The first part of the GameFi public blockchain research series: the development and upgrade route of Ethereum

Introduction

Recently, Guatian often receives consultation requests from project parties, asking which public chain should be deployed, the performance differences of each public chain, what is the ecological layout and platform traffic, and what is the long-term and short-term impact on the project. It just so happens that this year has experienced the issuance of several popular public chain projects, including Arbitrium, Sui and zkSync, which has not been released, etc., and everyone is eager for the popularization and analysis of the basic knowledge of public chains. Therefore, we specially set up a public chain research group to prepare to do an overall combing of the public chain that is now very active and has high attention in the market. From the perspective of GameFi project owners and users, we will make a comprehensive analysis of the performance level, friendliness and support of these public chains for GameFi projects.

Initially, it is planned to write 4 long research papers, the main content distribution is as follows:

The first article extends from the development history of Ethereum, the chain game ecology, and the existing problems, and further extends to the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade roadmap;

The second part, starting from the Optimistic Rollup track, analyzes the basic technical route of the OP series, and the differences in technology, market and support for chain games of several representative projects (Arbitrium, Optimism, opBNB, etc.);

The third part focuses on the analysis of the technology of the zk Rollup track, as well as the representative projects zkSync, StarkNet, Polygon zkEVM, Linea, Scroll and other related information;

The fourth part analyzes the technical characteristics, chain game ecology and technical support of other Layer1 popular public chains, such as Solana, Aptos, Sui, Near, and Avalanche.

It is believed that through the above systematic analysis, both project parties and users will have a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the mainstream public chains in the market today, and can also better provide a more solid theoretical foundation for project deployment, investment and other related decisions based on different public chains.

Opening

In the wave of the digital age, Ethereum shines as a bright star on the top of the blockchain world. Since its inception, Ethereum has been a cutting-edge enabler of blockchain and smart contract technology, constantly creating new chapters in history. Ethereum, as the pioneer of blockchain games, has been leading the development of the GameFi track. Guatian will take you through the development and upgrade route of Ethereum, and explore how this ecosystem has evolved from a start-up project to the world's most important public blockchain ecosystem.

First, the origin and development history of Ethereum

Ethereum has been an exciting story of challenges, innovations, and struggles since day one.

At the end of 2013, Ethereum Vitalik Buterin released the Ethereum white paper, which inherited some of Bitcoin's design concepts while also opening a new chapter in the development of the blockchain. Then in 2014, Ethereum launched an ICO that raised about $18 million worth of Bitcoin in 42 days, shocking the entire blockchain community.

On July 30, 2015, Ethereum successfully released the first version of Frontier, and at the end of the year proposed an extremely far-reaching standard for the industry - ERC20.

However, 2016 soon after, it became the most turbulent year for Ethereum. In March 2016, Ethereum introduced the Homestead upgrade, a major network upgrade. The upgrade aims to improve the stability and security of Ethereum, marking the entry of Ethereum into a more mature phase. The Homestead upgrade improves Ethereum's virtual machine, smart contract development tools, and network protocol, attracting more developers and businesses to participate. However, the good times did not last long, and during May and June 2016, the Ethereum community experienced a major crisis known as The DAO event. The DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization with vulnerabilities in its smart contracts that allow attackers to steal large amounts of Ether. The incident sparked community division, with one advocating a hard fork to recover stolen Ether and the other insisting on the principle of not modifying the blockchain. Eventually, a hard fork took place and Ethereum split into two different blockchains, Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). Ethereum Classic adheres to the principle of non-interference with the code and continues to maintain the unchanged Ethereum genesis block.

If 2016 marked Ethereum's evolution from a start-up to a more mature and complex blockchain platform, 2017 was a real boom for Ethereum. In early 2017, the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) was formed to promote the adoption of the Ethereum blockchain in the corporate world. The alliance has attracted many well-known enterprises, including Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and others, to jointly research and develop Ethereum technology.

