Prysmatic Labs, a team of blockchain engineers have released Ethereum 2.0 Prysm demo v0.0.0. The team announced the release of the first demo version of their Ethereum 2.0 Shasper [Sharding plus Casper] project, Prysm. In a Medium post, Raul Jordan, blockchain developer and Prysmatic Labs editor has briefly explained its features.
The Medium post read:
We are proud to announce our very first release of Prysm, v0.0.0, which will serve as the building block for all future releases as we get to production. We want to show the community we have a project we have put a lot of work into through careful thought and design decisions that we hope will set a standard for future ETH2.0 developments.
Details of the Release
Raul Jordan further explained that this version is v0.0.0 and not v0.0.1 because there is still work to be done such as wrapping up Phase 0 of Shasper and much more. This version 0.0.0 has a basic beacon-chain+validator demo which can perform various tasks. Following are some of the key tasks:
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin tweeted:
Excited to be trying out @prylabs's first PoC https://t.co/vjIedCV8UU pic.twitter.com/6Y5HzgJDNZ
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 3, 2018
There are some things which are not included in this release. These are as follows:
How to Run the Demo?
To run this current release, v0.0.0, as a local demo, users need to run a beacon chain node and a validator client. Users can start a beacon chain from genesis. After that, it can be connected as a validator client through a public key, and propose/vote on beacon blocks during each cycle.
Raul further stated that
Even though canonical blocks are created in the demo due to your activity as a validator, you’ll quickly see not much can be done with these blocks until real, state execution comes into play. However, this beacon chain node+validator client system is a critical piece of consensus and coordination for all actors participating in Ethereum 2.0 and will serve as the foundation for a full-fledged, sharding system.
What’s Next For Prysmatic Labs?
The medium post further explained the future roadmap. The team is currently focusing on various other things alongside the rest of the client implementation teams. The developers also want to work more on randomness generation and signature aggregation on the beacon chain as well as validator rotation. According to them, this is phase 0–1 of the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap because sharding state execution will not come until phase 1 and 2. In preparation for devcon, they will be focusing a lot more on this current release and they will include some of the key pieces they left out.
In the month of June 2018, ETH creator Vitalik Buterin had said that ethereum will soon reach 1 million transactions per second. He had also said that with the help of second layer solutions like Sharding and Plasma, the ethereum network will be able to process 1 million transactions per second. Prysmatic Labs is building a full-featured sharding client, allowing the system to process transactions at over 10x – 100x of its current speed!
Buterin had expressed that second-layer scaling solutions that are right now being tried on the Ethereum testnet could empower the Ethereum blockchain system to support large scale decentralized applications with huge clients by adopting a creative strategy in enhancing the blockchain. He had further explained that if users get 100x from sharding and 100x from plasma then those two together basically give a 10,000x scalability gain. Due to this, blockchains will be powerful enough to handle most applications people are trying to do with them.
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