Ethereum Isn’t Done

Transcript

hey everyone uh thank you for having me thank you ed khan for inviting me um that's another online conference but i'm i'm happy to be here one day we all meet in person again um cool i'm i'm danny ryan i work with the ethereum foundation on the research team i uh do some research do a lot of spec writing and do a lot of coordination around the project formerly called eth2 that is more recently called uh major consensus upgrades for ethereum and the next big one is the merge so i want to talk to you about the merge today it's relatively short talk but only had about 15 minutes so i decided

to [Music] keep it at a high level and bring you on a journey through math and diagrams and the math is well it's not even not complex math it's it's um it's not really even math at all and the diagrams are simple because the merge actually is simple and i want people to be able to get a good intuition for um what the merge holds uh how that process goes from a high level and actually how it will affect them as end users which it shouldn't at all you should just be in a more sustainable

and secure home after it which is cool okay so let's look at some math okay i actually i gave a talk september of last year called eth1 plus e2 equals ethereum when i looked that up i could not believe that it had been pretty much a year since that talk uh a lot has happened but it's also been kind of a wild year uh time has moved strangely and for me at least maybe for you as well so uh we we had the great renaming recently where we killed the terms eth1 and eth2 or at least or attempting to um these terms are a bit of misnomers and

don't allow you to get a really good intuition for what's going on here and actually kind of imply that one's being deprecated for the other when really it's like the amalgamation of two things um and so i gave a talk about that about a year ago um still relevant i'm not going to go too deeply into that but uh we're killing these terms and so i can't believe i even put them on the slide but uh e one plus c2 equals ethereum and what do i mean by that i really mean that ethereum's composed of two things the execution layer and the consensus layer uh and what do i mean by that really we have like the cradle of consensus that drives this thing the crypto economic consensus proof of worker proof of stake and then the execution layer the evm the states

the transactions all the goodies that uh that users and applications care about and really the summation of these two things the consensus giving meaning and driving the execution layers is ethereum so let's think about another another uh truism east today plus the merge equals eighth tomorrow uh so we have theorem today uh we're going to go through this process called the merge that's one of that's probably the major next upgrade coming uh and then we'll be at east tomorrow so what is the merge the merge is the subtraction of proof of work and the addition of proof of stake simple enough so eat today minus proof

of work plus proof of mistake is tomorrow uh what is heat today today is the execution layer that we all know and love plus the consensus layer that consensus layer currently is proof of work so we can do some simple mathematical substitution the execution layer of today plus proof of work my plus the merge which remember was minus proof of work plus six is ethereum of tomorrow so as we all know from math plus report minus before equals zero so we can just subtract it out cancel it out as they say so what are we

left with the execution layer plus proof of stake equals theorem into arrow that's pretty much the same slide again it must be very important the execution layer process proof of stake equals ethereum actually is a different slide because east tomorrow is ethereum wow that's substitution magic right there execution layer plus proof of sake equals ethereum uh so the execution layer plus the future consensus layer which is proof of stake which is the beacon chain is the theorem uh yeah not really math but uh the point being there is uh we have ethereum it really is the execution layer that we care about that users care about the interact with that that states that the contracts the applications the

transactions and that through this merge process of mathematical manipulation of symbols here uh is stable it came with us the whole way and it's really this consensus layer that we're swapping out and the users just get to be along for the ride and their execution layer remains stable which is really really nice so now we get into some diagrams um let's see ethereum after the merge this is what it looks like that's it it looks like a blockchain it feels like a blockchain and these first two blocks could be pre-merged and these next box could be post-merge and from the user's perspective

that's it you know the the execution layer rides along and just ripples through this merge um and so the applications on the before and after continue and it just looks like a blockchain uh i'm being a bit facetious but actually from the user perspective this is what it should the experience should be like a blockchain we can drill in a bit into it uh so again we're after the merge this is what it looks like after the merge we have the consensus layer which is provided by the beacon chain which is in production since december of last year it's been a good ride and the execution layer the primary thing that people are going

