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What benefits will ethereum beacon chain Altair upgrade bring?

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The beacon chain Altair upgrade is scheduled for October 27; After the upgrade, developers will be able to build light clients on beacon chains.

Original title: Beacon Chain Altair Upgrade coming! What benefits will it Bring?

By Jeff Benson

Unitimes

It's been less than three months since the last time ethereum's PoW chain went through a "London" upgrade that changed the way miners were paid. Now, ethereum's core developers are working on another important upgrade: the Beacon chain Altair upgrade, scheduled for Wednesday, October 27.

Altair is the first upgrade since the Beacon chain's own online line, which is helping the Ethereum network move away from PoW. According to Pooja Ranjan, head of Ethereum Cat Herders, Altair may be "the only upgrade to the beacon chain before Ethereum switches to PoS."

以太坊信标链 Altair 升级在即，将带来哪些改进？

Launched in December 2020, beacon Chain is a PoS chain that runs in parallel with the current PoW Ethereum main network. Beacon chains are designed to do many things: First, beacon chains introduce a Staking mechanism to the Ethereum ecosystem. The current PoW Ethereum chain processes transactions through "miners," each of whom uses specialized mining hardware in a race to be the first to solve cryptographic puzzles in order to generate the next block and receive a mining reward. A Staking mechanism, by contrast, abandons this kind of argument, allowing transactions to be validated by locking (pledging) ETH in software, ensuring network decentralization and security, in return for which the mortgor is eligible for ETH rewards.

The beacon chain also prepares for "sharding," or making transactions on the often congested Ethereum blockchain network faster by creating 64 shard chains that work together. According to ethereum Foundation documents, this feature will enable the so-called "Ethereum 2.0" to take full advantage of its capabilities and is expected to be implemented sometime next year.

For now, the beacon chain allows people to pledge ETH, but there is no way to withdraw ETH from the beacon chain. "After the merger, the consensus mechanism will be fully transformed from PoW to PoS. With a subsequent upgrade in 2022, users will be able to withdraw funds," said Pooja Ranjan.

While this Altair upgrade does not result in a merger of the old and new chains, it is still essential for anyone currently running the Beacon chain Verifier node. According to Tim Beiko, who coordinates the core Ethereum developers, the Altair upgrade will bring three main benefits:

First, after the upgrade, developers will be able to build light clients on beacon chains. Full node software is more cumbersome than light clients when it comes to validating blocks and transactions within them, because light clients don't need to synchronize with the entire blockchain all the time, making light clients ideal for those who want to interact with the network in a simpler way.

Second, the Altair upgrade "will bring slashing of inactivity and punishment of beacon chains to 'realistic' levels." For beacon chain pledgers, they cannot earn rewards without performing their duties. They need to keep their nodes online and upgrade to the latest software versions. If they fail to do so, they will be punished. According to Tim Beiko, "these penalties were reduced at the start of the beacon chain to be more lenient toward early pledgers." After Altair's upgrade, the pledge fee (ETH) for those who do not fulfill their obligations will be reduced, meaning they will lose a portion of their ETH.

Finally, this upgrade will help ensure that the network upgrade on the beacon chain can proceed smoothly. "We wanted to make sure the beacon chain was running smoothly before the merger happened," Beiko said.

In the meantime, it's time for beacon node operators to upgrade the running client version. Danny Ryan, who is coordinating the transition to Ethereum 2.0, says that as of writing, about half of beacon node operators have upgraded their nodes, and that it took him eight minutes to upgrade. "I'm sure more people will upgrade over the weekend, but we'll have to wait until Wednesday [Altair upgrade day] to know to what extent people are upgrading."

以太坊信标链 Altair 升级在即，将带来哪些改进？

If more nodes do not undergo client upgrades, this can lead to chain splitting in the beacon chain network in extreme cases. That's what happened in August, when users of the Geth software client on Ethereum were unable to upgrade their software after encountering a bug in the software, causing a temporary disruption to the ethereum network.

The last update to the Ethereum network, known as the "London" upgrade, introduced a number of changes, including, most notably, the implementation of proposal IP-1559, which redirected (most of) transaction fees from miners to a wallet that no one could access, effectively removing this portion of ETH from circulation, This effectively reduces the rate of ETH reissuance.

While the beacon chain Altair upgrade does not include such a significant change and will not affect the average user, this upgrade will be another big step towards the future of Ethereum!