--- tags: newineth2 description: The latest update on Ethereum 2.0 development image: https://benjaminion.xyz/f/favicon-96x96.png --- <style> a {text-decoration: underline;} a {color: #0000ee;} a:visited {color: #551a8b;} .ui-infobar {visibility: hidden; padding-top: 0;} .community-button {visibility: hidden;} .markdown-body {padding-top: 0;} </style> # What's New in Eth2 - 13 August 2021 ![My avatar](https://benjaminion.xyz/f/ms-icon-144x144.png =32x32) Ben Edgington (Eth2 at [ConsenSys](https://consensys.net/) — all views expressed are my own) Edition 75 at [eth2.news](https://eth2.news/) ## The Beacon Chain The formal verification of the Beacon Chain specification in the Dafny language [is complete](https://twitter.com/ConsenSysQuorum/status/1422903835761250315)! This is work by my excellent ConsenSys Protocols colleagues, Joanne Fuller and Franck Cassez. It's a monumental achievement, and among the most complex projects ever undertaken in Dafny. This work ought to provide a foundation for a very high degree of rigour in our future protocol development and analysis. You can find out more and run the proofs yourself from [the repo](https://github.com/ConsenSys/eth2.0-dafny). I believe that some blog posts and a paper (and maybe a video presentation) will be coming soon. In other spec news, there has been an update to the Eth2 API specification to [v2.0.0](https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-APIs/releases/tag/v2.0.0) in preparation for the Altair upgrade. One of the big motivations for the Altair upgrade is to enable light clients to operate efficiently within the Eth2 network. Imaging trustlessly running a light client in your browser rather than sending transactions via Infura or other trusted third-party. For a glimpse of what it will take to get us there, Alex Stokes has written about [Bootstrapping the beacon chain light client ecosystem](https://notes.ethereum.org/@ralexstokes/S1RSe1JlF). The other mildly interesting news is that the Eth2 deposit contract is now the contract that contains the [highest ETH balance](https://etherscan.io/accounts), having [just overtaken](https://twitter.com/antiprosynth/status/1425762470493294598) wrapped Ether (WETH). ### Altair The Altair upgrade slot for the Pyrmont testnet [has been decided](https://github.com/eth2-clients/eth2-networks/pull/56). Pyrmont will upgrade at epoch 61650, which is slot 1,972,800, due at 12 noon UTC on the 19th of August (plus 7 seconds). :::info <center> 🚨 If you are running validators on the Pyrmont testnet 🚨<br/> upgrade your client before Thursday! </center> ::: ### The Merge You know that [EIP-3675](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-3675) is the specification of the Merge of the Eth1 execution chain with the Eth2 consensus chain, right? Mikhail Kalinin did an excellent [deep dive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNIrIninMgg) on 3675 for the Ethereum Cat Herders' PeepAnEIP series. And here is a [short thread](https://twitter.com/nethermindeth/status/1424812633266528259) from Nethermind discussing some important aspects of The Merge from the Eth1 side of things. ## Staking StakeHouse [Community Call #5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akMtNy4Clac&t=578s) took place on the 11th of August. Follow progress on the GUI client installer and other projects. Here are [updates from the teams](https://github.com/stake-house/stakehouse/wiki/Updates-from-the-Teams), and a [project ideas list](https://github.com/stake-house/stakehouse/wiki/Project-Ideas-List). All help welcome! Client diversity remains a huge topic. Colfax of EthStaker and StakeHouse laid out some [great principles](https://twitter.com/colfaxselby/status/1424466820522815499) for enabling the staking community to become more diverse. There's much to like about this, and I'd love to see these things come about. However, this classic route tries to make Eth2 clients fully interchangeable; ensuring that it is as easy as possible to switch clients necessarily makes them somewhat indistinguishable. As I've discussed with Colfax, I think there is an alternative approach to consider. While I am ok with clients being fully fungible, it does make a product manager's heart sink a little. In team Teku, we've deliberately taken a different approach. It seems to me that an alternative way to promote diversity of clients is to make them quite _different_ from each other. That is, to optimise clients for specific user bases and use cases. Nimbus has a focus on low-power devices, while, at Teku, we're focusing on the institutional staking market, which means specialising in things that support professional stakers. I wonder if we could equally well achieve good deployment diversity by means of having specific clients tuned to specific user-bases. Ultimately, we can probably manage to accommodate both approaches through judicious use of standards. After all, whatever the explicit product focus, Teku remains a superb client for the individual staker. But I thought you might be interested to have a glimpse into my world. ### Tooling Rémy Roy made a terrific video explainer on [how to monitor your validators](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkvyd8k_R9Y), based on his incredibly detailed [guide](https://github.com/remyroy/ethstaker/blob/main/monitoring.md). There are some fabulous learnings here. Beaconcha.in's validator monitoring app continues to get [better and