Justin Drake Proposes Beam Chain Overhaul For Ethereum

Ethereum’s developers are considering a complete redesign of the network’s consensus layer.

During a Nov. 12 presentation at DevCon in Bangkok, Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, proposed replacing the existing Beacon Chain consensus layer with “Beam Chain.”

“Beam Chain is a proposed redesign of the consensus layer that incorporates all of the latest and greatest ideas from the research roadmap,” Drake said. “The goal is to try and transition in a safe and fast manner from the Beacon Chain… to the Beam Chain, which is much, much closer to the final design of Ethereum.”

Drake noted that the scope of the Beam Chain overhaul would exclusively target the consensus layer. This means the upgrade would not touch the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) execution layer or binary large object (blob) data layer, both of which are “directly consumed by applications” and require forward compatibility.

Drake said the Beam Chain proposal comes as the Beacon Chain has become “kind of old,” with its technical specifications having been frozen five years ago. “In those five years, so much has happened,” Drake said.

Beam Chain overhaul

The Beam Chain would comprise a comprehensive makeover of Ethereum’s staking mechanism, block production system, and cryptography.

Drake emphasized the need to improve Ethereum’s Proof of Stake issuance and reduce the validator bond from 32 ETH to 1 ETH to promote decentralization.

“The researchers have come to a consensus, broadly speaking, that the current issuance curve is kind of broken, and that there is an opportunity to improve the health and long-term outcomes of Ethereum by changing [it],” Drake said.

Beam Chain also seeks to bolster the censorship resistance of block production by introducing attestor-proposer separation and improve throughput by speeding up slots.

On the subject of cryptography, Drake challenged developers to “SNARKify the whole of the consensus layer in real-time using reasonable hardware” and build cryptography that is resistant to quantum computing to ensure the security of the network "for the next decade and centuries.” However, Drake acknowledged that overhauling Ethereum’s cryptography would require long-term development.

ZK consensus

Drake characterized the Beam Chain as serving to usher in a third era of Ethereum consensus, following its initial Proof of Work era, and the current Proof of Stake period.

The Beam Chain would introduce zero-knowledge (ZK) consensus, defined by the heavy utilization of Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge (SNARK) proofs.

SNARKs would serve two key roles within the roadmap to achieve significant scalability gains. First, SNARKs could be incorporated into the state transition function of consensus clients to compile high-level languages into bytecode. Secondly, SNARKs could underpin a “hash-based post-quantum infinitely-aggregatable scheme” that compresses thousands of hashes into a single proof.

Drake added that recent technical progress has shown laptop users can prove more than 2 million hashes per second, making the "SNARKification" of the consensus layer possible without alienating validators using consumer hardware.

Implementation roadmap

Drake described planning the Beam Chain's implementation as an opportunity to batch together multiple upgrades into a single fork that drives a “quantum leap forward in terms of upgrading the consensus layer all in one go.”

Such a move would contrast from the incremental improvements recently achieved through Ethereum’s annual hard forks. Drake characterized the proposed approach oxymoronically as “ossification accelerationism,” where major changes are implemented with the end goal of achieving future stability at an earlier date.

“We want Ethereum to go in ‘maintenance mode’ as soon as possible,” Drake said. “Right now, there’s this tension because we know there’s these big-ticket items that require fundamental rearchitecturing of Ethereum, and the more we drag it along, the further Ethereum will be in the position where it can comfortably ossify.”

Drake said that should Beam Chain attract community support, developers could begin speccing the upgrade next year, followed by development in 2026, and testing in 2027.

Drake also noted that new client teams based in India and South America have expressed interest in building clients for Beam Chain.

Long-term research

Drake attracted the attention of the Ethereum community on Nov. 11 by teasing an “announcement of an announcement” in reference to today's presentation. Drake said the proposal is his “most ambitious initiative to date.”

“For one year, I have been thinking about what a from-scratch redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer could look like,” Drake said. “The goal is to suggest a credible strategy to ship what is an extremely ambitious and exciting Beacon Chain roadmap, all on a reasonable timeframe... It's early days and your participation is key should this new approach to tackling the consensus layer roadmap ever achieve rough consensus.”

During his talk, Drake described the Beam Chain proposal as providing a “memetic wrapper” to aspects of Ethereum’s existing technical roadmap that he would like to expedite.