! [GameFi Public Chain Research Series Part 1: Ethereum's Development and Upgrade Roadmap] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-69a80767fe-ed35c7bcd6-dd1a6f-69ad2a.webp)

In October 2017, Ethereum completed the first phase of the Metropolis upgrade, called "Metropolis Byzantium." This upgrade introduces a number of improvements, including better privacy protection, increased smart contract security, and reduced transaction costs. Metropolis Byzantium further strengthens Ethereum's functionality, paving the way for future development.

With the mainnet upgrade, the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) craze swept the entire blockchain world. In 2017, Ethereum's smart contract platform became the first choice for many new projects, many of which raised funds through ICOs. This boom led to a skyrocketing price of Ethereum and attracted a large number of investors and developers. The price of Ethereum rose from a few dollars in early 2017 to hundreds of dollars at the end of the year. This has attracted worldwide attention, propelling Ethereum to the second largest market capitalization currency in the cryptocurrency market. But the flip side of the boom, due to the proliferation of transactions and smart contracts, has brought about Ethereum's growing transaction congestion and high gas fees. This has made the Ethereum community begin to pay attention to the problem of network expansion and performance improvement, and also paved the way for the continuous upgrade of Ethereum.

In 2018, Ethereum faced serious challenges. In early 2018, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies experienced a huge price crash that caused the price of Ethereum to drop sharply. This has sparked market volatility and investor concerns, reflecting the instability of the crypto market. In the crypto winter, Ethereum upgrades did not stop, and the development of Ethereum 2.0 made important progress and determined the overall route from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) to improve scalability and energy efficiency. At the same time, the Ethereum network continued to face congestion and high transaction fees in 2018 due to the increase in trading volume. This has led to more attention to network performance and scalability and has sparked much discussion about addressing these issues.

In 2018, regulators across the globe began to take stricter regulatory measures against cryptocurrencies and ICOs. This has led to a number of ICO projects being investigated and sanctioned, and the crypto industry has begun to focus on legal compliance issues. Despite market volatility, 2018 saw the rise of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. DeFi projects are growing rapidly on Ethereum, including decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, and stablecoins, bringing new opportunities and innovations to the Ethereum ecosystem.

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2019 was a year of innovation for Ethereum. The Ethereum 2.0 project made important progress in 2019, including the release of the Beacon Chain beacon chain, marking Ethereum's gradual move towards a more scalable and energy-efficient network. 2019 was also the year the DeFi ecosystem exploded. A large number of DeFi projects have sprung up on Ethereum, including lending platforms, decentralized exchanges, stablecoins, and more. These projects have attracted billions of dollars in inflows, bringing decentralized innovation to the financial sector.

With the rise of DeFi, regulators began to focus on compliance with Ethereum and other blockchain projects. This has led to some projects being required to take steps to comply with laws and regulations, which has also led to discussions about the balance between the nature of decentralization and compliance. Stablecoins on Ethereum, such as USDT, DAI, and USDC, have become important assets in the crypto world, providing stability and liquidity to crypto trading. 2019 also saw the rise of blockchain gaming, with some games on Ethereum starting to attract a large number of users. These games typically use NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to give players true ownership and interoperability.

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From its inception, to maturity, to its peak, Ethereum has undergone constant changes and challenges, and has fully demonstrated its great potential as a smart contract platform. From the initial Homestead upgrade to the hard fork, from the frenzy of ICOs to the increase in regulation, and the initial rise of DeFi and chain games, the Ethereum community continues to strive to push technological advancements that create endless possibilities for the future of blockchain. Let's focus on the history of Ethereum's chain game development.

Second, the rise of Ethereum on-chain games

If you want to sort out the development history of chain games, the first thing is the Ethereum ecosystem. Since 2017, Ethereum has blossomed in hundreds of flowers, and there have been many phenomenal chain games. We have selected a few representative projects to talk about their development history and existing problems.

