Topic: Ethereum Beacon Chain and Altair Upgrade (Read 58 times)

Beacon Chain

Beacon chain is the core component of Ethereum 2.0. The purpose is to introduce PoS mechanism and run it independently on Ethereum 1.0 for about 2 years. Meanwhile, Ethereum 2.0’s testnet Pyrmont will undergo the Ethereum Beacon Chain’s first hard fork upgrade called Altair on August 19.

ETH2.0 Ethereum will build a three-layer network structure, including the existing PoW main chain, Beacon Chain, and Shard Chains. It can be divided into three stages, first the current beacon chain introduces the PoS mechanism, followed by merging. However, the current beacon chain will co-exist separately with the 1.0 PoW main chain until it completely replaces 1.0. The last step is the shard chains, which splits and distributes the load on the data, to improve the operational speed of Ethereum.

Shard Chains: The Ethereum chain will be split into several different chains (64 fragments will be deployed initially). Shard chains are relatively independent. It operates relatively independently because communication between shard chains increase network complexity and reduces efficiency.

Beacon Chain: Responsible for managing and coordinating the shard chains, introducing the PoS mechanism but will not process accounts and smart contracts, which will be done by the shard chains instead. This means, that beacon chains do not have critical data, do not store account balances, token locations, DApp status, and so on, and stores only validators and the proofs.

On the beacon chain, members of the verification committee will vote on the final consistency of the status results of the transaction blocks in different shard networks on the beacon chain based on the PoS consensus mechanism. The committee is the validator that is serving the beacon chain. It is randomly assigned to a shard chain and cross linked to the beacon chain.

That is to say, tens of thousands of nodes on beacon chain networks can become “validators” when they stake ETH. These validators form committees, each committee contains 128 randomly selected nodes, and then the nodes in each committee will complete the consensus and verification process of the beacon chain and shard chains to ensure the consistency of the whole network.

In 2.0, the validator node will replace the miner role that previously handled transactions and created blocks. To achieve this, the deployment of beacon chains requires at least 16438 active validators, replacing previous miners to maintain the entire block chain network. But since real POW mining is not required, it is a virtual mining at some level.

Beacon Node: The beacon node is equivalent to a miner for ETH 2.0. It is responsible for validating the validator, aggregating the signatures, obtaining the necessary data to build a new block and passing it to the validator node for validation.

Validator Node: Verifier Node is very lightweight software that is responsible for linking blockchain networks.

In short, Ethereum 2.0 can be divided into three stages, which is analogous to the heart, four limbs, brain, that is, responsible for core motivation, specific actions, profound and highly complex planning and capabilities.

Stage 0: Beacon Chain, Stage 1: Shard, Stage 2: Execution.

More than 210,000 validator nodes are currently on the beacon chain, which means more than 6.6 million ETHs are staked. According to CoinGecko data on circulation, the amount of staked ETH is about 5.6% of the circulation.

View the full article