better](https://twitter.com/beaconcha_in/status/1425077372114583562). There is a [client metrics exporter](https://github.com/gobitfly/eth2-client-metrics-exporter) you can run to get your node's data into the app. Lighthouse actually supports this out of the box and doesn't need the exporter, and we're working on native support in Teku as well. ### Decentralised Staking The [SSV Community Call #2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8vM-9WY_aI) took place on the 11th of August. Alon Muroch presented the SSV Network public testnet launch. And there is a [new website](https://ssv.network/) to visit to find out more and get involved. (SSV is "Secret Shared Validator" - it's a rather weird name for something that would be better called a "distributed validator", or "resilient validator" imo.) Meanwhile, the [Rocket Pool testnet](https://medium.com/rocket-pool/rocket-pool-prater-testnet-guides-2428ecdc565e) Phase 4 has started, simulating a fully open Rocket Pool. I am excited for the future of decentralised staking! We badly need these technologies. ## The Great Explainers I appeared at the [Enterprise Ethereum Alliance Virtual Meetup](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5antzuQ-SU) to talk all things Eth2. As I said [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/benjaminion_xyz/status/1423597226706808832), I am basically clueless about Enterprise Ethereum, so it's just my usual presentation with a bit of extra fluff. Worth a watch if you want the big picture of where we are and how we got here. If you prefer Tweet-form, here's a solid what's coming in Eth 2.0 [explainer thread](https://twitter.com/PastryETH/status/1425640993085403140) from Pastry. And here's [eth2 update 015](https://bisontrails.co/eth2/015/) from Viktor Bunin of Bison Trails. ## Research Currently, the beacon chain achieves finality after two epochs, which is around 13 minutes. This finality delay means that there are opportunities for validators to re-org the more recent chain, for example in a [time bandit attack](https://www.coindesk.com/podcasts/coindesk-reports/time-bandit-attacks-on-ethereum), which is not good for stability and user experience. It would be nice if there were some degree of economic finality (that is, a significant cost to reorg the chain) after only a single slot. Vitalik has proposed just such a mechanism in [A model for cumulative committee-based finality](https://ethresear.ch/t/a-model-for-cumulative-committee-based-finality/10259?u=benjaminion). This would be an alternative to implementing Casper CBC consensus in future. It could allow for a reduction in the minimum stake, and thus many more validators. The [idea](https://ethresear.ch/t/proposer-block-builder-separation-friendly-fee-market-designs/9725?u=benjaminion) of separating the roles of shard builder and shard blob proposer is becoming more substantial. An early-stage [design](https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/pull/2486) has been merged into the [sharding spec](https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/dev/specs/sharding/beacon-chain.md). The main goal is to democratise MEV so that the value is not exclusively captured by large staking pools, but there are other benefits as well. Review and comments welcome! On the topic of sharding, here's [a call for discussion](https://ethresear.ch/t/gradual-sharding-rollout/10320?u=benjaminion) on whether 64 shards is the right number to kick off with, with the suggestion that fewer might be better initially, so as to have less of a supply-shock in block space availability. Fun fact: the maximum number of shards [in the spec](https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/blob/dev/specs/sharding/beacon-chain.md#misc-2) remains 1024 - it is already envisaged that we start low(-ish) and work up from there. ## Regular Calls ### Implementers Call #70 took place on the 12th of August. * [Agenda](https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-pm/issues/232) * [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24MRTRDJ-iw&t=256s) * My [quick notes](https://hackmd.io/@benjaminion/BJu7IifxY). ## Upcoming events - Saturday, August 21st at 18:00 UTC: [EthStaker Community Call #18](https://ethstaker.cc/community-call-18-saulius-grigaitis-of-the-grandine-beacon-chain-client/) Saulius Grigaitis of the Grandine Beacon Chain Client. - Wednesday, August 25th at 16:00 UTC: StakeHouse Community Call #6 (ping `colfax#1983` on Discord if you'd like to join in person.) ## In other news - [Changes Coming in Prysm V2](https://medium.com/prysmatic-labs/changes-coming-in-prysm-v2-stakers-need-to-know-be2601fbd4f5). Prysm installations will need to be updated to v2 before the Altair upgrade of the beacon chain. Also other big changes. * * * [![[Twitter]](https://benjaminion.xyz/newineth2/img/twitter.svg =40x40)](https://twitter.com/benjaminion_xyz) Follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/benjaminion_xyz) to hear when the next edition is out 🙌. [![[RSS]](https://benjaminion.xyz/newineth2/img/rss.svg =32x32)](https://benjaminion.xyz/newineth2/rss_feed.xml) We also have an [RSS feed](https://benjaminion.xyz/newineth2/rss_feed.xml). [Advertising](https://hackmd.io/@benjaminion/eth2_news/https%3A%2F%2Fhackmd.io%2F%40benjaminion%2Fadvertising) on this newsletter. [Give Feedback](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfkESc4CmNfRGHHjWfNeF3ceLwrXDvynetda4sKfJFJ71Oabw/viewform).