The Cancun upgrade is coming soon, taking stock of the key nodes in the history of Ethereum

Until today, blockchain technology can still be said to be an emerging technology. Although the basic concepts related to blockchain (cryptography, decentralization, peer-to-peer networks and transactions) have been studied for decades, it was not until 2008 that Bitcoin After birth, people believe that these concepts can indeed be combined to create a usable product. Especially Ethereum, it was not until 2015 that it appeared in people's field of vision with a public and usable appearance. Although the expected development timeline and specific details have changed, Ethereum is still sticking to the plan and constantly upgrading the protocol to ensure improved usability, security, functionality and decentralization.

This year, Ethereum will undergo two major upgrades according to the plan, namely the Shanghai upgrade completed on April 12, and the Cancun upgrade expected to be carried out in the fourth quarter. According to the official documentation of Ethereum, since the release of the white paper in 2013, a total of 24 milestone events have occurred, most of which are fork upgrades, and 12 upgrades are relatively important. This article will review and sort out the important hard forks and upgrades in the history of Ethereum, and introduce the possible changes brought about by the Cancun upgrade.

Frontier Upgrade - July 30, 2015

July 30, 2015, which is the date the Ethereum genesis block was generated and the date Ethereum Phase 1 began. The launch of Frontier marks the official launch of the Ethereum blockchain network. This stage is mainly for blockchain developers, and node participants participate in the form of mining. This stage already supports uploading smart contracts.

Frontier protocol includes the following key features:

Block Reward: When miners successfully mine a block on the Ethereum blockchain, they will receive a reward in ETH. In the Frontier phase, the block reward for miners is 5 ETH per block.

Gas: In the early days after Frontier was released, the gas limit for each block was hard-coded to 5000 gas. To put it bluntly, this means that there will be no big moves on the Internet. This allows a buffer period for miners to start working on ethereum and for early users to install the client. After a few days, the gas cap is automatically lifted and the network can start processing transactions and smart contracts as planned.

Canary contract: This contract is used to inform users which chains have been or are vulnerable to attacks. Canary contracts are assigned a value of 0 or 1. If the contract is assigned a value of 1, the client can recognize that this is a faulty chain and avoid this invalid chain when mining. Essentially, these functions of the Canary contract allow the Ethereum core development team to suspend the operation of the network when there is a problem with the network. In the early stages of Ethereum, the Canary contract was an extremely centralized but indispensable protection mechanism.

Usability: All developer operations are performed through the command line, as there is no GUI. The entire network is usable, but the user interface is very crude, and only those who are familiar with Ethereum and have operational experience are able to use it.

In the Frontier version, the Gas limit of each block was hard-coded to 5000Gas, and then the 5000Gas limit was removed in the Frontier thawing upgrade two months later, and the default price of Gas was set to 50gwei, And the difficulty bomb was introduced in this upgrade. The purpose of introducing the difficulty bomb is to provide a mechanism for the network to migrate from PoW to PoS. When the computing power is too high for miners to dig out any block, it will be The perfect time for the network to convert to PoS. It can be said that in the initial stage of Ethereum, there was already a plan to switch to PoS.

Since then, Ethereum has officially entered the era of quasi-available PoW mining. At this time, the price of Ethereum is $1.24 each.

Homestead Upgrade - March 14, 2016

The Homestead upgrade is the second major release of Ethereum, the first hard fork of Ethereum and the start date of the second phase of the roadmap. The most important features in this release are the optimization of smart contracts and the introduction of completely new code for the smart contract language Solidity. In addition, the desktop wallet Mist was released in this version, allowing users to hold/trade ETH and write/deploy smart contracts. Later, the Mist project was announced to be terminated in early 2019.

Homeland upgrade is one of the earliest implemented Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP), which includes 3 EIPs 2, 7, and 8: EIP-2: Increase the cost of creating smart contracts through transactions from 21,000 Gas to 53,000 Gas. Previously, it was more expensive to create a contract by contract (the recommended approach) than to create a contract by transaction. Due to the increased gas cost of creating contracts through transactions, EIP 2 incentivizes users to revert to creating contracts through contracts.

EIP-7: A new function DELEGATECALL is added to facilitate code reuse. This opcode is similar to CALLCODE, except that it sends the sender and value from the parent scope to the child scope, that is, the call is created with the same sender and value as the original call.

