How Will Ethereum 2.0 Be Better Than Ethereum?
Cryptocurrencies have played a vital role in providing gateways for investing and making payments. Blockchain technology is an underlying component of most cryptocurrencies. It rolled out along with cryptocurrencies and revolutionized the markets worldwide. The transparency of this technology is growing in several areas, most of which are traced back to the Ethereum blockchain development.
A Short History of Ethereum will give you an overview of the upgrades and the hard fork of Ethereum’s past.
Ethereum is a considerably vast blockchain platform developed to carry out smart contracts. These smart contracts help people transact without any trusted central authority. The first version of Ethereum was developed and introduced in 2011. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency with several decentralized apps built on it.
Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0, commonly known as Serenity or Eth2, is the upgraded version of the Ethereum blockchain. The purpose of developing Ethereum 2.0 is to improve the scalability, security, and accessibility of existing Ethereum.
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Aiming towards the launch of Ethereum 2.0, it extensively evolved the entire Blockchain ecosystem and Ethereum in particular. Therefore, most of the Ethereum holders’ concerns were: what will happen to the existing Ethereum? Will we need to migrate tokens? For most Ethereum holders, the answers were: no need to do anything and there won’t be any token migration either.
The upgraded version is specifically designed to deal with the bottlenecks. The fundamental changes in its structure help Eth2 to increase the transaction numbers.
If you are interested in the history of Ethereum, read Ben Edgington’s what’s new in ETH2–28 March 2021.
Differences between Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0
Although Ethereum 2.0 is the upgraded version of the already existing Ethereum it has been built with some major improvements that were not found in Ethereum.
Nonetheless, let’s go through the differences between Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0.
Ethereum mechanism vs Ethereum 2.0 mechanism
Miners ran nodes in Ethereum 1.0 (PoW) chains. They used computing powers to solve highly-complex mathematical algorithms. The minors solved puzzles to add a transaction in building a Blockchain. They were rewarded with the network’s native cryptocurrency afterwards. Proof of Work (PoW) was a complex method with little reward.
Ethereum 2.0, on the other hand, is based on a consensus mechanism where users don’t need mining, instead, they become validators by staking cryptocurrency. Validators verify and authenticate a transaction within a specific timeline. After enough attestations, validators get rewarded with Ethereum 2.0 by adding a block to the Blockchain. Proof of Stake (PoS) has a significant value in Ethereum 2.0. It has improvised the crypto-economic incentive structure to validate the Blockchain.
Sharding
Another core scaling strategy of Ethereum 2.0 is sharding. Its primary objective is to divide transaction processing into shard chains. In the sharding process, validators work to manage the whole workload as an individual process. Each shard chain works as turning a single-lane road into a multi-road highway.
Blockchain networks use this technique to proceed with more transactions per second. As a result, networks start functioning faster and it upscales the mechanism. Beacon Chain helps different chains to coordinate at the same time.
How does Ethereum 2.0 function better than Ethereum 1.0?
As the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism maintains Ethereum’s current architecture, it has to deal with the following issue too:
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Scalability
Ethereum can process a limited amount of data as each block contains the defined amount of data. There is back-to-back mining of blocks in the Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism. Sometimes transactions have to wait for the following block if the number of already-existing transactions exceeds. The implementation of sharding on the PoS mechanism has helped resolve this scalability issue.
Accessibility
The PoW miners play an elemental role in the maintenance of the flow in decentralized technologies. Minors have to face high-level barriers as they need to buy and set up hardware components first to function. They have to live in lower electricity cost regions to get a substantial return from block rewards.
Ethereum 2.0 levels the playing field for more validators to participate. On maintaining the networks’ validation, they earn a shared return.
Conclusion
Ethereum 2.0 is one of the most anticipated blockchains after Bitcoin. It has introduced cryptocurrencies with some exclusive qualities to enhance payment procedures.
Ethereum’s upgraded roadmap now involves the merge of Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0. This process involves pairing the execution layer on the Proof of Work (PoW) with the consensus layer on the Proof of Stake (PoS). By building a clearer Ethereum roadmap, the extensibility of Ethereum 2.0 will undoubtedly entice more users to invest in the crypto world.
