Vitalik Buterin Suggests Accelerating Transition to Ethereum 2.0 with ETH1-Friendly Validators

In the recent past, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has made public an alternative plan for a quick transition to Ethereum 2.0.

In his December 23 post on Ethereum Research forum, Buterin has formulated an “accelerated schedule” for the shift from Ethereum 1.0 to Ethereum 2.0 via a fresh kind of ETH validator named “eth1-friendly validators.”

As per Vitalik, the latest alternative suggestion will necessitate minimum “rearchitecting” in the network.

Vitalik Buterin wrote:

“Specifically, it requires stateless clients, but NOT stateless miners and NOT webassembly, and so requires much less rearchitecting to accomplish.”

In the same period, the suggested alternative transition would be carried out through a process similar to the earlier defined transition to Ethereum 2.0, Vitalik underlined.

Ethereum 2.0 is a key network overhaul on the Ethereum blockchain that is structured to transition its current Proof-of-Work consensus protocol to Proof-of-Stake.

The moment Ethereum blockchain transits to a PoS protocol, the block validation operation will be handed over from miners to special network validators.

The initial “phase zero” level of the Ethereum’s shift to Ethereum 2.0 is anticipated to happen on January 3, 2020. As per the latest alternative plan by Vitalik, eth1-friendly validators are anticipated to retain both the earliest Ethereum 1.0 node and the latest Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain. Butering proposed the following:

“Validators that want to participate in the eth1 system can register themselves as eth1-friendly validators, and would be expected to maintain an eth1 full node in addition to their beacon node. The eth1 full node would download all blocks on shard 0 and maintain an updated full eth1 state.”

The transition process is expected to increase transaction fees on the Ethereum chain, Buterin pointed out. As per the Ethereum co-founder, initiating a smart contract would necessitate an extra 1-2 gas per byte of code, while a standard ERC20 trade would cause fee to increase by 5% to 10%. Buterin finish with the following statement:

“This would actually be not that punitive to average applications, though many apps would need to rearchitect themselves to use fewer full-sized contracts. There would be some exceptional applications that become considerably less viable. A simple ERC20 transaction (including DAI) would maybe become at most ~5-10% more expensive.”

Crypto think tanks contradict Ethereum’s opinion that Proof-of-Work consensus protocol will turn the Ethereum blockchain safer than Bitcoin (BTC) network. The crypto community believes that Ethereum’s plan to transition from version 1 to version 2 protocol indicates that the Ethereum blockchain has not demonstrated its robustness till date.