EIP-8: It is a future-oriented network upgrade plan improvement proposal, which is forward compatible with the network protocol devp2p. This improvement ensures that all client software on the Ethereum network is resilient to future network protocol upgrades.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $12.5 each.

DAO Fork (DAO Fork) - July 20, 2016

In addition to the planned Ethereum upgrade and hard fork, there is also an unplanned fork event worth remembering. In 2016, a decentralized autonomous organization project called The DAO raised $150 million by issuing tokens. In June, The DAO's contract was exploited by hackers, and tens of millions of dollars worth of ETH were stolen by unknown hackers. Most of the participants in the Ethereum community decided to perform a hard fork to restore the stolen ETH in the wallet and patch the vulnerability. However, the hard fork has not been unanimously approved by all participants in the community, and some participants continue to mine and trade on the original chain. The unrecovered original chain of stolen ETH is known as Ethereum Classic (ETC). Since then, Ethereum has parted ways to form ETH and ETC, which is why Ethereum has two networks.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $12.54 each.

Metropolis: Byzantine Escalation - October 16, 2017

At this time, Ethereum has experienced two major milestone upgrades, the frontier and the homeland. According to the plan, the next step is to upgrade the Metropolis (Metropolis), but the Metropolis upgrade has more content, so the plan was divided into two stages: Byzantium (Byzantium) and Constantinople.

This hard fork contains 9 improvement proposals (EIP 100, 658, 649, 140, 196, 197, 198, 211, 214). In addition to low-level updates related to opcodes, smart contracts, etc., the "difficulty bomb" was postponed to a year and a half later, and the block reward was reduced from 5 ETH to 3 ETH. Block generation times approached 30 seconds before dismantling the difficulty bomb. Added the ability to make non-state-changing calls to other contracts; added some cryptographic methods to allow Ethereum's Layer 2 extensions.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $334.32 each.

Metropolis: Constantinople Upgrade - February 28, 2019

The second phase of the Metropolis upgrade, Constantinople, was originally scheduled to go live at block 7.08 million in mid-January 2019. On Jan. 15, an independent security audit firm called ChainSecurity released a report stating that one of five major system upgrades would give attackers the opportunity to steal funds. In response to the issues raised by the report, ethereum core developers and other members of the community voted to hold off on the upgrade until the security issue is resolved.

In the end, the Ethereum Foundation decided to carry out the last step of "Metropolis", a hard fork named "Constantinople", on February 28, 2019, which contains a total of 6 improvements: It will not be frozen until the PoS working mechanism is implemented; the gas cost problem in the Ethereum virtual machine is optimized; the interactive ability of address creation is added. Interestingly, there is also a hard fork called "St. Petersburg" (Petersburg) in this upgrade, which will remove a previous improvement proposal (EIP-1283) in Constantinople. In this five major updates, in addition to technical adjustments, the difficulty bomb was postponed again for 12 months, and the block reward was reduced from 3 ETH to 2 ETH.

At the same time, a new command CREATE2 introduced in EIP1014 can pre-calculate the contract address before the contract is officially deployed, thus introducing the state channel concept similar to the Bitcoin Lightning Network into Ethereum, which can be calculated off-chain first and then Deploy the corresponding contract to the on-chain settlement.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $136.29 each.

Istanbul Upgrade - December 8, 2019

Ethereum 2.0 plans to launch the first phase (phase 0) in 2020. Before 2.0 is fully launched, most users and developers may mainly use Ethereum 1.X, so subsequent updates to 1.X are also very important . This Istanbul hard fork was activated on December 8th and includes 6 improvements: continue to optimize the Gas cost in the Ethereum virtual machine; improve the resilience against distributed denial of service attacks; improve the verification mechanism based on SNARKs and STARKs The developed Layer 2 extends the performance of the solution; realizes the interoperability of Ethereum and Zcash; allows the Ethereum smart contract to introduce more creative functions.

Vitalik Buterin said that after this upgrade, ordinary transactions per second (TPS) will increase by about 5% to 10%, and for Layer 2 technology Rollup, it can be increased by about 4 times. At this point the price of Ethereum is $151.06 each.

