12 new things to happen on ethereum in 2019

Original title: "funky and useful: these 12 new ethereum things you can't miss"
Source links: links

The bad news: over the past year, the big blockchain breakthroughs we were hoping for haven't happened yet.

The good news: a lot of new discoveries are still happening, many of them technical, that have proven applicable and helpful to blockchain development, and that have been absorbed into it, making blockchain an increasingly robust system. In addition to technology, people also explore the governance of the open source community and the funding of public goods, and find some ways to solve these problems, which may be more important than technology, and are the source power for the sustainable development of the block chain.

In this article, we invited ten blocks chain observer and explorer of the world, they wrote about the etheric fang, please, this is now the biggest open source community block chain of new things, there are the underlying idea of the current most popular Rollup analysis, there will be about Vitalik Buterin is more a quadratic financing solutions for multiple years. Also contains the content of the has not yet entered the wider public, such as the BLS signature for the etheric lane 2.0 to design the significance of such as used on the etheric fang Zcash scrip.

These new things, and the ideas and people that drive them, convince us that the road is long, but the future is yet to come.

Key words:Rollup, Validity Proof, BLS signature, ethereum and Zcash interoperability, account abstraction, CREATE2 instructions; Staking, DeFi, ENS; Ethereum new governance process, market development model, quadratic financing.

Six hard nuclear technologies

Thousand words read Rollup

P0n1, a researcher at ambi lab, focuses on zero-knowledge proof and smart contract security

Rollup is a general name of layer-2 expansion scheme, which refers to the complicated calculation and state maintenance under the chain first, and then the data related to the state change is invoked through the contract, and the cheaper CALLDATA is saved on the chain. Anyone can recover the global state from the data stored on the chain, eliminating the security risks associated with data availability issues. Rollup rolls up a large number of transactions into one transaction, improving TPS while ensuring data availability.

So how do you ensure that your state changes are correct? ZK Rollup and Optimistic Rollup are two different schemes that are currently hot. Their core differences are as follows:

● the key to ZK Rollup scheme is ZK, which needs to provide zero-knowledge proof for each state transition and is verified by the contract on the main chain. Only the verification can change the state. That is, the state transition of ZK Rollup is strictly dependent on cryptographic proof.

In the Optimistic Rollup scheme, each state transition does not need to be strictly verified. It is to first optimistically assume that each state transition is correct (that is where the word Optimistic comes from), and then challenge a transition within a certain time period. If the challenge succeeds, it proves that the previous submission is wrong, which will punish the submitter and roll back the state. That is, the state change of Optimistic Rollup depends on economic incentives and games.

The difference between the two schemes can also be seen from the perspective of the Proof model: the former is Validity Proof, and only the state of "Validity Proof" is written into the main chain contract; The latter is Fraud Proof, which requires users to provide "error Proof" to the exception during the challenge period to report the incorrect status.

In terms of security, ZK Rollup has the advantage. Since Optimistic Rollup or the second-floor expansion agreement based on Fraud Proof must lodge complaints and reports within the challenging period, a scenario can be constructed for miners to cooperate with each other and reject all complaint transactions submitted with Fraud Proof during the challenging period, resulting in the identification of incorrect status changes and the theft of funds from the contract by attackers. This attack is not valid for ZK Rollup because it always has correctness checks in its contract.

On TPS, ZK Rollup USES zk-snark technology to compress the computation on the chain while ensuring the correctness of the data. The calculation of all transactions is not performed in the contract. The Operator (Operator) simply submits the Merkle Root of Merkle Tree, which stores the account state, the transaction data and the zk-snark certificate to the contract, and writes the new state after the contract is verified.

Because zk-snark proves that size (small) and validation time (fast) are constant and do not grow with the number of transactions, zk Rollup can greatly improve transaction TPS. The performance limit on the chain of ZK Rollup only depends on the cost of CALLDATA storage. With the completion of the ethereum Istanbul upgrade, the use cost of CALLDATA was reduced to 1/4, the performance of ZK Rollup was improved by 4 times, and the TPS reached nearly 2000.

Several teams have developed ZK Rollup solutions, such as ZK Sync, a trust-free expansion and privacy solution released by Matter Labs. ZK Sync relies on ZK Rollup at the bottom, focusing first on improving the performance and ease of use of simple transfers, then on expanding the capacity of general smart contracts, and finally on privacy protection. The goal of ZK Sync is to improve transaction performance while ensuring security.

