Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is known as the best Ethereum use case to date. The DeFi markets made it possible for permissionless and automated lending, facilitating, trading and borrowing to anyone with an internet connection.   The market surpassed nearly 22 billion in total value locked (TVL), which is a metric similar to assets under management (AUM).

DeFi apart, the Ethereum Staker community have lot of questions and are continuing to explore ‘where they are going?’ and ‘what’s next?’

During the ETHStaker Community Call #15 with Danny Ryan, the priority shift seemed to be to focus on implementing the ETH1/ETH2 merger before shards.

It is important to note that, “eth1” and “eth2” are misnomers. The clarification is that the designations like eth1 and eth2 imply a false sequentiality. These terms mean to imply that eth1 will be deprecated in favor of eth2 and that it will be the one that is being left behind for the other. However, the reality is that the terms actually represent different layers of the stack.

Eth1 deals with the operation and upgrading of the Ethereum’s user layer in terms of state, transactions, accounts and everything like the end user will want to consider when interacting with Ethereum.

The Eth2 is about a series of upgrades which focuses on overhauling the Ethereum’s core consensus.  All of these upgrades focus on energy hungry, inefficient proof-of-work providing for a more sustainable, and scalable proof-of-stake.

With the upgraded consensus mechanism should ultimately come in consensus with the eth1 user layer.

This just means that ETH1 has been silently doing what it takes to provide for the major overhaul of Ethereum Core Consensus (Eth2) in a comparatively less risky factor.  There is an exhaustive explanation about ETH1, ETH2 and client relationship.

In short, it has been established that eth2 = consensus; eth1= user_layer.

Ethereum Replacing the Brain of ETH

The ultimate focus of everything that is happening is to ensure that uninterrupted contracts happen with application stable APIs and tools. It has already been stated that the Ethereum of tomorrow will replace the brain of Ethereum with a secure Proof of Stake.

Of note, the beacon chain run by the community is to provide for the best in existing applications, contracts, and tools.

For now, the beacon chain is in consensus with itself the bulk of the work getting done is ultimately focused on making the beacon consensus mechanism which end users care about.