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- Sigma Prime announced that its Lighthouse client had conducted a successful transaction from Ethereum to ETH2, revealing that it had consumed 99.98% less power.
- Other clients have also revealed their ETH1-ETH2 prototypes as the Ethereum developers work on migrating the network to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
In recent weeks, the war between the Ethereum miners and developers has taken center stage as the march towards Ethereum 2.0 continues. However, despite this, Sigma Prime has proven that Ethereum will be better off as a proof-of-stake network, conducting its first merge transactions between the two networks while consuming 99.98% less energy.
Sigma Prime, a blockchain security services provider, revealed that the transaction had been conducted by Lighthouse, its open-source implementation of the Ethereum 2.0 specification.
🎉🎉 Lighthouse produced its first #Eth1 & #Eth2 merge transaction 🎉🎉
This is an ETH tx using *only* proof-of-stake validators. A step towards a 99.98% drop in Ethereum energy consumption 🌏🌲🌄
Credits to @gballet, @mkalinin2 & @Teku_ConsenSys!
Important qualifications 👇 pic.twitter.com/DW5GSk4JVo
— Sigma Prime (@sigp_io) March 25, 2021
The firm claimed that by migrating to proof-of-stake, it had managed to use just a tiny fraction of the energy it would have in a proof-of-work mechanism, referring to an Ethereum blog post that illustrates how ETH2 achieves high energy efficiency.
Sigma Prime’s prototype uses a fork of Geth called Catalyst. Geth, or Go Ethereum, is a command line interface for running Ethereum nodes in the Go programming language.
“Lighthouse and Geth talk via an RPC (remote procedure call); Lighthouse does the proof-of-stake work and Geth manages the account state,” the firm explained.
While the transaction is testament to the revolutionary nature of Ethereum 2.0, it’s merely a prototype, Sigma Prime pointed out. It stated:
This is exciting, but it doesn’t mean that we’re ready for production. This is a prototype and there’s still a lot of questions to answer and work to do. Primarily, you should take this is a signal that Eth1 and Eth2 developers are actively working together on the merge.
Ethereum 2.0 is coming
Ethereum 2.0 is highly anticipated. And while it may take time before the network fully migrates to ETH2, a few startups have already proven that it works. Teku, an ETH2 client targeting institutional players, was among the first to conduct an ETH1 transaction in an ETH2 environment. It announced its prototype in August last year.
Eth2 Phase 1 client demo, a demonstration of a simple transfer.
This prototype is capable of performing any Eth1 transaction in an Eth2 environment.
Prototype: https://t.co/H9echjeEJ4
Full video: https://t.co/2Py9CLXCX3 pic.twitter.com/iQ6vozDJOW— Mikhail Kalinin 🔥🧱 (@mkalinin2) August 27, 2020
With the move to ETH2, miners will run out of business as the creation of new blocks will be for the stakers. As CNF reported, these miners had waged a “show of force” which was to happen on April 1. They had pledged to direct their hash power to a mining pool opposing the upgrades – including EIP-1559 – which robs them of their core revenue stream. Their stance has since then softened.
However, for the users, ETH2 can’t come too soon. As one pointed out on Reddit, the miners have no one to blame as they have known for years that Ethereum was moving to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
He stated, “Electricity costs a mint these days. This was a much-needed change the way mining has snowballed out of control. Given how long ETH2 has been in production, miners have had the time to plan ahead, keep on mining for years, slowly sell off their cards before the market price drops. If I were a miner, I would be sitting on a pile of staked eth from selling my equipment collecting APY and waiting for the merge.”
ETH2 has received massive support from the Ethereum community so far. It now has over 111,000 validators who collectively have staked over 3.6 million ETH, worth over $6 billion.