Muir Glacier Upgrade - January 2, 2020

Less than a month after the Istanbul upgrade was completed, Ethereum underwent an urgent and temporary upgrade. It is very rare to perform two hard forks within a month because users and developers continue to find the most recent Ethereum blocks. The generation interval has been slightly increased, which will cause the TPS of the Ethereum network to decrease. Ethereum developers discussed, and some people proposed to carry out a hard fork code-named "Muir Glacier" at block height 9,200,000 to remove the difficulty bomb, which is expected to occur around December 31, 2019. According to data from developers in the discussion group, Ethereum's block generation time will continue to increase until the difficulty bomb is removed, and may reach 25 to 30 seconds around January 6th.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $127.18 each.

Berlin upgrade - April 15, 2021

Starting from this version, the upgrade codename will follow the order of Devcon, the Ethereum developer conference, and the first Devcon 0 was held in Berlin. Ethereum had previously planned many improvements for the Istanbul upgrade, but due to various reasons, some of the improvement proposals that did not have time to be put in Istanbul will be moved to Berlin. This time, the Gas cost problem in the Ethereum virtual machine is optimized; and support for multiple transaction types is added.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $2454 each.

London (London) upgrade - August 5, 2021

This upgrade involves a total of five proposals: EIP-1559, EIP-3198, EIP-3529, EIP-3541, and EIP-3554. One of the most influential EIPs on Ethereum is EIP1559. This proposal aims to change the existing fee structure of Ethereum, split the fee into base fee and miner fee, and destroy part of the base fee To reduce the circulation of ETH.

It directly changes the economic model of Ethereum. Previously, the block packaging was an auction mechanism, and the gas price was higher and all was given to the miners. EIP1559 divided the gas fee into two parts, one part was given to the miners, and the other part was burned, so that the Ethereum The market has entered the era of deflation.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $2621 each.

Paris Upgrade (The Merge) - September 15, 2022

This upgrade (merger) is an upgrade that directly modifies the execution layer and consensus layer of Ethereum, and is an important upgrade that transforms the Ethereum mainnet from the PoW consensus mechanism to the PoS consensus mechanism. This upgrade has produced some rule changes to the Ethereum network, the specific changes are as follows:

Verification node change: The original miner node will be replaced with a verification node. The verification node needs to have 32 ETH as a deposit, and run corresponding software to participate in network verification and pack blocks.

Changes to block rewards: The original block rewards will be canceled and replaced by transaction fees.

Change in transaction fee mechanism: In the new version, transaction fees will be paid directly to validators instead of the Ethereum Foundation.

Improved dynamic handling fee mechanism: A new feature called "EIP-1559" has been added to the new version, which can dynamically adjust the handling fee price, so that users can complete transactions faster and reduce excessive handling fees.

State storage method optimization: The new version uses a technology called "Rollups" to store a large amount of data on the side chain and aggregate it to the main chain, thereby reducing the burden on the main chain and improving the efficiency of the entire system and scalability.

Improved contract execution method: The new version adds a virtual machine called "EVM 384", which can improve the efficiency and security of contract execution.

In general, the Ethereum Paris upgrade has greatly improved the scalability and efficiency of the Ethereum network by improving the consensus mechanism, optimizing the transaction fee mechanism, improving the state storage method, and improving the efficiency of contract execution.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $1472 each.

Shanghai Upgrade - April 12, 2023

The Shanghai upgrade will be the first major upgrade of the Ethereum network after the merger, and it is also an important milestone on the Ethereum roadmap. There are 3 main changes brought about:

1. The Shanghai upgrade unlocked the pledge withdrawal function of Ethereum. This is not only conducive to maintaining the vitality of the Ethereum network, but also conducive to the sustainable development of Ethereum in the future, and will continue to attract more verifiers to the Ethereum network.
2. Reduce the Gas fee of Layer-2 solutions running on the Ethereum blockchain, which makes Ethereum faster and cheaper to a certain extent. The Shanghai upgrade will further optimize the Gas fee for transactions on Ethereum .
3. As the largest blockchain network supporting smart contracts, Ethereum will maintain Ethereum's leading position in this field by introducing EOF (EVM Object Format).

At this time the price of Ethereum is $1917 each.

Cancun Upgrade - Q4 2023 (Estimated)

The Cancun upgrade is an additional upgrade to the ETH blockchain after the Shanghai upgrade, with EIP-4844 and possible EIP-6969 mainly to promote the goal of reducing costs and increasing speed of Ethereum L2: at that time, it will make Ethereum Layer 2 10x faster, and potentially 100x faster, at a lower cost.

