null_radix

Populism rises again.

We are constantly reading of stories with one main theme where people turn to seemingly "simple" systems in order to manage complexity; except that these systems manage to produce complex problems, without having to acquire historical cruft, or suffering from any of the usual issues that produce non-essential complexity. There is a trend in programming language design, and a particular language that we will focus on, that are both seemingly gaining popularity today, for their minimalism and supposed simplicity. However, neither is awfully simple in practise; it appears there are good reasons why, and we will give some reasons at the end of this article.

Ethereum is moving towards a major upgrade that aims at making the network more sustainable, with the transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake, and more scalable with the introduction of data sharding. This process started with the deployment of the Beacon Chain in December 2020 and the next step called the Merge which is expected to happen later this year. In this article we look at how far the Ethereum 2 ecosystem has progressed in this transition and how ready is to move to the next level.

NU5, the first major upgrade since November 2020, includes the launch of the Orchard shielded payment protocol, utilizing the Halo proving system to remove reliance on complex setup ceremonies. The efficiencies built into this upgrade make possible — for the first time ever — private, trustless digital cash payments on mobile phones. Halo also paves the way for increased interoperability by providing a system that could unlock private cross-chain proofs at scale.