(BlockBar) There might be a major redesign in the core infrastructure behind ethereum 2.0. A new proposal of the beacon chain by introduced by ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. It suggests radical modification in the blockchain’s role in a new iteration of the ethereum network based on proof-of-stake consensus.
Raul Jordan, co-lead at non-profit Prysmatic Labs, says that the proposed beacon chain design by Buterin “makes it a lot easier for application developers, people building on [ethereum],” to uplift the new network without having to re-learn the parameters of an entirely new blockchain platform.
This is a welcome news to many application developers on the world’s second largest blockchain platform who have been anticipating the ethereum 2.0 upgrade for years.
The latest proposal by Buterin suggests interesting new dynamics to simplify how decentralized applications (dapps) are deployed on the estimated $26 billion network even though many aspects of ethereum 2.0 are still highly subject to change and further research.
It is to be noted that the beacon chain is a central blockchain that coordinates hundreds of other ethereum blockchains, called “shards,” in the envisioned ethereum 2.0 network.
“Instead of having one giant machine run transactions one at a time…we can split it up across tons of machines across the world and run them in parallel,” Jordan explained.
Originally, the beacon chain was supposed to act strictly as the coordinator or the “heartbeat”, as Jordan puts it, ethereum 2.0. It would be tracking all the data in shards and compiling summaries of that data onto one central blockchain.
Buterin has also proposed an additional function for the beacon chain to perform, which is to store specialized smart contracts called beacon chain contracts. Beacon chain contracts could also mimic bitcoin and create an execution environment on ethereum 2.0 with all of the same rules and parameters of the bitcoin blockchain.
It would be easy now for dapp developers to choose a different operating system for one’s computer. One could have the option to leverage a Mac OS or Linux operating system instead of booting up a computer with a Windows operating system.But still not everything has fallen into place for this newly proposed beacon chain contracts. Users will be discouraged to know that from deploying multiple beacon chain contracts and “bloating” the beacon chain, the contracts could be priced at a steep cost for users to deploy.