Written by: Sander Lutz, Decrypt
Compiled by: PANews
On Thursday, the Ethereum consensus mechanism transitioned from PoW to PoS, and the historic feat of "merging" that the Crypto community had been waiting for for more than five years was finally successfully completed. Now backed by this great technical feat, the core developers of the Ethereum network are starting to think about another question: What’s next for Ethereum?
In fact, the developers have already set their sights on the next upgrade: Shanghai .
While Ethereum core developers won’t be holding group meetings or making collective decisions about the future of the network for the next two to three weeks, the short break won’t last long and they need to collectively next month Determine what features will be included in Ethereum’s next upgrade, Shanghai. You know, tens of billions of dollars worth of digital assets are now deployed on the Ethereum blockchain, so the first upgrade after the merger is particularly critical.
Ethereum core developer Micah Zoltu said that the community has many ideas for the "Shanghai" upgrade, but there is no consensus yet. One of the most urgent new features currently heard is to allow Ethereum validators to withdraw pledged ETH.
The biggest change brought by the merger to the Ethereum blockchain is to change the network consensus mechanism into "proof of equity", that is, all transactions on the network will no longer be verified by energy-intensive "miners", but Individuals and organizational “verifiers” who stake large amounts of ETH perform verification . For validators, the ETH they stake can generate and collect new ETH, and these so-called "new ETH" are their rewards for proving transactions and protecting the network.
However, so far, Ethereum’s staking mechanism can only deposit ETH and cannot withdraw ETH. According to Ethereum's official network data, the number of network validators has reached 427,326, and the total pledged amount has reached 14,451,487 ETH. Calculated based on the current ETH price, the total pledged value is close to 22 billion US dollars, but all of these ETH are now "trapped" On the Ethereum network, unless developers add withdrawal functionality.
It is understandable that in the Shanghai upgrade, almost all core developers will prioritize the withdrawal function of staking ETH. Otherwise, the appeal of staking ETH will be greatly reduced, because people will find that their pledged ETH cannot be withdrawn, and they will inevitably By weakening the staking motivation of "verifiers", not so many people will enter the Ethereum network in the future, which will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the future development and network security of Ethereum.
Ethereum core developer Marius Van Der Wijden admitted that the core developers may agree to solve the issue of pledged ETH withdrawals in the next "Shanghai" upgrade. " This is almost a certainty . " However, it's unclear what other content will be included in the "Shanghai" upgrade.
What’s next for Ethereum after staking?
Micah Zoltu believes that the biggest problem with the "Shanghai" upgrade now is that "everyone has a different list." Everyone feels that their proposal is "the most urgent," but these ideas are very subjective and there is no consensus.
Nonetheless, in addition to adding the function of withdrawing pledged ETH, the Ethereum "Shanghai" upgrade may also have some other potential updates, such as:
1. Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) update . EVM is the underlying mechanism of Ethereum for developers and defines the management rules for how blocks on the network interact. In the past two years or so, Ethereum has not made any updates to the EVM, partly because of concerns that the updates would cause trouble for the merger. As Marius Van Der Wijden said, updating the EVM before merging will increase the testing complexity by a factor of 10 and make the upgrade more difficult.
2. Proto-danksharding update . The Proto-danksharding upgrade has actually been rumored for a long time and has attracted huge interest from the Ethereum community, and is related to Rollups scalability technology. Rollups is an Ethereum network expansion tool that aggregates a collection of transactions into a unit and then submits the unit to the Ethereum blockchain as an independent transaction, thereby solving the slow transaction processing speed and gas fees of the Ethereum mainnet. Too high a problem.
Proto-danksharding can be seen as a preliminary version of danksharding. During the proto-danksharding process, large amounts of data on Rollups can be verified by simply sampling small block data. In essence, this update should greatly improve Optimism. Verify large amounts of data quickly and conveniently with Ethereum Layer 2 networks like Arbitrum.
Van Der Wijden added that Proto-danksharding can reduce the gas costs on the Rollup chain and make it easier for Rollup to expand on a large scale, while transaction costs will also be significantly reduced. However, although danksharding is very attractive to Layer 2 users, and the upgrade can reduce gas costs and reduce transaction times, development work requires a lot of energy and time.
The larger the feature set included in the Ethereum "Shanghai" upgrade, the more complex the upgrade will be and, more importantly, will cause delays in the upgrade work .
Ethereum core developer Marius Van Der Wijden explained: “Some people only study the surface, and they even think that not all features in the ‘Shanghai’ upgrade must be implemented and tested, but the problem is, if there are 10 items in the ‘Shanghai’ upgrade changes, then each change needs to be tested individually, and how different changes interact and influence each other needs to be tested. This means that once the number of functions included in the 'Shanghai' upgrade increases, the testing workload will increase exponentially. level growth.”
As of now, Ethereum developers have not estimated how long the "Shanghai" upgrade will take to be implemented, but Van Der Wijden believes that the "Shanghai" upgrade should be carried out within 2023. However, if Ethereum users and developers turn their attention to other updates, such as danksharding, then the "Shanghai" upgrade date will be delayed.
Don’t forget, there are still more than 20 billion US dollars worth of pledged ETH “trapped” in the Ethereum PoS chain.
**This article only represents the views of the original author and does not constitute any investment opinions or recommendations.
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