Justin Drake proposes ‘Beam Chain,’ an Ethereum consensus layer redesign
2024-11-12

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake announced a new consensus layer upgrade proposal at Devcon on Tuesday called "Beam Chain," in what some have memetically described as “Ethereum 3.0.”
Beam Chain would target faster second block times, smaller validator stakes, "chain snarkifaction," such as zkVMs and, ultimately, making Ethereum post-quantum secure, Drake said. However, any such implementation would require community consensus, Drake warned.
“Native zkEVM in particular is huge,” Ambient Finance founder Doug Colkitt speculated ahead of the announcement. “The gas limit can be eliminated entirely. Builders can build arbitrarily large blocks, since nodes only need to verify the snark. The only scaling limit left would be bandwidth.”
The proposal could substantially increase scaling on the Ethereum mainnet without Layer 2s, countering recent concerns over the impact of such networks on Ethereum. The rise of Layer 2 solutions in recent years has helped address scaling issues but has also “cannibalized” demand for Ethereum's base layer, complicating the relationship between ether's value and the broader ecosystem, according to CoinShares researcher Matthew Kimmell.
“From a certain perspective this basically eliminates the need for rollups entirely because the L1 would have arbitrary scalability,” Colkitt said. However, he acknowledged that further centralization of block building would be the major tradeoff. “Already can see this tension internally between people who want to make sure the protocol is still friendly to home builders vs. some of the EF people who want to go full sail into professional builders only.”
Drake recently resigned from his advisor position at Restaking platform EigenLayer amid concerns over substantial EIGEN token allocation payments, presenting a conflict of interest. "I want to apologise to the Ethereum community and EF [Ethereum Foundation] colleagues for the drama I caused," Drake said at the time. "In hindsight it was a bad move for me to make."
Drake's 'most ambitious initiative to date'
In an announcement of an announcement ahead of Tuesday’s Devcon keynote, Drake described the proposal as his “most ambitious initiative to date.”
“For one year I have been thinking about what a from-scratch redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer could look like,” Drake wrote in an X post Monday. “The goal is to suggest a credible strategy to ship what is an extremely ambitious and exciting beacon chain roadmap, all on a reasonable timeframe.”
“After months of gestation alongside researchers and consensus devs I am finally ready to publicly present my proposal. It's early days and your participation is key should this new approach to tackling the consensus layer roadmap ever achieve rough consensus,” he added.
The biggest potential Ethereum protocol upgrade since The Merge
If implemented, Drake’s proposal would be the biggest upgrade to Ethereum since The Merge. 
The Merge was Ethereum's major transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus in September 2022, combining Ethereum’s mainnet with the Beacon Chain. It reduced Ethereum’s energy use by over 99% and set the stage for future scalability improvements.
The Merge was initially referred to as part of “Ethereum 2.0,” but the community shifted away from this term to avoid confusion. There was concern that "Ethereum 2.0" implied a new blockchain, which was misleading, and dropping the term also helped prevent scams where users might think they needed to swap ETH for a non-existent “ETH2” token. Referring to the change as "The Merge" provided a clearer, more accurate description and allowed each phase of Ethereum’s upgrade roadmap to be discussed independently.
This is a developing story.
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