The Ethereum vision has always been to create a world computer. But its scalability and performance limitations have meant that it has fallen far short of that vision. Yet, work on scaling Ethereum has exploded in breadth and complexity over the past years. From variants of PoS, to Plasma / Plasma Cash, sharding, EWASM, BLS signatures, everything has been on the table. While confusing on the surface, underneath a coherent vision for a new Ethereum that will scale near infinitely has emerged. We were joined by Ethereum Researcher Justin Drake to discuss the Ethereum Serenity vision, its core components and the roadmap ahead. A particular focus was the beacon chain, the role of randomness and Verifiable Delay Functions. Topics discussed in this episode:Justin's previous project building on top of Open BazaarWhy he made the switch from application development to Ethereum consensus researchThe high-level vision for Ethereum 2.0 / SerenityThe Ethereum Serenity roadmap to scaling the world computer by 1m timesThe crucial role of the beacon chainThe difference between Ethereum Serenity and PolkadotThe role of randomness in making Ethereum Serenity workThe limitations of existing trustless sources of randomnessHow Verifiable Delay Functions can be used to create better randomnessThe Ethereum Foundation plans to develop an open-source VDF ASIC Links mentioned in this episode: DevCon4 Talk by Justin Drake about VDF & RandomnessDevCon4 Talk by Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum 2.0VDF ResearchMinimal VDF randomness beacon - Sharding - Ethereum ResearchEthereum ProjectTwo Point Oh: Explaining ValidatorsTwo Point Oh: The Beacon Chain Sponsors: Azure: Deploy enterprise-ready consortium blockchain networks that scale in just a few clicks Support the show, consider donating: BTC: 1CD83r9EzFinDNWwmRW4ssgCbhsM5bxXwg (https://epicenter.tv/tipbtc)BCC: 1M4dvWxjL5N9WniNtatKtxW7RcGV73TQTd (http://epicenter.tv/tipbch)ETH: 0x8cdb49ca5103Ce06717C4daBBFD4857183f50935 (https://epicenter.tv/tipeth) This episode is also available on :Epicenter.tvYouTubeSouncloud Watch or listen, Epicenter is available wherever you get your podcasts. Epicenter is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sƒbastien Couture, Meher Roy & Sunny Aggarwal.