The BLS standard has finally been finalized as far as ethereum and the “blockchain agreement” is concerned according to an eth researcher.

Carl Beekhuizen, an eth2 researcher at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), stated that an agreement had been reached whereby if no issues were raised at the IETF standards committee, then it would be considered as final.

At the IETF meeting held on Thursday no issues were raised, thus the BLS signatures are no longer something hodling up the deposit smart contract. Beekhuizen said:

“From an Eth2 standpoint, we are treating it as though it is the final standard, so it is not something that is holding us up.”

Apparently there will be another meeting of eth devs in two weeks, so the deposit contract should now be out soonish as all else had been finalized, with just the standard delaying it until now.

Danny Ryan, another researcher, has given a bit more information on the transition process once the deposit contract goes out. He said:

“The transfer of ether from the existing ethereum chain (eth1) into the new beacon chain (eth2) will be uni-directional. That is, the ether moved into staking on eth2 will not be transferable (to start) back to eth1…

The eth1 chain would have to re-org deeper than 1000 blocks to break the link, and in such a case would require some manual intervention to overcome.

We are researching and prototyping the utilization of the beacon chain to finalize eth1 (i.e. the finality gadget). This would require eth1 to defer its fork choice ultimately to the beacon chain, gaining security from the PoS validators, and allowing for a much quicker eth1 to eth2 deposits. The finality gadget also opens up other fun things such as the bi-directional bridge and exposing the eth2 data-layer to eth1.”

So the deposited eth is received in the Proof of Stake (PoS) Beacon chain after 1,000 blocks, meaning as it stands after 15,000 seconds (4 hours) or as the difficulty bomb has kicked in, then if blocks reach one minute something like after a day or two.

The finality gadget is a sort of decentralized checkpoint whereby the blockchain history is finalized after a certain block and then every x blocks thereafter where the x block is sort of like the genesis block, you can’t reverse transactions beyond it.

That can allow for easy pruning of history where you discard the data prior to the x block since now there’s sort of a new genesis block.

Such pruning can allow for far bigger scalability than even sharding because the bottleneck would then be just bandwidth (currently 10MB/s for an average home) rather than syncing a node.

In addition, because the finality gadget would provide for far greater security of the blockchain from stakers, miners would be less necessary and thus at that point their block reward – and total new eth supply – would be reduced by 2/3rds to an inflationary rate of circa 0.6% or less, so basically zero once miners are removed completely.

Finally, Justin Drake of EF said the Ethereum Foundation is looking to stake with its eth holdings of circa 600,000 eth, so he asked for suggestions and the like regarding the staking setup.

Meaning they think this is now fairly close to launch with our estimate being spring 2020 presuming all goes well.

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