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Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain Successfully Undergoes Altair Upgrade, Buterin Praises Layer 2 Solutions

Post its launch a year back, the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon chain has undergone a major upgrade on Wednesday, October 27. Dubbed as the Altair Upgrade, it is the first upgrade to the Ethereum Beacon chain. Speaking of the development, Preston Van Loon, a developer on the Ethereum 2.0 client Prysm said:

“Altair has activated successfully! Finality was uninterrupted and participation dropped as low as 93.3% in the first Altair epoch (exact number to be confirmed). Participation is now above 95%”.

Altair Ethereum 2.0 Upgrade

Also, the Altair upgrade to the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain brings light client support to the platform. Besides, it also introduces cleanups to validator rewards accounting for simplified state management. The Altair upgrade will also give developers and the Ethereum engineering teams to dig deeper into the developments.

This upgrade is nothing but a hardfork on the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain. Thus, if anyone fails to upgrade, they would be cut off from the network. For the Proof-of-Work Ethereum network, not upgrading means miners wouldn’t receive the block rewards.

But not upgrading with the PoS Ethereum 2.0 upgrade comes at a higher cost. Failing to upgrade can lead to users losing their entire deposited 32 ETH with Ethereum 2.0. Speaking to TrustNodes, Paul Hauner of Lighthouse said:

“All is looking good on our nodes. [However] we think about 6% of validators haven’t updated… Someone is producing non-Altair blocks. That’s expected and totally fine. We can tolerate that and I assume they’ll figure it out.”

Vitalik Buterin Praises Layer 2 Solutions

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has expressed his strong support for Ethereum 2.0 scaling solutions while speaking at the Shanghai International Blockchain Week. During his recent speech, Buterin admitted that the existing PoW Ethereum blockchain needs urgent scalability.

Thus, Buterin noted that Layer 2 is the future of Ethereum scaling. He also added that it is the safest way to scale Ethereum while ensuring decentralization. As per Buterin, some of the popular Layer 2 scalable solutions for Ethereum are Arbitrum One, Polygon Hermez, ZKsync, and Optimism.

Buterin also spoke about another Layer 2 scalability solution dubbed rollups. The Rollups handle the transactions outside the main Ethereum blockchain while updating the transaction data later on Layer 1. The Ethereum founder noted:

The Ethereum ecosystem is all-in on rollups as a scaling strategy for the near and mid-term future… optimistic rollups, which are simpler and easier to build were likely to be preferred in the short-term.

Furthermore, Buterin also showered praises on ZK rollups for their higher security. However, its technical implementation is a bit complex. Buterin calls its a preferred solution as it will further attract enterprise applications to the platform.

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Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain Successfully Undergoes Altair Upgrade, Buterin Praises Layer 2 Solutions