HackMDWhat's New in Eth2 - 8 August 2020
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Edition 48 at eth2.news
Top picks
Latest eth2 quick update from Danny Ryan: Medalla launch preview, and attacknet news - bounties increased to $15k.
Medalla Testnet
No question that the biggest news this week was the successful launch of the Medalla testnet. Medalla is an open testnet, with the same spec as the planned Mainnet, that everybody is encouraged to join. All being well, it will be our last big testnet before beacon chain launch.
The genesis event took place at 1300 UTC (plus 8 seconds) on Tuesday the 4th of August, with 20084 validators having signed up in time. The Ethereum Foundation and /r/ethstaker organised a launch party: we had 30 or 40 on the Zoom call and I saw over 1700 watching live on YouTube at one point (the recording has had 12,400 views now, which is incredible). I was there!
In the event it was a little anticlimactic. For a number of reasons, initial participation by validators was low, and it took around 7 epochs (40 minutes) before we saw the chain first finalise. In reality this is not really a big deal, certainly nothing like the drama some of the crypto-press made it out to be. Anthony Sassano gives a nice write-up in the Daily Gwei.
We discussed some of the reasons for the initial low participation on the devs' call later in the week: there were some issues around setting up bootnodes and getting them into client distributions in time; a couple of the client implementations running at genesis had trouble making attestations, so the teams temporarily switched to using other clients; a bunch of large stakers were offline and may not have been ready in time.
To improve some of these issues for the Mainnet launch, we're looking at increasing the genesis delay from its current 48 hours, to 96 hours, or even a week. This buffer will allow everyone to get their ducks in a row.
Anyway, everything has been running pretty well since. All client teams have issued updates to address various issues–-that's what testnets are for–-so be sure to keep up to date if you are running validators. As of writing this, 23737 validators are in the system, with another 4706 in the activation queue. Only 4 validators can enter per epoch, so the current queue is going to take over 5 days to eat through. Patience.
Here's a quick reminder of some useful tools if you want to get running on Medalla:
- Launchpad - a nice workflow for registering your validators. Learn more about the Launchpad here.
- Eth2Stats - add your node and see who else is around, and where they are.
- Beaconcha.in - loads of useful insights here. Set up a dashboard for your validators.
- Earn some POAPs. Run different clients and collect the set.
- Check out the ethstaker Discord. See the pinned messages for links to client team Discords for specific help.
Attacknets
In parallel with Medalla, the Ethereum Foundation team continues to run attacknets. The first round was very successful. It can now be revealed that Jonny Rhea's successful attack on Prysm uncovered a nine year old bug in the Go standard library. Here's Jonny's write-up.
Rewards of up to $15k are on offer for the next round - so get hacking!
BLS news
Perhaps you thought that the BLS cryptographic signing changes were all done. Well… there is currently a bit of a spat going on around an edge case in the (draft) IETF BLS signature standard that might result in a small change to the standard.
The issue is around whether payloads signed with the "infinity" signature (the identity point in the 0 <= SK < r.
This is not academic for Eth2: all implementations need to handle all signatures in precisely the same way. An attacker is not bound by standards, and crazy things happen by accident. Participating in a consensus system makes it essential that we all agree precisely on what constitutes a valid signature. This was actually tested on the Witti testnet when somebody created a deposit with exactly this signature and public key. On that occasion, all beacon chain clients accepted it as valid, as per our understanding of the standard, and all was well.
It's not very important for our purposes which way this particular question gets resolved, and arguably it makes more sense to explicitly declare the infinity signature invalid. But we do need clarity and certainty so that Eth2 clients can continue to agree, and ideally continue to be standards-conforming.
The Great Explainers
The Google of Annotated Specs has just come along and wiped out my AltaVista :cry:
Seriously, though, Vitalik's annotated Eth2 spec is excellent, and obviously a primary resource. Nevertheless, I'll press on to complete and build out mine - they are sufficiently different in emphasis that I think both can happily co-exist. And I plan to add some extras, like better internal navigation over time.
In any case, I believe I still have the only known explainer of beacon chain genesis timing. Lots of confusion about this ahead of Medalla launch, even among devs, so I did a quick write-up.
Quite a few how-tos around on getting nodes up and running in Medalla. Sorry if I missed yours, but here's a few I noted this week:
- Larrypcdotcom has quick notes for all the clients.
- Somer Esat has done very thorough guides for Ubuntu/Medalla/Lighthouse and Ubuntu/Medalla/Prysm.
- A nice guide from CoinCashew on staking with Teku on Ubuntu.
- Helpful info on keeping things secure. Some guides cover this, some don't, but it is important.
- I came across this in the Prysm docs: Improve peer-to-peer connectivity - good advice that applies to all clients.
Jim McDonald of Attestant continues his killer series of explainers with a great description of the different levels of protection for validator keys.
Jim has also come up with a way to define attestation effectiveness. How quickly clients get their attestations (votes) for blocks included in the beacon chain is a key performance metric, because it has an impact on the rewards they earn. This is a very useful metric, and beaconcha.in has already integrated it into their validator overviews.
Alon Muroch continues his series on BLS signatures with Key Concepts of Pairings. His company, Blox, has also been developing a Hashicorp vault plugin for eth2 validators. Other interesting news is that Ledger has added support for the BLS12-381 curve in the recent Nano-X update. Not sure what this means in practice, but watch this space!
Research
An excellent student made video analyzing the proof-of-custody game in Ethereum 2.0. This is an important part of the Phase 1 shard chains specification.
Regular Calls
Implementers
Call #45 took place on the 6th of August.
- Agenda
- Video
- My quick notes, and from Mamy
We did a useful retro on the Medalla launch. Also solid discussions around whether and how clients should identify themselves to each other, and the wisdom or otherwise of deriving both signing keys and withdrawal keys from the same seed phrase. Justin told us about a breakthrough in Secret Single Leader Election that could make it into Phase 1, which would be very exciting.
In other news
EDCON is happening Sunday and Monday. Monday looks like Eth2 day, with talks from, Vitalik, Danny, Hsiao-Wei, Aditya, Afri, Paul Hauner from Sigma Prime, Terence from Prysmatic Labs - all the usual suspects, really. I'll definitely be getting along to as much as I can of this.
- Client team update from Prysmatic Labs.
- An interesting take on Bankless from Haseeb Qureshi on what DeFi in Eth2 might look like: Cities, suburbs, farms.
- Bitfly has made an Eth2 network explorer, Ethernodes. I have some reservations about its accuracy for now (no Teku showing up!), but it is showing two nodes in my home town, and I'm only running one. So if you are also somewhere near Reading, UK, drop me a line!
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