What are the Five Key Changes Beam Chain Will Bring to Ethereum? 1. **Scalability**: Beam Chain will significantly improve Ethereum's transaction pr

Original Article Title: "Will Beam Chain Bring Five Major Changes to Ethereum?"

Original Source: Ebunker Chinese

As we all know, Ethereum was born with PoW (Proof of Work) and successfully transitioned to PoS (Proof of Stake) in 2021. In this regard, Justin Drake, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, believes that although the beacon chain was effective when PoS was first introduced, over the past five years, it has accumulated some "technical debt," and its design did not leverage cutting-edge technologies of decentralized systems (such as zero-knowledge proofs). Therefore, Ethereum's consensus layer is in urgent need of a major overhaul.

In a recent speech at Devcon in Bangkok, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake announced a proposal to thoroughly reform the Ethereum consensus layer, called "Beam Chain."

This is part of Ethereum's long-term roadmap, allowing Ethereum to leverage the latest breakthroughs in ZK (Zero-Knowledge) cryptography without the need to launch a new network, significantly improving network scalability and performance. Undoubtedly, it is one of the most important upgrades for Ethereum in the next 3-5 years.

Beam Chain is not a completely new blockchain in a literal sense but rather a new infrastructure built within the Ethereum mainnet. It will greatly enhance the transaction speed, security, and efficiency of the L1 mainnet. Some interpret Beam Chain as Ethereum 3.0, which is a misconception, as Beam Chain only addresses the consensus layer issue and will not change the data layer (such as blob channels) or the execution layer (such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

The five core changes of Beam Chain are:

1. Faster Block Confirmation: Enable 4-second slot time and single-slot finality

2. No Sacrifice of Decentralization: Maintain or improve the current decentralization guarantee

3. Lower Staking Threshold: Allow ETH Staking to decrease from 32 ETH to 1 ETH

4. Protecting Regular Users: Eliminate MEV (Miner Extractable Value) based on block reordering

5. Future-Oriented: Make the Ethereum network quantum-resistant

Upgrade Approach and Principles of Beam Chain

1. Increase Block Production

Higher Throughput: Beam Chain will increase block production by 3x to enhance Ethereum's transaction capacity.

Censorship Resistance: The introduction of FOCIL (Fork-Choice Overridable Inclusion List) enhances censorship resistance, ensuring that transactions cannot be easily excluded by malicious actors.

Execution Auction & Validator Shuffling: Validators will use execution auctions for shuffling to ensure greater performance and decentralization, as well as to protect more users from MEV (Miner Extractable Value) extraction.

Quicker Finality: Ethereum will feature single-slot finality and 4-second block times, enabling faster transaction confirmation and improved network efficiency.

An interesting point is that exchanges will no longer need to wait for 1/32, 2/32, 3/32... confirmations, as transactions will be confirmed in a single block in the future.

2. Enhance Staking

Improved Issuance Model: Changes to the validator reward issuance model will provide stakers with greater returns.

Lowered Staking Requirement: Independent validators will only need to stake 1 ETH, much lower than the current 32 ETH threshold, making staking more accessible and widespread.

We believe that for Ethereum to accommodate more nodes in a faster environment without drastically altering the hardware barrier, breaking the staking impossibility triangle is truly a testament to ZK technology, which is indeed leading the industry by leaps and bounds.

3. Enhance Security

Post-Quantum Cryptography: Ethereum will implement post-quantum cryptography to ensure protection against quantum computing threats, marking the first step for mainstream blockchain resistance against quantum attacks.

zkSNARK and zkVM Integration: Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) will be integrated with Ethereum through zkSNARK and zkVM to further enhance privacy, scalability, and security.

SNARKified Blockchain: Ethereum will SNARKify the blockchain using RISC-V, a process that will enhance the efficiency and scalability of proof generation. SNARKs are a compact form of zero-knowledge proofs that allow one party to prove they possess information without revealing the information or requiring any interaction between the prover and verifier.

In summary, we can say: Let's ZKify the entire Ethereum chain.

Enhanced Randomness: Ethereum will also introduce strong randomness to ensure fairness in key network processes such as validator selection.

Reduced MEV Risk: Better censorship resistance can significantly reduce the prevalence of sandwich attacks and other bot activities.

4. Operation Principle

Since the design of Ethereum's current consensus layer (Beacon Chain), cryptographers have made significant advancements in SNARKs. By SNARKifying Ethereum's state transition function (i.e., validators maintaining an honest view of the blockchain through integrated state transition messages), we can achieve 4-second slots and single-slot finality.

On one hand, the reduction in block production and finality time can reduce wait times and positively impact Ethereum L1 transaction experience;

On the other hand, it can also eliminate the potential for value extraction from transactions through a remote block reorg strategy, reducing technical debt in the consensus layer.

Furthermore, SNARKification will make the Ethereum network quantum-resistant, a crucial feature for future blockchains.

Beam Chain will advance Ethereum's upgrade in the following ways:

Sharding for Increased Throughput: Ethereum Beam Chain will use sharding technology to split data into smaller parts (shards) to process multiple transactions simultaneously. This will reduce transaction bottlenecks and speed up transaction times.

Quantum Computing Resilience: Ethereum will leverage cutting-edge encryption to ensure that even future super quantum computers cannot compromise the network's security.

Integration with Ethereum's Roadmap: Beam Chain is not a standalone network but an integrated stage of Ethereum's future 5-to- scaling and security enhancement roadmap.

5. Significance

For Ethereum's ability to handle the growing decentralized applications, Beam Chain is crucial—it can enhance Ethereum's scalability, lower transaction costs, and improve overall security, allowing the network to support more users and complex applications over time.

Another significant benefit of SNARK-based proofs is that they enable ordinary stakers with standard hardware to achieve the performance benefits mentioned above. As the staking threshold decreases from 32 ETH to 1 ETH and with the improvement in network performance, the decentralization of the Ethereum staker community will also see enhancements.

With the significant reduction in barriers to entry, especially when combined with related hardware devices such as Ebunker's eNode, bringing household-level validator devices to the masses, Ethereum remains the most widely distributed and decentralized public blockchain in the world.

While Beam Chain's vision will not cause an immediate shift in Ethereum or drastically alter its long-term roadmap, its adoption will change the roadmap's development priorities, accelerating the development of specific components (for example, the current roadmap sets some important upgrades for 2029, while Beam Chain could expedite the arrival of crucial upgrades).

If Beam Chain gains enough community support, developers can begin drafting specifications next year, followed by the development of production-grade code by the development client teams in 2026, testing in 2027, and finally secure deployment on the Ethereum mainnet. Although the implementation of Beam Chain may seem distant, for a decentralized development of open-source software, this secure redundancy is crucial.

In a nutshell, Beam Chain, through its ZK-based approach, tackled the "technical debt" of the past in one fell swoop. These improvements are expected to significantly enhance its L1 functionality while maintaining Ethereum's "world-class decentralization."

Simultaneously, the introduction of new ideas such as quantum resistance and other long-term solutions places Ethereum's consensus layer in "maintenance mode," ensuring Ethereum's security, efficiency, and adaptability for decades to come. This paves the way for future innovation without the need for a disruptive redesign.

Ethereum continues its relentless focus on long-term strategy, which is an exciting update for the blockchain and the entire industry. This commitment allows us to maintain an optimistic foundation for Ethereum amidst the current booming market trends.

Original Article Link