to think about are transactions and state uh is in that cradle it's embedded in there so the consensus layer gives us the cradle gives us the home for the execution layer ethereum we can drill down a bit more take a deeper look at it look at the constituent parts and the nice thing is we have this execution layer which has the parent hash it has the state route has the base fee everyone loves burning eath and then we have the the transactions so this is a block you got the payload you got all the things that the users care about in this execution layer and then we move to the outer layer the consensus layer really the core of the beacon chain and

we have all these other fields so we have these fields are more about just keeping ethereum consensus going all the all the the processing and messages the validators are signaling about how to construct this consensus and keep it secure to keep this execution layer secure so we have the slot the parent route the state route the beacon state route so that has the validator balances and information about finality this signature this is the proposer signature uh so when a proposer creates this block they they wrap it up they package it all up and instead of doing a proof of work on the block they create a bls signature it's actually pretty big it's 96 bytes so

that's why it's really long randall they inject some randomness into the protocol they get a little bit of graffiti space so they can tag it with 32 bytes whatever they want and deposit routes so they can induct new validators into the system and then kind of like how we have transactions in the execution layer we have these validator operations and these are more restricted messages than transactions there's no like arbitrary virtual machine but they do still sign messages about things that they want to do with respect to the beacon chain that primary one is attestations really it's uh a validator has a role and uh given the state of the the system as they see it and their role they create a message

that says this is this is reality as i see it this helps with the fork choice it helps with finality this will help with bringing on shards um when that comes and so these attestations are really the primary consensus warming messages deposits when new validators want to join they sign these deposits and come in exits uh when i'm i'm ready to get out of here i've had fun i need to get my my 32 back out and maybe some nice rewards i send an exit these are the primary operations actually a couple more um and those are for slashings i didn't include them because most blocks don't have them um and in the future kind of how you extend functionality is you add more validator operations and more

associated duties so this is ethereum after the merge you know you have this nice beacon chain cradle out here and we have the execution layer this is where all the all the users hang out and this next slide is subtly very subtly only subtly different is this execution layer so we have this parent root in the consensus layer this hash reference this forms this chain right here but we actually the execution layer so much the same as it is today in uh proof of work is that this parent hash there's actually a chain still being formed in this execution layer so like not only are all of the contents the same other than the proof of work seal and a

couple of deprecated fields but even this execution layer still forms a chain and this means that by keeping all of these fields stable and even still forming a chain all of the web3 libraries apis user facing things do not have to change at all unless you're like doing some proof-of-work stuff and you care about difficulty or other things like that um your libraries just remain totally stable through this through this merge and so i just wanted to point out that there's this kind of like sub you have this meta consensus chain you actually still retain this like execution layer chain embedded in this thing

so i pulled here's another diagram i pulled this sub chain out so we can just look at it so again this is this is the theorem after the merge it's the execution layer it actually even still forms its own chain and the nice thing is this is literally exactly the same thing that was in the proof of work chain today it's just hoisted migrated into the speaking chain consensus [Music] so actually we can go look at it what it looks like inside of proof of work so here's the execution layer this is the theorem of today in the proof of work and since uh and it has it has this kind of outer um we can call it like proof-of-work

seal and that's just finding the correct proof of work rather than doing that proposer signature that i showed you with the beacon chain um but this execution layer is nicely just it's over here and then in the pre-chain consensus it's over here independently it's over here in the proof of work um and it still forms this kind of joint this this this chain it just this has this proof of work steel on it that's the crypto economic consensus driving it from today [Music] um and here is the consensus layer the beacon chain of today the proof of stake that was launched last year in december um and this is really what it looks like

it's kind of funny like it has all of these messages it forms consensus and then it's like but what is it forming consensus on well it's forming consensus on itself but then it has essentially we can slot things into the beacon chain it is a consensus mechanism right like all of this forms a consensus a crypto economic existence mechanism form of validators and then we have this this blank space what do we want to come to consensus on right now it's just coming to consist on itself it's live it's working on itself uh but after the merge we get to put stuff in here and with sharding we just put stuff in there and so again what does it look after the merge it's just a chain that's what it's going to feel like to end users we can drill in the second census layer filling in that gap

