Quite a few articles have been going around talking about Ethereum 2.0’s roadmap, its research proposals, and current status. However, not much has been publicly written on the design principles and invariants that are behind many of its inner workings. Having a clear-cut set of invariants is crucial for such a coordinated, multi-year effort to be successful, and it also allows implementers to be on the same page with respect to the philosophy of Ethereum. This article will explain some of these design decisions, their background, and why they matter for the future of the protocol.

History

The motivation for switching Ethereum from PoW to a Proof of Stake protocol has been in heavy development ever since the birth of the Ethereum network itself. Vitalik Buterin at the time was exploring a viable solution against the pitfalls of naive proof of stake protocols to provide greater security guarantees than PoW. In particular, him and the Ethereum research team devised a mechanism known as slasher as a way to penalize malicious actors in proof of stake and cut their entire deposit (Buterin 2014).