Altcoin News: Vitalik Buterin Proposed to Introduce a New Type of Contracts in Ethereum 2.0

May 27, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed to radically change the role of the beacon chain and blockchain itself in the new implementation of the protocol, based on the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism.

If initially beacon chain was conceived as a central blockchain, which will coordinate the actions of other blockchains or shards, now it is proposed to assign an additional function to store specialized contracts — Beacon Chain contracts.

These contracts are not analogous to conventional smart contracts that were launched for applications in Ethereum 1.0, explains Will Villanueva, a researcher at ConsenSys.

“Those contracts will still exist inside shard chains. Beacon Chain contracts, on the other hand, will be holistic runtimes or transaction frameworks.”

In other words, these contracts will determine the rules for calculating and executing smart contracts, including transaction fees, gas costs, etc. In particular, developers will be able to create such a contract Beacon Chain, which will allow them to reproduce the current settings of the Ethereum 1.0 runtime environment.

“[Dapp developers] don’t have to change much about what they already know,” CoinDesk quotes co-director of the startup Prysmatic Labs Raul Jordan.

According to Jordan, Beacon Chain contracts will also allow recreating, for example, the Bitcoin execution environment in order to apply the rules and settings in the blockchain of the leading cryptocurrency to Ethereum 2.0.

“You can have an execution environment for Bitcoin. You can have an execution environment for ethereum. You can basically create your own little custom blockchain world and have that be what people transact with,” he added.

At the same time, Villanueva notes that in the early stages there should not be a wide variety of Beacon Chain contracts — a few will be enough. To prevent the beacon chain from being overloaded by user contracts, the cost of their execution can be set at a high enough level.

These runtimes are separate worlds with completely individual settings. Ideally, their launch will be truly costly. Hopefully, this value will be measured in tens of thousands of dollars.

Despite the possible technical difficulties of implementation, developers draw attention to the undeniable advantages of this approach, which consist in increasing the flexibility of the ecosystem and simplifying the process of introducing changes as research progresses.

At the beginning of the month, a public testnet of the zero phase Ethereum 2.0 from Prysmatic Labs was released.

Author: Marko Vidrih