That is until today when the lead developer has submitted the first official proposal for the Phase 0 stage of the migration to Ethereum 2.0.
Ethereum developer Danny Ryan has submitted the first Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 2982 to the Github repository. This marks the first official step to getting Phase 0, or Beacon Chain, nearer to launch.
The proposal stated that the early phases of ETH 2.0 are to be executed without any breaking consensus changes on the current Ethereum mainnet. In other words, there will be two separate blockchains, the old proof-of-work, and the new proof-of-stake.
“This EIP serves to formalize the upgrade as a component of the Ethereum protocol and to tie eth2 into the core EIP process.”
It went on to explain that Beacon Chain is being constructed in parallel to ETH 1.0 as the core of the new consensus upgrade. The core of the mechanism will consist of Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) and a fork-choice rule called Latest Message Driven Greedy Heaviest Observed Sub-Tree (LMD-GHOST).
The EIP added that Phase 0 is centered primarily on the mechanics and incentives of validators executing these algorithms. The purpose of the EIP is to provide a high-level view on the Phase 0 mechanisms, such as the deposit contract, validator mechanics, and ETH 2.0 issuance.
“This EIP is a commitment to this path as being canonical and directly informing the future and roadmap of Ethereum mainnet.”
Beacon Chain has been humming along on the Medalla testnet, its final public test, since it launched on August 4. There were couple of initial glitches resulting from the receipt of bad responses from 6 different time servers in mid-August. This caused several synchronization issues which took a number of validator nodes offline, but the problem was quickly fixed so testing could continue.
According to the Medalla analytics provider beaconcha.in, there has now been 1.6 million simulated ETH, or Göerli testnet GöETH, staked on the blockchain. There are also over 51,000 active validators testing the system with the U.S. and Germany dominating geographically. In terms of clients, Prysmatic Labs’ Prysm still dominates the testnet with 98% coverage.
The big launch date has yet to be determined but Prysmatic has released a public checklist that may offer some indication as to when it is nearing.