Original author: Stephanie/Franci, ECN
Editor's note:
Happy New Year, readers of the ECN community!
2022 is about to pass, and looking back on the past year, the Ethereum community has had both hardships and joys. We may have experienced anger and frustration in the face of black swan events one after another; perhaps we have watched merger parties with like-minded friends; Keep up with every wonderful speech; maybe marvel at the technological innovation bred by the community; maybe get excited about DeSoc's innovative ideas...
ethereum merger
ethereum merger
At 14:42 on September 15th, Beijing time, the merger of Ethereum was successful. After 8 years of exploration, research and testing, Ethereum finally switched from the PoW consensus mechanism to PoS. Saying that the merger of Ethereum is the most important event of Ethereum in 2022, I believe there will not be too many objections.
The merger of Ethereum is epoch-making.
From the perspective of implementation difficulty, it is the most complex upgrade in the history of Ethereum. It is the consensus layer (Prysm, Lighthouse, Teku, Nimbus, and Lodestar) and the execution layer (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, and Erigon) 9 independent clients The result of the mutual collaboration of the end team, it is "hot swapping" achieved while Ethereum keeps running.
From the meaning of Ethereum itself, the merger makes Ethereum safer, more sustainable, and lays the foundation for the future scalability of Ethereum. Although there is no consensus in the cryptocurrency world about which of PoW and PoS is more secure, based onEthereum Foundation Research TeamBased on the research and understanding of these systems, as well as knowledge of various types of attacks, they believe that PoS is more secure. What is basically uncontroversial is that the switch to PoS has reduced the energy consumption of Ethereum by more than 99.95%, which removes a big stumbling block for Ethereum to enter the mainstream world, making it easier for applications like NFT, DAO, and DeFi to enter the general public. public life. In addition, the adoption of PoS lays the necessary foundation for the subsequent expansion of sharding in Layer 1 in terms of architecture.
After the Ethereum merger, the next major upgrade of Ethereum will focus on improving the scalability of Ethereum.
The sharding scheme is maturing
Sharding is seen as the future of Ethereum scalability, according to Vitalik'sstatement, sharding is the key to enabling the Ethereum ecosystem to achieve thousands of transactions per second. The Ethereum community has been discussing sharding since 2013, and the sharding scheme has been revised many times. In 2022, with the proposal of the Danksharding scheme, the road to sharding in Ethereum becomes clear and feasible.
Regarding Ethereum’s sharding scheme, the more well-known version was held at a seminar in Taipei in 2018. Researchers and core developers of the Ethereum Foundation unified the proof-of-stake and sharding research to form a three-part The "Ethereum 2.0" roadmap for each stage:
Phase 0 Brings Beacon Chain
Phase 1 Join data shards
In phase 2, virtual machines are added to each shard to implement computation in the system.
The number of shards was initially set at 100, then increased to 1024, and the roadmap for this version was lowered to 64.
The sharding mechanism used in this version of the roadmap refers to the horizontal segmentation of the database, that is, each shard chain has a subset of nodes that work on the chain. Each of the 64 shard blocks has its own proposer and committee randomly assigned from the set of validators who independently validate the available shard data. In this design, all shards cannot be verified as a whole, and each proposer has the ability to disrupt the entire process. Shuffling validators across shards is also quite cumbersome. And unless very strict synchronization assumptions are introduced, it is difficult to guarantee that voting can be completed in a slot.
Clearly, there are many unanswered questions to implement sharding in Phase 2 of "Ethereum 2.0". At the end of 2020, Vitalik published an articleWhat Will a Rollup-Centric Ethereum Roadmap Look Like? ", which mentioned that in the long run, under the rollup-centered Ethereum roadmap, when everyone moves to rollup, the TPS of Ethereum can reach about 3000. When rollup is transferred to the shard chain as data storage, The theoretical maximum TPS of Ethereum can reach 100,000. In other words, the path to eth 2 can be over at stage 1.5, and the base layer of Ethereum will focus on two things—consensus and data availability. And shard data availability is much safer than shard EVM computation.
