• ETH2.0 is a phased release

• Current merge is only a PoW to PoS move

• PoS’s primary benefit: No more energy wasted by uncle blocks

• Planned for 2023: Sharding

• Sharding is likely to have a huge impact on our development practices

• Finally: Notes from Consensus 2022 in Austin, Texas (Read below)

Ethereum, the most popular blockchain platform, has been planning a major software update for a long while. This update is known as ETH2.0.

There are a 1000+ articles on what and why about this ETH2.0, but after scanning through them for a day, we figured the current state of our understanding was ‘unconfirmed’. If you are in the same boat, then welcome to our dumb-friendly and easy-to-get-a-grip article on ETH2.0.

PoW to PoS (you already knew about this)

We are quite confident that you already know that ETH2.0 is a transition from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to a proof-of-stake model. A quick refresher:

With the ground zero set-up; let's understand:

• about the Merge

• why it is such a big deal for Web3 space, and

• most importantly why should you care about this at all

How does Ethereum work currently?

We all know that the current Ethereum Mainnet runs on the proof-of-work, aka PoW architecture; this is the same as the other largest blockchain network BitCoin. To not bore you to death, we are skipping the nuances of PoW and focusing on the most important lesson learned from PoW:

As the number of transactions in the blockchain increase, the computational power required to confirm the transactions also increases, which leads to higher power consumption.

While you will read almost everywhere that this “HIGH” energy consumption is ‘the’ problem, we will shout out loud that NO, it is not ‘the’ problem (unpopular opinion). ‘The’ main issue is the uncle blocks. Now again, we are choosing to not bore you to death with the nuance of uncle blocks, but cutting the story to the point:

Uncle blocks (or Ommer) are created when two or more miners create blocks at nearly the same time. Only one block can be mined and accepted as canonical on the blockchain. The others are uncle blocks, which are not included but still provide a reward to their miners for the work done

source: https://info.etherscan.com/

In short, these ‘mining’ efforts are “wasted”. Let us repeat this: “wasted”.

It is the energy consumption in the rat race of mining that is ‘the’ energy guzzler.

Now that we have understood the villain in the story. Let's introduce the hero: ETH 2.0 or The Merge. 🦸

I know what ETH2.0 is; tell me something that I do not know! 🙀

1. Main: Energy efficiency, less computational work = less energy used (our knight in shining armor)

2. Others: Lower barriers to entry (that’s not to say that just anyone can be a validator, but it is better)

3. Others: Reduced centralization, tied in with the last point, easier entry means higher decentralization

4. Others: Security is increased as 51% of attacks are more expensive

Power Ranger

Currently, Ethereum uses 113 terawatt-hours of electricity per year. That is as much as what the Netherlands consumes in a year.

According to Digiconomist, a single Ethereum transaction can consume as much power as an average US household uses in more than a week.

This has become a huge concern for the people as it has started showing its impact on the environment.

Power Power Power!

It is estimated the PoS will use 99.5% less energy than PoW.

That is it; literally, that is the BIGGEST benefit of the merge that happened on Ropsten. See here 👉 Link+

Wait a minute, there were so many other things that I read, was I cheated?

No. You were not.

ETH2.0 is a colloquial term and is used to represent one more BIG change: Sharding. Sharding is a technically heavy topic. In a one-liner, sharding is the ability to run a “chain of chains”. Zilliqa (based on our limited knowledge) was the first blockchain to execute sharding.

Try to bask in the light of this image to imagine how sharding looks like

source: Link

So what is the status of sharding?

Being your friend, we suggest you do not hold your breath for this. This is planned for somewhere in 2023.

Should I care about sharding?

Yes. Sharding is expected to have a huge impact on our development practices. So keep an eye out for that.

Benefits of sharding?

