Meet the Ethereum Beam Chain

Ethereum’s underperformance over the past two years post-Merge has triggered plenty of community concern around potential narrative weakness stemming from the prioritization of a rollup-centric roadmap.

In hopes of presenting Ethereans at DevCon with a new technical north star to rally around, prolific Ethereum Researcher Justin Drake unveiled his proposal for a major rehaul of the Ethereum consensus layer, dubbed Beam Chain.

Here’s everything you need to know about Justin Drake’s proposed Ethereum redesign 👇

🌈 The Beam Basics

Ethereum was born in proof-of-work and has conquered proof-of-stake. Justin Drake believes it is now time for validators to progress into the zero-knowledge era!

Billed as a from-scratch redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer and Drake’s most ambitious initiative to date, Beam Chain seems to be living up to the hype and has elicited high praise from many within the Ethereum community, who are lauding it as the endgame for Ethereum consensus.

tl;dr // Beam Chain is a proposed endgame solution for Ethereum’s consensus layer that will “SNARKify” the state transition function to:

• Enable 4-second slot times and single-slot finality
• Retain or improve upon current decentralization guarantees
• Eliminate block reorganization-based MEV opportunities
• Make the Ethereum Network quantum-resistant

In the five years since the designs for Ethereum’s current consensus layer (the Beacon Chain) were solidified, cryptographers have made significant progress on SNARKs, a compact form of zero-knowledge proof that allows one party to attest to their possession of information without revealing the information or requiring any interaction between the prover and verifier.

By “SNARKifying” Ethereum’s state transition function – a message of state changes incorporated by validators to maintain their correct view of the blockchain – four-second slot times and single-slot finality can be obtained.

Not only could the total reduction in block production and finality times positively impact the Ethereum L1 transaction experience by reducing wait times, but it would also eliminate potential value that can be extracted from transactions through long-range block reorganization tactics and enable reductions in consensus layer technical debt.

Additionally, SNARKification will make the Ethereum Network quantum-resistant, a necessary feature for any future-proof blockchain.

SNARK-based proofs allow the above performance benefits to be achieved utilizing standard hardware solutions available to home stakers, and when combined with another aspect of Drake’s proposal that would reduce staking requirements from 32 to 1 ETH, decentralization of Ethereum’s staker set might even improve as the Network becomes more performant!

While Drake’s vision for Beam Chain does not entail any immediate changes to Ethereum or significantly alter its long-term roadmap, its adoption would alter the order in which these roadmap developments are currently prioritized and, much to the chagrin of some prominent critics, would delay the most significant upgrades until 2029 at the earliest.

Whether the Ethereum community moves to adopt Beam Chain remains an open question, but for an ecosystem that has increasingly found itself concerned with a perceived lack of results generated from the rollup-centric roadmap, the improvements promise a plausible path forward to improve L1 functionality while retaining Ethereum’s world-class decentralization guarantees.

Although the Beam Chain implementation timeline is undeniably lengthy, it reflects a realistic timeline for how long it can be expected to take before a major overhaul of the most valuable blockchain network by total value locked in existence can be confidently and safely pushed to production.