What's New in Eth2 - 30 November 2020

Ben Edgington (Eth2 at ConsenSys — all views expressed are my own)

Edition 57 at eth2.news

The Eve of Mainnet Edition

Twas the night before genesis…

It seems like a lifetime ago, but it was actually early 2016, that I stumbled across a draft of the book, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. It was a compelling read, a journey into a fascinating new world. But it wasn't until I reached section 8.5 on page 231 that my mind was suddenly and properly blown: "Proof‐of‐Stake and Virtual Mining". I was immediately hooked by the genius of the Proof of Stake concept. Reading on, I learned of Ethereum's plans to deliver PoS, and there I hitched my wagon: a decision that I have not regretted for a single instant over the last 4.5 years. Never would I have imagined that I would be able to play a tiny part in finally delivering it.

I'll spare you the bit about how excited I am (and nervous too - I last felt like this on my wedding day). Anthony Sassano does a great job of capturing the momentousness of it all in today's Daily Gwei.

That so many (2647 unique depositors) have entrusted so much (855,264 ETH, worth over half a billion dollars as I write) to kicking off this endeavour is both wonderful and terrifying.

Until eight or nine days ago, all the questions were about, "will we make it?" Would enough Ether be committed to launch the chain? Progress was slow and flat. Journalists were asking me what we'd do if the ETH didn't come in, and there was a very long discussion on the specs repo about contingencies. But I had faith in you all! Slowly at first then all at once: the pace of deposits accelerated over the weekend, and went vertical on Monday, with deposit 16,384 coming in several hours ahead of the deadline.

Six-and-a-half days ago, my Teku node spat out the following historic information:

12:01:00.340 INFO  - Genesis Event ***
Genesis state root: 0x7e76880eb67bbdc86250aa578958e9d0675e64e714337855204fb5abaaf82c2b
Genesis block root: 0x4d611d5b93fdab69013a7f0a2f961caca0c853f87cfe9595fe50038163079360
Genesis time: 2020-12-01 12:00:23 GMT
Number of validators: 21063

The other clients all agreed, and now it's all systems "go"

for beacon chain genesis at 12:00:23 UTC on the 1st of December 2020, with the 21,063 genesis validators that made it into the deposit contract in time. (The rest are queued up to join gradually after genesis.)

How to follow genesis

Beaconcha.‍in's genesis dashboard is up. This is a super visualisation of the genesis process with the various milestones we hope to hit during the first 25 minutes or so. You can check out the kind of metrics that the devs will be looking at here.

And of course, there will be launch parties

• EthStaker + Ethereum Foundation
• EthHub + Bankless + Yield TV
• Stakefish

All begin at 11.30am UTC on December the 1st.

I'm looking forward to participating in the EthStaker party, and maybe making a quick appearance with StakeFish.

The rest of the news

That's pretty much all the prose I'm going to write today. There's been a vast amount of chatter on Twitter, and I can't possibly summarise all that. Of course, the usual naysayers and generally miserable types have popped out to try to rain on our parade, but frankly I couldn't care less

Staking guides

• Somer Esat updated his brilliant, brilliant client set-up guides ready for mainnet.
• CoinCashew has also updated their super-detailed guides for each client. It's in choose your own adventure format - click the tabs to take a different route. Includes Teku!
• Justin Leroux of Gridplus wrote a guide for Bankless, Running an ETH Validator for the Barely Motivated about staking with DAppNode and Avado. Hardware discounts available in the article!
• Here's a more detailed DAppNode guide by Pol Bordas.
• Coogan Brennan of ConsenSys academy is documenting his Eth2 staking journey in a series of four articles. Here's the first. If nothing else, be sure to read the introduction; Coogan writes wonderfully.

Explainers and best-practices

• Superphiz's super bench chats have evolved into State of the Stake - short daily video casts, under 10 mins, each covering an important topic.
• Superphiz also did a longer form in-depth interview about slashing with Jim McDonald of Attestant, and summarised it all in a super-important bench chat.
• EthStaker has put together a very good FAQ about all things staking.
• Phil.eth's best practices for Eth2 Staking, in tweet form and as a doc. Very thorough.
• Conor Svensson of Web3Labs follows up his quick Eth2 overview video with an Eth2 Deposit Walkthrough

Tooling

• Someone on the Teku discord brought up dshackle, which is a way of setting up automated failover between Eth1 nodes that can detect situations such as the node getting out of sync. You can also do this with nginx, but it's a little less capable.
• Stakefish's batch deposit contract was audited
• Alex Stokes's invaluable Eth2 fork monitor now supports all four mainnet ready clients, and is pointing at mainnet ready for genesis.
• The Block Monitor app apparently now supports alerting for beacon chain validators.
• The Ledger Nano X now supports Ethereum 2.0 keys. Ledger "is currently working on a second Ethereum application allowing stakers to securely sign blocks on the Beacon chain."

Other bits

• A very quick eth2 quick update no. 21 from Danny.
• The ethereum.org website now has an Eth2 vision page: "Grow Ethereum until it's powerful enough to help all of humanity". I can get behind that.
• Vitalik's analysis of deposit data statistics, with a linked Python script.
• Results of the Medalla data challenge are out. Some really excellent stuff there. I recommend spending some time in these articles if you really want to learn Eth2.
• The 5th Reddit AMA by the Ethereum Foundation research team.
• Jeff Coleman wrote a superb tweetstorm on "why millions of dollars of #ETH are being moved into this state of the art gadget, what makes it different from other #PoS systems, and why it was worth the wait!" Recommended.
• Adrian Manning from Lighthouse appeared in an episode of NEAR Protocol's excellent Whiteboard Series, discussing Eth2's network layer: Discovery v5, libp2p, Gossipsub, and the Eth2 RPC.
• I love Jacek's openness in giving us little glimpses behind the scenes at Nimbus. Here's an insight into some of the thinking around the fork choice implementation, exploring the kind of trade-offs all the client teams are having to make.
• If you have validators set up on mainnet, don't forget to try for your POAP. Just set your graffiti string as per the instructions.

Research

My colleague, Mikhail Kalinin published a proposal for an executable beacon chain. This is a way to make a very early merger between Eth1 and Eth2 (and thus turn off proof of work), potentially even before sharding is done. It's been interesting to see how the merger has gradually migrated forwards over time. The original idea was to move Eth1 into an execution engine as part of a Phase 2; then it was destined to become a shard of its own (or maybe 64 shards); and now it could be done directly on top of Phase 0. Yay for agility!

This is all part of Eth2 transitioning towards a rollup-centric roadmap. To that end another colleague, Alexandre Belling, published Rollups on a data-sharded Ethereum 2: linking the data availability with the execution. It's about proving "that the transactions put on the data shards are the same as the ones used in the execution shard, without providing these transactions to the smart contract."

A trio of articles on how validator stakes (and rewards) might be withdrawn from the beacon chain in future:

• Dirt Simple Withdrawal Contract by Jeff Coleman.
• Simple eth1 withdrawals (beacon-chain centric) is an alternative proposal from Danny Ryan.
• Jim McDonald proposes Simple Transfers of Excess Balance to avoid validator churn when withdrawals become enabled.

Upcoming events

• Messari presents ETH 2.0: The Next Evolution of the Cryptoeconomy. With Bison Trails. December 2, 14:30 UTC.
• Ethstaker quiz show #2 on December 5, 18:00 UTC.

And finally…

Camila Russo was kind enough to remind us all about the Eth2.0 rap.

See you all on the other side!

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