Update

This last week I worked on:

• implementing a first iteration of the networking component #107 #123
• a refactor of the underlying SSZ library used #97. Previously we decided to use the lighthouse client's containers, but as they have non-trivial logic attached, we ended up implementing them ourselves, for simplicity.
• improving error handling in the SSZ NIF #108. This handles Elixir-type to Rust-type conversion errors.
• improving the error messages in the SSZ NIF #124
• adding some more SSZ containers to the NIF #99

Networking

In its current state, the networking component connects to peers randomly, and subscribes to most gossipsub topics – decoding and logging received messages. Most of this work was done on the Elixir side, but some of it required revisiting the libp2p bindings.

SSZ

After the refactor, implementing new types was easier, and members of the community continued to add more of them.

Next steps

The next step is to refactor the networking component, to allow others to consume the received data, so as to allow receiving proposed blocks, and verifying them.