Ethereum 2.0, which has been brewing for many years, is likely to come online in July and August. For some developers or investors, this moment may seem a long time, so that in the dark period of the last round of the bear market, countless people They are all surprisingly singing empty Ethereum.
Such as: sharding technology has yet to be verified, Vitalik Buterin has no leader temperament, the number of users and activity is not as good as EOS or Tron, and the Ethereum team manages chaos. This kind of doubt continued until the first half of 2019. There was a pause. The reason is very simple. The price of ETH rose a lot during the take-off of that market.
In addition, when many skeptics looked around, they found an embarrassing fact: although the bulky Ethereum ship is not fast enough, it has been courageously moving towards its established goals. And the opponent next to it, either didn’t even put the testnet online, or fell into a dispute lawsuit, or even the founder left…
By 2020, various opinions on social media are surprisingly unanimously bullish on Ethereum, looking forward to Ethereum 2.0, and commending the era that Ethereum 2.0 will open as a milestone.
So why is Ethereum 2.0 so worth looking forward to? Why is Ethereum 2.0 praised as a blockchain milestone?
We may wish to review the history of blockchain. Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, countless benevolent people have been working towards the peer-to-peer electronic payment system, but until now it has not been successful, but it has been accepted as a store of value: Crypto gold, There are three reasons for this.
1. The price fluctuates greatly, which will cause many holders to prefer to put it in the wallet rather than consume it; 2. Only about 7 transactions can be processed in one second, which causes the transaction to take a long time to complete. As a comparison, Visa and MasterCard’s transaction processing capacity can reach thousands to tens of thousands; 3. A maximum of 21 million BTC, which is far better than gold in terms of being divisible, storable, portable, and not easily deteriorated. It has become the role of Crypto gold, and the demand for scalability is almost negligible;
Ethereum appeared. When Vitalik Buterin raised funds for project financing in 2015, the PPT was full of code. Those VCs who understood the stage were excited after Vitalik Buterin’s speech: This is the future! Invested one after another and set a record. And in 2017-2018, countless millions and even billionaires have been achieved. In contrast, industry tycoon Du Jun drove the V god out of the door and scolded scammers because he did not understand the code.
Why is it the future? It unprecedentedly created the era of smart contracts, which can be programmed on Ethereum. This technique cannot be overstated.
There is only one symbol in the bitcoin network-bitcoin. Users cannot customize other symbols. These symbols can represent company stocks or debt certificates, which loses some functions. In addition, the Bitcoin protocol uses a stack-based scripting language. Although it has some flexibility to enable functions such as multi-signature, it is not enough to build more advanced applications, such as decentralized exchanges. Ethereum is designed to solve the problem of insufficient scalability of Bitcoin. (WeChat public account “Internet chain” from this article) Vitalik Buterin said that when Ethereum 2.0 is fully implemented, the transaction confirmation time will be reduced to 3 to 6 seconds.
In the blockchain story, the most important thing is that the big guy is attracted (or the price soars) because of his exquisite design of Bitcoin, and he is desperate to devote himself to the story of the blockchain industry. The same is true for Ethereum. The managing partner of A16Z Crypto once told the real story in an interview:
“I see five entrepreneurial teams from major universities and technology companies every week. They are very interesting and want to really do something. The typical story is usually this: I am from a small town in the Midwest of the United States. As a programmer, I grew up reading some books related to innovations in Silicon Valley. I was encouraged and determined to chase my ideals. I finally got my wish and took up a job at Facebook, but in the past few years, I have only consumed myself in trivial work, which is a departure. My original intention. But when I studied Ethereum one weekend, I found something so cool and so exciting.”
The era of everyone who can create tokens created by Ethereum has made IC0 (the first token issuance) burst into flames, countless people have become rich, and many people have been tricked into ruin. The ability to conduct rapid fundraising and financing around the world has been criticized by most regulators and industry insiders as a slaughterhouse, but it has also been praised by Binance Zhao Changpeng and Coinbase Armstrong as a great achievement, but Ethereum will not No story to tell.
Until DeFi appeared in 2019, the story of open finance was big enough and enough, and Ethereum began to become lively again, but the problem that always troubled still needs to be broken through, that is scalability.
In 2014, Lu Xujun, the founder of Wanwei Chain, who replaced all Bitcoins with Ethereum, once talked about being the editor-in-chief of Mars: cross-chain, performance, efficient consensus, unified standards of blockchain technology, and consistency of data on and off chain Sex and so on. Any major breakthrough in these problems is a revolutionary change to blockchain 2.0.
