Sorting out 12 important upgrades in the development history of Ethereum

Author: Jason Chen, crypto KOL

Since the release of the white paper in 2013, a total of 24 milestone events have occurred, most of which are fork upgrades, and the relatively important ones are 12 upgrades. If you work in the Ethereum ecosystem, you must at least have a clear understanding of the growth process of Ethereum.

When the traditional centralized software needs to be upgraded, a new version will be released to replace the old version. However, because the blockchain is decentralized and has no central ownership, the upgrade of the blockchain will be carried out by forking. Miners and verifier nodes The Ethereum client must be updated to generate blocks according to the rules of the new fork, and the upgraded fork will become the new main chain

The other old chain was abandoned because no one continued to maintain it, but at the same time, there were some rare circumstances that made miners unwilling to give up, thus continuing to maintain the old chain and causing a permanent split of the network, which is the current ETH and ETC Ethereum Classic. relation.

Border Upgrade July 30, 2015

Frontier upgrade is the first quasi-system-level version released by Ethereum for developers. It uses code and command line operations, and there is no graphical single software version, so it can be understood as the beta version of Ethereum, which is also called Because of the border, Ethereum at this time is like the period of the Great Western Development of the United States, full of huge risks and opportunities.

In the frontier version, the gas limit of each block was hard-coded to 5000Gas, and then the limit of 5000Gas was canceled in the border unfreeze upgrade two months later, and the default price of Gas was set to 50gwei, and in this The difficulty bomb was introduced in the second upgrade to artificially regulate the difficulty of mining, thus forcing POW miners to be unprofitable when POS goes online.

It laid the groundwork for the subsequent switch to POS. When the difficulty bomb explodes, Ethereum will enter the "Ice Age (that's what the official calls it)", so please note that only in the initial stage of Ethereum, it has been determined to Turn to POS.

Since then, Ethereum has officially entered the quasi-available POW mining era.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $1.24.

March 14, 2016 Home Upgrade

Home upgrade is the second major version released by Ethereum. As the name suggests, the first batch of gold diggers have completed the western development of the border and entered the stage of building homes to live and work in peace.

Homeland upgrade is also the first upgrade to release EIP Ethereum Improvement Proposal.

A total of 3 EIPs are included: 2, 7, and 8. EIP2 increases the gas fee cost of contract creation from 21,000 to 53,000. EIP7 adds a new function DELEGATECALL to facilitate code reuse. EIP8 is forward compatible with the network protocol devp2p.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $12.5.

The DAO fork on July 20, 2016 (Ethereum’s darkest moment)

This is not a normal upgrade, but a compromise that Ethereum was forced to make in the darkest moment. Since then, Ethereum has parted ways to form ETH and ETC.

The DAO is an investment DAO controlled by smart contracts launched on Ethereum in 2016, and conducted an ICO to raise $150 million worth of Ethereum, accounting for 14% of Ethereum's circulation at that time.

But then it was attacked by hackers because of the loopholes in its contract code. After a lot of attempts and still unable to stop the hackers, Ethereum finally recovered the stolen funds through a hard fork. For members with decentralized beliefs, the old chain that should have been abandoned is still maintained by believers. This chain is called ETC Ethereum Classic.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $12.54.

October 16, 2017 Byzantine Upgrade

At this time, Ethereum has experienced two major milestone upgrades, the border and the homeland. According to the plan, the next step is to upgrade the metropolis. As the name suggests, after the homeland is built on the border, the homeland will be built into a bustling metropolis, but the metropolis will be upgraded. , so it was planned to split into two upgrades of Byzantium and Constantinople.

But in fact, the metropolitan stage is far more complicated than expected, so Istanbul, Berlin and other upgrades were removed later.

But before entering the metropolitan stage and truly making Ethereum "everything", Vitalik believes that Ethereum must turn to POS, and gradually make miners unprofitable in POW, thus "driving" them to be forced to accept POS.

So at least when it’s time to switch to POS, the miners feel that continuing to benefit from POW is not as good as switching to POS. Otherwise, when POS goes online, and a large number of miners rely on POW and are unwilling to leave, it will directly lead to the split of Ethereum. The severity of this split is far greater than that of ETC, so to gradually reduce the income of POW, this upgrade released 10 EIPs in one go, of which EIP649 delayed the difficulty bomb for one and a half years.

And reduce the block reward from 5 to 3. The main reason for delaying the difficulty bomb is that Ethereum is not ready for the POS switch.

Secondly, after experiencing the darkest moment of The DAO fork, Ethereum released EIP214 to restrict any modification of the state during the call of the contract, thereby improving security.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $334.32.

February 28, 2019 Constantinople (St. Petersburg) upgrade

The original planned Constantinople upgrade was postponed due to a loophole discovered by the security community ChainSecurity. After two years, Ethereum finally ushered in an upgrade, so in fact this upgrade is actually a double-shot. Two upgrades were completed in the block for Constantinople and St. Petersburg respectively.