When it comes to the originator of chain games, most people will think of it as CryptoKitties in 2017, and although it is not strictly the first chain game, it is indeed the first phenomenal game to become popular on Ethereum and be known by most people. It is a game based on collecting and breeding digital cats, which for the first time combined ERC-721 to become the earliest NFT project, and each digital cat is a unique NFT. The adoption, breeding and trading of kittens has successfully ignited FOMO sentiment in the crypto circle, and the price of a crypto cat is as high as one million, which also makes most ordinary players drop their jaws. The success of CryptoKitties has generated a large number of players/project parties to interest in NFTs, and due to the popularity of the game, transaction congestion and high fees have become the norm, which has also exposed the scalability problems of the Ethereum network.

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Fast forward to 2018, and Gods Unchained came into view. It is a "Hearthstone" card game on Ethereum, where players can collect, trade, and battle cards with different attributes. The game ensures the security of cards by using NFTs on Ethereum, so that chain games and card games have carried out a deep honeymoon period, and also ushered in the era of "Fi" in everything. However, due to the limitations of the Ethereum network, the game still suffers from transaction delays and high fees during peak periods.

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The last wave of projects that really developed to the top of the chain game is Axie Infinity. Axie is an Ethereum-based collection and combat game where players can collect, nurture and trade tokens through the game's virtual creature, Axie. When it came out in 2018, because it was in the deep bear market, it was tepid, until a wave of bull market in 21 years made its rapid rise, which not only greatly increased the playability of the game and the enthusiasm of players, but also brought a new wave of "P2E" chain game heat, and gave birth to a large number of game unions and gold studios. At its peak, Axie had a monthly turnover of more than $300 million, surpassing "Honor of Kings" to become the world's most profitable game. The rise of the P2E model also represents the real arrival of the GameFi era, which promotes the development and trading of game assets based on blockchain technology through the DeFi + NFT model. In addition to Axie Infinity, a number of games with similar models have appeared on the market, such as Alien Worlds, Cryptoblades, Sorare, Zed Run, and others. However, due to the congestion and high transaction fees of the Ethereum network, the entry threshold and transaction costs of the game are too high, which also limits the participation of many players.

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Another major branch of chain games is the so-called "meta-universe" faction, represented by Sandbox and Decentraland, meta-universe games with meta-universe elements and land sales as the main economic model. Take Decentraland, for example, an Ethereum-based virtual trading platform where users can buy, collect, and trade virtual land and assets in the game. Decentraland uses NFTs to ensure real ownership of virtual assets. However, the game's lack of optimization, poor experience, and performance limitations of the Ethereum network also hindered the game's further development. As you can see in the chart below, the transaction value and volume of Decentraland's land has continued to decline since its peak at the end of 2021 (about $34 million) and is now less than 1% of its peak.

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1, some groundbreaking Ethereum on-chain games:

Ownership and scarcity: Blockchain technology makes virtual assets in games truly ownership and scarcity. Players can actually own and control their game assets, and the supply of these assets is limited, thus giving virtual assets higher value and transactionability.

Economic ecosystem: Ethereum on-chain games create a real economic ecosystem for players. Players can earn virtual assets through their efforts and dedication in the game and trade, sell, or rent them to other players. This economic model provides players with the opportunity to earn real value and also provides greater motivation for the game to grow.

2, Ethereum on-chain games face some problems and challenges:

Ethereum's biggest problem is still in its scalability, due to the limited architecture, resulting in insufficient scalability, slow transaction speed, and limited throughput also leads to high gas fees, especially in the centralized sale stage of project NFT and tokens, tasting will lead to gas War, so that the network is paralyzed, transaction fees are instantly pushed to extremely high, which greatly affects the user experience.

