The world’s largest smart contracts platform Ethereum is responding positively to the general public and blockchain community’s call. The blockchain is increasing energy efficiency and reducing the environmental impact of decentralized systems. In a blog post titled “A country’s worth of power, no more”. It is written by Carl Beekhuizen and posted on May 18, Ethereum’s green initiative was put forward by the foundation, which will see the network’s power consumption decrease by 99.95%!
The upcoming Ethereum 2.0 and Ethereum’s shift to Proof of Stake (POS) signals a new era in smart contracts computing. This is coming from the current inefficient, power-hungry Proof of Work (POW) algorithm. According to the energy consumption data comparison, Ethereum 2.0 will utilize around 0.001-0.002 Giga Watts (GW) of power against 5 GW for the current Ethereum setup. This is almost 14 GW for the Bitcoin blockchain!
How much power does it take to run a beacon node (BN), 5.4 validator clients (VC), and an eth1 full-node? Using my personal setup as a base, it’s around 15 watt. Joe Clapis (a Rocket Pool dev) recently ran 10 VCs, a Nimbus BN, and a Geth full node off of a 10Ah USB battery bank for 10 hours, meaning that this setup averaged 5W. It is unlikely that the average staker is running such an optimised setup, so let’s call it 100W all in.
A Proof of Stake (POS) arrangement is more than 2000X power efficient than the current Proof of Work (POW) energy guzzlers and of course has a negligible environmental impact, if at all! Ethereum 2.0 will have power usage, equivalent to a small town, against that of a medium-sized country currently. Additionally, POS networks ensure that token issuance is smaller compared to POW. This is because of the significantly lower validator running costs and hardware. The security of the network isn’t reliant on electricity, but rather the worth of the ETH staked.
About Ethereum 2.0
Ethereum 2.0 is the next big upgrade for the Ethereum network. It will bring Proof of Stake (POS), eWASM, and sharding. It will reduce the resources, required to run the Ethereum network, as well as bring scalability and performance improvements.
The Eth2 upgrade will start in three phases. The first Phase 0 Beacon Chain launched on Dec 01 ’20 and introduced the staking feature. This comes after Phase 1 in Q1 2021, which will introduce sharding and allow data storage on shards, however, transactions can’t still be processed.
Phase 2 will make the Ethereum 2.0 truly complete and the network operational. This will happen after its introduction at some point in 2022. It will bring the Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) replacing the now operational Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Only after the ETH2 chain has been rolled out, proper execution of smart contracts and transactions can commence. The Eth1 and Eth2 chains will gradually merge with each other.