When it first launched, Ethereum was considered the alternative (alt) coin to the premier cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Over the years, the chain has been the home for upcoming technological advancements. First, it was NFTs and their various marketplaces, and then it was De-Fi, which brought lending, borrowing, and yield farming opportunities to Ethereum users.

Each change started as an Ethereum Improvement Proposal, submitted by developers or community members alike for the growth of the Ethereum network.

EIPs remain a large part of Ethereum development, with accepted proposals being adopted and added to the network’s roadmap. A new proposal, the Ethereum Beam Chain, has caught the community’s attention with its new approach to consensus mechanism and sped up roadmap development.

What is the Beam Chain?

At the November Devcon event held in November 2024, Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation Researcher, proposed a huge redesign of the Ethereum consensus layer. His proposal, termed the Ethereum Beam Chain, came from an observation that the “ambition of the Ethereum roadmap did not match the pace of change on the network.”

The Ethereum roadmap is a list of features implemented into the Ethereum network at an incremental and periodical pace, mostly through network forks. An example of a feature now on Ethereum that was implemented from the roadmap is the Beacon chain upgrade, which changed the network’s consensus mechanism from Proof of Work(PoW) to Proof of Stake(PoS). The problem, however, with these upgrades is that at the current pace, it could take decades for the community to enjoy the bigger, more important features on the Ethereum roadmap.

In response, Justin Drake came up with the Beam fork, essentially a way to batch up multiple upgrades into one bigger fork, allowing the Ethereum network to better match up against competing networks with more advanced technology being introduced to the chain via this Beam Fork. Beam targets the consensus and execution layer of Ethereum, proposing changes to block production, staking, and cryptography on the network.

Beam Chain Explained

Summarily, the beam chain is a rewrite of the consensus layer that integrates some of the greatest and most recent advancements in blockchain technology to the ethereum network. With the beam chain, features on the roadmap that would ordinarily take decades to complete are batched together into one large upgrade that can be completed and implemented by 2029 (4-5 years). Two development teams, the ZIM team and Lambda Class, have already committed to building the beam chain.

The beam chain proposal includes nine different items from the Ethereum roadmap that are all relevant to the consensus layer. Of all the nine items, five are incremental changes from the roadmap that would normally have been implemented to the Ethereum roadmap via a fork, while the other four are referred to as big-ticket items that are better suited to be built from scratch. The beam chain proposal features three main buckets: block production, staking, and cryptography.

Beam Chain’s Buckets: Block Production

The block production bucket includes three monumental features: censorship resistance, isolated validators, and faster slots. The first two are incremental changes.

Censorship Resistance

On the blockchain, censorship resistance refers to the freedom a user on a network has to transact without confiscation and transaction immutability (that is, third-party alteration of completed transactions). The Ethereum network’s verification process includes builders who sort transactions and submit blocks and proposers who select which blocks to sign and which is best to propose to the chain. The current structure of the process is highly centralized in a way that gives the proposer the final say and leaves open the possibility of collaboration between the proposer and builder to censor transactions and gain MEV.

The best solution to the problem now adopted under the beam chain roadmap is the concept of Forced Inclusion Lists (FOCIL) that helps to decentralize the block production process by making it necessary for each validator to cross check his aggregate inclusion list with the list broadcast by the inclusion list committee members.

Isolated Validators

Isolated Validators are another feature related to MEV. The point is to reduce the level of sophistication required to validate transactions on the blockchain, thereby improving the network’s health.

Faster Slots

Ethereum’s slot time is 12 seconds long, and it takes approximately 15 minutes for each block to reach finality. The impact of this on the network is particularly telling when it comes to high scale apps and building rollups on the network. Ethereum uses a concept known as Gasper for its single slot finality. And while it was functional, there is room for improvement. The Gasper algorithm uses an epoch basis to achieve connectivity and, consequently, finality, as each slot must be considered before economic security.

The beam chain proposes a shorter slot time of 4 seconds that will be achieved through preconfirmation, a feature that can be easily implemented on the Ethereum network even as it exists today. Preconfirmation is basically a blockchain process that “guarantees” users that their transactions will be included in the next slot, allowing users to receive transaction confirmation much faster than the usual slot time.

Beam Chain’s Buckets: Staking

The second bucket on the proposal has the following items: smarter issuance, smaller validators, and faster finality. The focus here is to optimize the issuance curve of the network and reduce the minimum staking requirement to become a validator. As a result, the overall health of the network increases, and the goal of faster finality is achieved more easily.

Beam Chain’s Buckets: Cryptography

This is the most difficult bucket, as two items are flagged red as part of the four big ticket items. The main ideas here are regarding the snarkification of Ethereum and quantum resistance.

Snark technology is no stranger to the blockchain industry as a whole. Layer 2 projects have been taking advantage of this innovation for a while, and larger networks like Ethereum are lagging. The goal of Justin Drake, as stated in his proposal, is to snarkify the consensus client by using ZK technology. The beam chain proposes to replace Ethereun’s beacon chain process of re-execution to confirm the resulting state root with a verification system powered by ZK technology. The idea with this new method is that the computations and data needed to achieve consensus on the network are provided through ZK, bringing efficiently to data size and scalability of the network, the latter being a problem Ethereum has long struggled with.

Finally, there is quantum security. Ethereum currently uses BLS signatures to validate signatures as attestation data. The problem is that BLS signatures use elliptic curves, which are becoming increasingly inferior to the computational powers of quantum computers. And so, the goal under the proposal is to achieve quantum resistance signature algorithms and the way to go is once again ZK technology.

Debates over the Beam Chain Implementation Timeline

Justin Drake’s big idea brings big changes to the network regarding scalability and security, but not without a cost. The proposed implementation sets 2025 for specification agreement, 2026 for production coding, and the years between 2027 and 2029 for exhaustive testing.

Essentially, with the proposed timeline, full deployment could take up to 5 years, launching publically in 2030. Critics argue that this will make the Ethereum network lag further behind its competitors. Nevertheless,, supporters of the proposal feel the elongated timeline is necessary for an upgrade of this magnitude.

How Will the Beam Chain Impact Ethereum?

The Beam Chain is a hard fork that aims to renovate Ethereum’s consensus layer. The main improvements it intends to bring to Ethereum are scalability and security by introducing faster block time and finality, chain snarkification using zkEVMs, and quantum and censorship resistance.

Undoubtedly, the beam chain proposal represents a significant step towards the final form of the network. If accepted officially, it could bring a significant and longer-lasting change to the state of the Ethereum network.

Beam Chain vs. Beacon Chain

Launched at the end of 2020, the beacon chain upgrade significantly changed the Ethereum network by replacing the working proof of work consensus mechanism with a faster, less energy-reliant proof of stake mechanism.

Since the first public launch of the proposal, community members have started comparing the beam chain with the older beacon chain upgrade. While there are similarities, there’s also big differences. The beacon chain, which came as part of the merge upgrade, changed the entire consensus layer: the participants and the working transaction validation process. While the beam chain is, in fact, proposing changes to the consensus layer, the changes proposed are not as drastic.

The beacon chain changed the consensus participants from proof of work miners to proof of stake validators, but the beam chain intends to keep the validators on both sides of the fork. What the beam chain is instead proposing is a change in rules, such as the rules relating to slot numbers and transaction finality, as well as the minimum staking requirement.

Conclusion

The Ethereum Beam Chain is a groundbreaking proposal aiming to overhaul Ethereum’s consensus layer significantly. By integrating advancements like faster block times, improved scalability, and enhanced security through zk-EVMs and quantum resistance, the Beam Chain seeks to propel Ethereum into a new era of performance and efficiency.