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Third, Ethereum 2.0 upgrade

Ethereum launched its ETH2.0 testnet at the end of April 2020, and after half a year of testing, officially launched its 2.0 mainnet in December, marking the arrival of the Ethereum 2.0 era. Ethereum 2.0 is a major upgrade to the 1.0 mainnet that aims to improve Ethereum's performance, scalability, security, and sustainability to accelerate the use and adoption of Ethereum.

Why upgrade 2.0

1. Ethereum's own high rates and congestion problems

As mentioned above, in chain game-related transactions, Ethereum Gas has been criticized by users for its high gas rate, slow confirmation speed, and low efficiency. Although some teams have optimized transaction efficiency and reduced fees to some extent by developing external applications such as Flashbots, they have seen a fraction of the rising demand for transactions. In order to fundamentally improve this problem, it is necessary to cut from within the Ethereum public chain and upgrade its underlying architecture in order to make the network have an essential performance leap.

2. The rise of competitive public chains

Although Ethereum still occupies an absolute leading position in the current public chain market, the continuous addition of latecomers, especially in performance and architecture, has continuously surpassed and innovated, which has shaken Ethereum's market share to a certain extent. The following is the performance and data comparison of several major public chains before 2020 (before the upgrade of Ethereum 2.0), Ethereum is not dominant in various data (TPS, transaction fees, block efficiency, etc.), if it continues to develop, it is foreseeable that it will be easy to be surpassed in both market share and market value in the near future.

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The public chain represented by BSC and Solana is not only compatible with Ethereum EVM, but also has a huge ecological blessing, and is supported by Binance, FTX and other gold owners, and naturally has user dividends and capital advantages, which can grow rapidly and divert the traffic of Ethereum. The congestion and high fees of Ethereum itself give these public chains excellent opportunities for development. These have forced Ethereum to upgrade as soon as possible in order to continue to hold the position of the king of the public chain.

3. New needs of users for public chain security and privacy

Since its inception, Ethereum has seen a thousandfold increase in transactions, from a few thousand daily trading volumes to basically stable at the million-level level. The rapid growth is accompanied by a large amount of money pouring into the cryptocurrency field, which has also brought more high-quality applications and a large number of users, while users' requirements for the security and privacy protection of blockchain technology are also increasing.

In the application of the financial field, users have strong demands for address privacy, etc., and the excessive transparency of the blockchain world will obviously become an important constraint on the development of limiters. How to achieve privacy protection under the premise of ensuring security is also one of the important issues that needs to be solved in the future development of Ethereum.

Upgrade Main Content

Everyone may have heard of the impossible triangle of blockchain, that is, decentralization, security and scalability, and the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade proposed a response plan for the three aspects of this triangle, and then built the main content of the main line of this upgrade.

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1****, Shard Chains - **** Solve scalability problems**

Shard chain is an architectural mechanism that can greatly improve the efficiency and scalability of Ethereum transactions. In Ethereum's latest sharding scheme (Sharding 2.0), all network resources will be divided into different segments, each shard can be understood as a new chain, and connected to the beacon chain (hub chain), so that each node does not have to process all transactions, only needs to run a slice, and only needs to store a small part of the data, thereby greatly improving work efficiency and greatly alleviating the scalability problem of Ethereum.

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The sharding 2.0 scheme is tailored for the Rollup solution (we will explain the Rollup scheme and the Layer 2 project in a subsequent article), while the Rollup solution is an extension of the sharding solution. With Rollups, all redemption processes and executions take place off-chain, while the Ethereum main chain only stores transaction data. The hybrid implementation of data sharding and Rollups can theoretically allow Etherstock to process more than 100,000 transactions per second, and Rollups is considered the most ideal scaling solution today.

Proof of Stake**** - **** Solving the Decentralization Problem**

Another important upgrade to Ethereum 2.0 is the introduction of the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. Once Ethereum was based on proof-of-work (PoW), which required a lot of computing power and energy, and the transition from PoW to PoS will reduce energy consumption by more than 99%.

