Casper ❤️ Sharding

Deprecating EIP 1011 in favor of a Casper+Sharding design

Today on the Ethereum Core Dev call, Vitalik and the research team discussed a new Casper/sharding design that unifies the two efforts sooner rather than later. This is an exciting new design that brings together the two areas of research while at the same time deprecating EIP 1011 and the existing Casper FFG contract. There is already a python proof of concept implementation that demonstrates the core functionality and efficiencies. This codebase will continue to evolve over the coming weeks to serve as a model for production implementations.

As the sharding research progressed and the FFG contract development matured, we realized that we were solving some of the same problems in two different places. On the FFG contract side of things, we also kept running into issues around developing within the existing EVM (vote parallelization, gas efficiency, etc). The unified design utilizes the blank slate of a new beacon chain to simultaneously allow for efficient shard management and FFG finalization.

Although this new design deprecates much hard work by the research team, client devs, and Ethereum community at large, we expect this to be a short term pain point for a long term overall gain. In fact in the long run, the hybrid FFG contract was to eventually be deprecated anyway in favor of a full PoS+sharding contract. This new design is the culmination of years of hard research on both proof of stake and sharding, and brings us to a full-PoS, sharded, scalable blockchain much sooner than if we keep the two efforts disparate. We are excited to see the research mature and move into production.

Thank you again for the continued hard work and support from all of the researchers, client devs, and community members. ❤️