The Beam Chain fork will take 5 years, including continuous upgrades to Ethereum.
Written by: Jarrod Watts, Abstract Developer Relations Engineer
Compiled by: Jinse Finance xiaozou
Beam Chain is the most significant announcement of the Devcon summit, introducing 9 major upgrades to Ethereum. However, most people do not yet fully understand these upgrades, and this article will help you better understand these 9 upgrades.
Beam Chain is Justin Drake's redesigned proposal for the Ethereum consensus layer (CL). Before delving into specific upgrades, let's briefly look at what the Ethereum consensus layer actually is.
Each Ethereum node runs two components: an execution client and a consensus client.
The consensus client is used by nodes to 'agree' on what the next block in the blockchain is. You can stake 32 ETH to add a third component — a validator, which proposes new blocks through the proof-of-stake algorithm to earn rewards.
So why does the Ethereum consensus layer need redesigning?
Currently, there are several issues with CL:
It has been around for 5 years — facing technical debt and not using the latest innovative technologies like ZK proof.
This is an opportunity to execute upgrades and clean up Ethereum's technical debt.
These 9 upgrades can be divided into 3 categories:
Block Production
Staking
Cryptography
Next, I will summarize each upgrade individually.
Upgrade 1: Anti-censorship
Current block production is very centralized. The two major block builders — Beaver Build and Titan Build — account for nearly all Ethereum blocks:
These builders create blocks in such a way — maximizing their profits in the form of MEV; including, excluding, or reordering transactions arbitrarily in the blocks they produce.
Today, if your transaction is unfavorable to these two block builders, they might choose to exclude your transaction from the block, censoring your transaction.
The upgrade proposed in EIP-7805 increases Ethereum's anti-censorship capabilities by allowing validators to select transactions from the memory pool and enforce their inclusion through inclusion lists (ILs); builders must follow the rules to have their blocks included by the network.
In the Beam Chain upgrade, the 16 validators in each slot will construct a list of transactions that must be included by the block builders, meaning block builders no longer have the ability to censor transactions.
Upgrade 2: Isolated validation
Attester Proposer Separation (APS) separates witnessing and proposing, for example, executing auctions.
While validators can build transaction blocks themselves, most validators use something called 'MEV boost' to delegate block building to others (typically Beaver Builder or Titan build), with the latter paying fees to the validators.
These two parties are referred to as:
Witness (Validator)
Proposer (Block Builder)
Now the two are separated — that is, validators accept blocks from proposers, however, it is centralized through trusted intermediaries called relayers.
Relayers like Flashbots act as 'intermediaries' facilitating transactions between validators wanting to sell blocks and block builders wanting to create profitable blocks.
APS is an upgrade that adds or 'embeds' this separation between validators and proposers in a decentralized manner; reducing the centralization risks of relayers like Flashbots.
One way to achieve this separation is by executing auctions; a system where anyone can purchase a ticket, giving them a chance to win the right to create future blocks.
Upgrade 3: Faster slots
On Beam Chain, slots will change from 12 seconds to 4 seconds.
Slots are a period during which a validator can propose a new block and get agreement from other validators.
Faster slots mean faster transaction finality and higher transaction throughput.
Upgrade 4: Smarter issuance (such as staking caps)
The issuance curve refers to how new ETH is created and distributed over time.
Currently:
ETH will be distributed as rewards to validators every epoch (approximately 6 minutes).
ETH is burned as part of each transaction.
Based on network activity, ETH fluctuates between inflation and deflation. For example, in a certain hour, you might see ETH inflating, as the issued ETH rewards exceed those burned in transactions:
There is much debate in the community about whether and how issuance should change, but Justin Drake mentioned the staking cap in the Beam Chain demonstration. The staking cap sets a maximum amount of ETH that can be staked to provide more predictable rewards for validators, possibly with the goal of making ETH deflationary.
Upgrade 5: Smaller Validators
Currently, you need to purchase 32 ETH to become an individual validator on Ethereum. At today's prices, that's about $100,000.
Beam Chain proposes reducing it to 1 ETH, which will help solve some centralization issues faced by liquidity staking providers like LIDO or Coinbase, which currently control nearly 40% of staked ETH:
Users who want to run a validator for rewards but do not have 32 ETH will benefit from this upgrade, as they can run a validation node with just 1 ETH.
The next upgrade (Pectra) will allow stakers to stake more than 32 ETH, up to a maximum of 2048 ETH. This means users will be able to stake 1-2048 ETH on Beam Chain.
Justin mentioned the Orbit staking method, which depicts a system where larger validators are selected more frequently, often receiving smaller rewards, while smaller validators are selected less often but receive larger rewards.
Upgrade 6: Faster finality (like 3 Slot FFG)
Currently, Ethereum finalizes transactions in about 15 minutes (64 slots).
Single-Slot-Finality has been proposed as a way to reduce this time to 1 slot, but a newer proposal — 3-Slot-Finality — may actually be faster as it runs in parallel with the voting rounds.
This means a transaction will be finalized within 36 seconds, rather than 15 minutes. This is especially important for services reliant on L1 finality (such as DeFi applications or cross-chain/interoperability protocols).
Upgrade 7: Chain Snarkification
Beam Chain aims to 'snarkify' the consensus layer (using ZK-SNARKs, a form of secure ZK proof). Justin Drake refers to this as the 'ZK Era'.
Specifically, Beam Chain proposes to use ZK-SNARKs to:
Compile beam chain deployments in different languages into zkVM bytecode.
Aggregate signatures generated by witnesses into ZK proofs.
Here, ELI5 refers to the significant progress of ZK technology over the past 5 years, with Ethereum hoping for native deployment of it on both the consensus and execution layers.
Upgrade 8: Quantum security
Today, quantum computers can break parts of Ethereum, such as cracking your private key or forging signatures in transactions using methods like Shor's algorithm.
Quantum computers are likely to be available for people in the next decade; thus, the Beam Chain proposal aims to provide Ethereum security for a post-quantum world using methods such as hash signatures with post-quantum security.
Upgrade 9: Strong randomness
Finally, the Beam Chain upgrade proposes a new primitive for building randomness sources using something called VDF (Verifiable Delay Function).
In 2018, Justin Drake mentioned this, saying it could be used for:
Consensus layer — for example, randomly selecting validators.
Application layer — for example, publicly providing an opcode that can offer verifiable randomness.
This is currently impossible without third-party services like Chainlink or Pyth VRF.
In addition to these 9 upgrades, the Beam Chain upgrade will also clean up most of its existing technical debt and unnecessary components, which will become redundant post-upgrade.
For example, faster slot finality may mean that epochs are unnecessary.
But some believe that the time span of Beam Chain is too long. However, Justin later clarified that Ethereum will continuously accept updates over these 5 years.
The Beam Chain fork will take 5 years, including continuous upgrades to Ethereum.
