0x01 When is the merger coming？
Currently, there is no official announcement time, but the community generally believes that it will be between June and August because it is expected that the difficulty bomb will detonate at the end of June.
0x02 Why does the inflation rate of ETH drop by 90% after the merger and the price TO THE MOON?
- The Ethereum merger is actually a transition from PoW to PoS
- Ethereum under PoW is additionally issuing ETH in the form of block rewards, and the current annual inflation rate is about 4.3%;
- Ethereum under PoS will issue additional ETH in the form of pledge rewards, but the pledge rewards are dynamically adjusted according to the total amount of pledge. Here, assuming that the pledge amount is 10 million ETH, the annual inflation rate is about 0.43%; (Note: inflation The rate rises with the amount of staking, so the specific annual inflation rate will change)
- Under this assumption, the inflation rate of ETH will drop by 90%, which is equivalent to completing three halvings.
- In addition, with the cooperation of EIP1559, the ETH destroyed by the handling fee may exceed the newly issued ETH, realizing the deflation of ETH, which is a long-term positive for the price.
0x03 Is the pledge income expected to be close to 10% after the merger? How does it work?
It is possible. You must know that after the merger, there will be three sources of pledge income:
- Staking Inflation Rewards
- handling fee
- MEV
According to Ethereum researcher Justin Ðrake, and we can calculate the annualized income of 9.6%. However, it is worth noting that this is only our ideal yield in the early stage of the merger. In the long run, the yield may fluctuate between 3.3% and 5.4%.
0x04 What is the latest future plan for Ethereum?
- Phase 0: Beacon chain with PoS as a consensus mechanism
- Phase 1：Data sharding, but not compute sharding
- Phase 2：Add execution capabilities to all shards (compute shards)
However, on November 18, 2020, at the fifth AMA event of the ETH2.0 research team of the Ethereum Foundation, Vitalik Buterin made it clear that the ETH2.0 roadmap has changed, and the rollup will be the center to promote the development of ETH2.0. Implementation:
- We will not emphasize the importance of Phase 2 for the time being. We mainly push Phase 1 to implement data sharding to achieve sharding Rollup; the current TPS of Ethereum is about 15~45, and using Rollup can increase throughput by 100 times, while 64 shards of ether The throughput of the square network can be increased by 64 times, and the two are superimposed, that is, the sharded Rollup can achieve 6400 times of expansion.
- The beacon chain will have the execution function, that is, after the PoS is merged, the beacon chain block will directly contain the transaction.
Recently, there have also been some updates in the sharding scheme. In the future, Ethereum is more likely to adopt a sharding scheme called Danksharding, which can effectively optimize the cross-domain MEV problem and help the implementation of sharding Rollup.
In the previous model, miners were responsible for producing blocks, they picked transactions from the mempool for sorting and inclusion in blocks, and they also had the power to censor certain transactions.In the design of PBS, this responsibility is divided into two roles: block proposer and block builder.
The block proposer is responsible for receiving transactions from the mempool and creating a list crList containing block transaction information to pass to the block builders. Block builders reorder transactions in crList and build blocks with the aim of maximizing MEV, and then submit their bids to the block proposer, who chooses the highest bidder as the valid one block.
The previous sharding scheme is a parallel data sharding mode, that is, each shard and beacon chain has an independent verifier. Although an independent verifier is more conducive to decentralization, in the context of the current prevalence of MEV, in the profit Driven by this, it will inevitably lead to the centralization of block producers (for example, a large number of verification nodes are running under the same entity, which is beneficial to MEV). In addition to adopting the PBS architecture mentioned above, Danksharding also made a change that all beacon block and shard data will be uniformly verified by a committee of validators.
Strictly speaking, this design is a simplification of sharding. There is no complex data access synchronization problem between shards, and it has many advantages:
- It can effectively reduce the network workload (nearly a hundred times);
- Data synchronization between L1 and L2 is accelerated;
- crList enables instant transaction confirmation on L1;
- MEV marketization to solve the potential centralization problem of validators