Ethereum 1.0's PoW consensus mechanism, miners receive ETH by processing packaged exchanges. In the PoS mechanism in ETH2.0, users only need to stake ETH to become validators on the network to obtain proof of stake representing shares. Under the PoW mechanism, becoming a verification node requires purchasing expensive mining rigs and generating sufficient computing power to be competitive, while under the PoS mechanism, the entry threshold of the verification node can be effectively reduced. Any user who stakes 32 ETH will have a chance to enter the validator committee, which is selected by the beacon chain random algorithm to select block validators and block proposers, where block proposers package transactions to propose new blocks, and other block validators test new blocks, and finally cooperate to complete the block production process. The lowering of the entry threshold has made more nodes participating in verification, and the entire network has become more decentralized and decentralized.

3**, Beacon Chain, and Casper**** Mechanism - **** Solve Security Issues**

The introduction of sharding and PoS consensus mechanisms solves the problems of scalability and decentralization, but also brings new security challenges. For example, 51% attack caused by sharding, double-spend attack between shards, and interestless attack, long-range attack, and simple attack caused by PoS consensus mechanism. Ethereum bridges these two types of risks and solves security issues through the beacon chain and the consensus mechanism Casper.

In order to solve the 51% attack problem, the beacon chain will avoid the tradition of collusion between verification nodes and improve security by providing randomness, making each validator unpredictable, and reshuffling all validators after each verification task, and electing a new verification committee. At the same time, cross-shard communication is realized through the beacon chain, and the status and information of all shards are recorded to avoid the double-spend problem.

Casper is the core consensus protocol of Ethereum 2.0, responsible for managing system nodes and imposing rewards and penalties on validators. Validators need to pass staking and apply to the beacon chain to become nodes before they can run the protocol. If the validator fails to complete the assigned task, there is a risk of losing the staked token, or even being kicked out of the node pool and unable to continue participating in the verification work. This forces validators to act honestly and comply with consensus rules through a reward and punishment system, largely solving the PoS disinterested attack problem.

A long-range attack refers to starting from the genesis block, creating a chain that is longer than the original main chain, and tampering with the transaction history to replace the original main chain. A simple attack is an attack in which the forked chain creates as many blocks as possible per unit of time to exceed the length of the original main chain. The upgraded Ethereum sets the first slot block in each epoch as a checkpoint and achieves the final determinism of the chain through voting, making the block unchangeable and avoiding such risks.

ETH 2.0 Upgrade Roadmap

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin outlines the future Ethereum 2.0 upgrade path in six concise phases: The Merge, The Surge, The Scourge, The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge. Each phase revolves around a specific theme and feature upgrade.

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1. The Merge

The Merge marks Ethereum's transition to a PoS system and marks an important step towards realizing Ethereum's vision of a highly decentralized, scalable, secure, and sustainable network. The Merge rolled out through two key upgrades: Bellatrix and Paris (proposals EIP-3675 and EIP-4399), merging Ethereum's original execution layer with its newly established PoS consensus layer (Beacon Chain), which was completed in October 2022.

Some of the major changes brought by The Merge are, the most important of which is that full nodes need to run both execution layer and consensus layer clients. Before The Merge, a single client can handle all tasks related to transactions and blocks, while after The Merge, the execution layer and consensus layer clients each maintain a peer-to-peer network, the consensus layer clients handle block propagation, proof, and penalties, while the execution layer clients continue to manage transaction execution and state maintenance.

One of the important upgrades to The Merge is Single Slot Finality (SSF). SSF aims to reduce Ethereum's block determinism time to one slot, instead of the current 64 to 95 slots (about 15 minutes). To implement SSF, three key challenges must be addressed: developing accurate consensus algorithms, optimizing the signature aggregation process, and determining the best economic approach for validator participation. Solutions to these challenges already exist, but they take a long time to implement. Interested friends can follow Vitalik's articles, which explore these issues.