In this context, after a year of exploration, at the end of 2021, Dankrad Feist, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, proposed aNew Fragmentation Scheme. This scheme has been valued and recognized by the community in 2022, and in order to distinguish it from the old sharding scheme, the new sharding scheme is named after Dankrad - Danksharding. Danksharding builds on two new research advances — PBS and crList — two schemes aimed at solving MEV and censorship issues. Different from the previous sharding scheme, in the Danksharding scheme, only one proposer chooses to enter all the transactions and data of the slot, which makes the integration of Layer 1 and rollup more tightly and greatly simplifies the original sharding scheme.
In 2022, the Ethereum community has made considerable progress in the research and development of Danksharding. Vitalik and other researchers proposed proto-danksharding (ieEIP-4844 ), which is a proposal to implement most of the logic and scaffolding of the complete Danksharding specification, which mainly introduces a new type of transaction - a transaction carrying a blob.
In addition to the work of merging in 2022, client developers will also focus on the implementation of proto-danksharding in the second half of the year. Currently, EIP-4844 already has specifications for the execution layer and the consensus layer, and two developer testnets have been launched. While the KZG ceremonies required for EIP-4844 implementation are available in public contributedtest site, the official version will be launched in the new year of 2023.
Related Reading:
Related Reading:
"Uncovering the Advantages of "Sharding" from a Technical Perspective"
"Ethereum Roadmap Centered on ROLLUP"
"Significantly Simplified New Fragmentation Design"
《Vitalik: Proto-Danksharding FAQ》
FTX, the world's second largest centralized exchange, has exploded. Where should the security of user assets go?
On November 11, the world's second largest cryptocurrency centralized exchange FTXDeclared bankrupt, the entire blockchain ecology fell into a complex emotion mixed with shock, anger, sadness... The asset gap of as high as 8 billion has caused countless users and some institutions associated with them to lose their money. The process from the exposure of the incident to the final declaration of bankruptcy happened too fast and too dramatically, so that many implicated users had not had time to digest and react to the successive revelations, and FTX suddenly restricted user withdrawals.
thingscause afterWhat is it like? Initially, on November 2, CoinDesk wasa news reportAccording to the disclosure in the report, the balance sheet of Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency quantitative trading company founded by SBF, shows that among the assets worth 14.6 billion US dollars held by it, a large part of it is the platform currency FTT issued by FTX or FTT. An asset that is used as collateral for a loan. For a while, the community's discussion on this revelation intensified, and the addition of Binance founder CZ made the whole thing more like a confrontation between two forces. Afterwards, FTX was unbearable from users' withdrawals, fell into a liquidity crisis, stopped user withdrawals, and declared bankruptcy... On December 13, SBF was officially arrested in the Bahamas and subsequently extradited to the United States to wait for a trial. The farce has come to an end for the time being.
Here is just a description of the FTX incident itself, and the domino effect triggered by this black swan incident is even more horrible or there are still many undisclosed.Crypto researcher Molly White made a diffusion map of FTXimage description
cr: mollywhite.net (parts extracted)
Asset security is a topic that can never be avoided in the blockchain field, and 2022 will be a year full of disasters for users on and off the chain: frequent cross-chain attacks, Luna-UST zeroing, Three Arrows Capital and Celsius One after another thunderstorms... The collapse of FTX is undoubtedly the most unbelievable black swan event this year. Obviously, the root cause of FTX's failure was the private misappropriation of users' assets, resulting in the final insolvency. It’s just that before this incident was disclosed, few people would believe that this kind of thing would happen to FTX, the world’s second largest exchange. This can't help but sound the alarm for the entire encryption circle: how to ensure the security of users' assets?
image description
cr: vitalik.ca
Of course, we can do much more than choose between CEX and DEX. There are still a series of options in the middle of the spectrum waiting for us to explore and develop.
VitalikWrite an analysis of how to make centralized exchanges more secure. In this article, we can see more possibilities for exploring centralized exchanges: payable proofs realized by cryptographic technologies such as Merkle trees and even ZK-SNARK, research directions of non-custodial centralized exchanges. ..
