As we all know, Ethereum was born with PoW (Proof of Work) and successfully transitioned to PoS (Proof of Stake) in 2021. Regarding this, Justin Drake, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, believes that although the beacon chain was effective when PoS was just introduced, it has accumulated some ‘technical debt’ over the past five years, and its design did not leverage cutting-edge technologies of the Decentralization system, such as Zero-Knowledge Proof. Therefore, the Consensus layer of Ethereum urgently needs a major upgrade.

During his recent speech at Devcon in Bangkok, Justin Drake, a researcher at Ethereum, announced a proposal to completely reform the consensus layer of Ethereum, called the “Beam Chain”.

This is part of the long-term roadmap of ETH, which aims to significantly improve network scalability and performance without the need to launch a new network, by leveraging the current breakthroughs in ZK cryptography. There is no doubt that it is one of the most important upgrades for ETH in the next 3-5 years.

Beam Chain is not a brand-new blockchain in the literal sense, but a new infrastructure built within the ETH Mainnet. It significantly improves the transaction speed, security, and efficiency of L1 Mainnet. Some people interpret Beam Chain as Ethereum 3.0, which is a misunderstanding because Beam Chain only addresses the consensus layer issue and will not change the Data Layer (such as blob channels) or the execution layer (such as Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)).

The five core changes of Beam Chain are:

1. Faster Block Confirmation: Enable 4-second slot time and single-slot finality.

2. Without sacrificing decentralization: maintain or improve the current decentralization protection.

3. drop Staking threshold: Let ETH Staking drop from 32 ETH straight to 1 ETH

4. Protecting ordinary users: Eliminating MEV based on Block reorganization

5. Facing the future: making the Ethereum network quantum-resistant

The upgrade ideas and principles of Beam Chain

1. Increase Block production

Higher Throughput: Beam Chain will increase Block production by 3 times to enhance Ethereum’s transaction capability.

Anti-censorship: The introduction of FOCIL (fork enforced inclusion list) enhances the ability to resist censorship, ensuring that transactions will not be easily excluded by malicious actors.

Execute Auction & Isolate Validators: Validators will be isolated using an execute auction to ensure stronger performance and decentralization, as well as to protect more users from MEV attacks.

Faster finality: Ethereum will have single-slot finality and 4-second block time, which will confirm transactions faster and improve network efficiency.

Interestingly, the exchange no longer needs to wait slowly for 1/32, 2/32, 3/32… Block confirmations, because in the future, a single Block can confirm.

2. Improve stake

Improvement of the issuance model: changes to the issuance model of validators’ rewards to provide greater returns for staking.

The dropstake requirement: Independent validators only need to stake 1 ETH, far lower than the current threshold of 32 ETH, making independent staking simpler and more accessible.

We believe that Ethereum needs to accommodate more Nodes participating in Consensus while speeding up, without significantly changing the hardware requirements and breaking the stake Unholy Trinity. This is really thanks to ZK technology, which is indeed far ahead in the industry.

3. Enhanced Security

Post-quantum cryptography: Ethereum will implement post-quantum cryptography to ensure the network is protected from the threat of Quantum Computing, taking the first step towards mainstream blockchain resistance to quantum computing.

zkSNARK and zkVM integration: Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) will be integrated with Ethereum (ETH) through zkSNARK and zkVM to further enhance privacy, scalability, and security.

SNARKification of the Blockchain (SNARKification): Ethereum will utilize RISC-V to SNARKify the Blockchain, a process that can improve the efficiency and scalability of proof generation. SNARK is a compact form of Zero-Knowledge Proof that allows one party to prove ownership of information without revealing the information or requiring any interaction between the prover and validators.

In short, we can summarize it as: let the entire ETH chain be directly ZK-ized.

Enhanced Randomness: Ethereum will also introduce powerful randomness to ensure the fairness of key network processes such as selecting validators.

drop MEV risk: better review resistance can maximum drop sandwich attacks and the proliferation of robots.

4. Working Principle

Since the design of the current consensus layer (Beacon Chain) of Ethereum, significant progress has been made in SNARKs by cryptographers. By SNARKifying the state transition function of Ethereum (i.e., validators maintaining a correct view of the blockchain and integrating state change messages), 4-second time slots and single-slot finality can be achieved.

On the one hand, the reduction of Block production and finality time can drop the waiting time, which has a positive impact on the transaction experience of ETH L1.

On the other hand, it can also eliminate the potential value extracted from transactions and reduce the technical debt of the consensus layer through remote Block reorganization strategy.

In addition, SNARKification will make the Ethereum network resistant to quantum attacks, which is an essential feature for the future of blockchain.

Beam Chain will advance the upgrade of Ethereum in the following aspects:

To speed up processing speed: ETH Ethereum Beam Chain will use Sharding technology to divide data into smaller parts (shards) to process multiple transactions simultaneously. This will reduce transaction bottlenecks and speed up transaction time.

Resistance to Quantum Computer Security: Ethereum will utilize cutting-edge encryption technology to ensure that even future super Quantum Computers cannot compromise the security of the network.

Integration with the ETH roadmap: Beam Chain is not an independent network, but an integrated stage of the ETH roadmap for the next 5 expansions and improved security.

5. Significance

For the ability of ETH to deal with the increasingly rising Decentralization application, Beam Chain is crucial - it can enhance the scalability of ETH, drop Transaction Cost, and improve overall security, allowing the network to support more users and complex applications over time.

Another advantage of SNARK-based proofs is that they allow ordinary stakeholders with standard hardware to achieve the performance benefits mentioned above. As the stake threshold decreases from 32 ETH to 1 ETH, the decentralization of the ETH staking community will also improve as network performance improves.

Especially the drop in the threshold, if combined with some related hardware devices, such as the eNode of Ebunker, allowing household-level validators devices to reach thousands of households, Ethereum is still the public chain with the most Nodes and the most Decentralization in the world.

While the vision of Beam Chain will not immediately change ETH blockchain, nor significantly alter its long-term roadmap, its adoption will change the development priority of the roadmap, accelerating the development of specific components (for example, the current roadmap sets some important upgrades for 2029, while Beam Chain may expedite the arrival of important upgrades).

If Beam Chain receives enough community support, developers can start drafting specifications next year, and then the production-level code will be written by the development client team in 2026, tested in 2027, and finally deployed safely on the ETH mainnet. Although the implementation of Beam Chain seems quite distant, these security redundancies are extremely necessary for a Decentralization developed Open Source software.

In short, Beam Chain, through the ZK route, has effectively addressed the past “technical debt”, with the hope of significantly improving its L1 functionality while maintaining Ethereum’s “world-class Decentralization”.

At the same time, the long-term solution of quantum resistance introduced by the new approach will put the Consensus layer of Ethereum in a ‘maintenance mode’, ensuring that Ethereum will remain secure, efficient, and adaptable in the coming decades, thus achieving future innovations without the need for disruptive redesign.

The Ethereum community is still tirelessly making long-term plans, which is an encouraging update for the blockchain industry as a whole, and it allows us to maintain an optimistic foundation for Ethereum in today’s booming market.

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