1. Higher throughput: which means the time taken to process transactions will be way lesser than the current 13 secs (average)

2. Reduction in Gas Costs

Impact of ETH2.0 on Mining and Markets

We all know that mining is an income generation venue. At present, a miner gets 2 ether per block plus all the priority fees contained in the block. Based on our research we found that per day the number of ETH mined and provided to miners is north of 12,000+ ETH. On the basis that all of this ETH arrives at the exchanges for liquidation, there will be sell pressure every single day. Based on this source: We require around $10M of new money every day to keep the price flat. Therefore, after the Merge, the value will be reduced to $8M for existing holders to sell their ETH to prevent the price from going up. Thank you again Korpi for this insight. As a Web3 developer, what impacts me? The current PoW to PoS has minimal impact. The block time is expected to be shortened from 13 seconds per block to 12 seconds. As a result, smart contracts that use block production speed as a measure of time will run one second faster after the Merge takes place. Is that it? No. Read the sharding portion above again. With sharding, a lot of changes are expected. But we just don’t know what all of these are yet. What does this change mean for the newcomers? For the newcomers to this space, this represents the best opportunity to jump in and start participating. It’ll be cheaper to start a DAO or launch a project. Or, if you’re more interested in contributing to the network as a validator, the new mechanism is making it even easier for you to participate with reduced hardware requirements. If you were concerned about the environmental impact of blockchain technologies, the reduced impact of the second-largest blockchain in existence is being cut so you can feel maybe a twinge less guilty about using it (if you’re in the category you should also check out this article). Or, if you’re a security skeptic then maybe you might be feeling unsure about this. After all, PoS is less tested under the heat of battle than PoW. On the other hand, ETH 2.0 was designed with security at the forefront of consideration; requiring a minimum of 16,384 validators, Vitalik is pretty confident in it as well. This number of validators certainly seems like it’s enough to adequately call it decentralized and the cost of a 51% attack against the network would cost many billions of dollars in staked ETH. Notes from Consensus 2022 in Austin, Texas Members of the core team that were at Consensus 2022 participated in a panel about the ETH merge and I was able to pull two major areas to highlight from this. First, regarding the frustrations voiced over the continual setbacks in finalizing the merge, the team pressed on the need for patience as research takes time to conduct and test. With security and stability being vital to the success of the merge, the team is taking the precautions necessary. If something does go wrong during the merging process the team will stop the merge and postpone it again. Secondly, when the issue of centralization was pressed the team responded that the update will effectively break up the Ethereum mining cartels that have dominated the market, leading to greater decentralization. Further, staked ETH centralization is a problem that will need to be solved by a combination of human and technical methods. Every layer of the ecosystem will have to continue to grow to mitigate the centralization of ETH. Authors (open to feedback): 👇 Mike Bivens, Pari Tomar and Amateur-Dev

The purpose behind this group is to have a dedicated group of other developers that are working to become competent blockend devs themselves. Smaller teams within the squad form to build portfolio projects and participate in hackathons while collectively providing feedback and support. I thought the name was well fitting with a core belief that we are all going to make it and become blockend developers that can contribute and build the next big web3 projects.

This group is targeted at people early in their journey to become developers building smart contracts, dApps, DAOs, NFT projects, and so much more. Who it's not for, are established developers that have been working in the industry, and that are competent enough to find employment or go full-time DAO anywhere.

Here's an introductory look at where we're at now.

So what exactly is WAGMI Squad?

Essentially, WS will be a DAO-like organization composed of members that are learning and building together while trying to become competent blockend developers working in the industry. Membership is restricted to 12 active members at any time.

Depending on your definition of a DAO, you might call me out for using that term fairly loosely. WS is DAO-like because it'll be incorporated on the blockchain, use on-chain voting for decision making, lacks any single leader, and its membership is spread out across the world.

The organization will also have a reputation system that allows members to recognize one another for their efforts and contributions to projects and the ongoing efforts of the squad. This system will be based on a non-transferable token system where tokens are sent to a member’s wallet following a vote. These tokens are strictly reputation-based and will never have any monetary value. Recommendations for the quantity of reward tokens for contributions are still be to determined.

Sam Hart, Toby Shorin, and Laura Lotti convinced me of capping the group at 12 members with Squad Wealth; arguing that a 12-person group is the ideal size if the members are trying to be present with one another and support tight coordination. So that's all the reason I'm giving for this, it's easier not to reinvent the wheel, so I'm deferring to the experts on this.

