Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin presented a proposal for the first hard fork in the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain. The rough name of the hard fork is “HF1”.
Buterin highlights the following targets for the planned upgrade:
Adding support for lightweight clients;
Elimination of weak points in the signal chain that were identified too late to be corrected at the stage of releasing the zero block;
Testing the hard fork mechanism on relatively small changes before larger ones such as sharding and merging with the existing Ethereum blockchain are introduced.
In particular, in order to achieve these objectives, it is proposed to create a “sync board” that will allow lightweight clients to define chain headers with limited use of resources. As a result, such clients can be launched on mobile devices and in browsers. The council will be appointed every period (approximately every 27 hours) from a randomly selected 1,024 validators. They will publish signatures according to the current headline and receive additional rewards for their work.
In addition, the mechanism for calculating the reward of validators will be changed so that data about them can be collected in real time. In the future, this will simplify the process of client implementation. The penalties for validators will also be reworked: some of them will decrease, while others will increase. Thus, a validator that has experienced several short interruptions with a total duration of one hour will lose 10 times less than a validator that simply disconnected from the network for an hour. Among other changes, Buterin mentions a change in the rules for choosing forks to reduce the likelihood of block reorganization attacks.
He did not specify exactly when the hard fork could happen. The study and refinement of the proposal continues. Other developers, meanwhile, are debating what names to name Ethereum 2.0 hard forks in the future. The names of stars, planetary systems, zones from the game World of Warcraft and months are offered as options.
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