Beacon Chain Contracts: A New Way to Deploy Dapps on Ethereum 2.0

Dubbed the beacon chain, a new proposal by ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin suggests radically modifying the blockchain's role in a new iteration of the ethereum network based on proof-of-stake consensus.

According to Jordan, the proposed beacon chain design by Buterin "Makes it a lot easier for application developers, people building on [ethereum]," to leverage the new network without having to re-learn the parameters of an entirely new blockchain platform.

The beacon chain is a central blockchain that coordinates hundreds of other ethereum blockchains, called "Shards," in the envisioned ethereum 2.0 network.

Originally, the beacon chain was to act strictly as the coordinator - or, in the words of Buterin, as the "Heartbeat" - of ethereum 2.0, tracking all the data in shards and compiling summaries of that data onto one central blockchain.

Now, Buterin has proposed that the beacon chain serve an additional function: to store specialized smart contracts called beacon chain contracts.

"These contracts are not analogous to regular smart contracts you would deploy for your application on ethereum 1.0," writes Will Villanueva, a researcher for ethereum venture capital studio Consensys.

More interestingly, Jordan added that beacon chain contracts could also mimic bitcoin and create an execution environment on ethereum 2.0 with all of the same rules and parameters of the bitcoin blockchain.

Still, not everything regarding the beacon chain contracts is set in stone.

"In practice, there should not be a plethora of beacon chain contracts. There should only be a few - especially at first," notes Villanueva about the proposed beacon chain design.

Jordan added that to discourage users from deploying multiple beacon chain contracts and "Bloating" the beacon chain, these contracts could be priced at a steep cost for users to deploy.