Validity Proof: a new idea for designing Layer-2

Ah jian, content director of ethereum fans

The extensibility scheme layer-2 named Rollup is very popular, but in fact, whether it is Rollup or not may not be the key, but whether the scheme layer-2 USES Validity Proof or Fraud Proof is the key.

Previous Layer - 2 solutions, such as channel and Plasma, when user withdrawal, which is under the chain chain is complete on state in the process of liquidation, is unable to prevent the operator or user submit the latest status, so they all have "challenge" period, in the state on the chain after a period of time to allow others to submit the update status, or certificate chain state is invalid. We call this pattern "false proof."

A new line of thinking, however, is why not just receive status updates from someone who can prove that their submitted state transition is valid? In other words, this model requires the operator of the computation under the chain to prove that some computation has already occurred and that the smart contract is responsible for verifying it, accepting the value of the new state and updating the state only if and only if it is proved to be a legitimate operation. We call this model "proof of validity," and it's just a matter of making sure the evidence is small enough and the amount of computation required to verify it is low enough.

The difference between the scheme represented by ZK Rollup and other Rollup schemes and the earlier layer-2 scheme lies in the idea of proving the validity of state transition. Compared with false proof, validity proof has huge advantages in many aspects. The biggest advantage is that it avoids a long challenging period and improves the operation efficiency of funds and user experience.

BLS signature on ethereum

Xie xiang, PlatON algorithm scientist

At present, ethereum 2.0 has been fully transformed to adopt BLS (boneh-lynn -Shacham) signature as its core signature algorithm.

The BLS signature is designed to replace the traditional RSA signature (1024bit) and ECDSA signature (320bit) by finding a digital signature scheme with a shorter signature length in a low-bandwidth communication environment. The BLS signature only requires a signature length of 160 bits and is as secure as the ECDSA.

In the blockchain scenario, we always want to reduce traffic as much as possible, and not only are BLS signatures shorter individually, but the way they work helps achieve that goal. For example, one way to reduce traffic is to use aggregate signatures instead of multiple signatures, but ECDSA cannot do aggregate signatures. Although Schnorr satisfies the requirement of signature aggregation, its essence is that multiple participants co-sign the same message, and this distributed collaborative process needs to greatly increase the number of communications.

In contrast, the aggregation process for BLS signatures is non-interactive, meaning that any node can directly aggregate multiple BLS signature message pairs received locally and support signature aggregation for different messages. The following figure describes the process of BLS signature aggregation:



These advantages make the BLS signature well suited to all types of authentication designs in ethereum (including ethereum 2.0). The Beacon chain in ethereum 2.0, including the pledge contract and the sharps in layer-2, all use BLS to support inter-chain communication.

Let's briefly illustrate the role of the BLS signature in organizing verifiers into the committee's vote on the proposed block.

In ethereum 2.0, verifiers will be counted in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, and the Beacon chain will assign verifiers to a committee based on some randomness, and the committee will vote on the proposed block. The votes for each committee will form a signature via the BLS aggregation algorithm, which will make it extremely efficient to verify all votes for the entire committee.

In addition, the Beacon chain node is responsible for managing the verifiers and their mortgage interests, naming the blockers for each slice, the rewards and penalties for the verifiers, and assisting in processing the cross-slice transactions... In these tasks, all rights-related actions need to be performed by validating the BLS signature.

"Cross-chain" operations for ethereum and Zcash

Wu weilong is a hardcore player of ethereum

Eip-152: increased ability to validate Equihash PoW (PoW of Zcash) in ethereum contracts, opening up the possibility of trunk transactions between Zcash and ethereum, as well as atomized swap transactions.

If Zcash and ETH are treated as two separate ledger books, then verifying Equihash PoW in the ethereum contract ensures that Zcash can verify the changes to the Zcash ledger in the ethereum contract, which means that Zcash tokens can be used through the ethereum contract. That way, you can have Zcash assets in ethereum.

The "asset" is a row in the database, and the block chain requires signatures and checks to make database changes. To verify Equihash PoW in the ethereum contract, a hash function is added to solve the signature verification problem.

In this way, A can support A scenario like this: by executing A contract running on ethereum, A can give B A Zcash token, then Zcash verifies its signature, passes the result to the contract on ethereum, and the contract then executes the next action.

However, this "cross-chain" or interoperability relationship between ethereum and Zcash is one-way from Zcash to ethereum, requiring Zcash to add corresponding functionality in both directions.

