The Cancun upgrade is coming! Inventory of 12 important upgrades in the history of Ethereum

This year, Ethereum will carry out two important upgrades according to the plan, namely the Shanghai upgrade completed on April 12, and the Cancun upgrade expected to be carried out in the fourth quarter. There have been 24 milestone events, most of which are fork upgrades, and the relatively important ones are 12 upgrades. If you are in the Ethereum ecosystem, it is very necessary to understand the growth process of Ethereum.

When the traditional centralized software needs to be upgraded, a new version will be released to replace the old version. However, because the blockchain is decentralized and has no central ownership, the upgrade of the blockchain will be carried out by forking. Miners and verifier nodes It is necessary to update the Ethereum client to generate blocks according to the rules of the new fork. The upgraded fork will become the new main chain, and the other old chain will be abandoned because no one continues to maintain it. However, there are also some very rare cases. The situation caused miners to be unwilling to give up, thus continuing to maintain the old chain and causing a permanent split in the network, which is the relationship between the current ETH and ETC Ethereum Classic.

July 30, 2015 Frontier Upgrade

Frontier upgrade is the first quasi-system-level version released by Ethereum for developers. It uses code and command line operations, and there is no graphical single software version, so it can be understood as the beta version of Ethereum, which is also called Because of the border, Ethereum at this time is like the period of the Great Western Development of the United States, full of huge risks and opportunities.

In the frontier version, the gas limit of each block was hard-coded to 5000Gas, and then the limit of 5000Gas was canceled in the border unfreeze upgrade two months later, and the default price of Gas was set to 50gwei, and just now The difficulty bomb was introduced in the second upgrade to artificially regulate the difficulty of mining, thus forcing POW miners to be unprofitable when POS goes online, laying the groundwork for the subsequent switch to POS. When the difficulty bomb explodes, Ethereum will enter the " Ice Age (that’s what it’s officially called)”, so please note that only in the initial stage of Ethereum, it has been determined to switch to POS.

Since then, Ethereum has officially entered the quasi-available POW mining era, and the price of Ethereum is $1.24 each.

Home upgrade on March 14, 2016

Home upgrade is the second major version released by Ethereum. As the name suggests, the first batch of gold diggers have completed the western development of the border and entered the stage of building homes to live and work in peace.

Homeland upgrade is also the first upgrade to release the EIP Ethereum improvement proposal. It includes 3 EIPs of 2, 7, and 8 respectively. EIP2 increases the gas fee cost of contract creation from 21,000 to 53,000. EIP7 adds a new function DELEGATECALL to facilitate code Multiplexing, EIP8 is forward compatible with the network protocol devp2p.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $12.5 each.

The DAO fork on July 20, 2016 (Ethereum’s darkest moment)

This is not a normal upgrade, but a compromise that Ethereum was forced to make in the darkest moment. Since then, Ethereum has parted ways to form ETH and ETC.

The DAO is an investment DAO controlled by smart contracts launched on Ethereum in 2016, and conducted an ICO to raise $150 million worth of Ethereum, accounting for 14% of Ethereum’s circulation at that time, but later because of the contract code. The vulnerability was hacked, and after a lot of attempts to stop the hacker, Ethereum finally recovered the stolen funds through a hard fork, but this also greatly shaken a large number of members who follow Code Is Low and believe in decentralization , the old chain that should have been abandoned is still maintained by believers, and the chain is called ETC Ethereum Classic.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $12.54 each.

October 16, 2017 Byzantium Upgrade

At this time, Ethereum has experienced two major milestone upgrades, the border and the homeland. According to the plan, the next step is to upgrade the metropolis. As the name suggests, after the homeland is built on the border, the homeland will be built into a bustling metropolis, but the metropolis will be upgraded. , so it was planned to split into two upgrades of Byzantium and Constantinople, but in fact the metropolitan stage was far more complicated than expected, so the subsequent upgrades of Istanbul and Berlin were dismantled.

But before entering the metropolitan stage and truly making Ethereum "everything", Vitalik believes that Ethereum must turn to POS, and gradually make miners unprofitable in POW, so as to "drive" them to be forced to accept POS. So at least when it’s time to switch to POS, the miners feel that continuing to benefit from POW is not as good as switching to POS. Otherwise, when POS goes online, and a large number of miners rely on POW and are unwilling to leave, it will directly lead to the split of Ethereum. The severity of this kind of split is far greater than that of ETC, so to gradually reduce the income of POW, this upgrade released 10 EIPs in one breath, among which EIP649 delayed the difficulty bomb for one and a half years, and reduced the block reward from 5 to 3. The main reason for delaying the difficulty bomb is that Ethereum is not ready for the POS switch.

Secondly, after experiencing the darkest moment of The DAO fork, Ethereum released EIP214 to restrict any modification of the state during the call of the contract, thereby improving security.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $334.32 each.

