According to a report by The Block, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake announced a new consensus layer upgrade proposal called "Beam Chain" at the Ethereum developer conference Devcon held on Tuesday. He stated that the goal of Beam Chain is to achieve faster secondary block times, smaller validator stakes, "chain snarkifaction" (such as zkVM), and ultimately provide Ethereum with quantum computing resistance.
Drake described this potential shift as a different "era" for Ethereum, which has already transitioned from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS), and may now enter the ZK (zero-knowledge) era of Ethereum consensus (with extensive use of SNARKs technology).
In terms of block production, this could mean faster slot durations, reducing the current 12 seconds to 4 seconds, and achieving faster block finality within three slots. Drake also suggested that the concept of "epoch" could be discarded, retaining only slots. A slot is a fixed time interval during which a validator is assigned to propose a new block. An epoch is an interval composed of 32 slots, used to organize validator duties, block validation, and the finalization of the blockchain.
Combining other ideas from the research roadmap, Drake indicated that the upgrade proposal might also introduce a staking cap, reducing the native staking requirement to launch a validator node from 32 ETH to 1 ETH.
Drake stated that this proposal could address some flaws in the current design of Ethereum's beacon chain consensus layer, but he emphasized that any such implementation would require consensus from the community.