The Altair upgrade later this month will be the first update to the Beacon Chain, marking the first preparatory move for the upcoming Merge
The price of Ether (ETH) nearly hit a new all-time high on Oct. 21 before falling below $4,000 after the $435-million options expiry on Oct. 22 soured the mood. The Ethereum network is set to take another step toward Ethereum 2.0 on Oct. 27 at epoch 74240 with the Altair upgrade to Beacon Chain. Eth2 will be an entirely proof-of-stake (PoS) network, for which the community has been gearing up for over a year now.
As per an Ethereum Foundation blog post explaining the development, Altair is an update to the Beacon Chain that brings support for light clients, pre-validator inactivity leak accounting, a rise in slashing severity, and clean-ups to validator rewards allowing for simplified stated management. This is the first scheduled upgrade to the Beacon Chain.
The blog post states that this update represents a “warm-up upgrade” for the Beacon Chain and its associated clients. Essentially, the update will bring several main features to the Ethereum 2.0 network.
First, the introduction of sync committees for light client functions allows light clients to easily sync up the header chain, with low computational and data costs.
Second, the incentive accounting reforms bring three main changes: The storing actions use a more efficient bit field format that reduces complexity, the “inactivity leak” quadratic is based per validator instead of globally — which is insignificant for validators that participate more than 80% of the time — and there are some bug fixes in the reward accounting.
Du Jun, co-founder of crypto exchange Huobi Global, told Cointelegraph: “Pre-Altair, if a chain stops finalizing for two 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 will make the inactivity leak more forgiving to honest, but irregular, validators