Ethereum 2.0 will undergo its first hard fork upgrade

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Monday released the first hard fork plan for the new Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain, tentatively named HF1.

The hard fork will allow developers to introduce several key upgrades to the recently released beacon chain, and will also serve as a useful test for deeper changes in the future.

The biggest practical change is support for light clients, which are nodes that have minimal resource requirements and can run on mobile devices. This will allow "trust-minimized wallets" to verify the blockchain themselves, rather than relying on external service providers.

Light client support is introduced via a special-purpose “sync committee” consisting of a group of randomly assigned validating nodes that are used to create special signatures that make it easier to determine the correct version of the chain.

Other improvements include fixing the fork choice rules, where developers found several instances where the protocol could be vulnerable to reorg attacks. The issues are subtle and require precise timing, but they could allow malicious actors to exploit the network while controlling a small fraction of validating nodes. Buterin wrote that the flaws were known before launch but discovered too late to be fixed in time.

In terms of actual changes, the hard fork aims to completely change how the slashing and inactivity leak mechanisms work. Currently, stakers on ETH2.0 can lose a portion of their capital for being inactive or trying to support a minority fork on the chain, which will be punished by slashing.

Inactivity leaks are sometimes seen as a deterrent to staking, as penalties are imposed for force majeure issues such as poor network connectivity or power outages. While the ETH2.0 system is set up to be very forgiving, the team is now further tweaking the mechanism to make life simpler for stakers with unstable connections. The leak mechanism will become quadratic, meaning there is a significant difference between intermittent and continuous inactivity. For example, a staker who loses power for a few minutes at a time for a total of an hour will lose 10 times less than another staker who loses power continuously for an hour.

Inactivity leaks will also end gradually rather than immediately, ensuring that offline nodes will continually lose value until the network is well past the necessary safety threshold.

While some changes make the system more forgiving of honest mistakes, the team is changing some parameters to introduce harsher financial penalties for bad behavior.

It is not clear when the hard fork will be executed, and some details of the proposal still need to be improved and reviewed. In the meantime, Ethereum developers are trying to come up with a naming convention for HF1 and future hard forks. The topics currently proposed include the names of stars, planetary systems, World of Warcraft zones, and months of the year.

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