Try Quests to earn cryptoDecentralization Post Merge
What is Ethereum Merge?
The Merge represents a significant update to Ethereum’s blockchain consensus mechanism that took place on 15th September 2022. In short, the transition have seen Ethereum shift from a mining-based proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain to a more energy-efficient, scalable proof-of-stake (PoS) system. This has been achieved by joining Ethereum’s mainnet with its PoS-based system, referred to as the Beacon Chain.
Ethereum, the industry’s second-largest cryptocurrency project by market cap, provides infrastructure for blockchain developers to build and deploy their own decentralized applications (dApps) and cryptoassets.
Prior to The Merge, transactions sent over the Ethereum network were verified and added to its blockchain via a PoW system. PoW involves cryptocurrency miners — who compete to verify transactions on the network — racing to generate a solution to a difficult (and therefore energy-intensive) mathematical puzzle.
After The Merge, Ethereum’s miners have been replaced by stakers, who lock up ETH for the right to validate transactions. In doing so, The Merge has reduced energy usage on the network by more than 99.5%.
Additionally, The Merge lays the foundation for future upgrades planned for Ethereum. Proposed network scalability improvements, like sharding, can only work under a PoS consensus model. Sharding is a technique of splitting a blockchain into smaller, independent shard chains in order to reduce network congestion and increase transaction throughput. The implementation of sharding is planned during subsequent phases of Ethereum’s ongoing development roadmap.
What is Beacon Chain?
The Beacon Chain is the coordination mechanism of the new network, responsible for creating new blocks, making sure those new blocks are valid, and rewarding validators with ETH for keeping the network secure.
The Beacon Chain was the name of the original proof-of-stake blockchain that was launched in 2020. It was created to ensure the proof-of-stake consensus logic was sound and sustainable before enabling it on Ethereum Mainnet. Therefore, it ran alongside the original proof-of-work Ethereum. Switching off proof-of-work and switching on proof-of-stake on Ethereum required instructing the Beacon Chain to accept transactions from the original Ethereum chain, bundle them into blocks and then organize them into a blockchain using a proof-of-stake based consensus mechanism. At the same moment, the original Ethereum clients turned off their mining, block propagation and consensus logic, handing that all over to the Beacon Chain. This event was known as The Merge. Once The Merge happened, there were no longer two blockchains; there was just one proof-of-stake Ethereum chain.
Think of the Beacon Chain as a big lighthouse, rising above a blue sea of transaction data. It’s constantly scanning, validating, collecting votes, and doling out rewards to the validators that correctly attest to blocks, deducting rewards for those not online, and slashing the ETH from malicious actors.
The Beacon Chain introduced proof-of-stake to the Ethereum ecosystem. It was merged with the original Ethereum proof-of-work chain in September 2022. The Beacon Chain introduced the consensus logic and block gossip protocol which now secures Ethereum.
Attestation and Attestant
Every epoch (6.4 minutes) a validator proposes an attestation to the network. The attestation is for a specific slot in the epoch. The purpose of the attestation is to vote in favor of the validator's view of the chain, in particular the most recent justified block and the first block in the current epoch (known as source and target checkpoints). This information is combined for all participating validators, enabling the network to reach consensus about the state of the blockchain.
Attestant is a non-custodial Ethereum 2 staking service that provides the highest levels of security for customer funds whilst also utilizing advanced validating strategies to reap higher rewards than would be possible with more traditional validating infrastructures. One of the ways it measures this is by tracking the generation and inclusion of attestations of Attestant validators for the Ethereum 2 blockchain, which is a critical metric as the sooner an attestation is included on the blockchain, the higher its reward. This article takes a look at how Attestant calculates attestation effectiveness, both individually and on aggregate.
