What's New in Eth2 - 24 January 2020

Ben Edgington (PegaSys, ConsenSys — but views expressed are all my own)

Edition 34 at eth2.news

Top picks

• eth2 quick update no. 7 from the EF has plenty of news, including some notes on the expected path to roll-out of the beacon chain.

Before we jump in, something for those who plan to be early stakers, from my colleague Georgia Rakusen. There's DAI to be had :moneybag:!

The user research team at ConsenSys is looking to interview individuals who plan to become validators and stake their own ETH during Phase 0. The purpose of the research is to understand the needs, motivations and goals of early bootstrappers, in order to improve the experience of becoming a validator. Participation in the research involves some initial screening to make sure you’re a good fit for this study, then a 1 hour zoom call with a researcher at a time and date that works for you. You’ll be paid 70 DAI as a thank you for participating. The community’s input is invaluable to us. Interested in taking part in the research? Please email [e-mail]

Phase 0: The Beacon Chain implementation

Spec version 0.10.0 was published shortly after the last edition of What's New went out, and a minor bugfix version, v0.10.1, was just released.

As a reminder, v0.10 is a stable version that will serve as the basis for multi-client testnets and specification audits. The key change from previous versions is the adoption of the new (in-progress) IETF standards for BLS signatures.

Least Authority has already kicked-off their security audit.

Protolambda has big plans for the spec repo, and after that for testnet monitoring.

The deposit contract

Runtime Verification has completed the bytecode-level formal verification of the deposit contract. Combined with their earlier work, this means that the contract is now verified end-to-end. (Working at the bytecode level sidesteps any concerns about the quality of the Vyper compiler.)

Networking

Hsiao-Wei has done a write-up on strategies for signature aggregation. The main value of using BLS signatures in the protocol is that many signatures can be aggregated into a smaller number of signatures, which are quicker to verify and easier to handle. It is important that the workload for aggregating signatures is spread out among the validators in each committee so that the aggregation can be done in parallel. But it's not easy to work out strategies for this that are both efficient and don't expose validators' identities.

Conceivably, clients might end up competing on their relative efficiencies of aggregating attestations: block proposers are rewarded for including more unique attestations.

Anyway, Hsiao-Wei's write up is an excellent survey of the state of the art, although Protolambda mentioned some work-in-progress improvements to the naive strategy on the latest call.

Documentation

Phase 0 for Humans has been updated to version 0.10.0. This is intended "to help onboard new contributors, auditors, etc". Given the lack of prose or intuition in the main spec, this is super-valuable.

Testnets

The Prysm testnet was relaunched a couple of weeks ago as a mainnet configuration. It's running well, and is now past 100k blocks, with over 28 thousand validators currently, and three thousand more queued for entry, although that may change soon: track the stats here. Here's a video on how to join up, and another guide.

Lighthouse have been a little stealthier with their rebooted testnet, but that's been running smoothly for about a month, and hosts around 16 thousand validators.

Both of these testnets are available on the shiny new Eth2 network dashboard from Aleth.io (Lighthouse here). There are instructions for how you can add your own node.

And just a reminder that Nimbus has been quietly running public testnets for many months now.

Phase 1: Sharding implementation

The Phase 1 specification has finally been merged into the dev branch :tada:

It's now time to give it some wider scrutiny, make some implementations, generate some tests, and put it through its paces on the route to production.

Read the spec here! There's a lot in there: the fruit of some great research and discussion over many months.

Will V has documented some options for how data might be uploaded to shard chains (and paid for), so that it becomes useful to Eth1 applications like optimistic or zkRollups. Bridging Eth1 and Eth2 like this is an interesting challenge, but promises to be immensely powerful.

Research

cadCAD is "An open-source Python package that assists in the processes of designing, testing and validating complex systems through simulation.". Well, Barnabé Monnot has managed to use this import the whole beacon state and run simulations of the beacon chain, with blocks, attestations, and all. This platform could be used for studying validator behaviour: will rational validators seeking to maximise their income really behave as we assume they will? This work is coming out of the new Robust Incentives Group at the Ethereum Foundation.

Ryuya Nakamura is back with Casper FFG Meets Subjective Finality. This presents Casper SFG - the Subjective Finality Gadget. Subjective finality seems interesting, but I wonder how it works in practice. Is finality really useful if you and I have different ideas of what is final?

Alex Vlasov has been thinking about time synchronisation and potential attack vectors. When a distributed protocol like the beacon chain relies on a different distributed protocol such as NTP, then there is a danger of inheriting that protocol's weaknesses.

Regular Calls

Implementers

Call #32 took place on the 23rd of January.

• Agenda
• Video
• My quick notes, and from Mamy.

Networking

The next Eth2 networking call will be on Wednesday, 29th January at 13:00 UTC.

Phase 2

There was a Phase 2 community call on Tuesday, January 14th. Notes from the call are here.

Eth 1.x

Transcript of the January 14th Eth 1.x call, and here's an easier to read digest, or maybe you like your updates in tweet form.

In future, the name "Stateless Ethereum" will be used to cover much of this work. See our last edition for background on the relevance to Eth2 and why this matters. There's also a repo to consolidate the work, but it's a bit bare just yet.

In other news

• Latest client team updates:
  • Lodestar grants update
  • Prysmatic labs
  • Tweet-form update from Lighthouse
• Lighthouse has an RFP out for a user interface for the client; check it out if that's your thing.
• The Prysm docs portal is looking amazing after an update.
• A couple more excellent articles from Jim McDonald:
  • Evaluating Staking Services
  • Understanding the validator lifecycle
• The latest from Carl B: Validated, staking on eth2: #1 - Incentives. What are rewards, penalties and slashing, and why do we have them?
• And Eth222 is back for its second year! So I guess it's Eth2222, if we're going to be 1-based. Anyway, the 22nd of February, right after the Stanford Blockchain Conference. Register here.

And finally…

We have renamed our PegaSys Eth2 client as Teku.

I was fond of the Artemis name, but it was tricky from a trademark perspective. NASA thought the name was so good they took it for their next lunar programme :rocket: :full_moon:^[1]

So… Teku, Teku, Teku - remember the name :smile:

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