HackMDWhat's New in Eth2 - 18 October 2020
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Edition 54 at eth2.news
Phase 0: The beacon chain
A v1.0.0 release candidate 0 has been published. The main breaking changes with respect to the v0.12.x series currently running on Medalla are as follows:
- Upgrade to discovery version 5.1, which is incompatible with the current v5, but hardens DoS resistance.
- Update to BLS standard v04 which excludes the zero secret key/infinity public key and signature. We've discussed this previously
- Some configuration parameters have been changed:
GENESIS_DELAYis now one week. That means that the genesis state will be known one week before chain start. This helps client teams to prepare genesis-ready releases, and users to update. Both of these have been pain points in previous genesis runs.INACTIVITY_PENALTY_QUOTIENThas been quadrupled. This quarters the penalties during non-finalisation, and is a temporary measure to give stakers more confidence in case we hit trouble.MIN_SLASHING_PENALTY_QUOTIENThas been quadrupled, which means that the base penalty for being slashed is only 0.25 Ether. Again, this is temporary.- Proportional slashing (how much more you get slashed when others are slashed at the same time) has been reduced to one-third. Once again, this is temporary.
- Some changes to Eth1 data voting: Eth1 follow distance is now 2048 blocks (~8 hours), and Eth1 data voting period has been doubled. The upshot of these is that there will be a longer time to wait between making a deposit and becoming active on the beacon chain (about 6-8 hours longer). I don't know the rationale for these changes.
All we need now are MIN_GENESIS_TIME and DEPOSIT_CONTRACT_ADDRESS!
The deposit contract
Speaking of which - I am expecting news about the deposit contract any day now. Probably about 10 minutes after I publish this :joy:. Basically, as I understand it, we are good to go: deposit contract in the next few days; beacon chain genesis 6-8 weeks later. (This is not an official statement!)
Meanwhile, be careful out there. Many fake deposit contracts and Launchpad front-ends will erupt in the coming days. Look out for the official anouncements: do not send Eth to random contracts; this is not DeFi.
Testnets
After the slightly bumpy genesis dress rehearsal with the Spadina network, we did it all again with Zinken. There was the now customary launch party, which I unfortunately missed (having some well-earned time off), and you can read a nice summary in the Daily Gwei. It wasn't perfect, but went smoothly enough for us to turn our thoughts now towards the real thing.
Medalla, meanwhile, is suffering from very low participation. I think people are getting a bit bored of testnests. It's time to move on. See this week's Implementers' call for some discussion about its future.
I wrote a thing about why the testnets don't really cut it any more, and we need to launch Phase 0 asap.
Bounty program(me)
The various bounty programmes for finding vulnerabilities in Eth2 have been consolidated into the Eth2 Bounty Program. This brings attacks against client implementations into scope for Teku, Lighthouse, and Prysm, in addition to attacks against the protocol. Up to $50k is currently available for critical issues.
Staking stuff
EthStaker ran a quick survey on staking intentions and the results are in. Some interesting nuggets there. But I am really very disappointed that all the advice about client diversity is falling on deaf ears. Prysm is a fine client, but there are other clients out there that can more than capably hold their own. I know this - I am product manager for one of them :stuck_out_tongue: Please stop risking yourselves and the network by all piling onto a single client. Here's Danny Ryan on the subject:
A side note on client diversity – Spadina was heavily weighted toward the Prysm client which had a critical peering issue at genesis. At this point in time there are many robust eth2 clients. If we achieve a better distribution for mainnet, single client issues, like we saw on Spadina, will have a much smaller overall impact on network health.
And again:
the incident on Medalla was significantly amplified by the failure of the dominant Prysm client, and as we move toward mainnet, we, as a community, must consciously seek to remedy this.
Do not read the above as a dig against Prysm - its success is well deserved - but as an urgent call to check out what else is out there.
Right, now I've got that off my chest, let's talk about tokenised stakes.
Tokenising stakes is an idea I first came across last year, in an article that was a bit gloomy about possible centralising pressures. More recently, Tim Ogilvie of Staked believes that tokenised stakes will be a good thing. Here's Adam Cochran with a thread on Rocketpool's plans for tokenising stakes, with thoughts on the ecomomics and regulatory issues. Lido seems interesting, and claims to be "backed by several industry-leading staking providers", which might alleviate the initial centralising concerns. I'm still not delighted by all this - it will certainly be a disincentive to solo staking, and will encourage the use of custodial services - but I guess it's inevitable.
