Ethereum for Pros

On 15 September, the Ethereum Merge finally happened without a glitch. What happens next?

“Stateless Ethereum” proposed to mitigate the reliance on centralised providers and systems.

Stakers combine their assets in a stake pool to increase their chances of reward and meet required minimum amount to stake.

Proof-of-stake is a type of consensus protocol that relies on a network of ‘validators’ with similar responsibilities to miners.

Ethereum WebAssembly (ewasm) is a part of a series of upgrades to the original Ethereum network under the banner of the consensus layer.

A decentralised oracle network (DON) is a group of independent third-party services that actively seeks out real-world data such as weather updates or financial information and feeds it back to the blockchain, providing a bridge between the decentralised and centralised worlds.

ERC-20 tokens run on top of the Ethereum blockchain alongside its native currency – ‘Ether’ and can act similarly as either a currency or a representation of other tokens of value such as shares of a company, loyalty points or more.

The ERC-20 token standard is a set of rules and guidelines that dictate the fundamental functions token-creating smart contracts must have.

Much like an upgrade to your operating system on your smartphone or laptop, Ethereum’s Consensus Layer is a series of upcoming upgrades to Ethereum’s blockchain that aims to improve its speed and capacity for transactions, reduce their cost and increase overall security.

Gas is the fuel that allows the Ethereum blockchain to operate. Users pay gas fees for services on the network.

The Beacon Chain is one of the key upgrades at the heart of the new Consensus Layer and is responsible for managing the new proof of stake blockchain protocol.

Created as part of the upcoming changes in the Consensus Layer, sharding was proposed by Ethereum developers to split the infrastructure of the Ethereum blockchain into smaller pieces to support more users, improve efficiency and speed up the verification process.