Account abstraction: adds extensibility to Account functionality

Wu weilong is a hardcore player of ethereum

Ethereum has two types of accounts. One is called an external account, which is a user account, and is controlled by a key. The other, called contract accounts, is generated by compiling the smart contract code and deploying it on the ethereum network. Contract accounts are extensible because contracts can customize logic.

Account abstraction is the implementation of a set of DID on the ethereum network, and the interaction can be handled directly by the holder of DID, whether the main body of DID is an external account or a contract account. This adds extensibility to the external account, allowing it to operate with higher logic like a contract account, and to more generically represent the external account and contract account types with a different form of "account". After account abstraction, external accounts can control other external accounts as well as assign and control contract accounts. The benefits of this include the ability to customize the payment subject of the transaction to generate account management mechanism and realize the signature control function of the use of funds; Can help DAO to design and implement better; An external account could be used to control the payment of fuel from a contract account, eliminating the existing lack of automation that requires the contract deployer to pay for the fuel even if the contract is owned.

CREATE2 directive: a useful new contract deployment method

Wang yuanming is the chief architect of Westar laboratories

EIP 1014: CREATE2, add a new 0xf5 opcode CREATE2, 0xf5 behaves the same as CREATE, except it USES keccak256(0xff ++ address ++ salt ++ keccak256(init_code)] [12:] instead of sender +nonce hash to compute the contract address.

Although the CREATE2 of EIP 1014 is a minor change, it has a significant impact on the design of the second floor.

Currently, there is no way for ethereum to predict the address of the contract at contract deployment because the contract address is determined by the sender's address and the sender's nonce at contract deployment, but the sender's nonce is unpredictable. We know that the transaction on the second floor is effective because it is constrained by the contract on the first floor. If relevant arbitration contracts on the second floor are required to be deployed on the first floor, the cost will be increased.

CREATE2 provides a new way to deploy contracts, with the contract address determined by the sender address, the salt, and the initialization code. This allows the two-tier system to write code based on a contract that has not yet been linked -- since the contract address is known -- and deploy the contract if necessary, saving costs and simplifying the design of the counterfactual state channel.



User participation 3

How to participate in ethereum Staking?

Rudy Lu is the China representative of InfStones and a partner of Infpool

First, we need to understand what's different about ethereum Staking:

Difference one: a fixed number of mortgages

Now we are familiar with the Staking of most projects, such as EOS, TRON, Cosmos, etc. Or through the deposit rate to make certain restrictions, such as Tezos, Wanchain and other projects. But ETH 2.0 is very different from these entrusted mortgage models. Each node needs to be mortgaged and can only mortgage 32 ETH. If I have 320 ETH, I need to set up 10 nodes.

ETH 2.0 this Staking design and its fragmentation chain structure is appropriate, by forcing set number 32 ETH fixed mortgage guarantee of the entire network node number is more, also ensures that there won't be a huge number of mortgage article head node in a shard chain has a monopoly on the control of charge to an account, dig and the decentralization of the ETH 2.0 degree will result in certain ascend.

Distinction two: principal and income are not a kind of currency, early all cannot trade

In addition to Ontology, Vechain and other projects with dual coin structure design, Staking generally mines "what coin is locked, what coin is earned". ETH 2.0, however, locks ETH tokens on the main chain of PoW, while BETH tokens on the beacon chain are the proceeds issued, which are essentially two kinds of COINS. Since the two chains will not interconnect quickly, the price of ETH and BETH on the open market is not expected to be exactly the same.

In stage 0 which is expected to launch next year, the ETH 2.0 there will be no trading function, even the verifier (nodes) exit Staking, principal, income also can't out of the account transfer, so early to participate in the nodes of all principal, revenue is near the state of the lock, and can only wait for the ETH 2.0 further development, gradually realize the function of account transactions.

Difference three: there was no decentralized mining at the early stage

The function of "entrustment" can separate the token from the issuing right carried by the token, and the holder can entrust the issuing right to the trusted node to participate in the consensus and win the reward. This is also the reason why Staking is widely recognized by the public and gradually gaining popularity. However, in the first two stages of ETH2.0 (stage 0 and stage 1), there is no decentralized mining authorization, which means that the coin holder can only set up node operation by himself or give the coin to the centralized mine pool for mining, but mining on behalf of the coin is equivalent to transferring the coin to someone else for trust, with the security risk of principal.

Second, we need to understand the participation conditions of ethereum Staking.

