Resource analysis of Ethereum 2.0 clients

Abstract

Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed to solve this issue. Tackling scalability while preserving the security and decentralization of the network is an important challenge. To deliver effective scaling solutions, Ethereum is on the path of a major protocol improvement called Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2), which implements sharding. As the change of consensus mechanism is an extremely delicate matter, this improvement will be achieved through different phases, the first of which is the implementation of the Beacon Chain. For this, a specification has been developed, and multiple groups have implemented clients to run the new protocol. This work analyzes the resource usage behavior of different clients running as Eth2 nodes, comparing their performance and analyzing differences. Our results show multiple important network perturbations and how different clients react to them. We discuss the differences between Eth2 clients and their limitations.

This work has been supported by the Ethereum Foundation under Grant FY20-0198.

Peer Reviewed

Postprint (author's final draft)