When is the merger?
At present, there is no definite official announcement time, but it is generally believed that it will be from June to August, because it is expected that the difficulty bomb will detonate at the end of June.
Is it possible to postpone it? It's possible.
Tim Beiko, the community experience of the Ethereum Foundation, recently said that he would discuss with the community whether it is necessary to postpone the difficulty bomb again in mid-April. The priority of safe and stable merger must be higher than that of fast merger. In addition, he also said that although the difficulty bomb was postponed for about half a year in the past, it is ok to postpone it for one or two months as long as all aspects are suitable.
Why: After the merger? ETH？ The inflation rate has dropped by 90%. Is the price going to the moon?
The merger of Ethereum is actually a transition from PoW to PoS.
The Ethereum owned by PoW is providing additional ETH in the form of block awards, and the current annual inflation rate is about 4.3%.
Ethereum under PoS will issue extra ETH in the form of pledge reward, but the pledge reward is dynamically adjusted according to the total amount pledged. Assuming that the pledge amount is 1 100 million ETH, the annual inflation rate is about 0.43%. (Note: The inflation rate rises with the increase of pledge, so the specific annual inflation rate will change. )
Under this assumption, the inflation rate of ETH will drop by 90%, which is equivalent to halving it by three times.
In addition, with the cooperation of EIP 1559, the ETH destroyed by the handling fee may exceed the new ETH, thus realizing the deflation of ETH and benefiting the price for a long time.
On the contrary, after the merger, ETH will usher in a huge sell-off. Why?
People who hold this view mainly think that the cost of pledging a large amount of ETH into the beacon chain deposit contract in the early stage is extremely low, and there are several times of profits, which is likely to be combined with cash withdrawal.
This possibility does exist, but we can comprehensively consider the following factors:
At present, the upgrade in Shanghai includes the function of activating cash withdrawal, which will be the first hard fork after the merger. In view of the uncertainty of the current time and the possible bear market nature (even if it picks up recently), investors eager for profit can hedge through derivatives and OTC.
Similar to deposit queuing, withdrawals need to be queued, and only 1 125 verifiers can withdraw money at most every day (3.8w ETH in total).
At present, there are many liquidity pledge schemes similar to Lido in the market, and some pledger can actually quit at any time.
When a large amount of cash is withdrawn, the pledge income will rise, which will attract investors to deposit.
Is the pledge income expected to approach 10% after the merger? How to calculate?
It's possible. You know, after the merger, there will be three sources of pledge income:
Commitment to inflation incentives
Expense income
MEV
For specific data, please refer to Justin, a researcher at Ethereum. Rake's calculation model can calculate the annualized income of 9.6%.
However, it is worth noting that this is only our ideal rate of return at the initial stage of the merger. In the long run, the yield may fluctuate between 3.3% and 5.4%.
What is the latest future route planning of Ethereum?
Overall, the road map about ETH2.0 (actually, the Foundation has cancelled this name) has actually been changed twice.
At the beginning, the roadmap of ETH2.0 is a classic three stages:
Stage 0: Beacon chain with PoS as * * * identification mechanism.
Phase 1: Data fragmentation, but excluding computational fragmentation.
Phase 2: Add execution functions (calculate slices) for all slices.
However, on June 5438+065438+1October 18, 2020, in the fifth AMA activity of the ETH2.0 research team of the Ethereum Foundation, Shenwu made it clear that the ETH2.0 roadmap had been changed, and the realization of ETH2.0 would be promoted centering on Rollup:
The importance of stage 2 is not emphasized for the time being, and stage 1 is mainly used to realize data fragmentation, so as to realize fragmentation Rollup；; At present, the TPS of Ethereum is about 15~45, and the throughput can be increased by 100 times by using Rollup, and the throughput of 64 fragmented Ethereum networks can be increased by 64 times. The two are superimposed, and the capacity can be increased by 6400 times by using fragmented RulUp.
Beacon chain will have execution function, that is, after PoS merger, beacon chain block will directly contain transactions.
Recently, the fragmentation scheme has been updated. In the future, Ethereum is more likely to adopt a fragmentation scheme called Danksharding, which can effectively optimize the cross-domain MEV problem and is more conducive to the realization of fragmentation Rollup.
But before that, let's take a look at the PBS(proposer-builder separation) solution proposed by V God for the cross-domain MEV problem.
In the previous model, miners were responsible for blocking, they selected transactions from the memory pool to sort and put them into blocks, and they also had the right to review certain transactions.
In the design of PBS, this responsibility is divided into two roles: block advocate and block builder.
The block proposer is responsible for collecting transactions from the memory pool and creating a list crList containing block transaction information to pass to the block builder. With the goal of maximizing MEV, the block builder reorders the transactions in crList and build blocks, and then submits bids to the block proponent, who will select the block with the highest bid as the effective block.
After understanding PBS, it is easier for us to understand Danksharding.
Our previous fragmentation scheme is parallel data fragmentation mode, that is, each fragmentation and beacon chain has an independent verifier. Although independent verifiers are more conducive to decentralization, in the current background of MEV prevalence, driven by profits, it will inevitably lead to the centralization of block producers (for example, a large number of verification nodes run under the same entity, which is beneficial to MEV). In addition to the PBS architecture mentioned above, Danksharding also made a change, that is, all beacon blocks and fragment data will be verified by a Committee composed of verifiers.
Strictly speaking, this design is a simplification of fragmentation, and there is no complicated data access synchronization problem between fragments, which has many advantages:
Can effectively reduce the network workload (nearly 100 times);
Speed up the data synchronization between L 1 and L2;
CrList can realize instant transaction confirmation on L 1
MEV marketization solves the problem of potential verifier centralization
So at present, the latest route planning of Ethereum can be summarized as "Rollup as the center +Danksharding". But Danksharding is still in the theoretical stage, and the overall route may change in the future.