The cost of Ethereum Layer 1 has been high, and necessary improvements are urgently needed to reduce the overall operating cost. Currently, scaling solutions on Ethereum are mainly Layer 2 Rollups. Rollups does help users save a lot of Gas Fee. For example, the representative project Optimism, the regular overhead of Gas Fee is only 0.001 gwei, which is far lower than the regular overhead of Ethereum's first-tier main network; ZK Rollups' solution has better data compression performance , and does not need to include signature data, the fee is lower, and can even be reduced to one percent of the Ethereum layer 1 main network. However, for a wider range of users, even after the Rollups solution, Gas Fee is still a relatively expensive burden. In addition, the efficiency of Ethereum in processing parallel transactions is still low, and it can only process double-digit transaction volume per second. These require new improvements to help improve scalability.

Sharding is a powerful improvement method to solve the above problems, but the current Ethereum cannot implement it yet, and the timely proposal of the improvement plan EIP-4844 is to find a solution between the above needs and the implementation of sharding upgrades. A trade-off that can be applied to Ethereum at this stage has been established, laying the early technical foundation for Ethereum to achieve overall data sharding in the future. Therefore, EIP-4844 is also known as "Proto-danksharding".

EIP4844 introduces a new type of transaction to Ethereum, which can store data at a cheaper cost in a space called Blob, so that the data stored in Layer1 before Layer2 can be stored in Blob, which greatly reduces the cost of Layer2. cost.

In addition to the much-watched EIP-4844, the improvement proposals that have been confirmed for the Cancun upgrade include:

EIP-1153: Add Transient Storage Opcodes. Transient storage is a solution specially designed to solve the internal communication of blocks.

EIP-6780: Modify the function of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode to prepare for the future application of the Verkle Tree architecture in Ethereum.

In addition to ETH itself, there are some projects worth planning under the Cancun upgrade:

Layer2

The biggest beneficiary of the Cancun upgrade is undoubtedly Layer 2. Arbitrum and Optimism, which have sufficient first-mover advantages and are L2 leaders, deserve attention; at the same time, leading applications in the Arbitrum ecosystem such as GMX, RDNT, and Magic will also follow the L2 The outbreak of the tide rises all boats. In addition, there are also Metis built and improved based on OptimisticRollup, and projects that imitate Optimism such as Boba Network are also expected to receive dividends from the Cancun upgrade.

ZK-Rollups

As a more advanced solution considered by the industry, zkRollup is also expected to shine with the upgrade of Cancun. zkSync, StarkNet, and Scroll are the three most well-known projects in this field; these three projects have not issued coins yet, but their potential cannot be underestimated.

zkSync is an extension solution based on the ZK-Rollup architecture developed by Matter Labs. The 1.0 main network mainly for payment purposes and the general 2.0 test network fully compatible with EVM. Recently, zkSync has also upgraded the 2.0 entry, which supports the use of any token to pay network fees, which greatly improves the flexibility of users.

Starknet is a decentralized Validity-Rollup that runs on Ethereum as an L2, enabling any application to scale massively without compromising Ethereum's composability and security.

Scroll is a zkRollup based on zkEVM on Ethereum, as an L2 solution to solve the congestion problem of Ethereum.

other

In addition to the above two major categories, the Cancun upgrade will also benefit other concentrated types of projects. Including a cross-chain protocol with similar functions to L2; due to the short storage time of Blob data, it will benefit the data availability layer project. Among the representatives are: Layerzero is currently the hottest cross-chain protocol. It is a cross-chain communication protocol that can transfer "information" on one chain to another chain, and realize decentralized information cross-chain services by deploying a series of smart contracts (Endpoints) on the chain.

Celestia is a data availability layer project. Based on the Cosmos architecture, it provides a data layer and a consensus layer for other L1 and L2 to build a modular blockchain. The principle is the same as the Ethereum sharding scheme, which can reduce Rollup's current transaction fee bottleneck "data storage cost" to a certain extent.

With the implementation of EIP-4844, L2 will be more competitive with other L1, and the future development prospects are relatively large. In addition to greatly reducing L2 transaction fees, EIP-4844 also provides a good soil for the future application of Danksharding, so that data sharding can be easily realized in the future. With lower transaction fees, better transaction experience, and even more application scenarios, the Cancun upgrade will become a turning point for Ethereum L2.