Key facts:
The plan is to incorporate a series of improvements with the Berlin fork, scheduled for July.
The proposals seek to introduce advances in the network’s transaction format.
The engineering software and platform, Light Clients, published a series of improvement proposals that have been presented to the Ethereum community and could be launched in 2021. With this, it expects this to be the most innovative year since 2016 for this protocol .
On his Twitter account, Light Clients started a thread to mention at what specific points this progress will be made for Ethereum. He first referred to the four improvement proposals (EIPs) that could be activated in the next hard fork of Ethereum called Berlin.
The first one, EIP-2929, increases the cost of gas for some operational codes in order to provide greater security. The idea is that the gas limit corresponds to a necessary limit in time to process a block.
In his thread, Light Client explains that this EIP increases by 3 times the cost of gas for access to the state of the network. Since the cost of gas for storage codes has historically been undervalued, this has led to malicious transactions that take 20-80 seconds to execute.
Another proposal is EIP-2930. It seeks to prevent breaches or breaches of certain contracts in Ethereum that are usually generated by the previous EIP (2929). This EIP allows you to pre-specify and prepay the accounts and storage spaces that the transaction wants to access.
What is planned with this proposal is to add a type of transaction that contains an access list, that is, a list of addresses and storage keys to which the transaction intends to have access. If you do not belong to this list, having access to this information is more expensive.
Regarding the EIP-2930 Light Clients points out its function of fixing breakages in approximately 0.18% of the EIP-2929 transactions. It also introduces a new transaction type that allows you to specify which storage slots will be read, to pay a 10% discounted fee up front.
The third of the proposals, EIP-2718, what it does is create a wrapper or package to facilitate the creation of new types of transactions, as long as they are compatible with the previous ones.
For its part, the EIP-2315 allows the introduction of three operating codes to support subroutines in the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which are not available natively.
More EIPs to be included for Ethereum blockchain
During the mentions of the four previous proposals, Light Client also made a point to say that “after Berlin, things will be less concrete”.
The next fork will be made in July and these 4 proposals will be incorporated into it. Then, around July, what has been called the ice age in Ethereum is expected to begin. By this he refers to the deliberate increase in the time between blocks due to the increased difficulty of mining, as part of the transition from proof of work to proof of stake, as a consensus mechanism.
If there is no favorable change, then forks or hardfork might be needed soon after. If this occurs, EIP 1559 would be included.
The year 2021 may be an optimistic timeline for the consolidation of ETH1 and ETH2. Source: macondoso / elements.envato.com
The EIP-1559 aims to improve the user experience in relation to the payment of commissions in Ethereum. When the “gas” starts up, it will be divided into two parts, one of which will reach the miner and the other will be burned.
Then there is EIP-2982, it seeks to make changes to the governance of Ethereum. Regarding this EIP, it points the way for the Ethereum 2.0 proof of stake to supplant the proof of work of the current version.
The EIP-3102 would make Merkle tests more efficient, as it allows speeding up the process of verifying large amounts of data. It consists of summarizing the amount of data necessary for processing, while preserving integrity, reliability and improving information tracking.
Another tentative EIP is 2937, which allows developers, when writing a smart contract, that the first information they enter is an operating code that makes the contract indestructible. This in case they want the contract to serve as a library and they want the code to remain forever unchanged.
We also have the EIP-2938, which adds a functionality in the Ethereum code that improves the user experience in terms of commission payments. Thus, it would be easier to interact in scenarios such as wallets and DeFi applications, among others.
Lastly, EIP-2537 would make it easier for the Ethereum 2.0 blockchain and the current blockchain to communicate with each other by using a similar cryptographic setup.
“2021 is going to bring a lot of changes to the Ethereum protocol. There is much more than just this list. All stateless eth2 and ethereum groups have their own ambitious agendas for the year. It is a very exciting time to work on Ethereum, ”added Light Clients.
Ethereum miners reject commission system update
Another improvement proposal that has been raised is EIP 1559, a new scheme with which it is intended to change the commission system of the network. As CriptoNoticias reported in October 2020, eight of the nine mining projects that participated in a community survey had a negative impression of the Ethereum 1559 upgrade proposal.
The report with the survey results was posted on Medium by ConsenSys Product Manager Timko Beiko. There it points out that seven of the nine mining projects consulted said they would refuse to implement the proposal, even if it were included in a future fork. This when expressing doubts about how to establish a base rate.
EIP 1559 proposes introducing a fixed network rate per block to deal with transitory congestion. The proposal was introduced in 2019 by a group of developers headed by Vitalik Buterin. It seeks to change the current transaction system based on offers, for a base rate that would be adjusted according to the demand of the network.