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The biggest news to come out during Devcon in Bangkok was also the biggest news about Ethereum since 2022: The Beam Chain proposal.
It’s a redesign of their entire consensus layer, proposed by Ethereum researcher Justin Drake. This big upgrade will be introduced throughout the upcoming years, so here it is in bite-sized pieces to make it a little more understandable:
In the opening of his speech at Devcon, Justin Drake argued it was time to move past the Beacon chain: the technology has changed in 5 years, and it’s time to retool Ethereum with what Ethereum’s learned from new innovations and past mistakes.
Developed in 2020 and implemented in 2022, Beacon is the tech that introduced staking, improving decentralization efforts and making Ethereum more secure in the process.
This overhaul in Ethereum's consensus layer would bring the network closer to its creators' ultimate vision. While the complete implementation is projected to take five years, the upgrade will be rolled out in two distinct phases to make the wait a bit more palatable:
This upgrade isn’t meant to be a complete replacement of the roadmap established by Vitalik: instead it’ll be integrated with it, reworking some other steps in the process.
The “Low-hanging fruits” include:
Drake’s proposal for major upgrades begin with near-instant slot finality. With information confirmed instantly by validators, this means no miner could tamper with transaction orders and extract MEV (Maximal Extractable Value).
He also proposes the addition of post-quantum security to keep Ethereum safe for decades to come: Though post-quantum security is difficult to implement due to its complexity, adding it would maximize Ethereum’s security.
The upgrade will use something called "snarkification" to make Ethereum much faster and more efficient. It's based on a technology called zk-SNARK, which allows the network to verify information is true without seeing all the details, making privacy and security much better.
Snarkifying the chain would let it unify thousands of signatures under one zero-knowledge proof, increasing the performance of the chain.
The good thing is that none of the Beam chain upgrade would require a full overhaul of Ethereum: it’s just a heavy improvement of Ethereum in its current state which would benefit L2s written over it in the process.
Five years is a long time, but there’s a necessity to be slow and thorough with a chain as big as Ethereum. With thousands of applications and millions of users depending on it, meticulous testing and gradual implementation are essential for success.
The roadmap is long and this is only a proposal, but including this in Ethereum's development could change the game for the evolution of the biggest chain in DeFi and all that's built on it.
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