After PoW and PoS, we may be entering the era of zero-knowledge proof consensus for Ethereum.
Compiled by Karen, Foresight News
Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake proposed the final design of Ethereum at the Devcon conference today, the core of which is a large-scale redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer. He named the design and fork of this proposal "Beam". So what vision does the Beam Chain carry, and how are its technical architecture and implementation plan unfolding?
Beam Vision
Why is there a need for a large-scale redesign of the consensus layer? Justin Drake believes that the current beacon chain is outdated, with its specifications frozen five years ago, and in recent years, there have been many breakthroughs in areas such as MEV mitigation, SNARKs (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments), and zKVMs (zero-knowledge virtual machines), making the redesign of the consensus layer particularly urgent.
First, it needs to be pointed out that since the launch of the beacon chain in 2020, Ethereum has seen an important fork upgrade every year. From the increase in sync committee in 2021, to the completion of the merge in 2022, to the support for staking withdrawal in 2023, and the proto-danksharding in 2024, each step has witnessed the growth and transformation of Ethereum. In 2025, Ethereum will implement the Electra fork, including the implementation of EIP-7251 (MaxEB). In the next few years, Ethereum will also undergo some gradual forks.
However, after these gradual forks, Justin Drake believes that we may face an unprecedented challenge - the Beam fork. This is a "quantum leap" in the consensus layer, which can integrate multiple upgrades (batch) into a single fork.
It is worth mentioning that Beam is specifically aimed at the consensus layer, excluding the blob and execution layer (including EVM), because the opportunities to modify the blob and execution layer are quite limited, while the consensus layer is not directly used by applications, so there is a greater opportunity for design and change.
The Beam Chain consensus layer roadmap includes three categories: block production, staking, and cryptography. In terms of block production, the introduction of inclusion lists to resist censorship, the decoupling of validators and block production processes, and ideas like execution auctions, and perhaps shortening the current 12-second slots.
In terms of staking, researchers widely believe that optimizing the current issuance curve has the opportunity to improve the overall health of Ethereum. In addition, reducing the amount of Ethereum staking required to become a validator and achieving faster finality are also research focuses. In terms of cryptography, the main focus is on chain abstraction, quantum security, and strong randomness.
Beam Chain Technical Layer
Justin Drake believes that "after PoW and PoS, we may be entering the era of zero-knowledge proof consensus for Ethereum. In the ZK era, in this era, SNARKs will become an indispensable technology. The entire Beam Chain, and even the entire consensus layer, can be SNARK-ized."
It is worth noting that the parts that need to be SNARK-processed are mainly the state transition functions, which are the core of the consensus client. All the infrastructure around the state transition function, such as networking, syncing, cache optimization, or fork selection rules, do not need SNARK processing. Ultimately, the state transition function is just a subset of the entire system.
Another place where Beam Chain makes extensive use of SNARKs is in aggregate signatures - using hash functions to implement post-quantum aggregatable signatures. Justin Drake explained that you can collect thousands of signatures and compress them into a proof, and by combining them you get a hash-based post-quantum aggregatable scheme, and you can even aggregate the aggregates multiple times.
In addition, Ethereum will continue to use the existing infrastructure, including libp2p, SimpleSerialiZe, PySpec, and the Protocol Guild.
Beam Chain Roadmap
Justin Drake has laid out a detailed plan for the launch of Beam Chain. The specification process will be initiated in 2025, construction will begin in 2026, and testing will start in 2027 to ensure that Beam Chain meets production-level standards and can be safely deployed to the mainnet. From the roadmap below, the mainnet deployment may be in 2029 or after 2030.
Justin Drake plans to start writing the executable specification next, which will ultimately be reduced to about 1,000 lines of Python code.
In addition, two client development teams (the Zeam team from India and the Lambda team from South America) have expressed interest in developing Beam Chain clients.