By introducing account abstraction (Account Abstraction) and multi-party computing (MPC) technology, functions such as wallet social recovery, Web2 social media account login, etc. are realized to further improve the user experience of the decentralized asset custody solution.
Related Reading:
Related Reading:
"Building a Secure Centralized Exchange - Proof of Repayment and More"
DeSoc in Breeding
People in the Ethereum community must have heard of SBT (Soulbound Token, Soulbound Token) in 2022. It appears in major hackathon entries, financing news, Web3 digital certificates and identity systems. In the track analysis article...
The craze originated in mid-May 2022, when Vitalik published a paper with lawyer Puja Ohlhaver and economist E. Glen Weyl"Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul". This paper points out various problems in the current Web3 world. Sybil attacks and collusion are prevalent in the virtual world. Only transferable assets make the DeFi ecosystem unable to support ordinary activities in the real economy. The Web3 world is facing hyper-financialization, Concentration of wealth, vulnerability of governance to financial attacks, etc.
The author of the paper believes that the lack of native Web3 identity is the key to these problems, so he proposed two Web3 primitives, SBT and Soul (the account or wallet of "soul-bound token"), where SBT refers to the public Visible, non-transferable (but potentially revokable by issuer) tokens that can represent commitments, credentials, and attribution, and Soul is an account or wallet that holds SBT. They hope that under the identity paradigm formed by SBT and Soul, Web3 can move towards a decentralized society (DeSoc) with co-determined sociality, soul and community bottom-up convening and collaboration.
Once the paper was issued, it became a "hot topic in the city", and the community's exploration of the realization of SBT and Soul emerged in an endless stream. Currently there areMultiple SBT standards proposed in EIP, in Draft, Review or Final stages. As of November 2022, there are two ERCs in the Final stage - ERC-5192 "Minimal Soulbound NFTs" and ERC-5484 "Consensual Soulbound NFTs". Both of these two ERCs use non-transferability as the core function. The difference is that ERC-5192 adds additional technical parameters to detect the status of transferability, while ERC-5484 focuses on the mutual agreement between the issuer and the receiver. Other EIPs include:
EIP-4671: Non-Tradable Tokens Standard (Draft)
EIP-4973: Account-bound Tokens (Review)
EIP-5114: Soul Badge (Draft)
EIP-5727: Semi-Fungible Soulbound Token (Draft)
EIP-5516: Soulbound Multi-owner Token (Review)
EIP-5633: Composable Soulbound NFT, EIP-1155 Extension (Draft)
In addition, projects, platforms, and protocols related to Web3 digital credentials, identity systems, reputation systems, and account abstraction have also attracted the attention of the community and the favor of investment institutions.
Related Reading:
Related Reading:
"Decentralized Society: Finding the Soul of Web3"
Zero-knowledge proof has attracted much attention, and the competition in the ZK-EVM track is fierce
When it comes to the strongest cryptography technology born in the past ten years, it is inevitable to mention zero knowledge proof (zero knowledge proof). In the blockchain field, they have two major application scenarios: scalability and privacy.
In the opening ceremony of Decon VI on October 11th, a theme of"What to Know About Zero Knowledge"The Panel. As one of the guests, Vitalik once said: "I think ZK is naturally a supplement to the blockchain. The reason why I say this, first of all, I think that the anti-censorship features provided by the blockchain are at the expense of "scalability" and " "Privacy" at the expense of these two very important properties. ZK-SNARK is a technology tailored for these two properties."
