Most of this will probably not be needed by the time we’re creating assets and showing people what we’ve got besides Proof of Stake (could be a nice history lesson, though)

Concept | Concept Map

• Proof of Stake
• Casper
• Beacon Chain
• The Merge
• Improvement proposals?

Beacon Chain

• Initially shipped separately from Mainnet (which is still secured by proof of work)
• Runs in parallel using proof of stake
• Features and upgrades:
  • Introduces proof of stake
    • Validators will process transactions and create new blocks in the chain
  • Sharding
    • After mainnet merges with Beacon Chain, the next upgade will introduce shard chains
      • Requires proof of stake to work securely
    • Eventually, the Beacon chain will be responsible for randomly assigning stakers to validate shard chains
      • Make it difficulty for stakers to collude and take over a shard
        • Minimum Committee Size

The Merge

When ready, Ethereum will merge with the Beacon Chain becoming its own shard. In addition, the mainnet will bring the ability to run smart contracts into PoS and the full history and current state of Ethereum