Secret Leader Election is to set up a mechanism for secretly electing proposers, through random numbers and shuffling, to achieve the unpredictability, fairness and uniqueness of proposer elections, reducing the possibility of being attacked.

2. The Surge

The Surge is another important part of Ethereum's upgrade to solve the scalability problems that have plagued it since the birth of blockchain technology, so that its performance can eventually reach the level of 100,000 TPS, close to the speed of traditional electronic payments (such as visa). This upgrade is achieved through Danksharding ("DS", sharding).

Proto-Danksharding (EIP-4844) is the first step in Danksharding, an important step for Deneb-Cancun (i.e. Cancun upgrade), and an important step for Ethereum to implement a sharding mechanism and complete the expansion roadmap, which can significantly reduce the transaction and operational costs of Layer 2 Rollup. By allowing each shard block to be directly included in the beacon chain, the shard block no longer contains the executed transaction, but only the large block of data, and the specific transaction task will be taken care of by the Layer 2 rollup protocol.

After the Layer2 original transaction data is submitted to the Layer1 mainnet, how to verify the correctness of the data, based on different solutions, two different rollup routes have emerged, namely Optimistic rollups and ZK rollups.

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1. Optimistic rollups

Optimistic rollups are fraud-proof-of-fraud or challenge-based solutions that take an optimistic approach to the reasonableness of data. If no one challenges the data and submits proof of fraud within the specified time (e.g. one week), the data is considered true and accurate.

But when someone challenges and points out that a transaction is fraudulent, Optimistic rollups need to implement a set of EVM logic in L1's smart contract to simulate the execution of that transaction, so as to verify the legitimacy of the data and punish the fraudster and reward the challenger. Unlike Optimistic rollups, Arbitrium takes a different approach. Instead of implementing an EVM logic, it narrows down the scope of problematic instructions by having the challenger interact with the contract for multiple rounds. Finally, verify the problematic instruction.

2. ZK rollups

ZK rollups is a solution based on zero-knowledge proof technology, which can be understood as L1 outsourcing the calculation process of the transaction to L2, and L1 can verify whether L2 executed the transaction correctly, which is the charm of zero-knowledge proof. At the same time, because the transaction signature has been verified in the process of executing the transaction at L2, that is, the zero-knowledge proof part already contains the verification of the signature, so that the transaction submitted to L1 can not contain the signature, further saving data space. The legitimacy of transactions can be confirmed immediately, and the smaller amount of data makes ZK rollups considered more in line with L2's future direction. The challenge was how ZK rollups designed a common circuit system, zkEVM, that was compatible with all applications.

3. The Scourge

Scourge includes a series of upgrades designed to ease the centralization of MEVs while maintaining fair and transparent transaction inclusion. MEV is a measure of the additional revenue that a miner or validator can earn on top of the block reward and transaction fees, which is achieved by strategically including, excluding, or reordering transactions within a block. An ordinary validator running standard client-side software that has no MEV value capture capabilities at all, while a large validator uses modified and optimized software to capture MEV value, this unfairness will lead to the network becoming more and more centralized

The solution to the above problem is proposer builder separate (PBS), that is, the proposer proposer is still the protagonist of the publishing block, but the construction and execution of the block is handed over to the creator block builder. In a well-functioning market, competitive creators will bid for the full value of the MEV they can extract from the block, allowing the decentralized validator set to receive the majority of the MEV reward. As a result, PBS is able to effectively counter the centralized forces of MEVs.

Another feature of PBS is that it increases the cost of review. The spirit of blockchain has always been incompatible with centralized censorship, and in a PBS solution, block builders add as many transactions as possible because of price competition between builders. If a builder wants to exclude a deal from review, its potential bid may be completely lower than its opponent and it will not be able to win the auction. In order to win the auction and exclude the transactions it censored, he needs to invest higher costs, which increases the cost of review.