image description
cr: @VitalikButerin (Chinese translation)
In this part of the work (The Verge), the ultimate goal is to be able to introduce trustless or trust-minimized node solutions (making light clients finally feasible), making it super simple to verify blocks. And all of this is based on zero-knowledge proof technology. In the roadmap, the realization of a fully SNARK-based Ethereum needs to be composed of the following three milestones:
SNARKs for Verkle proofs;
SNARKs for consensus state transitions;
SNARKs for L1 EVM
In addition, since the beginning of this year, the competition for ZK-EVM solutions in the field of Ethereum expansion has been fierce, and it is roughly divided intoFour types of ZK-EVM。
Type 1: Full Ethereum equivalent of ZK-EVM (Privacy and Scaling Explorations team, Taiko)
Type 2: Full EVM equivalent ZK-EVM (Scroll, Polygon Hermez)
Type 3: almost EVM equivalent
Type 4: high-level-language equivalent (zkSync, StarkNet)
Related Reading:
Related Reading:
Compliance and Decentralization of MEV-Boost
In 2021, Vitalik and Ethereum Foundation researchers will discussProposer/Builder Separation Scheme (PBS)came up withspecific design, to resolve MEV issues. In November of the same year, the Flashbots team proposed MEV-Boost based on the design of PBS for the merged Flashbots architecture, which can be regarded as the prototype of PBS. The Flashbots auction architecture allows validators to outsource block building to a network of third-party block builders, but puts the mev-boost relay in a trusted location - both block builders and proposers need to trust the relay.
image description
Adoption rate of mev-boost, source:https://dune.com/queries/1279670/2192739
expressexpress"Flashbots relayers and builders are and will be in compliance with OFAC." That said, validators on Ethereum using the Flashbots mev-boost relay are all under review.
Share of Flashbots relayed after September merger84% , which introduces a critical centralization crisis to the Ethereum infrastructure. Fortunately, in order to promote the development of the Ethereum network in a healthier direction, the Flashbots team has successively open sourced MEV-Boost, sync-proxy andBlock Builder API. The share of Flashbots relays dropped to less than80% 。
In addition, the Flashbots team announced in late NovemberSUAVE(Single Unified Auction for Value Expression) scheme to drive the decentralization of MEV. SUAVE unties the role of transaction pool and block builder from the existing blockchain, and provides a highly specialized and decentralized plug-and-play option, allowing block builders to share the same ordering layer .
Although the centralization crisis and censorship issues brought about by the Flashbots MEV-Boost relay are still hanging over the Ethereum community, the ecological diversity of MEV has gradually improved, and the Flashbots team has launched a plan to promote the decentralization of MEV , and can better solve the MEV problemPBS within agreementRelated Reading:
Related Reading:
"Flashbots Architecture MEV-Boost for Consolidation and Its Implementation Plan"
Fee Market Design Friendly to Proposer/Block Builder Separation
"Vitalik: Proposer/Builder Separation Scheme for Two Slots"
Optimistic Rollup solution opens the first year of #L222 ecological application
image description
cr: l2beat.com/scaling/tvl
image description
cr: orbiter.finance/data
image description
cr: l2beat.com/scaling/tvl
Arbitrum last year'sSeptember 1Open the beta version of the mainnet to the public and lift the whitelist system. This year, Arbitrum has two major updates:
Launched Nitro, an iterative version of Arbitrum One, which further improves the original version in different aspects, including providing higher efficiency, less latency, stronger liveness guarantees, and better compatibility.
Arbitrum Nova, an off-chain data availability solution based on AnyTrust technology, is launched to meet the needs of some applications for higher scalability (such as the game industry), but at the same time it will bring additional minimum trust assumptions.
Optimism in last year'sDecember 17Officially remove the whitelist restriction, and open deployment without permission. In terms of protocol development, this year Optimism mainly reduces transaction fees by at least 40% and improves user experience through overhead optimization and upgrades; it launches the next iteration version of Bedrock’s test network, which will introduce the next-generation fraud proof system Cannon. while inGovernance, Optimism also made some innovations: issuing token OP, introducing Optimism Collective and establishing Optimism Foundation. Optimism is jointly governed by members of the Optimism Foundation, an organization registered in the Cayman Islands, and the Optimism Collective. Among them, Optimism Collective is jointly governed by two houses, Citizens' House (Citizens' House) and Token House (Token House).
Token House was established through token airdrops and built the first batch of community members. OP token holders will be able to vote on protocol upgrades, project incentives, governance funds, and more.
Citizens' House will facilitate and govern the distribution process of retroactive public goods funding collected from the network's profits. Citizenship will be conferred by "soulbound" (distribution of NFT), and as the Optimism community grows, so will the community of citizens. Citizens' House is a tool, a mechanism for distributing power from any centralized organization to an individual-centric, non-consortium group.
