The Ethereum blockchain’s massive upgrade and highly anticipated migration to the Ethereum 2.0 network, also known as ETH 2.0, is finally becoming a reality.
The Ethereum blockchain’s most comprehensive upgrade and highly anticipated migration to the Ethereum 2.0 network, commonly known as ETH 2.0, is finally becoming a reality. ETH 2.0 is a multi-phase project that is aimed to solve numerous issues facing today’s Ethereum network, including speed, scalability and energy efficiency.
In order to kickstart the eventual move from today’s main Ethereum public chain to ETH 2.0, which has been years in the making and met several delays, a deposit contract was created in which at least 524,288 ETH was needed to be deposited by no less than 16,384 different validators.
This required threshold was met on November 24, which means that the first stage of ETH 2.0, known as Beacon Chain and referred as Phase 0, can go ahead in a week’s time on December 1.
Moving to Proof-of-Stake to achieve scalability
To achieve these goals and improve the Ethereum blockchain, ETH will be moving from the Proof-of-Work (POW) consensus mechanism used today, to Proof-of-Stake (POS). Simply put, Ethereum is moving from POW, which is the same consensus mechanism that Bitcoin uses, to POS, which means that the miners on Ethereum instead becomes validators.
Both Bitcoin and Ethereum today use POW, and while this system of blockchain governance is great for decentralization, it does require a large amount of energy usage, while limiting speed and transactions per second quite significantly.
So by moving to a new consensus mechanism in POS, what these ETH 2.0 validators do is instead of mining new blocks by solving mathematical puzzles, like on Bitcoin, they actually stake ETH coins to the network in order to validate transactions and secure the network.
Validators on ETH 2.0
These validators are intended to ensure and advance the security of the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain by locking up ETH with their blockchain nodes. The validators are incentivized to keep their ETH locked up, or staked, by earning a passive income and reward for validating transactions on ETH 2.0, similar to how Bitcoin and Ethereum miners are rewarded today.
In order to become a validator on ETH 2.0, interested parties simply need to move their ETH to the new Beacon Chain, with over 16,000 validators already doing so.
The first phase of ETH 2.0, ironically named Phase 0, is embodied in the December 1 launch of the Beacon Chain, which forms an essential part of integration of something called “sharding”. The principle of sharding is quite simple in its essence: In order to achieve higher scalability of the ETH 2.0 blockchain, the splitting of the Ethereum network into smaller pieces, or shards, takes place, which is intended to achieve a transaction scaling solution.
It is important to note that ETH 2.0 Beacon Chain will not impact the current Ethereum blockchain or decentralized applications (Dapps) running on ETH today, but instead will run alongside the main chain as a parallel network as it prepares for the next stage of the ETH 2.0 roll-out.
ETH in Klever
ETH and Ethereum-based tokens like LINK, MATIC, USDT-ERC20, USDC, CHZ, UNI, YFI and many others, serve as a fundamental part of the Klever ecosystem. Besides enabling the safe storage, sending, receiving and charging of ETH and other ERC20 tokens, Klever also offers dozens of ETH-based tokens for Swap in Klever’s built-in Swap tool. Moreover, Ethereum Dapp Browser support is a feature that will be introduced very soon in our next update.
As the ETH 2.0 network takes shape and evolves, the Klever team will be there to integrate any new features of the ecosystem and will support the development of the ETH 2.0 blockchain in any way we can.
Sincerely,
Misha Lederman
Director of Communications and Marketing at Klever.io
