HackMDWhat's New in Eth2 - 10 April 2021
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Edition 66 at eth2.news
Top picks
Easy decision this week: The Eth 2.0 Merge.
Teku is hiring!
If you are a Java dev who'd like to be a core dev then check out the role description.
Feel free to drop me a line if you have questions or would just like to chat about the role: ben.edgington@consensys.net or ping me on Twitter.
I can personally vouch for our wonderful team
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The Beacon Chain
There's been a slashing! After two entire months with no slashing events at all, there was a single, isolated slashing on April 6th. Unfortunately I don't have any further info on this one.
A security advisory was issued for the Blst cryptographic library, which I believe all four mainnet clients are using. It looks difficult to exploit, but all clients have now updated to a fixed version. There were also a few other bug fixes. If you haven't updated your node recently, I recommend that you do so. (No release version of Teku used an affected version of Blst, but it's always good to keep up to date.)
There is a new proposal for fixing a potential finality delay attack. We discuss this a little on the recent devs' call: a coordinated fork would not be required to implement it, and we can decouple the roll-out from the Altair upgrade.
Altair
Altair is the beacon chain upgrade due for mid-2021.
No huge updates from last time, though an alpha.3 version of the spec is out. This is basically just a few fixes and clarifications. My one-character pull request made it in
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Teams continue to plug away on implementation, with a planning goal of June or July for deployment.
The Merge
The Merge is the plan to get Ethereum onto Proof of Stake as soon as possible. There is momentum among devs to get the Merge done this year. That is aspirational; a more realistic estimate might be Q1/2022.
Prysm has joined the gang of clients that have demonstrated interoperability with the Eth1 Merge client, Catalyst. (Teku did this last August, and Lighthouse last month).
Mikhail Kalinin has written up a detailed specification of what needs to be done to current Eth1 Proof of Work clients to get them ready for the transition to Proof of Stake. It's really a limited set of changes, and I am hopeful that we will have several viable execution layer clients by the time the Merge is enacted.
Regular calls are being held to discuss the Merge. These are not live-streamed, but agendas, and recordings are available.
As ever, the hardest thing about the whole effort is what to call stuff. Mikhail has nicely summarised hours of intense discussion in Telegram and Discord groups. In short, we are going for "Consensus layer" for the Beacon Chain side of things post-merge, and "Execution layer" for the EVM/Eth1 side of things post-merge. Lots more detail in Mikhail's doc.
Rayonism
Rayonism is a coordinated effort to build and demonstrate a merged, sharded devnet, with a stretch goal of putting the Optimism rollup on top of it all.
The effort is taking place under the umbrella of the month-long EthGlobal Scaling Ethereum Hackathon, with most if not all of the relevant Eth1 and Eth2 teams represented.
There was a kick-off call on April 7th, and a detailed meta specification has been put together. To follow progress or get involved, you can join the Rayonism Discord channel.
Protolambda is hosting optional, informal "office hours" for participants via the Discord voice channel #rayonism-calls at the following times, and at the same times in subsequent weeks:
| PT (-7) | UTC | CET (+2) | AEST (+10) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10:00 Mon | 17:00 Mon April 12 | 19:00 Mon | 03:00 Tue |
| 18:00 Wed | 01:00 Thu April 15 | 03:00 Thu | 11:00 Thu |
| 02:00 Fri | 09:00 Fri April 16 | 11:00 Fri | 19:00 Fri |
Testnets
The Nimbus team wrote a short thread nicely introducing the Prater network. We are encouraging all test stakers on the Pyrmont network to migrate over to Prater in the coming weeks as we plan to use Pyrmont for some experiments and it could get a bit unstable. Here's the Prater launchpad.
Tooling
The deposit CLI has been updated to support the new functionality that allows depositors to specify an Eth1 address for withdrawal rather than a BLS12-381 withdrawal key. This is a great usability simplification, and opens the way for properly trustless staking pools.