The bar for participation in ethereum Staking isn't very high. On the hardware side, a home computer's performance is enough to run a node. Ethereum hopes to encourage as many coin holders as possible to participate by lowering the threshold.

Because the node of cash is not professional operators, in general there is no guarantee that the node running 24 hours a day, so on the design of the economic model, the etheric fang Staking for nodes off-line penalties are very small, and the penalties for offline for 3 days at about 1%, but the longer you offline, penalties will be, the greater the 21 days offline will punish by 50%.

For participants, 24-hour operation of nodes can guarantee the maximum benefit. Meanwhile, the node version upgrade, "double flower" prevention, fault monitoring disaster prevention and other work should be done well. At that time, some node operators will launch professional node operation services.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the earnings analysis for ethereum Staking.

ETH 2.0 annual increase rate is a dynamic change with the whole network pledge rate. According to the current published rules, the relationship between the annual increase rate and the whole network pledge rate is 0.5 power. The higher the total network load rate, the higher the annual increase rate, the lower the annual return rate of a single node. When the whole network pledged 10%, the annual return rate of nodes was 5.72%.

In 2020 DeFi

Yang mindao, founder of dForce

● in 2020, we will see a relatively big breakthrough in cross-chain and asset cross-chain between various chains, with many new asset classes entering the DeFi system of ethereum, such as PoS type Staking assets, which can realize the lending interest of Staking assets.

● ethereum system will see the deployment of more layer-2 systems, which will make it easier to scale the DeFi ecosystem.

The gameplay of ENS is limited only by your and my imagination

Old bai, DApp player, NFT collector's item lover, started to contact eteum from ENS auction

ENS (Ethereum Name Service) is a distributed domain Name system built on the Ethereum blockchain. If ethereum is the foundation for the next generation of decentralized networks, then ENS will become the same domain name registry as ICANN, and eth will replace com as the core building block of Web3.

ENS has a large imagination space as well as a large experimental space. Briefly introduce some existing games:

1. Replacing the ordinary account address with ENS can reduce the capital loss caused by the input error, because when we transfer to ENS, we cannot effectively resolve the ETH address it points to if the input error is wrong, which prevents further operation.

2. When ENS points to the address of the agent contract, it can be transferred to ENS domain name to realize flash conversion. For example, we can receive dai by sending eth to dai.now.eth. The principle is that ENS refers to the eth/dai exchange contract of uniswap. You can also set the fallback function of the proxy contract, that is, the default function of the contract after receiving ETH, to be the exchange gateway of uniswap or eth2dai, so as to realize the exchange.

3. If you have MetaMask installed in your browser, you can directly access the ".eth "domain name, that is, open the website ending in".eth "or the front address of DApp with your browser, just like the".com "website on the Internet. The web site or DApp front end can be built on top of IPFS, without relying on a single point-and-center server. For example, we can access https://almonit.eth, an ENS navigation website built on IPFS, through the browser. All the developer needs to do is add a record in the ENS management interface, pointing to the IPFS address of the website.

4. The developer of DApp can register the main domain name of ENS and assign the subdomain to the user according to the user's will. If it is an encrypted communication application, the user can interact with the subdomain as the user name.

5. The DApp merchant application of ENS is a promising scenario. Starbucks, for example, it can be through the coupon. The eth registration member: starbuck. Coupon. Eth, then generate their own ERC721 collection, each batch collection of domains such as: sun 2019 Santa. Starbuck. Coupon. Eth, and referring to the sun domain name to a NFT contracts. Users can be set to send 0 ETH to this ENS address to receive a collection or participate in the lottery, so as to achieve the issuance and delivery of merchant souvenirs.



Community construction 3

Ethereum's new governance process

Ah jian, content director of ethereum fans

Starting in March, ethereum began to explore a new governance process.

Developers led by Alexey Akhunov proposed that in the ethereum 1.x development process, instead of placing all the reference implementation and testing tasks of EIP on the client team, a separate working group would be introduced, with a freely composed working group to implement the EIP of interest, generate tests, and submit them to the client team. Alexey herself is a hands-on practitioner of this model.

Then, it was suggested that a "representative" system could be established, that is, an EIP must have a representative who is responsible for community liaison, communication with the community, response to community questions, and so on.

Later, it was proposed that the time for hard forks should be normalized to provide predictability, and that hard forks should receive only those eips that are fully prepared and not in doubt, and that the deployment of eips that are in doubt should be delayed so that the implementation schedule of the eips does not affect the time for hard forks. Similar to the train, the arrival of the departure, did not get on the EIP and wait for the next train.

