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In the most of current sharded blockchains, there is a second chain required for the computation needed for the maintenance of the whole of the network and receiving updates of the shards and their snapshots. Such a chain has different names in variant protocols: Beacon chain (Ethereum 2.0), Relay chain (PolkaDot) etc.

So the second chain is used for keeping shards snapshots and maintenance of the network.

According to this answer: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/72045/23024 :

Beacon chain validators for a particular shard, randomly get chosen to add the hash of the tip of the shard, to the beacon chain.

Does it mean that a Beacon chain validator CANNOT be a shard validator at the same time?

  • If it is NOT permitted, Why?
  • If it is permitted, How?
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A Beacon Chain validator can also be a shard validator.

Recall, that initially there won't be any shards.

State of Ethereum Protocol #2: The Beacon Chain is a helpful article on these topics and describes that:

validators participate in the protocol by proposing blocks, when chosen to do so, on both the Beacon Chain and, once they have been implemented, the shard chains.

To the question of how a Beacon Chain validator would also become a shard validator, the shard validation would probably be another piece of software and there would be APIs similar to Beacon Node API for Validator, so that the Beacon Chain software and the shard chain software can communicate.

References:

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