The shift from POW to POS will start at the 0th stage of Ethereum 2.0. From machine energy consumption to pledge token production blocks, the POS consensus mechanism is indeed the general trend. For a long time, Bitcoin has been criticized for its huge energy consumption and increasing mining threshold, and the POS has come at the right time. Pledge 32 ETH to participate in the mining output as a validator and start Ethereum’s efficient consensus engine with ETH fuel. I believe that in the future, the threshold for pledge mining and the cost of production blocks will drop significantly.
But the most pressing issue, I think the scalability issue should be at the forefront. This is like a smart phone with an operating system, but the network speed is still at 2G. Being in the 2G era will never drive the rapid development of Douyin, short video, live broadcast, e-commerce logistics, and mobile navigation.
Players who download cryptocurrency wallets may have a deep understanding. (Article WeChat search public number: millionchainking) Open many Dapps, the experience is very poor, and even stuck in the page display loading. Not only that, most Dapps are even single-digit. The reason is not that the design is unreasonable, but the processing performance of the system, which is called the snail level.
In the fireside conversation with Ben Horowitz, the CEO of Coinbase believes that the biggest area where the blockchain industry needs to develop is the first to bear: scalability-we need a blockchain that can achieve at least thousands of TPS to enable encryption The mainstream adoption of currency (similar to broadband Internet is a major unlocking method on the network).
He also emphasized again in a prediction article: Scalability is a prerequisite for the crypto industry’s utility phase to really start. Once we see the scalability of the blockchain increase by several orders of magnitude, we will start to develop new applications faster.
Just a few days ago, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik tweeted that Ethereum’s two-tier expansion strategy has “basically” succeeded, and the rest is improvement and deployment. The two-tier expansion strategy is not limited to the upgrade of Ethereum, but also includes the implementation of zero-knowledge (ZK), the state chain, and the Plasma expansion scheme framework.
The basic success of Ethereum Layer 2 actually means that the Ethereum ecosystem has entered a scalable era. Without sharding and PoS, the current Ethereum is basically unable to carry an ecology. With the introduction of various DeFi, games and other applications and protocols, Ethereum has slowly become overwhelmed, and now the development of Layer 2 can alleviate this situation.
Someone may ask again, the question of scalability, why only talk about Ethereum, other public chains are doing well. Why is it not NEAR who has always told the story of open networks, why is it not the Dfinity of the central cloud computing, its luxury lineup team, will be on the testnet in July; why is it not EOS or TRIN, why is it not cosmos…
These questions are of course reasonable, because the public chain dispute is far from over, and it is still too early to talk about it. However, with its strong first-mover advantages and network effects, Ethereum has irrefutably occupied the initiative.
Many mainstream projects are actually ERC20 tokens. After counting the top 2,000 token data by market value, we can roughly see the number of dApps on each platform and the market share occupied, and Ethereum has an overwhelming advantage.
The author has also seen such a phenomenon. Some projects always boast of themselves in terms of the number of active people. In fact, in the early days, it was meaningless to talk about the number of false users. On the contrary, the number of developers on Ethereum is far ahead of any competitors.
Vitalik Buterin said in a recent podcast that Ethereum 2.0 will solve all the problems that have been dealt with since the birth of the ETH ecosystem. Overall, Vitalik Buterin believes: “ETH 2 is radical, ETH 2 is great, ETH 2 has a growth potential of 100 to 1000 times, ETH 2 is the future trend.” But at the same time, ETH 2 is not a real tomorrow “.
Indeed, Ethereum is not really tomorrow. What people want is not blockchain, Ethereum 2.0, nor cross-chain, nor distributed storage, but a crypto economy. In this sense, the real tomorrow may be many years away.
But Ethereum 2.0 is still great, it can still be called a milestone, and will bring “fuel gasoline” to the entire industry.
Reference article
1. Blue Fox notes, Ethereum layer2 breakthrough progress: ETH ecosystem has entered a scalable era
2. Literature, Lu Xujun, the founder of Wanwei Chain: Galaxy Consensus + Cross-Chain, Explore the Next Possibility of Blockchain 3.0 | Mars Editor-in-Chief No.27
3. Babbitt, Coinbase CEO and A16z founder’s fireside talk: Blockchain and the Internet are so familiar
4. Mars Finance, Wang Feng 10 asked Nervos co-founder Wang Ningning: Why do “China’s most Ethereum-savvy people” want to take the road of independent innovation in China’s public chain?