4. The Verge

The Verge is to implement a minimalist block validation method, that is, download a small amount of data, perform basic calculations, and to achieve this goal, you need to upgrade the existing Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT) to Verkle Trie.

Currently, Ethereum implements state data management through MPT. To be sure that the result is correct, the entire MPT proof is required, and then the hash layer by layer is verified. At present, each full node of Ethereum maintains a complete state tree, so independent transactions and state verification can be performed, but it also makes the whole verification process very inefficient and cumbersome. Verkle Trie proof does not require the participation of brother nodes, and the width of the tree can be large and shallow, which makes the proof efficiency greatly improved, and it is expected to increase by 5-10 times.

5. The Purge

The Pure stands for Cleansing and aims to achieve simpler protocols, more lightweight nodes by removing the burden of historical data storage. In the Ethereum 1.0 era, each node needs to retain the historical data of all blocks, and after the 2.0 upgrade, block verification introduces finality and checkpoint, and beacon chain data synchronization does not need to start from the founding block, which greatly improves the speed of data synchronization. With the introduction of EIP-4444, the client will no longer save historical data older than one year, expired data will be archived, and there are special read and write rules for accessing archived data.

6. The Splurge

The Splurge means to show off, representing moments of glory. This series includes upgrades for all miscellaneous categories, including account abstraction, multidimensional EIP-1559, and verifiable delay functions. Among them, account abstraction will greatly reduce the threshold for using wallets. It abstracts all accounts into a kind of account, a contract account. Wallets can be upgraded to contract wallets, creating a smart contract for each user to manage users' assets and on-chain interactions. The contract wallet can define more business logic, such as security limit, multi-signature, gas fee, etc., and there will be corresponding wallet templates for users to choose in the future, making it more convenient to configure the contract wallet.

Subsequent Impact and Outlook

The impact of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade on the market is positive. First of all, the upgrade will improve Ethereum's transaction performance and scalability, and through the introduction of sharding technology and improved consensus mechanism, it will greatly improve network throughput and transaction confirmation speed, which will greatly improve the availability and competitiveness of the Ethereum network and attract more developers and enterprises to join the Ethereum ecosystem. Secondly, Ethereum 2.0 will also improve security and stability. By introducing the beacon chain and Casper mechanism, as well as token staking, it reduces the dependence on energy while improving the security and overall stability of the network. Again, the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade will bring more innovation and functionality. By adjusting the distribution of benefits, reducing the burden on nodes, lowering the threshold of nodes, and introducing sharding technology, Ethereum will be able to support more complex smart contracts and decentralized applications. In addition, with the integration of Layer 2 solutions, Ethereum will be able to process more transaction data and better meet market demand. This will provide more opportunities for developers and businesses to create more valuable applications and services.

However, the implementation of the Ethereum 2.0 upgrade also faces some potential risks and challenges. First, because the upgrade requires major changes to the network, there will be different node versions that are not uniform, which will further lead to problems such as unwillingness to upgrade or inability to upgrade. Second, the impact of the upgrade on the Ethereum ecosystem is uncertain, and for applications already in the Ethereum ecosystem, the upgrade may lead to a series of compatibility issues. Finally, the upgrade schedule is also uncertain, and technical difficulties and delays in the upgrade can affect the upgrade process.

Ethereum's upgrade from 1.0 to 2.0 is an important milestone in the Ethereum ecosystem, but its development will never stop. With a clear roadmap, the development team is moving forward with the implementation of various module upgrades to realize the full potential of Ethereum and realize the ideal decentralized network. Expect that in the near future, we will see a stronger and more efficient Ethereum ecosystem. The vigorous development of layer2 will also continuously inject new impetus into the Ethereum ecology to achieve more applications (including games) and data on the chain. In future series of articles, we will cut from the perspective of Optimistic Rollups and ZK Rollups to deeply analyze the public chain projects of the two Layer 2 tracks, so stay tuned!

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