As The Merge is approaching, the community is becoming more and more concerned about the implications of the merger and the future roadmap planning for ethereum. In this article, we will focus on this main theme and distill five faq to draw the focus for you.

1. Wen merge?

There is no definite official announcement, except that the community generally believes in June to August, as the difficulty bomb is expected to detonate at the end of June.

Is it possible to postpone it? It’s possible.

Tim Beiko recently said that in mid-April, he will discuss with the community whether it is necessary to postpone the difficulty bomb again. The priority of a safe and stable merger is bound to be higher than a quick one, and he also said that although the difficulty bomb has been postponed for about 6 months in the past, it is possible to postpone it for a month or two as long as all aspects are suitable.

2、After the merger, ETH inflation rate drops by 90%, price to the MOON?

The merger is actually a transition from PoW to PoS.

When PoW, inflation in the form of block reward, and the current annual inflation rate is about 4.3%;

When PoS, inflation in the form of pledge reward, but the staking reward is dynamically adjusted according to the total amount of staking, here assume the staking amount is 10 million ETH, then the annual inflation rate is about 0.43%; (Note: the inflation rate rises with the staking amount.

Under this assumption, the inflation rate of ETH will drop by 90%, which is equivalent to completing three halves.

In addition, with the cooperation of EIP1559, it is possible that the ETH destroyed by fees will exceed the newly added ETH, achieving ETH deflation, which is good for the price in the long run.

3、The opposite view is that ETH will see a huge sell-off after the merger, why?

Those who hold this view mainly believe that the large amount of ETH staked into the deposit contract of beacon chain in the early stage has extremely low cost and several times of profit, so there is a great possibility that the withdrawal will be smashed after the merger.

It is true that this possibility exists, but we can take the following factors into consideration:

• Activating withdrawals is currently included in the Shanghai upgrade, which will be the first hard fork after the merger. Given the uncertainty of the current time and the possible bearishness of the market (even if it picks up recently), investors who are eager to take profits can hedge their bets through derivatives and over-the-counter transactions.

• Similar to the queue for deposits, there is also a queue for withdrawals, with a maximum of approximately 1125 validator withdrawals per day (3.8w ETH in total).

• There are already many liquidity pledge solutions like Lido in the market, and some pledgers can actually withdraw at any time.

• When there is a large number of withdrawals, the pledge return goes up, which in turn attracts investors to deposit.

4、staking earnings are expected to be close to 10% after the merger? How is it calculated?

It is possible. You should know that after the merger, there will be three sources of pledge revenue:

• Staking inflation bonus

• Fee

• MEV

Specific data we refer to the projection model of Justin Ðrake, an Ether researcher, we can project an annualized return of 9.6%.

However, it is worth noting that this is only our ideal return in the early days of the merger, and the return may fluctuate between 3.3% and 5.4% in the long run.

5、What is the ethereum latest roadmap?

Overall, the roadmap for ETH2.0 has actually changed twice.

Initially, the roadmap for ETH2.0 was a classic three-phase process:

● Phase 0: Beacon chain based on PoS consensus mechanism

● Phase 1: Data sharding, but not computation sharding

● Phase 2: Add execution functionality for all shards (computation shards)

However, on November 18, 2020, at the 5th AMA of the Ethereum Foundation’s ETH2.0 research team, Vitalik made it clear that the ETH2.0 roadmap has changed and will be Rollup centered on the implementation of ETH2.0:

● Temporarily de-emphasize the importance of Phase 2, and mainly push Phase 1 to realize data sharding, so as to realize sharding Rollup; The current TPS of Ethereum is about 15 to 45, and the throughput can be increased by 100 times with Rollup, while the throughput of 64 shard Ethereum networks can be increased by 64 times. The combination of the two, namely shard Rullup, can achieve 6,400 times of capacity expansion.

● Beacon chain will have execution capability, i.e. after PoS merge, beacon chain block will contain transactions directly.

In the future, Ethereum is more likely to adopt a sharding scheme called Danksharding, which optimizes cross-domain MEV issues and facilitates sharding Rollup.

But before we do that, let’s take a look at Vitalik’s PBS (proposer-Builder Separation) solution to the cross-domain MEV problem.

In the old model, miners were responsible for the blocks, sorting transactions from the memory pool and including them in the blocks, as well as having the power to review certain transactions.

In the design of PBS, this responsibility is divided into two roles: block proposer and block builder.

The block proposer is responsible for collecting transactions from the memory pool and creating a list of transactions to pass to the block builder. Block builders reorder the transactions in the crList and build blocks to maximize MEV, then submit their bids to block proposers, who select the highest bidder as the valid block.

Now that we know PBS, it’s easier to learn about Danksharding.

Our previous subdivision scheme for the parallel data fragmentation patterns, namely each shard and beacon chain has independent validation, although independent verification is more conducive to decentralized, but in the context of the current prevalence of MEV, by the driving of the profit is bound to lead to block the producer centralized (such as a large validation runs under the same entity nodes, is conducive to MEV). In addition to the PBS architecture mentioned above, Danksharding also made a change, that is, all beacon blocks and shard data will be uniformly verified by a committee of verifiers.

This design is strictly a simplification of sharding, eliminating the complex synchronization of data access between sharding, and has many advantages:

● Can effectively reduce network workload (nearly a hundred times);

● Faster data synchronization between L1 and L2;

● crList enables immediate transaction confirmation on L1;

● MEV marketization to solve the potential centralization problem

Therefore, for now, ethereum’s latest route planning can be summarized as Rollup centered + Danksharding. But Danksharding is still theoretical, and the overall route may change in the future.

Follow us
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain
Telegram: https://t.me/wublockchainenglish