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Is the block number increase going to be more frequent than it is now ? The reason I am asking is because some smart contracts I am developing depend on the block number increase, so if this changes, it might throw-off the way the contract works.

Similar question was asked here but no definite answer was given: What happens to immutable contracts when Ethereum 2.0 will likely change the 15s block time?

I understand that things should not be timed by the blocks, but then, that is not the answer I am looking for. I just want to know whether the frequency of a block number increase will be significantly greater when ETH 2.0 starts, or not (lets say that significant means times two or more).

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The current plan is around 12 seconds (https://blog.bitmex.com/ethereum-2-0/ , search for "Block time interval"). There's loads of more information about the background and how the system works.

There is an official phase 0 testnet running and it seems to be producing blocks quite nicely every 11,5 seconds: https://beaconscan.com/statistics (divide amount of seconds in day 86400 by 7500).

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  • Thanks! and thank you for the links.
    – Damir Olejar
    Sep 3, 2020 at 16:47
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Answer for Smart contracts

whether the frequency of a block number increase will be significantly greater when ETH 2.0 starts, or not

When ETH 2.0 starts, only the beacon chain will exist. You will not be able to write "eth2" smart contracts. So "smart contracts I am developing depend on the block number increase" will not be affected at all.

See What is the difference between Ethereum 2.0 and the beacon chain?

Answer for Beacon chain

The beacon chain expects to have a block every 12 seconds, but block proposers might be offline so there is no guarantee. So you could have the genesis block, 12 seconds later a block is missed/skipped, and the first block in the beacon chain could start 24 seconds after genesis.

Future phases of Ethereum 2.0 could reduce the 12 seconds. It is unknown at this time what it would be. But again, it doesn't matter because "eth2" smart contracts cannot be written yet.

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  • Now this is a bit confusing in regards to GAS price problem. I was expecting that ETH 2.0 will be merged with ETH 1.0 and reduce the GAS prices with it. At this stage I only care that blocks do not become faster than 8 blocks per second after the merge. I do not worry about the new ETH 2.0 features since I can't code them... yet. Or maybe I should just say f!@#$-it all and lets rewrite the code and use the timestamps!!!
    – Damir Olejar
    Sep 7, 2020 at 3:16

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