Eth2 Misconceptions: Top 5

1. “Eth2 will never launch”

The first phase of Eth2 will launch in 2020, judging by every indicator we have. The deposit contract bytecode was just formally verified by Runtime Verification, meaning it can be deployed to mainnet. Prysm, Lighthouse, and Nimbus have been iterating with longer-lived testnets, and recently switched over to mainnet specs. Every week brings innovative client optimisations, larger testnets, and an ever growing community of informed stakers.

While it’s definitely been a long path since the rearchitecting in mid-2018, timelines have solidified. Best estimates from client devs place the Phase 0 launch in summer this year:

• Attestant.io: “somewhere in the second or third quarter”
• Into the Ether, Paul Hauner, @ 43 min: “mid year range”

Keep tabs on a potential launch date with Danny Ryan’s “eth2 Quick update” or Ben Edgington’s “What’s New in Eth2".

2. “The transition to Eth2 makes Eth1 immediately deprecated”

Eth1 will live alongside Eth2 for at least a little while, before merging both protocols together. This includes the historic chain-state, the DeFi applications built on top, and all your NFT crypto-art.

this is a staged scenario of what asset convergence looks like, played by actors

Eth2 has been split into several phases. While these phases are being researched, developed and deployed, Eth1 will continue happily humming along in the background. However, as phases reach maturity and are deployed, there will come a time when the Eth1 state becomes fully integrated into the Eth2 system. Read up on the latest proposal on how to make that happen on Ethresear.ch: Alternative proposal for early eth1 <-> eth2 merge.

Eth1 will only become fully integrated after a full exploration of all options and their tradeoffs. This is a proper security minded approach, as opposed to trying to compress timelines in service of arbitrary cutoffs.

Phasing gives significant benefits. First, boxing code into discrete chunks is simply good risk management. Researchers, client implementers, and auditors can reason more easily about the protocol architecture by assessing it in manageable parts. Second, it allows parallel tracks of research, implementation, and testnets, which brings a mainnet launch to the community much faster. We’re seeing this benefit play out now: Prysmatic Labs and Lighthouse both have Phase 0 public testnets, while research on Phases 1 and 2 continues apace.

3. “There will be two ETH tokens from the fork”

In the long run, there will only be one asset. All ETH in circulation today will eventually live on Eth2 as a first class citizen. This convergence will occur over time, once Eth2 has proven itself stable and the proper preparations have been made to join the two protocols, as discussed above.

Most regular users won’t need to worry about it, so don’t be tempted to buy any tokens called “Eth2.” Vitalik summarised it well in the recent Eth2 AMA:

If you are just holding ETH and want to keep your money, in all present proposals there is no risk from you going into a cave for five years.

Some people think a network upgrade means two tokens will live on. The majority of “hard forks” are network upgrades, resulting in better features for developers or mitigating attack vectors. While less frequent, contentious forks that split a community can sometimes cause two assets to live on. A well known example is the 2016 hard fork that split the community into Ethereum & Ethereum Classic.

The Eth1 to Eth2 transition won’t cause any similar split, because Proof of Stake and sharding have been anticipated since early on:

The key part is the nuance in that transitional period after the Beacon Chain launch, but before the Eth1 integration. During this time, ETH (the asset) will be performing similar functions, just separated into two domains. Over time, these will converge into the same fungible market. Here’s a rough sketch of what the base asset transition might look like:

1. In the next few months, the audited deposit contract will be deployed on the Eth1 mainnet. Prospective Eth2 stakers will deposit Ether in anticipation of the Phase 0 (Beacon Chain) launch. The ETH is locked and cannot be removed from the contract .
2. Sometime after, the Phase 0 will go live, and depositors become stakers: they validate the chain, and get rewarded through new issuance on Eth2.
3. Phase 1.5 suggests mechanisms to allow Eth1 to become a shard, avoiding some of the more convoluted tradeoffs uncovered by a finality gadget (Eth2 lending security to Eth1) or a two-way bridge (transferring assets between the POW and POS ETH chains). Stateless models that would enable this are being researched now.

At any point before a complete integration, third parties (exchanges or staking services) may create derivatives and IOUs to facilitate liquidity in ETH that is staked and is temporarily illiquid. But these are third party created derivatives of actual ETH, not actual ETH. Given the difficulty and trust required, it remains to be seen how this will play out, and at what scale.

4. “All Eth2 decisions are made by Vitalik”

While he may play a key role, Vitalik is only one person in a larger web of researchers and contributors that drive the effort forward. For example, Danny Ryan has taken on a crucial coordinating role, bridging the gap between researchers and client implementers. This group has additionally expanded over the past year to include:

• Core Ethereum Foundation research team
• 8 active client implementer teams
• Quilt team
• Ewasm Team
• TxRx Research
• Stateless Ethereum Research
• Robust Incentives Group

Some of the Eth2 implementers at the Sept 19 Interop retreat: No Vitalik! (photo by Danny Ryan)

There are ~75 main developers and an ever-growing pool of individual contributors. Ben Edgington described it well in his end of the year article on Eth2’s bazaar:

So, as a developer community, we try to operate as openly as we can, encouraging participation through developer calls, GitHub issues, formal updates, informal updates and many other channels. All are welcome to participate, and many do. We nurture organic growth and are wary of any one party exerting too much control. To an extent, our approach resembles that of Linux, which has come to dominate much of the world’s computing.

And in the words of Joe Lubin,

“If Vitalik took some time off … the Ethereum machine would just keep chugging”

play this at the opening rave for Devcon 6 (link to tweet)

5. “Eth2 is a catch-all fix for the challenges of Eth1”

Eth1 has surfaced important issues inherent to the bleeding edges of distributed systems, trustless applications, and community cohesion. Eth2 will provide many benefits, but a similar set of challenges remain for permissionless public chains. This will be true regardless of whether it’s a v1, v2, or even v3. The community will still need to be attentive regarding:

• Developer experience: Smoothing the transition between Eth1 to Eth2 for builders. What are the best ways to ensure devs have the tools they need to continue creating and innovating? Make sure to fund infrastructure on Gitcoin!
• Network upgrades (fork coordination): This requires consistently engaged community members with the knowledge and commitment to bring network upgrades to life. At least at the beginning, Eth2 will have hard forks and its own path of continuous improvement that needs to be managed, though this will likely stabilise over time.
• Community cohesion: The community is not a monolith, with each niche having its own preferences. Which EIPs should be included? Where should resources be directed? These are all part of the collaborative social maintenance that Ethereum has come to rely on.
• Smart contract security: Like it or not, people will still be able to write buggy smart contracts. eWASM is expected to allow other languages to work with the EVM, and this means best practices for these broader domain need to be framed.
• Onboarding: The community, and by extension, the protocol it midwives, is only as strong as its capacity for core renewal. This mandate may need to be expanded by organisations like ETHGlobal.
• Dapp UI: What can be abstracted away from end users? We need to continue pushing towards non-custodial products that can be picked up by new users. Eth2 introduces protocol finality, but this will never impact the vast majority of end users.
• Sustainability of Public Goods: Funding builders continues to be incredibly important. Eth2 will need to see support mechanisms for of all the implementing teams, perhaps through voluntary client fees. Support open source projects on Gitcoin!

This is just a small selection of the challenges that will remain. While maintenance may not be sexy, it’s crucial to keep pushing on issues that hinder community cohesion. Put differently: the Ethereum community needs to interweave the ideals of creating and maintaining radical permissionless infrastructure for value transfer. Above all else, bear in mind that people are building these protocols.