What's New in Eth2 - 30 December 2020

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

Edition 59 at eth2.news

Top picks

This is a short edition; you've got time on your hands: why not read it all :slightly_smiling_face: I guarantee you'll find plenty of good stuff here.

Phase 0: The beacon chain

Things continue to run very smoothly.

As I write, 2.1 million Ether has been sent to the deposit contract, worth over $1.5 billion. There are 47,000 active validators, with a further 19,000 in a three-week queue to get in. Participation rates continue to hover around 99%. And that's it. No news is good news!

Slashings update

I am tracking slashings to see what we can learn from them. Since the last tally, 18 further validators were slashed in three incidents.

1. Validator 1644 received an attester slashing for a double vote. It appears to be an individual, but not much more is known about this one.
2. Validator 23241 also received an attester-slashing. I've been in touch with the owner: this occurred due to briefly running the same keys on a second validator during a system upgrade.
3. The most severe event was the slashing of 16 validators, accounting for fully half of the validators slashed so far, apparently belonging to the same owner. They are all in the range 38058 to 38148, and were created in a single batch of 100 stakes by a 3200 ETH deposit to this bulk-deposit contract. Etherscan tags the contract as "Staked.‍us: Eth2 Depositor" with a link out to the staked.‍us website, and comments in the contract code confirm that it was authored by staked.‍us. But the contract is open and anyone can use it. No one has come forward publicly to claim responsibility for these slashed validators. The website of staked.us says that they "have never been slashed".

A reminder that getting slashed at this stage is not wonderful, but neither is it the end of the world. The total penalty is approximately 0.6 ETH out of the 32 ETH stake. The big issue is that the remaining ETH of slashed validators is now locked and unproductive until the Eth1/Eth2 merge.

If you'd like to follow slashings in real time, there is now a Twitter and Telegram bot you can follow. I hope it will be very quiet.

Testnets

The Pyrmont testnet is also running well. There have been some periods of non-finalisation when client teams have been performing upgrades and experiments, but it is otherwise healthy. There's no queue to enter, so if you want to test your staking set-up, joining Pyrmont is the best way.

Tooling

More great tools continue to emerge.

Bitquery has built a beacon chain explorer, and GraphQL API. This is a different approach from block explorers, and gives new insights. For example, it's interesting to see how the number of committees per slot has increased as more validators come on board. Eventually we want to have 64; so far we're up to 11. The attester slashings info looks a bit wonky, though.

Web3Labs has published its Web3j Eth2 Beacon Node API Client for querying Eth2 APIs from Java. Of course, they are using Teku to demo it :slightly_smiling_face:

Protolambda update

Proto doesn't take holidays! Here's a crazy tweet-form update on his latest work and plans. The data availability sampling prototype is making good progress. All this despite haveing a graphics card but nowhere to install it.

The Great Explainers

/u/accidental-green has written an Ethereum 2.0: Ubuntu for Beginners guide, with a terrific bonus section of links out to useful Ethereum resources. AG has written a bunch of other Eth2 guides as well.

Beaconcha.‍in has also assembled a very nice collection of links to Ethereum 2.0 educational materials.

Vitalik has written an ELI5 (for unnaturally smart five year olds) on sharding + DAS. DAS is "data availability sampling", so read this if you want to understand what Proto has been working on, above. The article is a nice primer on the next steps for Eth2 now that we've got the beacon chain running.

Media and stuff

Aditya Asgaonkar of the EF did an AMA with ETHPlanet: "Decentralization Is the Most Competitive Function of Eth2.0".

Here's a live-tweet of Vitalik presenting at EthBA on "Ethereum in 2021 and Beyond". And here's the video.

Danny Ryan appears in Coindesk's Year in Review with an interview that took place on the eve of beacon chain genesis.

Stateful Works is making a book about "the people and teams that brought the Ethereum Beacon Chain to life." I've submitted my contribution already. It was hard! I kept it very brief, but I could literally write a book myself on all this. Perhaps I shall, one day…

And finally…

That's your lot. I said it was a short one.

It only remains to wish all my readers a Happy New Year, and a wonderfully enjoyable and productive 2021! :fireworks:

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