Each member will be provided an NFT that signals their membership within the organization. The current members of the squad will be able to propose a vote for membership anytime there is a vacancy, they vote on a specific wallet address to decide whether to extend membership or not. If the vote passes, they receive the NFT which comes with voting rights.

At any time the holder will be able to resign from active member status by calling a 'retire' function that updates the NFT to show that they are now alumni. Alumni members won't have voting rights within the organization, but they can earn reputation still for volunteering their time by joining feedback sessions or helping with code reviews.

While there won't be any single source of leadership within the organization, we will have some need for roles to help manage components like the website (used to provide information on members and to showcase completed projects). Designating who would have a role and when to take that role away would be done through the voting system and efforts would be rewarded with additional token distributions.

Where is WAGMI Squad now?

At the time of this writing, WAGMI Squad is Telegram chat. There's no DAO structure, code written for any of the previously mentioned systems, or NFT art. Just a group chat actively working to decide the final components of the group and preparing to build a website while sharing resources on whatever topic we're individually learning.

We are already at capacity for the group size and we've got a waiting list of others who are asking to join. The demand for this is definitely high. It's made me consider making this into more than just a squad but I want to keep it to the 12-person structure that's been laid out. I would encourage others who are in a similar place as us to consider taking my structure here to create your own squad.

Most of us are working through Patrick Collin's Solidity & JavaScript course, so a tall order of business is to get through that material and use it as a springboard for jumping into more projects.

Next Steps

One step in front of the other is the surest way to reach the destination. The next step for our group is to just start building projects. We've got a small group working to figure out the website, another will form to help properly establish the DAO.

While we currently exist as a Telegram group, I've quickly realized that a Discord server is much more appropriate for our needs. With working groups needed for different projects like creating the website and the DAO they will need their own separate chat space to declutter the main chat, and so will each team that will be working on projects or hackathons together.

Of course, the members are encouraged to self-organize into smaller teams at any point to start building projects as well. This organization acts as a sort of accelerator for creating strong junior-level devs and the sooner projects start getting built, the sooner these members will have the potential to find their next opportunity.

After these foundational components are built, I'll provide an update to this article with a look into how each section was built, the tools used, and reflect on any challenges that present themselves.

This article as an NFT

The fact is that it costs ETH to set up a DAO and it costs ETH to get the website up and using ENS. So I'm turning on that NFT option for this article if you'd like to support this squad of developers as they attempt a journey of growth and become blockend devs.

Any funds collected from this article's NFT sales will be used in their entirety to pay for the creation and upkeep of WAGMI Squad as it seeks to complete its mission to accelerate new developers into their first opportunity in web3.

Inspiration

This project was inspired by our shared interest in video games as well as the article by the Chainlink article "What Is a Dynamic NFT?" from April of 2022. We wanted to provide a template and working demo for other early NFT game builders to take and use themselves in their games or at least show how it could be done.

What it does

This application would allow users to freely mint a customized character that lives as a dynamic NFT on the Polygon Network. This dNFT can then be customized with new features that would trigger a smart contract, updating its metadata. Alternatively, users could use Chainlink's VRV to get a Google "I'm feeling lucky" method to get a randomized character.

This project is being built to serve as a template and working demo for a system of video game character development as future implementations will include the ability to modify stats and trigger further changes such as classes typically found in role-playing games.

How we built it

We built this project relying only on the member's foundational knowledge of Python programming, starting this as a Flask app (some of you might have just cringed), and using Python to build the back-end and Brownie for smart contract development. The project progressed with the core developers attempting to address challenges that stemmed from our lack of prior experience in development and web3 programming as our knowledge and familiarity grew resulting in the state of the application today.

Now would be a good time to let you know that three of the four members on this team were still in a coding bootcamp during the entirety of this hackathon. We were doing our best with what we knew.

Challenges we ran into

This team experienced two primary challenges in developing the project thus far. The first challenge revolved around team members as the team size was constantly in flux with the fourth and fifth positions. We would have people join and then drop without contributing and it took time to find replacements.

