Ethereum 2.0 Altair Hard Fork

Owned by Hashim Omer
Last updated: Oct 25, 2021 by Egya (Unlicensed)
2 min read

Altair is the first hard fork of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain (https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/).

News: https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/10/05/altair-announcement/

Specs: https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/altair/beacon-chain.md#introduction

 

It is expected to go live at epoch 74240 (Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC).

Evaluation Process

MidChains evaluates:

  • What is changing

  • Analyse the impact of those changes

What is changing

  • "Sync committees", which allow light clients to easily sync up with the header chain with very low computational and data cost. The goal is to make a light client easy and efficient enough that it can be run inside any environment (mobile device, embedded hardware, browser extension, and even inside another smart-contract-capable blockchain)

  • Incentive accounting reforms. This includes a few changes:

    • Storing actions that were taken during the current and previous epoch in a more efficient bitfield format instead of storing PendingAttestation objects, reducing spec complexity

    • Making the "inactivity leak" quadratic per validator instead of quadratic globally, and in particular make it insignificant for validators that are participating >80% of the time. For example, pre-Altair, if a chain stops finalizing for 2 weeks, fully inactive validators lose ~11.8% of their balance and validators active 75% of the time lose ~3.1%. Post-Altair, the fully inactive validator's loss would be ~15.4% but the 75% active validator's loss would only be ~0.3%. This makes inactivity leaks more forgiving to honest-but-imperfect validators.

    • Bug fixes to reward accounting (eg. giving proposers a ~1/8 share of all rewards instead of just a ~1/8 share of one small piece of rewards, and ensuring that the rewards under perfect performance actually do add up to the full base reward)

  • Penalty parameter updates, making both inactivity leaks and slashing somewhat more punitive than pre-Altair, though still less punitive than their eventually-intended values.

Impact Analysis

MidChains is not connected to and does not make use of the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon chain. There is no impact to MidChains operations or trading platform.

There is no impact on Client Funds.

Ethereum deposits and withdrawals will not be affected. Trading will remain open for the trading pair - ETHUSD.

 

What are the regulatory implications: None.

Maturity / Market Capitalization:  The surviving asset’s root is ETH so the legacy carries forward

Security and Operation: it will make the Ethereum network more secure.

Traceability / Monitoring : The changes will not affect the addresses so the tracing will not differ

Exchange Connectivity and Demand : No impact

Type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) : Remains ETH

 Innovation and Efficiency: Support for light wallets