In this upgrade, in order to drive miners to POS one step closer, EIP1234 once again reduced the block reward from 3ETH to 2ETH. Similarly, the difficulty bomb was delayed again for 12 months due to the lack of preparation for switching to POS .

Introduced in EIP1014 is a new command CREATE2 that can pre-calculate the contract address before the contract is officially deployed, thus introducing the state channel concept similar to the Bitcoin Lightning Network into Ethereum, which can be calculated off-chain first and then the corresponding The contract is deployed to the chain for settlement.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $136.29.

January 2, 2020 Muir Glacier Upgrade

Less than a month after the Istanbul upgrade was completed, Ethereum underwent an emergency upgrade. It is very rare to perform two hard forks within a month. It will lead to an early explosion, and the POS switch is still not ready, so an urgent upgrade is required to delay the difficulty bomb again.

It is also because this upgrade is a temporary decision, so it does not follow the naming rules of the city after the metropolis. Do you still remember what the Ethereum official said above after the difficulty bomb exploded? The ice age, and Muir Glacier is the name of a glacier in Alaska, USA that has been replaced by sea water, so the meaning of being called Muir Glacier is to let the glacier "disappear" first.

At this point the price of Ethereum is $127.18.

Beacon chain officially released on December 1, 2020

The POS plan that has been brewing since 2015 has finally taken an important step. The POS beacon chain is officially launched today, running in parallel with the POW main chain. An epic Merge will be carried out in the Paris upgrade two years later. .

At this point the price of Ethereum is $586.23.

April 15, 2021 Berlin upgrade

The upgrade of Berlin opened the era of "naming" the Devcon city. In the forum, when everyone discussed how to name the next upgrade, there were various suggestions, including constellations, musical instruments, World of Warcraft characters, etc., and the final one was named after the Devcon city The proposal was voted on, so this upgrade was named after Berlin, where the first Edvcon was held.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $2454.

LONDON UPGRADED 5 AUGUST 2021

EIP1559, which has the greatest impact on Ethereum, was released, which directly changed the economic model of Ethereum. Previously, block packaging was an auction mechanism, and the gas price was higher and all of it was given to the miners. EIP1559 divided the gas fee into two parts, one for the miners and the other Burning, thus bringing Ethereum into the era of deflation, 3.2 million ETH worth 6 billion US dollars have been burned.

At this time, the price of Ethereum is 2621 US dollars.

September 15, 2022 Paris Upgrade (Merge)

Ethereum has officially completed the epic upgrade of Merge in Paris. This time it directly modifies the upgrade of the execution layer and consensus layer of Ethereum. EIP3675 upgrades the consensus to POS proof of rights. The beacon chain that has been running for two years has been successfully installed. The years-long POS road has finally come to an end, but there is still a small tail that has not been resolved, which is the issue of pledge withdrawal.

Because the beacon chain did not support pledged withdrawals in the past two years, a large number of pledgers were unable to withdraw funds, and just experienced a round of bull market highs of $4,000 in the first half of the year before the Paris upgrade, so those early pledgers I can only watch the roller coaster ride but have no choice, so the pledge withdrawal problem must be solved, otherwise people dare not pledge their ETH into it as a node, which will lead to centralization risks in the POS chain.

However, there are also LSD products such as Lido that solve the pledge withdrawal problem to a certain extent. I have written articles on Lido and SSV before. You can read the two articles I wrote before and review them:

"Talk about Ethereum 2.0, POS pledge and Lido with a TVL of $5.9 billion"

"Detailed explanation of SSV, the head project of POS decentralized pledge track"

At this time the price of Ethereum is $1472.

April 12, 2023 Shanghai upgrade

The biggest problem solved by the Shanghai upgrade is the realization of pledged withdrawals. Nodes that have been struggling for two years on the beacon chain can finally withdraw money, but at the same time more people are willing to pledge their money. There are already 1900 Ten thousand ETH was pledged, which also opened the curtain of LSDFi.

At this time the price of Ethereum is $1917 each.

2023 TBA Cancun Escalation

To solve the problem of Ethereum consensus, it is necessary to focus on breakthroughs in capacity expansion. First of all, Ethereum has clearly adopted the Layer 2 solution on the path. How to better support Layer 2 is a key consideration for Ethereum. The Cancun upgrade is expected in 23 In the second half of the year, the most important included EIP4844, which introduced a new transaction type to Ethereum.

Data can be stored at a cheaper cost in a space called Blob, so that the data stored in Layer1 before Layer 2 can be stored in Blob, which greatly reduces the cost of Layer 2.

The above is the growth history of Ethereum. After sorting it out, it is soul-stirring. It is hard to imagine that all these plans were designed as early as 7 years ago when the first official version of Ethereum was released. At that time, Vitalik was only 21 years old. .