The other primary challenge was our limited experience, the three core members who have contributed to the project since its beginning are also brand new to programming, two of us just finished a coding bootcamp the same day as submitting this project for review and another still has a while to go. We were having to learn Solidity and Brownie as we built our project with very limited prior knowledge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of what we have managed to build thus far, there is still a lot of work left to conduct on the project but the current members have affirmed their desire to continue working on the project to see a working prototype in the near future.

What we learned

The answer to this is nearly everything, our team learned a lot about product/system design, user experience, and dApp development. This is all in addition to just learning how to be better programmers, how to work on a team with other devs, and using GitHub for team projects.

What's next for dNFT Character Builder

What's next is for us to continue the development of the character builder with the knowledge we've gained now, and a better understanding of how to build something like this, the team has agreed to continue building dNFT Character Builder in order to produce a working MVP. Now that we have a better understanding of how to build web3 products, there is a lot of code to go back to and rebuild and improve.

Video demo of the project

Eric created the video for the project as part of the submission materials.

Week By Week

Let's take this week by week, I wrote each of these sections at the end of each week rather than waiting for the end of the event so keep that in mind when seeing how each week's recap was written. I thought this might be helpful because organizing my thoughts and clearly looking back at each week would have been difficult for me at the end of this experience.

Week 1

Okay, so week 1 was actually just three days, the hackathon started on a Friday. These three days were just spent reviewing documentation, attending webinars, and getting adjusted in the Chainlink discord, thus we haven't started the code yet!

Week 2

The first full week ended up being focused on administrative functions; replacing team members who dropped out, organizing how communications would be handled, and setting up the GitHub. I thought it was a bit much for just a quick project for a hackathon, but it was also my first so maybe this was appropriate and maybe the time spent would pay dividends as we progress. In addition to these admin components, I built a wireframe and continued to improve the initial write-up document to help track responsibilities and understand the project.

Week 3

Strong start over the course of this week; with a clickable prototype constructed, basic functionality underway, most of the components being claimed by members of the team, and the provided educational opportunities from Chainlink being taken advantage of. At this point, I am confident in the team's ability to deliver a working prototype by the end of the event. There's a healthy backlog list I've developed that will likely have to be tackled post-hackathon. With 3 of the 5 of us still being in a coding boot camp, I am proud of what we've accomplished thus far especially taking into consideration everything else we are having to juggle at the same time!

Week 4

The end feels like it is very quickly approaching, there's progress being made in the code but there are still some hiccups happening within the team. While a majority of the team is active nearly every day and making progress by either researching and finding resources or writing code, there are still some issues with a free rider. While it does cause some issues because of the workload on everybody else, I'm not upset about it because there's been a lot of progress. Ultimately this is just part of the process and learning how to deal with this is important, I'm relying on past experiences to navigate through it. It definitely reinforces my desire to find a small team of other devs to work closely with to build projects and participate in hackathons. I'm hoping to get this started soon.

Week 5

With just a few days left, we've been pushing for wrapping up what parts we can in the project. We've all agreed that we want to continue working on the project after the end of the hackathon, and we're committed to getting to the prototype stage. The 5th member of the team having ghosted us was the hiccup from week 4 and this week, I did end up frustrated about it before I just let it go and dropped it. We were all fairly busy this week, so progress was slow and steady, but progress is progress.

Week 6

The project was turned into the judges, and you can find the repo for it here. We pushed through many challenges in getting this project to where it is today and given everything I’ve learned since it was started, if I had to do it again I would make it very differently. Ultimately, the project was a success for me as we all learned a lot from its development and participating in the Chainlink Spring 2022 Hackathon. The team is fully committed to putting in continued efforts to improve the project to a workable demo as we had originally planned. Once the judges have reviewed it, we plan to revisit the project and pick up the work again.

This Article as an NFT

You’ll see below that this article can be collected as an NFT. I’ve created this option to represent just one method of supporting my journey to becoming a Blockend developer.

If you enjoyed this article, found value in it, or just would like to signal your support for my efforts, let me know! It doesn’t have to be through ownership of this article, I’d love to find a time to talk with you about web3 and to learn about what you’re building.