Update

This last week I worked on:

• adding the fork-choice handlers that were left:
  • on_attestation #394
  • on_attester_slashing #404
• finishing process_rewards_and_penalties #373
• implementing glue code for state transitions and block processing #392 #407
• mitigating some IO concurrency problems we are having #408
• doing some general improvements on the codebase #397 #393 #403

These last two weeks we focused on integrating what we have worked on until now. Some things are still a work-in-progress (e.g. state transitions), but by doing this we intend to have the node in a presentable state before the presentation at Devconnect.

Next steps

We are improving the node, focusing on block downloading, since we have low throughput in that area, and observability, to facilitate finding problems and debugging.

We found some improvements that can be made on peer discovery. Currently we aren't filtering peers, and so most of them can't answer our requests. Introducing this should help when downloading blocks.

We recently added a sync progress graph on graphana, which we should integrate with recent additions to the node, to make the syncing progress more transparent.