- Beam Chain brings speedier finality and scalability to Ethereum.
- Ethereum layer-2s will be essential for zk-rollups and scaling solutions.
During the Ethereum Devcon conference in Bangkok, Justin Drake, one of the leading researchers at the Ethereum Foundation, announced Beam Chain, an exciting new proposal meant to redefine the way forward for Ethereum’s consensus layer. Beam Chain optimizes Ethereum’s consensus process by simplifying some of the existing challenges, most notably in the Beacon Chain, instead of using a blockchain for processing transactions.
Beam Chain is the improvement of Ethereum’s roadmap that offers innovative ideas, such as new staking methods and advanced zero-knowledge cryptography. It does not present changes in Ethereum’s core code for the short term but communicates a different approach to a new road map strategy for updates to be collated in a few years into a major overhaul.
Core Advancements with Beam Chain
The most important contributions to Beam Chain would be improvements in Ethereum’s scalability and finalization times. Faster block times, accompanied by the potential for instant finality of transactions, could boost the user experience significantly. As it is, finalizing an Ethereum block currently takes about 15 minutes which would create many inefficiencies and even routes for MEV. With Beam Chain, though, it could shrink to only a few seconds, giving faster, more reliable transactions to users of DeFi.
Another advantage of the Beam Chain is its possibility of attaining the single-slot finality, that is, after finalizing blocks immediately will make Ethereum much more scalable and non-prone to delay. Centralization is however a concern because faster finalizing might require more computing power. This has got many developers in Ethereum thinking, including Justin Drake, on how to balance this compromise.
The Beam Chain proposal also talks about opening potential consensus client teams worldwide. Drafting of the Beam Chain specification is expected to begin by 2025, and production code will begin in 2026 with full deployment targeted for 2029-2030.
Drakes made the announcement when the mood around Ethereum’s fiscal transparency reached a peak because the Ethereum Foundation recently sold 100 ETH for DAI stablecoin, raising questions in regard to the financial practices of the Foundation
However, Drake says that even as Ethereum gets more scalable, these layer-2s would still be valuable, and the beam chain proposal will focus on the consensus layer while still paving the way for layer-2s to help in the growth, especially through zk-rollups.
