As we are getting closer to the Ethereum 2.0 release, more precious explanations of its system are being disclosed. That's what the Beacon Chain will look like

Ben Edgington, Ethereum 2.0 contributor and applied researcher in ConsenSys, has published a comprehensive development update on Ethereum 2.0 progress and unveiled his 'secret' annotated specification.

Testnets and Phase 2 execution environments

Mr. Edginton picked up the most important milestones the Ethereum dev community has reached on its way towards Ethereum 2.0 rollout. He revealed the brilliant progress of the Prysm testnet which is now working with 41, 686 validators and more than 300,000 system slots. Furthermore, he teased the upcoming public release of the next version of the massive Lighthouse testnet.

The developer outlined that the Quilt team had attempted to look far into the PoS-Ethereum future and announced the explanation of the Phase 2 sharding design. Its most exciting part is the concept of the so called 'execution environments' that will ensure cooperation between shards and therefore guarantee the integrity of the whole blockchain. This concept is derived from the ideas of Ethereum's 'operating system' by Vitalik Buterin.

Image via Ethereum Research

Execution environments are intended to pass balances across shards to each other. According to the concept, execution environments (or EEs) will also prevent any ETH leakage when transferring between shards.

Beacon Chain: annotated specification is ready

Finally, Mr. Edgington introduced his annotated specification for the different stages of Ethereum 2.0 development. He has delivered this explanation for the Beacon Chain, initial ETH2 phase so far. This annotated specification is a very detailed encyclopedia where the plethora of elements of the future network is described.

Image via Twitter

Mr. Edginton unveiled that the new Java-written client he is working on in PegaSys will be called Teku. The development of this ETH2 client was one of the sources for the information in this specification.

As previously reported by U.Today, the rollout of the initial ETH2 phase, the Beacon Chain, will highly likely occur by mid-2020. The most reasonable time for its launch is three months after reliable multi-client testnet operations are over, Ethereum Foundation developers concluded.