ViaBTC｜The Ethereum Beacon Chain Embraces Its First Anniversary, with Over 260,000 Validators
Last December, the mainnet of Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain (Phase 0) officially went live. As the beacon chain embraces its first anniversary, Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, tweeted to celebrate its birthday and disclosed “an updated roadmap diagram for where Ethereum protocol development is at and what’s coming in what order”.
According to Vitalik Buterin’s roadmap, The Merger is an important task in the next stage of Ethereum, followed by another four major stages, respectively The Surge, The Verge, The Plurge and The Splurge. Earlier, Tim Beiko, the core developer of Ethereum, also published an article in the official Ethereum Foundation to elaborate on some important changes after the merger of Ethereum.
Tim Beiko suggested that after the Ethereum merger, the block generation time of Ethereum will drop from 13 seconds to 12 seconds. Moreover, the final confirmation of a block will need to be confirmed by two thirds of nodes. If an attacker wants to create a fork, he needs to burn at least one third of the staking amount, that is, according to the current statistics, over 2.5 million ETH. In addition, there will also be changes in the block structure, block header, mining difficulty code, etc.
The rapid development of the Ethereum ecosystem has stimulated users’ demand for Ethereum. As we can see, Ethereum miners enjoy fast-growing mining revenue. According to the data of The Block Research, in November, the mining revenue of Ethereum has surpassed that of Bitcoin for seven consecutive months. That month, the revenue of Bitcoin miners was approximately US$1.69 billion, a decrease of 2% from the previous month, while Ethereum miners got about US$1.99 billion, an increase of 11.8% from October. The total income of all Ethereum miners in November was 1.18 times that of all Bitcoin miners. However, considering the current Ethereum TPS that is too low to meet the huge demand, it’s no surprise that the merger of the Ethereum beacon chain has attracted so much attention.
The data of the beacon chain also reveal the expectations and optimism among users and investors for the long-term value of Ethereum. According to beaconscan, by the time of writing, more than 266,467 independently verified accounts have participated in the verification of the Ethereum beacon chain, cumulatively staking more than 8,526,484 Ether. Calculated at the current market price of Ethereum, that is over $30 billion. In the current network, the APR of the Ethereum staking on the beacon chain is approximately 5.2%.
Previously, the Altair hard fork, the first mainnet upgrade to the Ethereum’s beacon chain, has introduced an important new feature of the “Light Client Synchronization Committee” and improved the validator reward and punishment rules, which lowered the threshold of participation in Ethereum 2.0 and reinforced the security of the POS network. And this year in Greece, the Ethereum development team stated that the developers of the network have successfully launched the testnet, with 3 Ethereum 1.0 clients and 4 Ethereum 2.0 clients. As Eth1 and Eth2 have communicated, the testnet has moved from PoW to PoS and is running and processing transactions smoothly. As we can see, everything is going well on Ethereum.
Based on the current development progress and the delay time of the difficulty bomb, the merger of the Ethereum beacon chain is expected to be completed next May. According to the “personal estimation” of Trenton VanEpps, the core developer of Ethereum, on Twitter that goes “Plan for PoW to end in 3–6 months”, think twice if you intend to purchase Ethereum mining machines at this moment. Instead, you may update yourself on the dynamics of the beacon chain and Eth2 to adjust your mining and investment strategies in time.
