ETH consensus layer reconstruction Beam Chain: The ultimate road or a technical puzzle?

Is the 5-year implementation schedule of Beam Chain reasonable? What does the community think?

Author: 0XNATALIE

At the Devcon conference, Justin Drake, a core member of the Ethereum Foundation, proposed a comprehensive restructuring of the consensus layer of the Ethereum blockchain, called Beam Chain. By redesigning the consensus layer, it aims to mitigate MEV issues, improve scalability and security, and apply ZK technology to enhance performance. Beam Chain mainly follows changes in the consensus layer, without creating new Tokens or altering the existing blockchain architecture.

The existing Consensus layer (Beacon Chain) of ETH has a history of five years. Although it performs well in security, technical debt accumulates over time. Moreover, with the in-depth research on MEV and the rapid progress of ZK technology in the ETH community, the existing Consensus layer is not sufficiently adaptable to emerging technologies. The Beam Chain reconstruction plan aims to remove technical burdens and make ETH more flexible and adaptable in the future.

Technical highlights

Technically, Beam Chain has two features: Snarkification through ZKVM and the use of hash-based aggregated signatures.

The Consensus layer is mainly responsible for how all Nodes in the network reach consensus on the state of the chain, such as transaction order and account balance. In the Ethereum network, the tasks of the Consensus layer include verifying Blocks, validating signatures, handling forks, and maintaining and updating account states. The key operation of the Consensus layer is state transition, which means transitioning from the state of one Block (such as the account balance after a transaction) to the state of the next Block. These operations often involve many calculations, and Snarkification is a technique that converts the calculation process into Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

Beam Chain uses ZKVM to Snarkify the consensus layer, transforming the state transition function into Zero-Knowledge Proof. ZKVM is responsible for moving the computation process off-chain, thereby reducing the on-chain computation burden. Each Node can confirm the correctness of the state by verifying the Zero-Knowledge Proof without the need for redundant calculations. In addition, Beam Chain allows validators to choose the appropriate ZKVM without forcing a specific ZKVM into the on-chain protocol.

At the same time, with the development of Quantum Computer, traditional encryption technologies (such as elliptic curve encryption) may face the risk of being cracked. This means that the security of current blockchain systems (such as Private Key and signature verification) may be compromised after the appearance of Quantum Computer. To address this threat, Beam Chain has introduced an aggregate signature scheme based on hash. The hash function has post-quantum security, which can resist attacks from quantum computing. This scheme not only improves the efficiency of signature aggregation, but also provides higher security guarantees for the future.

In addition, Beam Chain adopts PBS, introducing a list containing and executing auctions to reduce the negative impact of MEV. It also plans to drop the minimum stake requirement for validators from 32 ETH to 1 ETH to further enhance Decentralization. The transition of the entire Beam Chain will be conducted in stages, gradually replacing the functionality of the Beacon Chain, which is expected to take five years.

Community opinion

Concerns about development time: The community has expressed concerns about the 5-year development cycle for Beam Chain, and some members have questioned whether the goal of Beam Chain is to gradually approach the characteristics of Solana, similar to Ethereum.

Delphi Ventures founding partner José Maria Macedo expressed disappointment with Beam Chain. He believes that the core improvement of Beam Chain is nothing more than a codebase refactoring, including a 4-second block time and ‘resistance to quantum attacks’ capability, but these changes are expected to be realized only by 2029-2030. Such improvements are not enough to keep ETH 1.0 competitive in the blockchain competition, let alone shape a narrative that gives ETH 1.0 long-term competitiveness.

Solana development platform Helius CEO Mert also expressed concern about the development schedule of Beam Chain. If Beam Chain does need until 2029 to launch, Ethereum may struggle to stay competitive in the rapidly evolving blockchain competition.

EthStorage co-founder Qi Zhou believes that Beam Chain’s estimated completion time by 2030 is too long. He suggests focusing on development using a single programming language such as Rust or Go to speed up the process. Ethereum can reference Cosmos’ ‘re-genesis’ mode in dealing with technical debt, which involves regenerating the blockchain’s genesis block while preserving the core state data of users and contracts, and removing redundant historical data and outdated code from the system. This thorough reset can address technical burdens and legacy issues.

Hydrogen Labs co-founder Meir is concerned that the timeline of Beam Chain is too long and may not meet the scalability needs of ETH as a fully functional blockchain. If the goal of ETH is to be an efficient blockchain platform rather than just a DA, it needs faster and more aggressive scalability improvements instead of incremental optimizations over the next five years.

Developer cygaar explained why the 5-year schedule for Beam Chain is necessary. He pointed out that Ethereum is not an ordinary small-scale blockchain. It is the world’s second-largest blockchain, with a TVL of $600 billion, a basic asset value of $4 trillion, and thousands of applications relying on it. It is extremely difficult to implement such a large-scale change on a distributed, real-time Ethereum network, involving significant risks, hence requiring long preparation and rigorous testing. Any mistake could lead to heavy losses for users.

ETH client Prysm maintainer terence expressed concerns about the long implementation time of Beam Chain, which is the “ultimate goal” of Ethereum. During this period, Ethereum will continue to improve through Hard Fork. Some proposals in Beam Chain will help enhance the Decentralization and censorship resistance of Ethereum. At the same time, before the implementation, Ethereum will continue to improve data availability, censorship resistance, EVM performance, etc., to meet the evolving needs.

Flashbots’ strategic lead, Hasu, believes that the Beam Chain proposal should not be overhyped, as it is a long-term project that will take at least 5 years to realize, and most of the improvements have already been included in the technical roadmap. The real innovation lies in bundling these improvements for testing and eventually replacing the entire chain, which should have been the highlight of the acceleration process. However, many community members mistakenly see this proposal as an exciting release of ‘ETH 3.0’ and even hope to emulate some of Solana’s features, leading to unmet expectations.

MetaLeX founder gabrielShapir0 believes that the core value of Ethereum lies in its Decentralization and autonomy, while Beam Chain will significantly enhance these core features. Many people hope that Ethereum can provide different products, services, or cater to more popular trends and narratives, but that is not Ethereum’s positioning, it is Solana’s direction.

Technical Challenges

ETH Foundation core member Péter believes that the Beam Chain proposal has too many changes bundled together, which poses potential issues from both technical and governance perspectives. Technically, the combination of too many changes increases the possibility of errors. From a governance standpoint, bundling multiple changes may lead to overlooking details and increase the risk of controversy. He suggests first addressing low-difficulty improvement tasks on the Beacon Chain, followed by phased implementation of more complex changes, to allow the system to adapt gradually and avoid comprehensive reforms all at once.

ETH researcher mteam said that although the proposal for Beam Chain is announced as a new concept, it actually consolidates many old ideas from the past. He supports the proposal, but is also concerned that such an upgrade may interfere with the research of the execution layer. The execution layer and the consensus layer are two independent research directions that should be improved in parallel to avoid interfering with each other.

SMG research director Max Resnick said Ethereum needs a grander vision, not to be constrained by five-year incremental improvements. He calls for a return to Ethereum’s original intention to make it a global computing platform that helps developers solve the most complex coordination problems. He has proposed the goals that Ethereum should achieve in the next five years, including: achieving 1-second block time; single-slot finality for easy cross-chain interaction; significantly increasing throughput (>1000 TPS); multiple parallel proposers to achieve real-time censorship resistance.