Ethereum’s upcoming Grey Glacier upgrade

A week ago, EF’s Tim Beiko published an article on the EF blog stating that the Ethereum network will undergo a scheduled network upgrade at block 15,050,000, which is expected to take place on June 29, 2022.

However, due to different block times and time zones, the exact date may change. Teams with Ethereum nodes involved will need to upgrade their nodes before June 27, 2022.

This upgrade was called Gray Glacier.

Grey Glacier is an upgrade in the same vein as Byzantium, Constantinople, Muir Glacier, London, and Arrow Glacier network upgrades.

Its main function is to postpone the start time of the Ice Age difficulty bomb by 700,000 blocks, about 100 days. The EIP for this update is 5133, and the expected time is mid-September.

Previously, the Ethereum Foundation issued a notice to launch EIP4345, delaying the original difficulty bomb to June 2022. As expected, the difficulty bomb continued to be delayed.

If EIP-5133 is implemented, the start time will be adjusted to 11400000. According to the Ethereum block time, the difficulty bomb will be postponed by about 3.5 months, which is also expected to be within the consolidation period of the Ethereum budget (the fourth quarter).

However, according to speculation by Twitter users, if the block delay time caused by the deduced difficulty bomb is different from that calculated using the current block time, there may be an error.

Before we calculate, we need to understand the difficulty bomb, which is a set of codes added to the Ethereum blockchain to increase the mining difficulty level exponentially, making it difficult for miners to keep up. When the block time increases infinitely, it will eventually cause the blockchain to freeze. The mining difficulty will present a very "steep" exponential curve. Normally it will be a flat curve. When the difficulty bomb "explodes", it will take effect very quickly.

At present, the mining difficulty has some periodic block delay effect. When 5133 comes into effect, the mining difficulty will decrease slightly, then remain flat for a period of time, and then slowly increase again.

Under the influence of such network indicators, the time estimated by the average value will change, and it is necessary to wait until the time is closer and then predict the time again.

Before the Gray Glacier upgrade, in order to be compatible with the Gray Glacier upgrade,

Node operators and miners need to update the client versions they run to the following versions:

When upgrading, changes to the protocol are written to various Ethereum clients, such as Besu, Erigon, go-ethereum, and Nethermind. The protocol is activated at a specific block number. Any nodes that have not upgraded to the new rule set will be dropped on the old chain, which still has the previous rules.

Therefore, in order to be compatible with the latest Ethereum, node operators (basically all industry roles except coin holders) need to update to prevent security issues.

After this upgrade, the progress of Ethereum has been confirmed again. So what else can we expect?

Ethereum calls eth1 the execution layer and eth2 the settlement layer. This name directly indicates that eth1 is one of the execution shards.

This is one of the biggest expectations for the future. Eth2 will be a larger homogeneous sharding structure. This is also the main step in 2023: sharding chain.

After the PoS consensus began to take on network packaging, it did not realize Ethereum's ultimate vision, because the huge transaction data will still cause congestion and increase gas fees. Therefore, the development route centered on rollup will require Ethereum to achieve the successful operation of the shard chain under the PoS consensus.

Sharding is the process of splitting a database horizontally to distribute the load. In the context of Ethereum, sharding will reduce network congestion and increase transactions per second by creating new chains called “shards.”

The sharding process of Ethereum will be a multi-stage upgrade process, and the final sharding chain will distribute the network load to 64 new chains. The hardware requirements will be kept low to regulate the local running nodes.

The sharding upgrade is expected to be in 2023, depending on the speed of the post-merger work. Sharding will provide Ethereum with more storage and access to data, and is currently believed to have no impact on code execution.

Sharding is a way to scale while maintaining decentralization. With sharded chains, validators only need to store/run data for the shard they are validating, rather than for the entire network. This speeds things up and greatly reduces hardware requirements.

Sharding will eventually make it possible to run Ethereum on a personal laptop or phone. More people will be able to participate or run clients in the sharded Ethereum. This will improve security, the more decentralized the network, the smaller the scope for attack.

To maintain data availability, when the first shard chain is running, it will only provide additional data to the network. It will not process transactions or smart contracts. But when combined with rollups, they will process a large number of transactions.

Rollups are a "layer 2" technology. They allow dapps to bundle or "roll up" transactions into a single transaction off-chain, generate a cryptographic proof, and then submit it to the chain. This reduces the data required for a transaction. Rollups combined with all the extra data availability provided by sharding can get to 100,000 transactions per second.

However, under the processing capacity of a single shard or an initial shard scale, we need to consider the process of applying shards to processing execution. The part that needs to be discussed is more complicated, and there are also some difficulties in the roadmap.

For example, to improve aggregation capabilities and reduce costs, it is necessary to reduce the cost of transaction calldata; the complete sharding implementation takes a long time, and only part of it can be implemented first; the number of shards increases from 4 to 64, which is a test for the P2P layer.