remember that gap here and here we are good that's this fusion layer so what does the theorem today look like i showed you the constituent parts it's really two chains operating in parallel uh this was a decision design decision made because the the beacon chain is quite a sophisticated piece of infrastructure uh and uh ethereum is quite the ecosystem and technology live today so it was architected independently and and actually launched independently so we have the proof of work company consensus on the execution layer we have the beacon chain company consensus on itself waiting to come to consensus on eager to come to consensus on other stuff but just operating in parallel this is

ethereum it really is two different it's two things operating parallel waiting anxiously to come together and this is what the merge looks like it's uh it's actually not so complicated in this diagram i probably make it look even simpler than uh it than it is but but it's really not that complex of an operation it's really running a piece of software that is aware of the beacon chain and it's aware of the proof of work chain and upon some condition it stops listening to the work miners and instead listens to the uh when the validators take over uh this execution layer starts listening to those

validators for the execution error and we can follow i've been saying over and over again this execution layer is hanging out in proof of work hanging out in proof of work the beacon chain is ready it's coming to consensus but it hasn't really hasn't come to consistently execution layer yet it has just this slot ready to go and then at this point the validators and this this transition is is hinged upon a terminal total difficulty so once this gets to a certain total difficulty the validators just take over they say okay that was the end of the proof of work this execution layer now is being slotted into our consensus and now we'll continue forward and that's it i mean we have this

consistent mechanism it is live it is ready and look at this all this roomy space to shove stuff into and at some point our software will stop listening to work and start listening to proof of stake and this execution layer is just continuous and really like this this is what the users care about and that from their perspective is totally uninterrupted and so doing we're doing this in a live setting um and we're doing it soon [Music] so that's the actual merge uh and again this is the theory map of the merge really to end users that's that chain just being continuous simple uh and then i just want to show you charting charting essentially is taking that consensus layer

finding a bit more space in it and shoving more stuff into it um and it is primed i mean the way that sharding requires many many validators to be randomly sampled across different domains and and this the way we're doing attestations and the way we're doing shuffling and the way that we're doing validators inside of the speaking chain is such that they are primed and ready to deliver additional data in their attestations about various shards and the idea is that a beacon block after the addition of sharding comes to consensus on that execution layer that we know and love and also comes the consensus on a sharded data layer coming in this is on these routes that are known to be uh valid and available uh and those

will then be leveraged by the execution layer to uh for massive scale through rollups so here we go ethereum merge execution layer and then sometime in the future just add these shards uh what does a post merge client look like we get to reuse a lot of the same software we get a beacon node which is live today we get an execution engine think about it geth it's it's like gather nether mind uh minus the proof of work plus the proof of stake or minus proof of work listening to this proof of stake they both have their own p2p stuff and they have these beacon apis and user apis so these are all the apis that we know and love web3.ethe all that kind of stuff beacon apis tell us about

validators and finality and that kind of stuff and and we just get to use both independently um the interesting thing is this potentially brings up some ux issues uh it's very nice from an architecture standpoint but web three libraries to the to the rescue we just name space it wrap it under the same library and uh called day so web 38th eth remains very stable through the merge web through it beacon extends our information about the state consensus that's it i think i'm running low on time so i do have one more thing i've taken all these diagrams and i've put them on openc into a project into a collection it's

called when merge and you can own diagrams for today's talk while supporting the merge all proceeds will go to research developers it's going to winmerge.eth this is just an experiment um if you want to help support the incentivization of of public goods and support the people that work their asses off to get this done uh go buy your favorite diagram uh cool i really thank you so much edcon for having me i hope this was was interesting this journey to diagrams and fake math um and again if you want to want to support the merge and you like some of those diagrams and want to put them on your metaverse art wall check it out

thank you