Next year, in addition to the update and iteration of the protocol performance itself, Optimistic Rollup and even the entire Rollup ecological solution will conduct more exploration and practice in the decentralization of Rollup. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin first proposed it at Scroll's Rollup Day event on October 11.Strengthen the Rollup system with multi-provers, followed by a post in the Ethereum Magicians forum proposing"Three stages of removing the rollup training wheel"Related Reading:
Related Reading:
"Using multi-provers to strengthen the Rollup system"
"Three Stages of Removing Rollup Training Wheels"
Tornado Cash sanctions and regulatory turmoil
On August 8, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned virtual currency mixing platform Tornado Cash. According to the Sanctions Act, it is illegal for any U.S. citizens, residents and companies to conduct trade, economic transactions or "other transactions" with persons, companies and countries on the sanction list (including Tornado Cash). regulations, or face heavy fines and prison terms.
For a time, the community for"What the OFAC Sanctions Act Means"The discussions are endless. Especially at that time, Ethereum was about to switch from PoW to PoS consensus. The possible impact of Tornado Cash’s OFAC sanctions on the merged Ethereum’s PoS mechanism caused extensive discussions in the community: For Ethereum’s American miners and verifiers , are they violating OFAC sanctions if they include one of the Ethereum addresses on the SDN list in the Ethereum block they generate (or verify) that contains the transaction?
It was pointed out at the time that it looked like over 66% of beacon chain validators would comply with OFAC's sanctions. (Lido, Coinbase, Kraken, Staked, and Bitcoin Suisse have more than 60% of their network of validator nodes.) This could lead to censorship at the base layer/protocol level.
Subsequently, in an All Core Devs on August 18, the core developers of Ethereum discussed the topic of "how to deal with censorship attacks on the network"discussed. Developer @tkstanczak said that ideally he would prefer to see responses to these things happen at the societal level rather than the protocol level. Marius emphasized that while it can be difficult to get team/organizational commitment, individual voices are also important. He said that anti-censorship is the top of his personal defense. If Ethereum cannot be anti-censorship, he will leave Ethereum.
Previously, in a poll for the Ethereum community initiated by @ercwl: If most pledgers choose option A in the above vote, what would you do:
X) Treat censorship as an attack on Ethereum and expel these nodes from the network through Ethereum community consensus;
Y) Tolerate censorship.
Vitalik stated that he supports option X.
Anti-censorship is undoubtedly a problem that the Ethereum community needs to think about and solve for a long time. Fortunately, in the face of different levels and levels of censorship, the Ethereum community has at least some solutions in the research stage, such as PBS written into the protocol layer, MEV- Smoothing, encrypted trading pool, etc. In addition to the core developers of Ethereum, the anti-censorship work also requires the active participation of various teams in the Ethereum ecosystem.
Devcon Bogota
After Devcon V held in Osaka, Japan in 2019, due to the impact of the epidemic, Devcon VI will finally be held again in Bogota, Colombia, South America on October 11, 2022.
Devcon is the only annual conference hosted by the Ethereum Foundation and is the largest event for the Ethereum community. The long-lost Devcon VI ushered in an unprecedented event, the conference receivedMore than 1200 speaker applications, during the 4 days held at Devcon, there are60,000 peopleWatching the live broadcast, more than 20,000 people watched it on the first day alone.
The theme of Devcon this time is no longer limited to technology-led, but also added themes such as "Opportunity & Global Impact" and "Governance & Collaboration", among which "Opportunity & Global Impact" has become the most popular theme category. Both UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) and the Internet Archive were represented at Devcon VI, showing Ethereum's growing influence in helping the "real world" overcome "gap across cultural, ethnic and economic classes".
Devcon Bogota in 2022 is undoubtedly a carnival for the global Ethereum community. Everyone gathers to cooperate and share knowledge, communicate and generate new ideas, grow the Ethereum community and have fun together, leaving a deep impression on every participant present.
So, which city will Devcon VII be held in 2023? Let's take a look at the shortlist:https://forum.devcon.org/c/devcon-7-location-suggestions/14
