Edition 51 at eth2.news
As ever, Danny Ryan's eth2 quick update no. 15 remains the source for succinct, authoritative info. Read that if you haven't got time to read this.
All quiet on the testnet front. Since Medalla recovered over two weeks ago, it has been running as smoothly as you like. There are over 42,000 validators activated, with a ten-day queue to join. Participation has been healthy at around 80%. Finalisation has been excellent. Nothing much else to say right now.
We are planning another test of the genesis process at the end of this month, applying lessons learned from the Medalla genesis. This won't disrupt the existing Medalla testnet at all, and we plan to run the resulting beacon chain for only a couple of days. The Launchpad portal is being updated for the trial and the plan is to deploy it and the deposit contract around the 21st, with Genesis expected a week later. More news in a couple of weeks.
Don't forget that you can follow progress towards the beacon chain launch on the GitHub tracker [1]. It may be closer than you think :wink:
Meanwhile, the attacknets continue to run and bear fruit. There's still plenty of opportunity to get involved and claim some dollar!
The good folk at Attestant have built Dirk, a DIstributed Remote Key manager that looks very capable.
Key managers or signing services will be an important part of Eth2 infrastructure, in particular those that offer slashing-protection. We've been building Web3Signer (formerly Eth2Signer) at ConsenSys and are adding the slashing-protection component right now.
Also by Jim McDonald of Attestant is ethdo
- "a command-line tool for managing common tasks in Ethereum 2". This is super useful and has got me out of a hole in the past. So useful that the EF is funding a security review. Get moving if you are interested, the RfP closes in 2 days.
If you wish, you can exit from validating on the beacon chain, and eventually claim back your stake plus any accrued rewards. This facility won't be useful, however, until there is somewhere to withdraw the stake to. That is, until there is a functioning economy within the Eth2 ecosystem.
Since we originally didn't really know what that economy might look like, the beacon chain currently provides only a minimum viable withdrawal mechanism. When you register your stake, you include a commitment to a withdrawal key that you hold. The understanding is that there will be a way in Eth2 to prove that you own the corresponding key, and you will then get to move the exited stake to an account.
Now that things have come into focus a little more, with Phase 1.5 in view (see below), there are interesting ways that this mechanism might be extended. For example, Vitalik posted a suggestion about setting the withdrawal key to correspond to an Eth1 address. This could be an Eth1 contract that, in Phase 1.5, would own and distribute the withdrawn stakes. It is potentially not hard to implement. Martin Köppelmann is excited about the possibilities that this opens up for non-custodial staking pools, and the opportunities for staked Ether to participate in DeFi: "It would really change everything. Let's do this!" Aave already has plans.
A reminder that, while we've been focusing on delivering the Phase 0 beacon chain, work on the later phases continues apace. Phase 1.5 is the inelegantly named point at which the current Eth1 chain is folded into the Eth2 system and becomes full proof of stake. As originally conceived, this was planned to take place as part of Phase 2 - the full implementation of execution environments on Eth2. But it has gained greater urgency over recent months and been brought forward in the roadmap.
Anyway, here's a demo of a prototype by my brilliant colleague Mikhail Kalinin of what an Eth1 transaction on sharded Eth2 looks like. It uses Metamask! And you can run it for yourself.
Bankless published a very clear and comprehensive guide to be becoming a validator on the beacon chain, written by Collin Myers and Mara Schmiedt of ConsenSys Codefi. While we're on Bankless, I enjoyed the recent podcast with Raul Jordan. The first 30 minutes give a great recap and insight into the challenges we had on the Medalla testnet, and there's some useful discussion on how to participate.
Attestation inclusion is a hot topic at the moment. How efficiently your validators' attestations get included in beacon chain blocks is one of the important performance metrics: it relates directly to the rewards you receive. As reported last time, beaconcha.in is now showing an "attestation effectiveness" metric for validators, which has focused minds nicely. We've recently done a lot of work on Teku to bring our numbers up to scratch, and Adrian Sutton made a very nice explainer video about some of the complexities and challenges involved in getting attestations included quickly on the chain. There are some great insights into all the work that validators and beacon nodes are doing under the hood. Before watching that, it's worth taking a quick look at beaconcha.in's primer on attestations
The beaconcha.in team has also been busy adding an article on staking hardware to their knowledgebase.
Meanwhile, I finally wrote up everything I know about shuffling in Eth2. It's a bit niche, but I needed to get it out.
And ICYMI, the Ethstaker Eth2 Studymaster Programme is going along nicely, wonderfully curated by Superphiz. It's not too late to join. Week 3 info is here. Get yourself onto the Ethstaker Discord and check out the #eth2-studymaster
channel. This is a terrific initiative.
Work on a VDF (verifiable delay function) for unbiasable randomness continues. This is more for Eth2.x than Eth2.0 - we are not dependent on it for any of the current plans. But it is definitely a nice-to-have, especially for applications. ZenGo has been analysing the trusted setup required for the planned VDF and has written up a new attack they are calling DogByte.
Barnabé Monnot of the EF's Robust Incentives Group has added another to his excellent series of notebooks on modelling the economic behaviour of the beacon chain: Beacon Runner: Thunderdome. This one explores individual validator strategies when attesting to blocks, and ties in nicely with the discussion on attestation inclusion above. Spoiler: in a network with latency, it is better to be prudent than swift.
Also on ethresear.ch:
Call #47 took place on the 3rd of September.
Pretty quick call this time. The main ongoing discussion is about how to handle the weak subjectivity period in clients. We are also planning a catch up about networking topics on a separate call on Wednesday the 9th.
The other big announcement was the putting on hold development of the Trinity Eth2 client. This is the Python client developed by the Ethereum Foundation. It's open source, and if anyone wants to contribute they would be welcome to do so. The Trinity team, however, will now be focusing on working with the other teams to get the beacon chain mainnet launched.
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