I have always believed that governance processes are at the heart of governance, and many of the above improvements to EIP processes have resulted in clearer accountability for development, clearer ownership of Credit, and clearer expectations for the entire community. At the same time, I also sigh that the development of practice seems to run ahead of the development of knowledge again.

How will the marketplace model guide the evolution of ethereum 2.0?

Thor, blockchain world watcher

An entirely new system is typically designed and implemented by the initiator in the early stages, with a small, closed-loop push, as was the case with ethereum 1.0 in its infancy. On the one hand, the initiators know their ideas best, so the efficiency of early closed development may be higher; on the other hand, it is difficult to attract like-minded participants to join the collaboration without brand recognition and community culture precipitation.

Ethereum 2.0 is something of a near-new system on a technical level, but not in terms of brand identity and community culture. Since the creation of ethereum, the community has evolved and gradually formed a self-organizing system with strong vitality. Old people keep leaving, but the vision and culture of the community keep attracting new blood, increasing the robustness of the whole ecology.

Thus, ethereum 2.0 has the opportunity to practice a more radical, open bazaar design and development model in the early stages, and based on this, minimize the influence of authoritative individuals on protocol development and maintain the characteristics of the bazaar model. How will the bazaar model promote the evolution and development of ethereum 2.0? Will the bazaar model have more competitive advantages and vitality than the cathedral model of the corporate chain project? That's what I'm most interested in about ethereum 2.0, other than technology.

Gitcoin Grants: exploration of the financing mode of public goods

Mako, founder of v2eth.com

Gitcoin Grants is a crowdfunding platform that periodically funds eaeum's open source projects with a capital-constrained Liberal Radicalism, a mechanism that Vitalik Buterin and Glen Weyl, one of the authors of "radical markets," wrote in "Liberal Radicalism: Formal Rules for a Society Neutral among Communities.

It can be said that Gitcoin Grants is a very good practice of blockchain technology and the idea of radical market quadratic voting (quadratic financing is an extension of quadratic voting). It explores how to finance open source projects/public goods in a mathematically optimal way, which is why I am very interested in this project.

The quadratic financing CLR mechanism includes two parts: crowdfunding and donation allocation:

Crowdfunding: individuals donate to public goods. Add up the square root of the amount donated by each person to get A, and then square A to get B. B is the total amount of funding the project party should get.
Contribution: the amount due to the project, or B, is greater than the sum given by each donor, and the foundation or private philanthropist makes up the difference. Under this mechanism, the amount of money a project receives becomes more correlated with the number of people supporting it, and the more donors a project has, the more matching money the project receives.
In fact, there are two basic problems in the allocation of public goods in a society: the free-rider problem and the problem of squeezing the interests of minorities.

In the "one person, one vote" mode, a single vote has little effect on the result, so a reasonable person would not vote, which would create a free-rider phenomenon. But with quadratic financing, the dollar would be magnified, and rational people would have an incentive to participate in crowdfunding, thereby reducing free-riding.

In the "one person, one vote" mode, the minority is subordinate to the majority, and the system cannot reflect the importance of diverse products to different individuals, so it will suppress the interests of the minority. In financing, which projects are funded by the majority vote is decided. If quadratic financing is adopted, individuals can choose to fund the projects they are interested in and indirectly affect the allocation amount of the project, which can partially solve the problem of competing minority interests.

Since its launch in January 2019, Gitcoin Grants have helped raise and distribute $827,000 in Grants to the open source community; In its third donation in 2019, it made 1,982 donations worth $170,000 to 68 open source projects. In 2020, the Gitcoin Grants program will conduct fundraising activities at least once a quarter.

I suggest ethereum's open source projects submit their own projects (jan.6-jan.21) in the first quarter of 2020 to participate in Gitcoin Grants. Ethereum foundation and Gitcoin Core will provide $200,000 in matching funds for social media projects and infrastructure projects, and it's up to us to decide which projects will receive funding, with $1 per person.

How to participate in Gitcoin Grants:

Project: the developer shall submit the project introduction and the monthly fund required by the project by applying to join the list of candidates receiving donations.
Users: users sponsor their favorite projects, can choose the total amount of funding, and how many cycles the funding is distributed to project developers. Through Gitcoin Grants, the platform will charge 5 percent.
Ethereum foundation: ethereum foundation determines the matching amount.

Source:https://www.chainnews.com/articles/611792499738.htm

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia