BEAM CHAIN
Here's an explanation in one tweet:
Beam chain is a complete redesign of Ethereum's consensus layer.
Why propose a massive redesign now?
The Beacon Chain (Ethereum's consensus chain) is now five years old. There has been a lot of new research that we can include in Beam Chain.
MEV, SNARK breakthroughs, and tech debt. All areas for improvement.
Block production: Better censorship resistance with FOCIL, isolated validators with execution auctions, and faster slots.
Staking: Better issuance, smaller validators (1 eth staking), and faster finality.
Cryptography: Chain snarkification, quantum security, and strong randomness.
Some of these require large changes, so might as well rework everything at once.
The new design will keep security high AND IMPROVE PERFORMANCE.
Note: the beam chain is not changing the roadmap, but is just a group of upcoming changes all bundled together.
We can purge many existing tech debt from pre-merge.
We've had one consensus upgrade each year. Once we fix all the low hanging fruit, the beam fork will allow a quantum leap forward.
THE TECH
Proof of Work
Proof of Stake
ZK Era of Ethereum Consensus
We want to snarkify the entire beam state transition function. Note: networking, syncing, fork choices, etc dont need to be snarked.
RISC-V has become the defacto standard of zkVMs.
Side note: we can also use zkVMs for the EVM, but that's separate from the beam chain.
POST-QUANTUM: hash based signatures, hash based snarks, and aggregatable signatures, gives us quantum security 😃
We'd still reuse networking, libp2p, SSZ serialization, etc.
THE PLAN:
Make a specification for beam chain in 2025. Start writing production code by 2026, test, and then put in production 🤩
Beam Chain would be a fantastic onboarding opportunity for new consensus client teams in other parts of the world. Zeam in India and LambdaClass in South America.
Contact beam.chain@ethereum.org
Here's an explanation in one tweet:
Beam chain is a complete redesign of Ethereum's consensus layer.
Why propose a massive redesign now?
The Beacon Chain (Ethereum's consensus chain) is now five years old. There has been a lot of new research that we can include in Beam Chain.
MEV, SNARK breakthroughs, and tech debt. All areas for improvement.
Block production: Better censorship resistance with FOCIL, isolated validators with execution auctions, and faster slots.
Staking: Better issuance, smaller validators (1 eth staking), and faster finality.
Cryptography: Chain snarkification, quantum security, and strong randomness.
Some of these require large changes, so might as well rework everything at once.
The new design will keep security high AND IMPROVE PERFORMANCE.
Note: the beam chain is not changing the roadmap, but is just a group of upcoming changes all bundled together.
We can purge many existing tech debt from pre-merge.
We've had one consensus upgrade each year. Once we fix all the low hanging fruit, the beam fork will allow a quantum leap forward.
THE TECH
Proof of Work
Proof of Stake
ZK Era of Ethereum Consensus
We want to snarkify the entire beam state transition function. Note: networking, syncing, fork choices, etc dont need to be snarked.
RISC-V has become the defacto standard of zkVMs.
Side note: we can also use zkVMs for the EVM, but that's separate from the beam chain.
POST-QUANTUM: hash based signatures, hash based snarks, and aggregatable signatures, gives us quantum security 😃
We'd still reuse networking, libp2p, SSZ serialization, etc.
THE PLAN:
Make a specification for beam chain in 2025. Start writing production code by 2026, test, and then put in production 🤩
Beam Chain would be a fantastic onboarding opportunity for new consensus client teams in other parts of the world. Zeam in India and LambdaClass in South America.
Contact beam.chain@ethereum.org
Oversimplified summary: we're going to rebuild the consensus layer with ZK proofs everywhere 🤩
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