Danny Ryan Demos Ethereum Shard

The ethereum 2.0 coordinator, Danny Ryan, has demoed an eth1 shard running on the ethereum 2.0 Proof of Stake (PoS) network.

Speaking from his home in New Orleans for the Edcon virtual conference while accompanied by his cat, the ethereum coder said:

“The unification of eth mainnet with upgraded eth 2 consensus is the most exciting thing happening in a year or so.

It unified different portions of the stack, it introduces highly optimized consensus with a highly optimized user layer and brings the vision of eth 2 to all.”

The demo links the eth1 current network, the user layer and state/data, with the ethereum 2.0 consensus system.

“Essentially its adding a consensus engine within Geth to be controlled by RPC instead of proof of work,” Ryan said, RPC being remote procedure call.

*Eth1 shard running eth2 consensus, Aug 2020*

You can see there we have proposers, shard blocks, new blocks being created, with anyone able to do this demo if you can follow the instructions.

As we reported previously this demo is the result of Mikhail Kalinin, an eth 2.0 dev for TXRX, which seems to be focusing on Teku, and Guillaume Ballet, an ethereum core developer working on Geth, as well as others.

Ryan said the next step now is to get METAMASK to point to this eth 1 engine “and demo we can use existing eth1 infrastructure to interact with the eth1 shard chain” which runs on ethereum 2.0.

Once this goes live by Ryan’s estimate potentially next summer, ethereum’s inflation will drop by 90% or more from 2 eth per block, plus all the uncles, to only about 0.22 eth per block for stakers.

That’s because this removes the miners completely, and therefore once it goes live there will no longer be Proof of Work, only Proof of Stake.

In addition Geth will clearly continue to be very relevant for the foreseeable future as it will be the first shard and probably for quite some time it will be the most dominant shard because it’s the current network.

From the sound of it based on this demo, all the defi kids with all their pools arbing around and yield farming probably won’t even notice anything as instead of ‘answering’ to miners they’ll ‘answer’ to stakers in a peaceful democratic transition instead of an abrupt chaotic revolution.

Just like no shop closed just because Theresa May went out of Number 10 and Boris Johnson went in, it looks like here too the defi farmers won’t notice anything.

Except maybe capacity could be increased a bit as there wouldn’t be uncles threatening to chop up the chain when data resources are increased, but it is unclear currently how the gas limit voting will work in this eth1 chain, presumably the same just with stakers.

Meaning what two years ago looked a bit chaotic in regards to the ethereum 2.0 upgrade, it is now starting to look a bit exciting because the solution to scalability is in sight.

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