What's New in Eth2 - 22 October 2021

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

Edition 80 at eth2.news

⚠ The Altair upgrade takes place on Wednesday 27th October at 10:56:23 UTC ⚠
Be sure your node is updated and ready!
Consult your client's dev team if in any doubt.

The Beacon Chain

As per the above warning, the Altair upgrade/fork on the beacon chain is imminent. If your beacon node is not on a very recent version then it will no longer be compatible with the network, and you will suffer penalties until you upgrade.

According to ChainSafe's NodeWatch, only 47.2% of nodes are ready for Altair at the time of writing this. If that's accurate (it might be backwards) and doesn't improve by Wednesday, it will be a disaster. Altair will be chaos, and the Merge will undoubtedly be delayed as we sort out the mess. Upgrade your nodes, friends! This is literally what you are being paid for. Go and do it now; I'll wait.

If the prospect of staking armageddon doesn't persuade you, then I suppose we'll need to bring out the big guns. Yep, there's a POAP available for updating your client and telling others about it.

For power-users, please note that Web3Signer also needs updating to v21.10.0 for Altair. You'll know if this applies to you.

EthStaker is hosting a watch party for the upgrade, which we very much hope will be utterly uneventful. I hear rumours of a POAP art canvas.

The Merge

We're all safely back from the Merge Workshop. My ConsenSys homies did a nice write-up of the event, and there's a write-up from the Ethereum Foundation too.

Coming out of the workshop is the Pithos testnet which is running nicely with various combinations of Eth1 (execution) and Eth2 (consensus) clients. In case you are wondering, a Pithos is another kind of Greek earthenware jar, much like an Amphora, I guess.

There are a couple of Pithos monitoring tools: a block explorer, and a consensus monitor. You can try joining Pithos if you like. It's not intended to be simple to use yet, and comes with no guarantees. Nonetheless, CoinCashew's guide reckons you can be up and running in less than 10 minutes. And here are EthStaker's SuperPhiz and friends getting up and running on video. If you know Ansible, instructions and scripts are here.

Good news is that Prysm has now caught up with the Merge interop, and also has instructions on joining Pithos.

There are plans to stand up a larger, more stable Merge testnet in a few weeks.

Vitalik's annotated Merge spec is an excellent read to gain a better understanding of what we're doing here. See also Alex and Proto's LisCon talk.

Wen merge

Lots of discussion on last week's Ethereum All Core Devs call. The difficulty bomb on Eth1 must be postponed again, and they need to estimate how far to push it out.

After much conversation, it was decided to punt the bomb to June 2022, with the expectation that the Merge will likely have happened by then.

Please note that this is not a commitment!!! No Eth2 client devs were involved in this decision. At best, it is a planning target. We will not launch until we are utterly convinced that The Merge is ready; it would be better to push the bomb out again than merge too early. Don't shoot the messenger

Staking

Diversity redux

Client diversity remains the topic du jour. I was glad to host a panel discussion on this at the EthGlobal summit last week, with Evan Van Ness, Carl Beek, Superphiz, and DappLion.

As Evan says, most panel discussions are pretty dull. But this one turned out to be nicely

, which is the more surprising as we all 99% agree on this topic. Nonetheless, the areas where we disagreed are instructive. I didn't do a lot. I just asked a couple of innocent questions like, "Is Prysm too big to fail?", and "Was client diversity a mistake?", and retired to a safe distance

See also Carl's provocatively named LisCon talk.

Meanwhile, Michael Sproul has updated his client diversity stats based on ever more sophisticated block fingerprint analysis. This is an excellent thread, with some interesting findings.

Stereum

Stereum has been busy with their beacon node launcher. Version 1.8 is out, as is their security audit (man, I love a good audit report). And they have launched their upkeep challenge - registration closes on the 31st of October. NFTs and POAPs are available for participating, and for missing as few attestations as possible during November. It's a nice idea - though I am cautious about doxxing my (wife's) validator IDs, so I might not participate myself.

Media and stuff

First, I owe the Prysm team an apology for missing their PEEPanEIP session a few weeks ago on the Altair Upgrade and Roadmap. Sorry for that, guys. Still time to watch before Altair goes live! Pooja has just made a nice round-up of all the past Altair-related sessions.