February 28, 2019 Constantinople (St. Petersburg) Upgrade

The originally planned Constantinople upgrade was postponed due to a vulnerability discovered by the security community ChainSecurity. After two years, Ethereum finally ushered in an upgrade, so in fact this upgrade is actually a double-shot. Two upgrades were completed in the block for Constantinople and St. Petersburg respectively.

In this upgrade, in order to drive miners to POS one step closer, EIP1234 once again reduced the block reward from 3ETH to 2ETH. Similarly, the difficulty bomb was delayed again for 12 months due to the lack of preparation for switching to POS .

Introduced in EIP1014 is a new command CREATE2 that can pre-calculate the contract address before the contract is officially deployed, thus introducing the state channel concept similar to the Bitcoin Lightning Network into Ethereum, which can be calculated off-chain first and then the corresponding The contract is deployed to the chain for settlement.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $136.29 each.

January 2, 2020 Muir Glacier Upgrade

Less than a month after the Istanbul upgrade was completed, Ethereum underwent an emergency upgrade. It is very rare to perform two hard forks within a month. It will lead to an early explosion, and the POS switch is still not ready, so it is urgent to upgrade and delay the difficulty bomb again. It is also because this upgrade is a temporary decision, so it does not follow the naming rules of the metropolis. Remember the above mentioned What does the Ethereum official call the difficulty bomb after it explodes? The ice age, and Muir Glacier is the name of a glacier in Alaska, USA that has been replaced by sea water, so the meaning of being called Muir Glacier is to let the glacier "disappear" first.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $127.18 each.

The Beacon Chain will be officially released on December 1, 2020

The POS plan that has been brewing since 2015 has finally taken an important step. The POS beacon chain is officially launched today, running in parallel with the POW main chain. An epic Merge will be carried out in the Paris upgrade two years later. .

At this point the price of Ethereum is $586.23 each.

Berlin upgrade on April 15, 2021

The upgrade of Berlin opened the era of "naming" the Devcon city. In the forum, when everyone discussed how to name the next upgrade, there were various suggestions, including constellations, musical instruments, World of Warcraft characters, etc., and the final one was named after the Devcon city The proposal was voted on, so this upgrade was named after Berlin, where the first Edvcon was held.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $2454 each.

London upgrade on August 5, 2021

This upgrade released one of the most influential EIPs on Ethereum: EIP1559, which directly changed the economic model of Ethereum. Previously, block packaging was an auction mechanism. It is divided into two parts, one part is given to miners, and the other part is burned, thus bringing Ethereum into the era of deflation. Up to now, 3.2 million ETH worth 6 billion US dollars have been burned.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $2621 each.

September 15, 2022 Paris upgrade (Merge)

Ethereum has officially completed the epic upgrade of Merge in Paris. This time it directly modifies the upgrade of the execution layer and consensus layer of Ethereum. EIP3675 upgrades the consensus to POS proof of rights. The beacon chain that has been running for two years has been successfully installed. The years-long POS road has finally come to an end, but there is still a small tail that has not been resolved, which is the issue of pledged withdrawals, because the beacon chain does not support pledged withdrawals during these two years, resulting in a large number of pledged withdrawals. Participants cannot withdraw their funds, and just experienced a round of bull market highs of 4,000 US dollars just half a year before the upgrade in Paris, so those early pledgers can only watch the roller coaster but have no choice, so they must solve the pledge withdrawal problem, Otherwise, people would not dare to pledge their ETH as a node, which would lead to centralization risks in the POS chain, but there are also LSD products such as Lido that solve the pledge withdrawal problem to a certain extent.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $1472 each.

Upgraded in Shanghai on April 12, 2023

The biggest problem solved by the Shanghai upgrade is the realization of pledged withdrawals. Nodes that have been struggling for two years on the beacon chain can finally withdraw money, but at the same time more people are willing to pledge their money. There are already 1900 Ten thousand ETH was pledged, which also opened the curtain of LSDFi.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $1917 each.

2023 time to be determined Cancun Upgrade

To solve the problem of Ethereum consensus, it is necessary to focus on breakthroughs in capacity expansion. First of all, Ethereum has clearly adopted the Layer 2 solution on the path. How to better support Layer 2 is a key consideration for Ethereum. The Cancun upgrade is expected in 23 In the second half of the year, the most important ones include EIP4844, which introduces a new transaction type to Ethereum, which can store data at a cheaper cost in a space called Blob, so that the data previously stored in Layer1 by Layer2 can Stored in Blob, greatly reducing the cost of Layer2.

The above is the growth history of Ethereum. After sorting it out, it is soul-stirring. It is hard to imagine that all these plans were designed as early as 7 years ago when the first official version of Ethereum was released. At that time, Vitalik was only 21 years old. .