Vitalik Buterin outlines details of Ethereum 2.0’s first hard fork

Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin shared details about the first hard fork in phase zero of ETH2. The update will add support for light clients, simplify the specification, improve overall performance, and reduce penalties for validator inactivity.

A doc detailing a proposal for the first hard fork (tentatively named «HF1», better name pending) of the Ethereum beacon chain. Adds light client support, simplifies the spec, improves efficiency and introduces a less punitive inactivity leak mechanism.https://t.co/lICffChJsG

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) February 15, 2021

The hard fork carries the working title «HF1».

The update is also aimed at testing the progression of the hard fork in ETH2 in the run-up to more significant changes (sharding, the merge with the first version of the protocol).

What is Ethereum 2.0?

HF1 will add support for light clients capable of operating on smartphones and in browsers. As a result, developers expect to create a much more “trustless” wallet ecosystem.

A so-called “sync group” is envisaged, which will determine network headers with limited resource usage (500 bytes for block validation, 20 KB for the entire history per day).

The group’s authority lasts for about 27 hours, after which its composition is reselected from randomly chosen 1024 validators. They will publish signatures according to the current header and receive additional rewards for the work performed.

HF1 will introduce changes to the algorithm for calculating validators’ rewards so that data can be gathered in real time. This could simplify the process of implementing clients and reduce the cost of updating the дерева Меркла.

The hard fork also envisages revising the penalties for validators: some will decrease, others will increase. A validator who experiences several short outages totaling one hour will lose only one-tenth as much as a validator who disconnects from the network for the same period. This will ease the burden on nodes facing blackouts or repeated reconnections to the network.

Among other changes, the proposal includes changes to the rules for fork selection to reduce the probability of block-reorganization attacks. These vulnerabilities were identified too late for fixes at the genesis block stage.

The document does not specify the timing of the hard fork. Work on certain aspects is ongoing.

Developers have not yet settled on future hard fork names. The current proposals touch on, in particular, names of stars, planetary systems, zones from the World of Warcraft game.

In January, James Hancock, the coordinator of updates for the first version of the protocol, presented specifications of the upcoming Berlin hard fork.

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