Michael J. Casey also thinks that "tokenized ETH 2.0 bonds" are inevitable, in an article for Coindesk, and that their value will become a useful indicator of market confidence in the success of the Eth2 project.
The Great Explainers
A couple of very nice, short videos from Stakefish:
- Part I | Meet Ethereum 2.0 (2m36s)
- Part II | Phase 0 and the Beacon Chain (2m41s)
Definitely digging the groovy Hammond organ on the background music.
Bite-size is a theme this week. Gitcoin did a livestream with Vitalik and others on the rollup-centric roadmap, and then split it up into bitesize chunks. Videos are in this playlist, and this Tweet thread gives a brief summary of each. You can also watch the whole thing.
More from Vitalik and others from the Taipei Ethereum meetup tea party (starts at about 6 minutes, with Hsiao-Wei on Eth2 Highlights at 21mins).
Vitalik has been very busy (he also appeared at the Ethereum Engineering Group talking about account abstraction, and the Coindesk conference): here's a recap of the AMA he recently did via the Status App which covers some Eth2 things.
A little less brief is the lovely explainer from u/ben-ned on Reddit about how to set up Teku with our Web3Signer service using Hashicorp vault to store the keys. There is an effort underway, EIP 3030 to standardise interfaces between remote signing services, with discussion here. When the proposal has settled down we'll look at implementing it - it's already very close to what Web3Signer does in any case.
Crypto Testers has done a nice Eth2 proof of stake explainer, with some useful discussion about options for staking.
Research
Rollups
We discussed last time the rollup-centric vision for the future of Ethereum that Vitalik presented. This seems to have been very well received. Vitalik has a follow-up Twitter thread with some more insights: it's not "rollups instead of sharding", it's "rollups on top of sharding".
In Matt Garnett's view, the rollup-centric roadmap leads us to a fairly similar destination to where we've been heading with Eth2 anyway.
Balancing attack
There was a little stir caused by this article last week, A balancing attack on Gasper, based on an earlier paper. There's also a related presentation by David Tse at LA Blockchain Week (Solving the Availability–Finality Dilemma, or, How to Fix Eth 2.0's Consensus Protocol) with some great intuition about the inner workings and trade-offs of consensus mechanisms - definitely recommended.
While the attack identified is interesting, in my view it falls into the consider a spherical cow realm of feasibility. In particular, assumption B in the article (which is critical to making the attack work) just doesn't reflect the reality of the Eth2 gossip network. The attack relies both on being able to partition the network and on precise timing, both of which are super-difficult to achieve outside a lab.
Nonetheless, there is a proposed fix under discussion. This adds some randomness to the time at which a validator publishes its attestation, which is an effective defence against the attack. I'm not a big fan of this as it relies on "honest" behaviour by validators (following the spec at all costs) rather than the much weaker "economically rational" behaviour (validators act in their own best interests). The timing of publishing an attestation is a careful balance between publishing early enough to get included in blocks reasonably swiftly, and late enough to make sure the vote is for the correct head block: validator rewards depend on getting these things right. If adding jitter to the timing negatively affects rewards, then users will demand that validators don't do this, and the "fix" will not fix anything.
Vitalik believes that better solutions are available. Anyway, there are plenty of other things to lose sleep over; I'm not going to be worrying about this one.
Also on ethresear.ch:
- In the rollup-centric world ("Phase 1.5 and done"), data availability becomes very important. Here's Vitalik with 2D data availability with Kate commitments. He has also been working on data sampling for data availability while moving away from relying on committees in Eth2.
- And, hot off the press, here is a proposal for A fee market contract for eth2 shards in eth1. The idea is to have a way for people to bid to put data into Eth2 shard blocks and be charged accordingly on the Eth1 chain.
Regular Calls
Implementers
Call #50 took place on the 15th of October.
- Agenda
- Video (First couple of minutes is missing)
- My quick notes.
We has some (unresolved) discussion about what to do with the Medalla testnet now that participation is dropping, and it is no longer at the latest spec. We might upgrade it for practice and keep it around a while longer. Ultimately the plan is to have a smaller long-lived devnet alongside mainnet.
The ever-present elephant in the room is the mainnet launch date. We never talk about such things on the calls :joy:
In other news
- Latest client team updates from Lighthouse and Prysm
And finally…
My apologies if bits of the above seem rushed. That's because they were :slightly_smiling_face:. I took some very pleasant time off last week, and did some hiking in Dartmoor. Highly recommended!
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