An attestation is a vote by a validator about the current state of the Ethereum 2 blockchain. Every active validator creates one attestation per epoch (~6.5 minutes) consisting of the elements shown on ==FIG1==
An interesting element is the chain head vote, which is a vote the validator makes about what it believes is the latest valid block in the chain at the time of attesting. The structure of a chain head vote is shown on ==FIG2==
the slot defines where the validator believes the current chain head to be, and the hash defines what the validator believes it to be. The combination uniquely defines a point on the blockchain, and with enough votes the network reaches consensus about the state of the chain.
Although the data in each attestation is relatively small, it mounts up quickly with tens of thousands of validators. As this data will be stored forever in the chain, reducing it is important, and this is done through a process known as aggregation.
Aggregation takes multiple attestations that have all chosen to vote with the same committee, chain head vote, and finality vote, and merges them together in to a single aggregate attestation ==(FIG3)==
An aggregate attestation differs in two ways from a simple attestation. First, there are multiple validators listed. Second, the signature is an aggregate signature made from the signatures of the matching simple attestations. Aggregate attestations are very efficient to store, but introduce additional communications and computational burdens (more on this below). If every validator was required to aggregate all attestations it would quickly overload the network with the number of communications required to pass every attestation to every validator. Equally, if aggregating were purely optional then validators will not bother to waste their own resources doing so. Instead, a subset of validators is chosen by the network to carry out aggregation duties1. It is in their interest to do a good job, as aggregate attestations with higher numbers of validators are more likely to be included in the blockchain so the validator is more likely to be rewarded. Validators that carry out this aggregation process are known as aggregators.
What is Slashing on Ethereum?
Slashing describes the process whereby other network participants forcibly eject an offending validator from the Beacon Chain while continuously draining their balance. In the most extreme cases, a slashed validator may lose their entire stake in the network. Because validators do not want to lose their investment in resources and infrastructure, slashing ensures that network actors act in a fashion that does not harm the network. Slashing is a mechanism put in place to enforce good behavior. It is an irreversible punishment that ‘slashes’ a percentage of an offending validator's current stake. It results in a steady loss of ETH over time until the network forcibly evicts the validator and labels them “slashed.” Its main purpose is to reward validators who keep the network running smoothly while penalizing those who do not maintain their validation responsibilities. Slashing prevents low-effort attacks like creating contradictory forks of validators attesting to past checkpoints. Besides misbehavior or suspicious acts, penalties can occur due to misconfigurations that could obfuscate or undermine the system's integrity. (Read More)
According to the left data, Since The Merge update (15th September) till today (9 November), There are more than 396k procuded blocks on the Beacon Chain. We can see there is almost a constant number of produced blocks on each day over time.
According the left data
we can see
Total number of registered validators on the chain since The Merge update is more than 34.9k. Also, we can see the daily number of active and total validators since 15th September over time on the right chart.
As we see, there are increasing number of new validators on beacon chain over time. This means, the Ethereum is becoming more and more decentralized over time since the network power is being distributed among increasing number of validators.
According to the aboce chart we can see distribution of Validators By Totl Volume of Deposits
,Majority of validators (more than 99.3% of them) have deposited 32 ETH into the beacon chain.
34642 validators has deposited 32 ETH into beacon chain.
235 validators deposited 16 ETH.
1 validator deposited 1 ETH.
1 validator deposited 2 ETH.
1 validator deposited 9 ETH.
1 validator deposited 64 ETH.
According to the above and left charts, the highest ETH volume (more than 55.616k ETH) has been deposited into the beacon chain on 23rd September 2022.
Moreover,
we can see there was high number and volume of deposits into the beacon chain on September till 1st October.
Since 2nd October till 18th we can see decreasing deposit activity into the beacon chain.
But again after 19th October, we can see high deposit activity on Ethereum’s beacon chain over time.
According to the leftcharts, There are not any slashed proposer on the Ethereum’s beacon chain since the Merge event.
But, there are few (only 23) blocks that have experienced slashed Attesters. this number is way too low compared to the other 393k blocks that have not experienced any slashings.
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