Ethereum 2.0 upgrade is not a game changer that can bring more users

Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2) is regarded as the blockchain messiah of Ethereum. Newsletter: No. The long-awaited changes are not expected to solve the core issues that plague the network and prevent wider adoption.

Vitalik ButrinHe is an outstanding planner behind the Ethereum blockchain. He believes that people working with Ethereum have greater problems than the actual software because he believes statement In a recent interview with Forkast News. Although the people working on the project may or may not have problems, this is certainly not the only drawback. Although the new deployment looks promising, the kind of software upgrades that are coming will not solve the long-term problems that have plagued the network to the heights that Buterin and his disciples once envisioned.

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main problem

Ethereum currently runs on a Proof-of-Work (PoW) system, which can only perform up to 15 transactions per second-twice that of Bitcoin (Bitcoin) Blockchain-and is widely regarded as impractical for building any extensive decentralized finance or DeFi ecosystem. Therefore, the gas fee of Ethereum is very high. Since few transactions can be processed per second, prices for faster processing speeds become competitive. Dune Analytics research shows that there are 2-5% transactions on Ethereum-based decentralized exchanges (DEX) lose Due to complications such as insufficient natural gas prices.

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Another core problem that the Ethereum platform faces but is often overlooked is poor user experience (UX) design.Therefore, may be interested in participating in decentralized financial applications (DApp) or Irreplaceable tokens For example, the (NFT) market will avoid this because most user interfaces are not only unintuitive, but also lack sufficient educational resources to provide users with the expertise to use the platform.

Users need to set transaction fees in the gas price and gas limit for transaction processing. However, how many users really know this without falling into the fierce rabbit hole of cryptocurrency terms and information?Inside information Report 25% of American adults do not understand or do not know how to invest in digital currencies. Without effective educational tools, how can users know that, for example, sending payments from two different wallets to the same receiving address will not cause nonces conflicts? It is very likely that the vast majority of ordinary users will not realize this problem at all at first.

related: Mass adoption of blockchain technology is possible, education is the key

Ethereum 2.0

In response to these long-standing problems, the regulators of Ethereum Announcing the launch of Eth2 As a series of upgrades to its existing models, including switching to Proof of Stake (PoS) and sharding. The proof-of-stake concept states that people can mine blocks and verify transactions based on the number of coins they hold. The Ethereum Foundation announced that it expects to complete the conversion to PoS by the end of 2021.As the Ethereum Foundation Explanation In a recent blog post, “energy requirements remain the same” compared to the old PoW system.

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According to Ethereum, sharding is expected to take longer websiteAfter the merger of the current Ethereum mainnet and the beacon chain’s proof-of-stake system, “the shard chain may be shipped sometime in 2022, depending on the speed of work progress.” Sharding is the process of horizontally splitting a database to distribute load, reduce network congestion, and increase the number of transactions per second. The shard chain is expected to provide more storage and access data capabilities for Ethereum.

The new upgrade aims to increase environmental awareness and speed up transaction processing. In addition to these upgrades, the blockchain programming language is expected to change from the traditional Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to a language that developers can use C++ or Rust, which will simplify coding directly in the browser. Although infrastructure upgrades may prove beneficial in some areas, such as improving transaction processes, they still fall short of their goals.

1. Ethereum 2.0 Have been working for years, So many users want to know when the real full upgrade will happen. Proof of stake aims to reduce mining costs and energy consumption, but only by reducing block time and/or increasing block size will the network throughput increase. In addition, sharding only helps applications that can run independently and only need to be synchronized every once in a while. But the inherent decentralization and open source characteristics of DeFi mean that fragmented processing needs to run transactions through the relay chain, which slows down the entire process.

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More importantly, in terms of user experience, Ethereum still lags behind to a large extent, which still has not been resolved by the launch of the Eth2 upgrade. Although Ethereum claims to release upgrades to solve the transaction processing speed and high gas fee issues to a certain extent, the foundation blatantly ignores these problems. If these problems are resolved, it will be more intimidated by Ethereum. The user interface is not friendly when opening the door.

Even if the expected upgrade is finally rolled out, users still have difficulty setting transaction fees for transaction processing in gas prices and gas limits. Even outside of Ethereum, the user experience problem is not unique to Ethereum. It is also common on other blockchains that use the EVM protocol, such as Binance Smart Chain and Polygon. Since other Ethereum compatible chains that use the EVM protocol also have the same UX problem, it is difficult to imagine that ordinary users can actually access the EVM-based chain in the future.

In addition to the lingering gas fee parameter problem, the confirmation time of the transaction is very long, which usually leads to delays, asynchronous transaction submissions, and confirmation notifications. In many cases, users will not receive confirmation immediately after the transaction, which leaves too much uncertainty on whether the target recipient receives the transaction. This is a strange and frustrating user experience for users who are accustomed to instant results on the web, such as in e-commerce situations.

Ethereum may be the darling of the blockchain world, but at some point, the hype may turn into hot air, and the long-awaited upgrade may not attract wider mainstream adoption. It is not clear whether the anticipated changes can fulfill the promise of the head of the Ethereum Foundation. Before Ethereum can solve some of the deeper problems, it is questionable whether Eth2 will have a significant impact on anyone outside of the Ethereum enthusiast community. At present, Ethereum 2.0 is not a much-needed game changer, but an upgrade in appearance.

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