the Ethereum 2.0 proof of interest chain. This is the first phase of Ethereum 2.0 effort, which has already achieved its deposit goal. This means that the code is completely ready for ethereum 2.0’s proof-of-interest chain, and it’s been in the works for some time. In practice, it takes a lot of people to push the chain — to become verifiers, and as part of this proof-of-interest system, about 520,000 Ether is deposited into the system. The first two days, we reached that target, and now, we’re way over that target, with about 740,000 ETH available as validators in this new proof-of-stake network. This means the Proof-of-stake beacon chain is ready to launch next Tuesday at 8pm China time, so get ready and look forward to the first phase of Ethereum 2.0!
Ethereum 2.0 is a huge project and we’ve been working on it for years. Now, the project is finally becoming a reality. Ethereum 2.0 will show its benefits as the proof-of-claim network launches early next week. First, the consensus of proof of equity is more efficient and reduces energy consumption. It’s not so much the consensus requirement as the miners’ need for computers that run 24/7 and constantly consume a lot of power. Proof of equity is more energy efficient, it reduces a lot of waste, it uses fewer resources to provide the same level of safety. The second is faster consensus, meaning less time to wait for a deal to be confirmed. In Ethereum 2.0, you get a very strong security guarantee for transactions that are guaranteed to complete in 12 to 18 minutes. But even after about 12 seconds, you can get a strong initial confirmation that this is a higher level of security. In Ethereum, a single confirmation takes about 12 seconds, and for a very high level of security, you might have to wait a lot longer. Third, it is more scalable. One of the key technologies in Ethereum 2.0 is sharding, which can reduce transaction costs and improve scalability. Combining sharding with layer 2 technology could potentially allow us to process as many as 100,000 transactions per second. Finally, existing Ethereum applications continue to work. If you have an Ethereum app, transitioning to Ethereum 2.0 won’t break your app and it will continue to work as it does today.
Next, the path to extensibility is presented. The existing Ethereum chain today can process about 15 to 45 transactions per second, using an extended technology called Rollups. This technology already works on the main network to some extent. A number of ongoing projects will also be launched soon, including Shanghai-based Loopring and ZK-Sync, with Sync as another major team, as well as other promising ethereum teams. Rollups is an scalability technology that can increase scalability to about 1,000 to 4,000 transactions per second. For now, simple payments are mostly possible, but more complex applications, such as smart contracts, are some way off. Finally, if you combine rollups with sharding, the Rollups are almost ready, but sharding will take more time to combine the two. At that point, you can get up to 25,000 to 100,000 transactions per second, which will give enterprise users a much higher level of scale and scalability, which is a strong guarantee. If you start building an application now, even if you get to millions, tens of millions of users
Or in the long run, even hundreds of millions of users, there will still be room for the app to continue to run. And those numbers only apply to today’s technology. As computers become more powerful, Ethereum will become more efficient. As time goes on, I expect that number to increase.
For a long time, I thought that one of the reasons companies used private chains was that public chains were very poorly scalable. The Ethereum 2.0 public chain will be very scalable, and you can think of Eth2 as a hotbed for running applications. It will become more and more important as time goes on. Any kind of integration effort can be done with BSN or anyone else, so scalability is very important.
Next, I will introduce privacy protection. Privacy is a big problem for many enterprise applications. For this reason, a lot of work has been done in cryptography, such as zero-knowledge proof, ZKSnarks, Aztech and so on. The Ernst & Young project, announced last year, has done a lot of work on privacy-protecting applications to benefit from the security provided by blockchain without sacrificing the privacy of private data.
Beacon Chain, the Ethereum 2.0 proof-of-claim chain, will launch next week and is expected to be sharded. And early in the middle of next year is likely to be the beacon chain’s first major upgrade – light customer support. This is a fairly simple upgrade, so it’s likely to happen soon. At the same time, we are making more improvements to the existing Ethereum blockchain, such as stateless client support, encryption, more efficient data structures, binary trees, accelerated fuel pool protocols, and many other things in the works to improve the existing Ethereum user experience. Then, there is sharding extension, and work on integrating Ethereum 2.0 at the same time. And the existing Ethereum chain, so that the existing Ethereum chain, and the new proof of interest chain are combined into a system that runs the proof of interest chain together.
Taken as a whole, these are upgrades. This will make ethereum chains much more efficient, and they will make applications much more scalable and less costly. If you’re building an application that you expect to eventually have millions of users, there may not be enough room on the existing Ethereum 1.0 chain, but there will definitely be enough room on the Ethereum 2.0 chain. So you can start building and then be confident that you’ll have a way to take full advantage of the capabilities of the Ethereum 2.0 chain. Proof of equity will also provide a more stable and efficient consensus layer, giving a stronger guarantee of transaction security, along with many other improvements. So, if you’re building an application, we encourage you to learn about all of these upgrades, as well as rollup and some layer-2 extension techniques. Also, take a look at what’s going on in the Ethereum ecosystem and learn how the technology fits into your application. If you are just a hobbyist, you are welcome to join the beacon chain as a validator.
Keep watching, keep participating, and hope you enjoy the Ethereum ecosystem. We will continue to improve rapidly over the next two to three years. Thank you!