What is Ethereum 2.0?
I will start by answering your first question. It is an upgrade to the current Ethereum blockchain. The main goal of any upgrade is almost always to improve performance. Ethereum 2.0 wants to achieve increased speed, efficiency and scalability. As a result it expects to increase the number of transactions per second.
How many transactions does the current Ethereum process per second? Any guess?
Exactly (if you guessed it right) - the answer is 10 to 15 transactions per second. Ethereum 2.0 aims to process 1000's of transactions per second.
What is the major difference between Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0?
Ethereum uses Proof of work which is an energy intensive process to solve complex mathematical puzzles. This is carried out by miners with the help of their computer hardware processing power in order to verify new transactions.
Ethereum 2.0 is more environmental friendly that the current Eth. It makes use of Proof of stake which is more efficient and contributes to lower energy consumption. This process makes use of validators instead of miners. Validators can validate transactions based on the amount of coins they hold. In order to become a validator, a user must stake 32 units of ETH. A user who has less than 32 ETH can still become a validator by joining a staking pool.
What are the roles of a validator?
- Storing data
- processing transactions
- adding new blocks to the blockchain
- report malicious transactions by other validators
What are the risks of being an ETH 2.0 validator?
As mentioned earlier - in order to become a validator you will need to stake 32 ETH. This stake acts as a safe deposit. If a validator violates any rule or performs malicious activities - he will lose his stake. You may also ETH for going offline and failing to validate.
