Author: Jarrod Watts, Abstract Developer Relations Engineer; Author: Golden Finance xiaozou

Beam Chain is the biggest announcement of the Devcon Summit, introducing 9 major upgrades to Ethereum. But most people don’t quite understand these upgrades, and this article will help you better understand these 9 upgrades.

Beam Chain is Justin Drake’s proposal to redesign the Ethereum consensus layer (CL). Before we delve into the specific upgrades, let’s take a brief look at what the Ethereum consensus layer actually is.

Each Ethereum node runs two components: an execution client and a consensus client.

The consensus client is used by nodes to "agree" on what the next block in the blockchain will be. You can stake 32 ETH to add a third component - a validator, who proposes new blocks through a proof-of-stake algorithm and is rewarded.

So why does the Ethereum consensus layer need to be redesigned?

There are currently several problems with CL:

It has been out for 5 years - it faces technical debt and does not use the latest innovative technologies such as ZK proof (zero-knowledge proof).

This is an opportunity to perform upgrades and clean up Ethereum’s technical debt.

These 9 upgrades can be divided into 3 categories:

1/Block Production

2/Pledge

3/Encryption< /p>

Next, I will summarize each upgrade separately.

Upgrade 1: Censorship Resistance

The current block production is very centralized. The two major block builders - Beaver Build and Titan Build - account for almost all Ethereum blocks:

These builders are based on this Create blocks in a way that maximizes their profits in the form of MEV; arbitrarily including, excluding, or reordering transactions in the blocks they produce.

Today, if your transaction is not conducive to these two block builders, they may choose to exclude your transaction from the block and review your transaction.

This upgrade, proposed in EIP-7805, increases Ethereum’s censorship resistance by allowing validators to select transactions from the mempool and force their inclusion via inclusion lists (ILs), builder Rules must be followed in order for their blocks to be included in the network.

In the Beam Chain upgrade, the 16 validators in each slot will build a list of transactions that must be included by the block builder, which means that the block builder no longer has the ability to review transactions .

Upgrade 2: Segregated Verification

Attester Proposer Separation (APS) separates witnessing and proposals, such as executing auctions.

While validators can build transaction blocks themselves, most validators use so-called "MEV boost" to hand off block building to others (usually Beaver Builder or Titan build), who in turn provide the Validators pay a fee.

The two parties are called:

-Witnesses (validators)

-Proposers (block builders)

There is now a separation between the two - i.e. validators accept blocks from proposers, however, it is centralized through a trusted intermediate relayer.

Relayers like Flashbots act as "middlemen", facilitating transactions between validators who want to sell blocks and block builders who want to create profitable blocks.

APS is an upgrade that adds or “embeds” this separation between validators and proposers into Ethereum in a decentralized way; reducing the centralization risk of relayers such as Flashbots.

One way to achieve this separation is to implement an auction; a system where anyone can purchase tickets, giving them a chance to win the right to create future blocks.

Upgrade 3: Faster slots

On Beam Chain, slots will change from 12 seconds to 4 seconds.

Slots refers to the period of time during which a validator can propose a new block and get approval from other validators.

Faster slots mean faster transaction finality and higher transaction throughput.

Upgrade 4: Smarter issuance (such as pledge caps)

The issuance curve refers to how new ETH is created and distributed over time.

Currently:

-ETH will be distributed to validators as rewards every epoch (about 6 minutes).

-ETH is burned as part of every transaction.

ETH moves between inflation and deflation based on network activity. For example, during a certain hour, you can see that ETH is inflationary because more ETH rewards are issued than are burned in transactions:

There is a lot of debate in the community about whether and how issuance should be changed, but Justin Drake mentioned the staking cap in the Beam Chain demo. The staking cap sets the maximum amount of ETH that can be staked in order to provide more predictable rewards to validators, possibly with the goal of deflating ETH.

Upgrade 5: Smaller Validator

Currently, you need to purchase 32 ETH to become an independent validator on Ethereum. At today's prices, that's about 10million dollars.

Beam Chain proposes reducing it to 1 ETH, which would help resolve some of the centralization issues with liquidity staking providers like LIDO or Coinbase, which currently control nearly 40% of staked ETH :

Users who want to run a validator to receive rewards but do not have 32 ETH will benefit from this upgrade, they will be able to run a validator node with only 1 ETH.

The next upgrade (Pectra) will allow stakers to stake more than 32 ETH, up to a maximum of 2048. This means that on Beam Chain, users will be able to stake 1-2048 ETH.

Justin mentioned the Orbit staking method, which depicts a system in which larger validators are selected more frequently and will often receive some small rewards, while smaller validators are selected more often Less, but greater rewards.

Upgrade 6: Faster Finalization (e.g. 3 Slot FFG)

Currently, Ethereum takes approximately 15 minutes (64 slots) to finalize a transaction.

Single-Slot-Finality has been proposed as a way to reduce this time to 1 slot, but a newer proposal - 3-Slot-Finality - may actually be faster , as it parallels the voting wheel.

This means that a transaction will be finalized in 36 seconds instead of 15 minutes. This is especially important for services that rely on L1 finality, such as DeFi applications or cross-chain/interoperability protocols.

Upgrade 7: Chain Snarkification

Beam Chain hopes to "snarkify" the consensus layer (using ZK-SNARKs, a secure ZK proof). Justin Drake calls it the "ZK Era".

Specifically, Beam chain recommends using ZK-SNARKs to:

-Deploy and compile beam chains in different languages into zkVM bytecode.

- Aggregate signatures generated by witnesses into ZK proofs.

The ELI5 here refers to the fact that ZK technology has made great progress in the past 5 years, and Ethereum hopes to deploy it natively at both the consensus layer and the execution layer.

Upgrade 8: Quantum Security

Today, quantum computers can crack parts of Ethereum, such as cracking your private key, or using methods such as Shor's algorithm to forge signatures in transactions.

Quantum computers are likely to be available to people within the next decade; therefore, the Beam Chain proposal hopes to provide future post-quantum security by using methods such as hash signatures with post-quantum security.Subworld provides Ethereum security.

Upgrade 9: Strong Randomness

Finally, the Beam Chain upgrade proposes a way to build a source of randomness using a new primitive called VDF (Verifiable Delay Function).

In 2018, Justin Drake talked about this, saying that this could be used for:

Consensus layer - for example, randomly selecting validators.

Application layer - for example, exposing an opcode that provides verifiable randomness.

This would not be possible today without third-party services such as Chainlink or Pyth VRF.

In addition to these 9 upgrades, the Beam Chain upgrade will also clean up most of its existing technical debt and unnecessary components, which will become redundant after the upgrade. Remain.

For example, faster slot finality might mean no epochs are needed.

But some people think that the time span of Beam Chain is too long. However, Justin later clarified that Ethereum will continue to receive updates during these 5 years.

The Beam chain fork will take 5 years, including continuous upgrades to Ethereum.