What's New in Eth2 - 16 July 2021

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

Edition 73 at eth2.news

Top picks

Acquaint yourself with the Merge readiness checklist.

The Beacon Chain

Beacon chain status: A-OK. I don't know what else to add. Deposits continue to flow in, possibly including from a significant whale.

I'm happy to report that we have no fail of the week this time. But here's a consolidated record of Staking Pool Mishaps, including slashings, rugpulls, and other disasters for your reference.

Altair

Altair is an upgrade to the beacon chain that modifies a few parameters and calculations, and introduces sync committees. This is not The Merge.

Beta 1 of the Altair spec, Astrophotography, was released. Yep, we're officially out of Alpha

This means no more breaking changes unless critical security issues are found.

Beta 1 is mostly about increasing test coverage. There is one substantive but non-breaking change, which is to increase the target number of sync committee aggregators from 4 to 16. The reasons for this change are quite interesting.

As discussed on the devs' call, all clients are passing the enhanced tests.

Altair devnets

Since we last met, two Altair devnets have been run. These are relatively small, with only 10,000 validators, shared between the client teams and the Ethereum Foundation.

Devnet 0 sprang to life at 1200 UTC on July the 8th and forked to Altair ten epochs (64 minutes) later. We just about made it through: a couple of clients had some wobbles, but within 9 epochs or so we managed to finalise the fork epoch checkpoint and all was smooth thereafter.

Devnet 1 started exactly a week later to see if we could sail through the fork this time. We almost made it - as reported on the devs' call, Prysm initially had some issues gossiping Altair blocks and attestations. Nonetheless, even without their 20% of validators we were able to finalise the fork epoch checkpoint in a timely fashion. By the end of the call Prysm was back and things have been running nicely, but for a sync committee message issue in Teku (fixed by Proto!). Lodestar participated, and proposed the first block.

The plan from here on is to upgrade Devnet 1 to the Beta 1 spec early next week. This is not a fork and does not require coordination. We may run one further devnet to make sure we can fork without losing anyone. On the next call (29th of July) we will plan when and how to deploy Altair to the Pyrmont testnet.

The Merge

The Merge is the process of turning off proof of work and transitioning Ethereum's consensus over to the proof of stake beacon chain.

The excellent news is the The Merge Mainnet Readiness Checklist is up on the Ethereum project management repo. The number of tasks to be completed looks many, but the majority of them are rather small and basically testing or administration related. I expect that, once London and Altair are behind us, we will make rapid progress on checking these off.

Tooling

CADLabs published an Ethereum Economic Model, including the beacon chain, EIP-1559, and the Merge. The Twitter thread gives some terrific examples of what you can do with this. There is talk of putting a front-end on it all.

I think this has been around a while, but I just came across it: calculate the probability of your validator(s) making a proposal in the next two weeks. New stakers often seem puzzled by the variance in how often validators propose blocks; we are not very good at dealing with randomness.

The Great Explainers

There are a couple of new graphics for the short-term Ethereum roadmap floating around. Here's Trent Van Epps' work, and here's one that Tim Beiko presented and Pooja Ranjan made.

James Spediacci has made a Telegram group for those wanting to learn how to set up their own staking rigs and stake from home. I haven't checked it out, but he looks trustworthy

Media and other stuff

The Beacon Book is out! Follow that link to find out more, to sign up for the Genesis auction, to buy NFTs of the artwork, and to read the entire text. I received my lovely contributor copy last week^[1].

Bankless hosted an ETH Staking Panel discussion with Coinbase, Lido, and Rocket Pool participating.

I did a couple more talky things. On the Compass Mining podcast I explained ever so nicely to Ethereum miners that their days are numbered. We covered a lot of proof of stake basics, so worth a listen even if you have no interest in mining. And I did a PeepAnEip with the Ethereum Cat Herders on A Brief History of Ethereum's Future. I love this theme

Here's a round-up of the various recordings I've done recently.

Dankrad has also been busy, taking on Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana on the Blockchain Debate podcast.

Research

Dmitry Shmatko of ConsenSys TX/RX team published a demo and tutorial for a prototype of validator stake withdrawals. This requires careful coordination between the beacon chain (consensus side) and the execution chain (Eth1 side) and is a big step forward. It is definitely just a PoC at this stage, so don't panic! There will most certainly be nice shiny front-ends put on the process when it finally gets implemented.

Speaking of withdrawals, Georgios Konstantopoulos has an interesting proposal to introduce another type of withdrawal credential, 0x03, but it could be an extension of the existing 0x01. This would allow a smart contract to initiate validator voluntary exits. Stakers in pools would have more control over their funds, and it enables some interesting use cases around tokenising stake. The proliferation of withdrawal credential types is getting a bit confusing—Lido is just now upgrading from 0x00 to 0x01 credentials; and I can't even remember what 0x02 is any more—but it does seem like an excellent idea.

Also on ethresear.ch:

• Dankrad has a Suggested format for shard blob headers

Regular Calls

Implementers

Call #68 took place on the 15th of July.

• Agenda
• Video
• My quick notes, and Tweet form from Alex Stokes.

Half the meeting was Altair updates and planning, for which, see above.

The other half was some discussion around rather technical Merge topics. The dedicated Merge call had been cancelled - the plan is gradually to move the Merge discussions into the mainstream devs calls: this one, and the Ethereum All Core Devs every other Friday.

Upcoming events

• 20-22 July: EthCC is happening ! I won't be there, unfortunately, but will be following along online. The agenda is out, and there is a dedicated Ethereum 2.0 track, among many other good things.
  • 20 July, 17:00 UTC/19:00 CEST: Nethermind, Flashbots, and Lido are hosting an Ethereum 2.0 staking and beyond event. The Meetup site says that it will also be streamed.

Stakers: be sure to update your Eth1 nodes before the London fork on August the 4th!

In other news

• Prysmatic Labs' June update.

And finally…

Here's a cake for Proof of Stake:

It could be the tenth anniversary of the idea of PoS. Here's a Bitcoin Talk post from July 11th, 2011 proposing Proof of stake instead of proof of work.

I became aware of PoS in around March 2016, so I've known it for half its life

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1. Note that, although contributors are eligible to receive proceeds, I am donating mine back to Stateful Works - I am shilling this because I love it, not for any personal gain

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