Valid8r, which is a kind of "linting system" for checking the configuration of your Beacon Chain staking set up, has had a v1.0.0 release.
This is a potentially useful resource: Beaconcha.in's identification of staking pools by Eth1 address.
The Great Explainers
InsideTheSim is community-sourcing an FAQ on The Eth 2.0 Merge. This already has a lot of quality content. Go and add some more!
Lots from Vitalik over the last couple of weeks. First, a braindump on Proof of Stake vs Proof of Work, prompted by Justin Drake's Bankless episode. (I do recommend that episode—all two hours of it!—for some great not-too-technical insights into why Proof of Stake fundamentally provides better security than Proof of Work, among other things.)
Vitalik has also been posting some nice concise explainers of various Eth2 ideas and concepts to Reddit lately. Here's an idea about shard block staggering for faster block times which he first suggested on Ethresear.ch a couple of years ago. And there's one discussing Single secret leader election protocols. Neither of these are yet in the protocol, but could make it into the roadmap at some point.
And something more substantial from Vitalik on Why sharding is great: demystifying the technical properties.
Protolambda has produced another of his epic diagrams. Click on sections to expand. (The original and the best is here, though elements may be a little dated now, such as crosslinks.)
Pintail published an excellent deep dive into staking rewards. If you want to know why some validators have loads of block proposals already, and some (like mine) very few, this is the place to look. Lakshman Sankar added some comments, and linked to Pintail's simple spreadsheet calculator for rewards.
Media and Stuff
Check out the progress of the Beacon Book at Update 001. I have the pleasure of proof-reading this tomorrow, which I am looking forward to very much. There are contributions from 46 folk involved in delivering Ethereum 2.0. It reminds me that we are doing something important.
Continuing the theme of people-of-Eth2, Elias Simos of Bison Trails has published the fourth of his profiles: this one of Jacek Sieka of Nimbus. I've enjoyed this series very much, if only for the different viewpoints each of the interviewees brought along. It's interesting that Jacek once worked on high-frequency trading; Adrian Sutton from the Teku team is also a HFT veteran.
And there's another terrific Eth2 update from Viktor Bunin, also of Bison Trails, update 013.
Danny Ryan, not of Bison Trails, published Finalized no. 25 covering Rayonism, the Blst advisory, and a reminder about the open Beacon Chain security+testing RfP.
Tim Beiko recently ceased being my colleague
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Coindesk's latest Mapping out Eth2 podcasts:
- What Eth 2.0 Meant in 2014 and What It Means Today
- Education: The North Star of Navigating Ethereum - we talk to Coogan Brennan about his excellent series of articles on setting up as a solo staker.
Research
Elliptic curve gurus might like to take a look at Vitalik's Request for cryptographic primitive: vector commitment for elliptic curve points with algebraic properties.
Also from Vitalik, a simplified proposal for capping the number of validators active at any one time to, say, half a million. This is intended to maintain a high level of security, while not over-burdening nodes with having to process the activities of even more huge numbers of validators.
Regular Calls
Implementers
Call #61 took place on the 8th of April. There were technical problems getting the live stream up, but a recording was made and uploaded after the meeting. You can't see who's there
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- Agenda
- Video
- My quick notes, and Alex Stokes's Tweet thread.
The Merge
Call #1 took place on the 1st of April. The main goal was to run the proposed Merge specification past the Eth1 client maintainers and gather feedback. My impression is that people left the meeting quite positive about the state of play.
Upcoming events
- April 20th, 2021 at 5pm PST: deadline for responses to the Beacon chain security and testing RFP
- April 16th - May 13th: Scaling Ethereum, including the Rayonism effort.
In other news
I published some cheeky performance comparisons between Teku and the other clients. In truth, Teku's advantage is marginal, but I'm still proud of the team! /u/torfbolt got similar results when comparing client performance in Rocketpool Beta 3.
And finally…
Did I mention that Teku is hiring?
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