Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has unveiled a proposal to increase Ethereum’s decentralisation and update its creaking infrastructure.
Drake presented his idea for what he calls the “Beam chain,” a redesign of the infrastructure that keeps track of Ethereum transactions, during a presentation at the Devcon conference in Bangkok.
“The goal is to try and transition in a safe and fast manner from the Beacon chain that we have today, to this Beam chain, which is much, much closer to the final design of Ethereum,” Drake said.
The Ethereum blockchain is made up of two layers. The first layer, called the Beacon chain, handles Ether staking and keeping track of transactions. The second execution layer is where users submit transactions.
The idea is to update Ethereum’s Beacon chain to reduce old technical issues, implement new cryptographic techniques, protect against future security risks from powerful quantum computers — which could break current encryption — and make transactions faster.
Blockchain development moves fast, and as the Beacon chain was created five years ago, Drake said, it has become outdated.
Drake’s Beam chain proposal is one part of a larger push to scale Ethereum as newer blockchains like Solana look to compete by offering faster and cheaper transactions.
The Beam chain will bake in a buzzy cryptographic technique called ZK-SNARKs.
ZK-SNARKs allow one party to prove it possesses certain information without revealing that information. On blockchains, ZK-SNARKs can increase privacy and scalability.
“We’re potentially entering this ZK era of Ethereum consensus,” Drake said.
Drake’s presentation was highly-anticipated in the Ethereum community. Many had hoped the Ethereum researcher’s talk would introduce plans for a brand new version of the network dubbed ETH 3.0.
When asked if Drake’s Beam chain plans constituted a new version of Ethereum, he shot the idea down.
“The moniker Ethereum 3.0 is not appropriate,” Drake said, because the upgrade only affects one part of the Ethereum network and excludes other areas, such as the execution layer.
Mixed reactions
Drake’s Beam chain plan is the first big Ethereum announcement in some time.
But it might be a long time before it’s implemented. In the presentation, Drake said the Ethereum community must all agree on the update before any work towards it can take place.
He estimated that developers may not begin writing code for the upgrade until 2026, and that it might take until 2029 to complete testing.
Reactions to the proposal were mixed.
“Researchers like research. Programmers like refactors. Users don’t care about either, change the culture,” Aragon co-founder Luis Cuende said on X.
Others, such as 1kx Research Partner and early Satoshi Nakamoto collaborator Wei Dai, were also critical of Ethereum’s prioritisation of technical tweaking.
“There is simply not enough discussion on how Ethereum can create more network effects for its rollups,” Dai said on X. “That’s a more important question for Ethereum than decentralisation and protocol optimisations in my opinion.”
Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@dlnews.com.
