- Justin Drake unveils Beam Chain at Devcon; focuses on enhancing Ethereum’s long-term security, not immediate performance.
- Beam Chain differentiates from competitors like Solana, prioritizing network health over performance metrics such as speed.
Ethereum developer Justin Drake recently unveiled a proposal called the Beam Chain at Ethereum’s biennial Devcon in Bangkok. This proposal aims to refine the consensus layer of Ethereum, focusing on enhancing the network’s long-term health and security rather than immediate performance improvements.
Drake stated that this initiative is intended to ensure the network’s viability over an extended period, rather than responding to competition from other blockchains.
Ethereum has become increasingly popular, leading to higher transaction costs and slower processing times.
In response, new blockchains dubbed “Ethereum killers” have emerged since 2020, such as Solana, which have focused on faster transaction speeds. Solana, in particular, has gained significant attention due to increased activity from memecoins.
Drake clarified that the Beam Chain is not designed to boost Ethereum’s current performance metrics but to strengthen its underlying security and operational health.
“Solana has no consideration for health. The only thing they care about is performance. They care about reducing latency and increasing throughput,” Drake added.
He contrasted Ethereum’s strategy with that of Solana, which prioritizes reducing latency and increasing transaction throughput, often overlooking broader network health.
“I think the layer-1 is competing with Bitcoin, and the layer-2s are competing with Solana. And so it’s not even part of the remit of the layer-1 to even compete with Solana,” Drake said.
To address scalability, Ethereum has adopted a rollup-centric roadmap, which leverages secondary networks known as layer-2 solutions or rollups to process transactions more quickly and at lower cost. These networks include Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, and ZKsync.
“We should be competing on security and health. And so if there’s any competition to Solana, it needs to come from the applications and from the layer-2s.”
According to Drake, while Ethereum’s primary layer competes with Bitcoin, its layer-2 solutions contend with networks like Solana on performance metrics.
For instance, Arbitrum achieves transaction processing times as fast as 250 milliseconds between blocks, quicker than Solana’s target of 400 milliseconds. This showcases that Ethereum’s secondary layers can offer competitive, if not superior, transaction speeds.
“Solana is having its moment right now, but I think it’s going to be the end of the Solana golden era, because all of the competitive advantages that Solana has around latency and throughput are going to melt away because of fundamental differences in architecture that don’t make it scalable,” Drake said.
Drake also mentioned ongoing developments in Ethereum’s primary layer that aim to enhance its speed, including features like “pre-confirmations” and “blobs.”
Pre-confirmations expedite the transaction confirmation process, aiming to streamline user experience on Ethereum to match that of Solana.
“We need a super-secure, incredibly neutral layer-1 and then we need a very rich and vibrant ecosystem of layer-2s that bring the application to the users,” he said.
Blobs allow for the off-chain processing of large batches of transaction data. These developments are separate from the Beam Chain, which is slated for potential implementation by 2029.
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Ethereum (ETH) is currently priced at $3,843.7 USD, with a slight decrease of 0.01% in the last 24 hours. Over the past 30 days, Ethereum has shown significant growth, increasing by 60.21%, and its year-to-date performance has risen by 68.14%.
