Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain might be undergoing its first hard fork judging from a proposal published by Vitalik Buterin.
The hard fork has been tentatively named HF1 and would allow developers to rollout key upgrades to Beacon Chain. As per the proposal, HF1 has three primary aims.
First on the list, which is arguably the most practical change is introducing support for light clients. For the uninitiated, light clients, otherwise known as light nodes allow users to connect to full nodes to interact with the blockchain. Due to their small resource requirements, they can run on mobile devices, thus, enabling “trust-minimized wallets.”
The hard fork will enable light client support through special-purpose “sync committees.”
The hard fork is also expected to fix several weaknesses in the beacon chain, as well as serve as a testing ground for the hard forking mechanism.
The timeline for the hard fork is still unknown. Some aspects of the proposal still need to be reviewed. Meanwhile, Ethereum developers are working on the naming convention for HF1 and future hard fork. So far, there have been suggestions around planetary systems, names of start, months of the year, and even World of Warcraft zones.
Considering the rising gas fees of the Ethereum transactions, the network is seriously in need of a major upgrade.
