A Brief Talk on the Future of Eth 2.0: Sharding as a Data Availability Layer

Every time the winds and clouds change, people start to think about what's next for the systems we deploy.

The rise of DeFi in Ethereum has also brought such doubts to the smart contract platform level. At present, the gas fee of Ethereum has reached the highest in history, and various congestions make users and application developers ask such questions: Is Ethereum really the right choice?

This is a very delicate question, with several variables to consider:

➤ A series of new Layer 2 solutions after the release of the mainnet

➤ Eth 2.0+ sharding process

➤ New, well-funded layer1 chains such as Solana, Near

➤ The inertia of Ethereum at the community or tool level

➤ Application chain + interoperability technology, such as Cosmos, Polkadot

Ethereum News Weekly founder: Vitalik did not sell 3,000 Ethereum: On November 15th, Evan Van Ness, the founder of Ethereum News Weekly, tweeted that after asking Vitalik Buterin, he learned that the wallet address starting with 0xe692 is not V God. All, so this is fake news.

Earlier news, according to SlowMist monitoring, the address of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (starting with 0xe692) recently exchanged 3,000 Ethereum for USD 4 million USDC in three transactions on Uniswap V3. [2022/11/15 13:06:16]

➤ The trade-off between DeFi primitive interoperability and low fees for new applications

So much information to keep track of! Many narratives in the ecology are affected by the narrator's profit-seeking motives, which are often useless.

I want to discuss a possible future that I'm excited about - using Eth 2.0 sharding as a data availability layer for Layer 2.

Ethereum client Geth released version v1.10.18: On May 25th, the Ethereum client Geth released version v1.10.18 upgrade, which added the parameters of merging (The Merge) on the Ropsten test network, as long as the total difficulty of the network reaches 43531756765713534 will activate the merge. For nodes, to participate in this merger, the consensus client needs to be installed at the same time. [2022/5/25 3:41:40]

This is a very technical statement, and is why I feel like it doesn't get as much attention as concepts in other web articles. I hope this provides another mental model of the future that readers can use as a reference in the next 5 to 10 years.

What exactly is data availability?

"Data availability" is a lesser known, but very important concept. It comes up a lot in conversations between researchers, but I rarely see it discussed outside the circle.

GameStop transferred about 15 million IMX tokens to Binance and other exchanges: News on February 5. Previously, Immutable, the developer of Immutable X, an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution, announced a partnership with GameStop as part of the transaction. In part, GameStop will receive grants in IMX tokens worth up to $150 million upon completion of certain milestones. GameStop has received over 37.5 million IMX tokens in the past four days.

GameStop transferred about 15 million IMX to centralized exchanges Binance, Huobi and OKX. The current circulating supply is approximately 225 million, and the 15 million IMX tokens represent approximately 6.5% of the token supply. The influx of IMX tokens into the market may have caused a sharp drop in its price over the past day and a half. After Immutable’s announcement, the price of IMX tokens reached above $4.20, but the price has since dropped by 40%. (Crypto Briefing)

Earlier news, GameStop and Immutable X launched a joint fund of 100 million US dollars, which will invest in NFT game projects. [2022/2/5 9:32:53]

This post is not to explain how it is achieved, but to discuss what data availability is. If you want to see more technical instructions about it (how to use it), you can refer to these materials.

BTC broke through the $56,000 mark with an intraday increase of 1.87%: BTC rose in the short term and broke through the $56,000 mark. It is now reported at $56,000.1, with an intraday increase of 1.87%. The market fluctuates greatly. Please do a good job in risk control. [2021/10/10 20:18:05]

Data availability may become a feature of the blockchain. In addition to knowing what it is, it is also very helpful to know what it is not.

At present, the reliability of the data on the chain is not guaranteed. For example, if you want to know whether the sender's account balance is sufficient to pay for transactions in a certain block, this information is not provided by data availability.

What data availability can provide is the guarantee that any user (including light clients) can find all data on the blockchain.

The following diagram visualizes the data availability blockchain:

It is just a sequence of data elements without interpretation of their contents. You can probably think of it simply as an ordered, permissionless, append-only database.

But for a blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum, we need more functionality, we need to know which transactions are valid and which are not.

Instead of having to deal with this on the blockchain, we can account for the data availability blockchain in some "execution context", which can tell which data blocks are valid and which are not:

If we interpret our blockchain in "execution context 1", then block 1 represents valid data and block 2 represents invalid data. This execution environment is available elsewhere, such as layer2.

The beauty of this approach is that it completely separates data from execution. We can build a chain that can quickly sort and process data. Then, the data is interpreted through a layer 2 execution environment, like optimistic rollup.

Eth 2.0 Sharding as Data Availability Layer

One possible future for Eth 2.0 is for all but one shard to become a Layer 2 high-throughput data-availability blockchain. And the exception shard is used as a data transition for eth1, so it is the only shard that can define the meaning of data at the consensus level.

The following figure shows the visualization of the execution environment:

Those concerns that cross-shard transactions are impossible will be addressed in the future. Layer2 can utilize all shards in its transactions. Ultimately, the economic separation between shards will depend entirely on layer 2.

We don't have to wait until Phase 2 of Eth 2.0 for this to happen. I don't make personal estimates here, but this will accelerate the arrival of a more scalable and executable Ethereum.

Of course this is just a vision. There is also the possibility that it will not happen in the end, but if it does, it will have far-reaching consequences.

A new round of agreement battle is underway!

We are poised to enter a world of unknowns as blockchain and scaling technologies attempt to fulfill themselves in this new, highly congested DeFi regime.

Smart people consider many different possibilities and follow their development closely to understand what is going on. This article is a simple exploration of the possibilities of the future, and I hope it can add a vision of the future to readers.

In future articles, I will explore this in more depth.

Source | lakshmansankar.com

Original link:

https://www.lakshmansankar.com/#/shards-as-data-availability-layers

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