Will Beam Chain bring five major changes to Ethereum?

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, the core researcher of the Ethereum Foundation, believes that although the beacon chain was very effective when PoS was first introduced, it has accumulated some “technical debt” over the past five years, and its design has not leveraged cutting-edge technologies of the Decentralization system, such as Zero-Knowledge Proof. Therefore, the Consensus layer of Ethereum urgently needs a major overhaul.

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

This is a part of the long-term roadmap of Ethereum, allowing Ethereum to make use of the cutting-edge achievements in ZK cryptography, aiming to significantly improve network scalability and performance without the need to launch a new network. Undoubtedly, it is one of the most important upgrades for Ethereum 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, which will greatly improve the transaction speed, security, and efficiency of the L1 mainnet. Some people interpret Beam Chain as ETH 3.0, which is a misconception, because Beam Chain only solves 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. Not at the expense of Decentralization: preserve or improve the current Decentralization guarantees

3. drop Staking Threshold: Lower ETH Staking from 32 ETH to 1 ETH

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

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

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 capabilities.

Anti-Censorship: The introduction of FOCIL (Fork Choice Mandatory Inclusion List) enhances the ability to resist censorship and ensures that transactions are not easily excluded by malicious actors.

Execute the auction& isolate validators: validators will use the auction to isolate, ensuring stronger performance and Decentralization, and also allowing more users to avoid MEV intrusion.

Faster Finality: Ethereum will have single-slot finality and 4-second block time, thus confirming transactions faster and improving network efficiency.

Interestingly, the exchange no longer needs to wait for block confirmations like 1/32, 2/32, 3/32… in the future, as a single block will suffice for confirmation.

2. Improve stake

Improvement of the issuance model: Changes to the issuance model for validators to provide greater rewards for stake.

dropstake requires independent validators to stake only 1 ETH, significantly lower than the current threshold of 32 ETH, making independent staking simpler and more accessible.

We believe that Ethereum must accommodate more Nodes to participate in Consensus while speeding up, without significantly changing the hardware threshold, and breaking the Unholy Trinity of stake. This is really thanks to ZK technology, which is indeed leading the industry by a large margin.

3. Enhanced Security

Post-Quantum Cryptography: Ethereum will implement post-Quantum Cryptography to ensure the network is immune to the threat of Quantum Computing, taking the first step in mainstream blockchain’s resistance to quantum.

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

SNARKification of the Block chain (SNARKification): Ethereum will utilize RISC-V to SNARKify the Block chain, which 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: making the whole ETH chain directly ZK.

Enhanced randomness: Ethereum will also introduce strong randomness to ensure fairness in key network processes such as selecting validators.

drop MEV risk: better censorship resistance can maximize the drop of sandwich attacks and the proliferation of robots.

4. Working Principle

Since the design of the current consensus layer (Beacon Chain) of Ethereum was determined, cryptographers have made significant progress in SNARK. By SNARK-ing Ethereum’s state transition function (i.e., validators integrate state change messages to maintain a correct view of the blockchain), 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 and have a positive impact on the ETH Ethereum L1 trading experience;

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

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

Beam Chain will promote the upgrade of Ethereum from the following aspects:

To speed up processing, Ethereum Beam Chain will use Sharding technology to divide data into smaller parts (shards) for simultaneous processing of multiple transactions. This will reduce transaction bottlenecks and speed up transaction times.

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

Integration with the Ether roadmap: Beam Chain is not a standalone network, but an integrated phase of the Ether roadmap for the next 5 to expand and enhance security.

5. The importance

For Ethereum’s ability to handle the increasingly rising Decentralization applications, Beam Chain is essential - it can enhance Ethereum’s scalability, drop Transaction Cost, and improve overall security, enabling the network to support more users and complex applications over time.

Another major benefit of SNARK-based proof is that it allows ordinary stakers with standard hardware to achieve the above performance advantages. As the staking threshold decreases from 32 ETH to 1 ETH, and with the improvement of network performance, the decentralization of the ETH staker community will also be improved.

Especially the drop of the threshold, if combined with some related hardware devices, such as Ebunker’s eNode, allowing household-level validators devices to reach millions of households, Ethereum is still the most widely spread Node and the most decentralized public chain in the world.

While the vision of Beam Chain will not immediately change ETH’s trajectory or significantly alter its long-term roadmap, its adoption changes the priority sequence of roadmap development, accelerating the development of specific components (for example, the current roadmap sets some important upgrades for 2029, while Beam Chain may accelerate 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 safely deployed on the ETH mainnet. Although the implementation of Beam Chain seems distant, these security redundancies are essential for a decentralized, open-source software.

In a nutshell, Beam Chain solves the past “technical debt” through the ZK route, and these improvements are expected to significantly improve its L1 functionality while maintaining Ethereum’s “world-class decentralization”.

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

Ether Square is still tirelessly making long-term layouts, which is exciting news for the blockchain industry. It also allows us to maintain an optimistic foundation for Ether Square in today’s booming market conditions.