Berachain’s V2 upgrade is now live on its public testnet. The upgrade has ushered in a series of technical architectural changes, with the main one focussing on drifting away from Polaris - a blockchain framework for EVM integration.
Chalking out what the new upgrade brings along with it, the official blog post noted,
“Berachain V2 introduces BeaconKit, an EVM-focused development framework designed to improve the Berachain experience… Developers can now utilize any execution client on Berachain V2 with BeaconKit.”
The Bera team asserted that V2 is a “culmination of learnings” from V1, and is specifically designed to make developers’ lives easier to support the growing user base.
Tangents associated with modularity are not merely limited to architecture. It has a say in user experience too. The native horizontal scalability is applied to apps that are deployed within its ecosystem. That is combined with incentive alignment at the protocol layer.
The lack of separation between consensus and execution was another obstacle on Polaris. BeaconKit instead makes the network EVM identical for developers, removing the need for Polaris’ implementation of precompiles for EVM equivalency.
In fact, these principles have been inspired by ETH2’s modular separation. Alongside, some parallel adjustments to the process of validator setup have been made.
The blog post highlighted,
“Berachain originally planned to set a cap of 100 validators with a BGT bond. V2 raises this to a soft limit of 256 and, to ensure sufficient economic stake to secure the massive TVL expected on Berachain, validators will now stake BERA to post an activation bond.”
Aside from the technical adjustments, Berachain’s core stakeholders remain the same. Powered by the Proof of Liquidity [PoL] consensus mechanism, the Layer 1 blockchain opened its testnet for the first time to the public in January this year. The latest V2 upgrade brings Beracha one step closer to its mainnet launch.
