The Ethereum community had announced the release of the Beacon Chain as Ethereum 2.0 went live yesterday at 12pm UTC. This launch has been backed by the ETH community with almost 900,000 staked ETH, surpassing the 524,288 ETH required for the upgrade.
ETH 2.0 Is Finally Here
After weeks of investors actively staking their ETH in deposit smart contracts, the launch of Ethereum’s ultimate upgrade was successful. And with the first phase of ETH 2.0 now live, the network is now closer to the launch of a proof-of-stake (PoS) mechanism that would finally solve the blockchain’s scalability problem.
Ever since the release of the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus model for Ethereum, the community has been hard at work in developing Ethereum 2.0. As it goes live, the network is in full gear moving towards a purer PoS model.
Congrats on the launch all!
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) December 1, 2020
According to Ethereum Foundation researcher, Danny Ryan:
“We got all the metrics up and I’m very excited.”
He also adds that he feels ‘confident’ in the launch and should any problems arise, they should be able to fix them.
What Is the Beacon Chain?
The Beacon Chain, Ethereum’s newest chain, is expected to be a vital participant in the ecosystem. designed to compete with other financial service providers like Visa.
Through this new chain, Ethereum can enable a sharding system that distributes data to multiple, independent datasets. This is meant to enable faster transaction times and greater scalability as it eases the computational and storage workload required to record on-chain information.
At first, the Beacon Chain will be a separate chain to the Ethereum network. But according to the team, the plan is to eventually integrate the mainnet with the Beacon Chain to implement its PoS system to the whole network.
Staking
With the Beacon Chain in place, staking is now possible on the Ethereum network. By staking ETH in smart contracts, users can then activate a validator software that enables them to take part in transaction processing and block creation.
With more people incentivized to participate in maintaining network security, the safer it becomes from attacks. In fact, the chances are one in a trillion, according to Minimum Committee Size.
Furthermore, Coinbase also recently announced that it will support Beacon Chain staking.
Shard chains
The roll-out of shard chains from the Beacon Chain is expected to help improve the capacity of the network. The Beacon Chain will effectively spread the chain to 64 independent blockchains, which would require stakers in order to validate them. The validators will be randomly assigned to make it almost impossible for stakers to collude and compromise any particular shard.
Sourced from crypto.news.
Written by Adam Robertson on 2020-12-02 06:00:56.
