Will Beam Chain bring five new changes to Ethereum?

As we all know, Ethereum was born from PoW proof of work and successfully switched to PoS proof of equity in 2021. In this regard, Justin Drake, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, believes that although the beacon chain was effective when PoS was first introduced, it has accumulated some technical debt over the past five years, and its design does not utilize cutting-edge technologies of decentralized systems (such as zero-knowledge proofs). Therefore, Ethereums consensus layer urgently needs a major overhaul.

In a recent talk at Devcon in Bangkok, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake announced a proposal to overhaul Ethereum’s consensus layer, called “Beam Chain.”

This is part of Ethereum’s long-term roadmap, allowing Ethereum to take advantage of the current breakthroughs in ZK क्रिप्टोgraphy, aiming to significantly improve network scalability and performance without launching a new network. It is undoubtedly one of the most important upgrades for Ethereum in the next 3-5 years.

Beam Chain is not a new blockchain in the literal sense, but a new infrastructure built on the Ethereum mainnet, which will greatly improve the transaction speed, security and efficiency of the L1 mainnet. Some people interpret Beam Chain as Ethereum 3.0, which is a misunderstanding because Beam Chain only solves the consensus layer problem and does not change the data layer (such as blob channels) or the execution layer (such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

The five core changes of Beam Chain are:

1. Faster block confirmation: enabling 4 second slot time and single slot finality

2. Not at the expense of decentralization: retain or improve current decentralized guarantees

3. Lower the threshold for staking: reduce ETH staking from 32 ETH to 1 ETH

4. Protecting ordinary users: Eliminating MEV based on block reorganization

5. Future-proofing the Ethereum network

Beam Chain upgrade ideas and principles

1. Increase block production

Higher throughput: Beam Chain will increase block production by 3 times to improve Ethereum’s transaction capacity.

Censorship resistance: The introduction of FOCIL (Fork Choice Forced Inclusion List) enhances censorship resistance, ensuring that transactions cannot be easily excluded by malicious actors.

Execution Auctions Isolate Validators: Validators will be isolated using execution auctions, ensuring stronger performance and decentralization, and also enabling more users to be protected from MEV intrusion.

Faster finality: Ethereum will feature single-slot finality and 4-second block times, allowing for faster transaction confirmations and improved network efficiency.

What’s interesting is that exchanges no longer need to wait 1/32, 2/32, 3/32… for block confirmation, because in the future a single block will be sufficient for confirmation.

2. Improved staking

Improved issuance model: Changes to the validator’s reward issuance model to make staking more rewarding.

Lower staking requirements: Independent validators only need to stake 1 ETH, which is much lower than the current 32 ETH threshold, making independent staking simpler and more popular.

We believe that if Ethereum wants to speed up, accommodate more nodes to participate in consensus, and not change the hardware threshold of the equipment too much, and break through the impossible triangle of staking, this is really thanks to ZK technology, which is indeed far ahead of the industry.

3. Enhanced security

Post-quantum cryptography: Ethereum will implement quantum-resistant cryptography to ensure that the network is protected from the threat of quantum computing, taking the first step towards quantum resistance for mainstream blockchains.

zkSNARK and zkVM Integration: Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) will be integrated with Ethereum through zkSNARKs and zkVM to further improve privacy, scalability, and security.

SNARKification of blockchain: Ethereum will use RISC-V to SNARKify the blockchain, a process that improves the efficiency and scalability of proof generation. SNARK is a compact form of zero-knowledge proof that allows a party to prove that it possesses information without revealing the information or requiring any interaction between the prover and the verifier.

In short, we can summarize it as: making the entire Ethereum directly ZK-ified.

Enhanced randomness: Ethereum will also introduce strong randomness to ensure fairness in key network processes such as selecting validators.

Reduced MEV risk: Better censorship resistance minimizes the proliferation of bots such as sandwich attacks.

4. Working Principle

Cryptographers have made significant progress with SNARKs since the design of Ethereum’s current consensus layer (the beacon chain) was finalized. By SNARKing Ethereum’s state transition function (i.e., the state change messages that validators aggregate to maintain a correct view of the blockchain), 4-second slot times and single-slot finality are achieved.

On the one hand, the reduction of block production and finality time can reduce waiting time and have a positive impact on the Ethereum L1 transaction experience;

On the other hand, it can also eliminate the potential value extracted from transactions through long-range block reorganization strategies and reduce the technical debt of the consensus layer.

Additionally, SNARKization will make the Ethereum network quantum-resistant, a must-have feature for future blockchains.

Beam Chain will promote the upgrade of Ethereum from the following aspects:

Sharding to speed up processing: Ethereum Beam Chain will use sharding technology to divide data into smaller parts (shards) to process multiple transactions at the same time. This will reduce transaction bottlenecks and speed up transaction times.

Quantum-resistant security: Ethereum will use leading-edge encryption technology to ensure that even future super quantum computers cannot undermine the security of the network.

Integration with Ethereum roadmap: Beam Chain is not an independent network, but an integration phase of Ethereum’s future 5-year roadmap to expansion and improved security.

5. Significance

Beam Chain is critical to Ethereum’s ability to handle the growing number of decentralized applications — it enhances Ethereum’s scalability, reduces transaction costs, and improves overall security, enabling the network to support more users and complex applications over time.

Another major benefit of SNARK-based proofs is that they allow ordinary stakers equipped with standard hardware to achieve the above performance advantages. When the staking threshold is reduced from 32 ETH to 1 ETH, the decentralization of the Ethereum staker group will also improve as network performance improves.

Especially with the lowering of the threshold, if combined with some related hardware devices, such as Ebunkers eNode, home-level validator devices can be brought to thousands of households. Ethereum will still be the public chain with the most nodes and the most decentralized in the world.

While Beam Chain’s vision will not bring about immediate changes to Ethereum or significantly alter its long-term roadmap, its adoption will change the priorities of roadmap development and accelerate the development of specific components (for example, the current roadmap sets some important upgrades until 2029, while Beam Chain may accelerate the arrival of important upgrades).

If Beam Chain gains enough community support, developers can start developing specifications next year, then the development client team will write production-level code in 2026, test it in 2027, and finally deploy it safely on the Ethereum mainnet. Although the implementation of Beam Chain seems far away, these security redundancies are extremely necessary for a decentralized open source software.

In a nutshell, Beam Chain has solved the past technical debt in one fell swoop through the ZK route. These improvements are expected to significantly improve Ethereums L1 functionality while retaining its world-class decentralization.

At the same time, long-term solutions such as quantum resistance introduced by the new ideas put Ethereums consensus layer into maintenance mode, which ensures that Ethereum remains secure, efficient and adaptable for decades to come, thereby enabling future innovations without disruptive redesign.

Ethereum is still working tirelessly on its long-term plans, which is an exciting update for the blockchain and the entire industry. This also allows us to maintain our optimism about Ethereum in todays surging market conditions.

This article is sourced from the internet: Will Beam Chain bring five new changes to Ethereum?

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