There were a bunch of Eth2-related talks at LisCon this week. The agenda is here, and videos here. A few selected talks from the ones that are up so far:

• Carl Beekhuizen on The Prysm Problem- exploring the spectrum of client diversity
• Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, The game of reorgs in PoS Ethereum
• Alex Stokes & Proto with Development of The Merge
• DappLion's talk on Light clients will surely be worth a look, but I don't see the video anywhere yet.

Also at LisCon was an informal side-conference organised by Blox Staking/ssv.network: [SSV] Conference - The Future of ETH Staking. Conversation ranged widely across a broad selection of beacon chain, staking, and client diversity topics.

Speaking of SSV (secret shared validators), the Obol Network de-cloaked this week. I am delighted to be an advisor to this project. I know Collin and Oisín from ConsenSys, and fully expect this to be a huge success.

EthGlobal hosted a Merge & Scalability Summit for the close of their month-long EthOnline event. Quality talks, as ever:

• Josh Stark, Year in Ethereum
• Danny Ryan, Killing Proof of Work
• The above-mentioned Client Diversity Panel in case you want to watch it again. I know you do.
• Marius van der Wijden, The Merge from the Perspective of the Execution Layer
• Guillaume Ballet, Statelessness & Verkle Trees
• Vitalik, Upgrading our infrastructure for a rollup-centric Ethereum
• AMA with Aya Miyaguchi

Finally, a couple of pods for you:

• Danny Ryan on the Bankless Layer Zero podcast
• Vasiliy Shapovalov of Lido on Epicenter

Research

BitMEX continue their series on Staking with a substantial discussion piece on issues around outsourced stake, concluding that:

large amounts of outsourced stake are a significant potential problem for the ETH 2.0 network

This is primarily why Ethereum never considered implementing a formal delegated proof of stake (dPoS) protocol. Though it looks like we might end up in a similar place if not enough solo-stakers step up and get involved.

Here's a lengthy and detailed analysis (with pretty pictures!) of what the equilibrium supply of Ether might look like in a post-1559, post-Merge era. Depending on details, the supply might eventually stabilise between 27.3-49.5 million ETH (less than one quarter to one half of the supply today), or there may even be perpetual deflation. Did somebody say ultra sound?

Vitalik's work on block builder/block proposer separation continues to evolve. Latest is Two-slot proposer/builder separation. On my quick read, beacon chain slots would be reduced from 12 to 8 seconds, and execution blocks (Eth1 blocks) would be added once every two slots (every 16 seconds). It's mainly about giving block builders confidence that they can safely publish their blocks. I suspect it's also about restoring the power-of-two zen - everything has felt weirdly out of balance since slots were set to 12 seconds long <shudder>.

Itching to get involved in some serious Eth2 research? cadCAD has released their Masterclass in Ethereum Validator Economics. This honestly looks amazing.

Regular Calls

Implementers

Call #74 took place on the 21st of October.

• Agenda
• Video
• My quick notes.

Mostly straightforward, the only irregular item being a discussion of naming for the various upgrades involved in The Merge. The two hardest things in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. (Yeah, it's confirmed, I am funny af.)

Stakehouse

Stakehouse Community Call #9 took place on the 13th of October. I was happy to join the discussion led by James He of Prysm on standardisation of key management APIs for validators.

Upcoming events

• Wednesday 27 October, 10:30 UTC: EthStaker Altair watch party
• Sunday 31 October: registration closes for Stereum's validator upkeep challenge
• Friday 5 Nov, 14:00 UTC: The Merge Community Call #1

In other news

• Lido is fixing up the issue found recently around front-running of deposits. I hear that Rocket Pool is testing their fix on the Prater testnet, and it is being audited by Sigma Prime before a new mainnet launch date is set.
• A Lodestar for Ethereum Consensus - the first in a new series of updates from the Chainsafe team.

And finally…

Come and work with me! ConsenSys is hiring for a Blockchain Ecosystem Advisor, which is basically a research analyst advising the business on strategy in this crazy, crazy ecosystem. If I weren't already in my dream role, I'd definitely be applying for that

If you'd like to actually join my team and work on Teku, we continue to hire. I'd be overjoyed to find another terrific Java dev in a Europe-ish time zone. Let me know if you apply!

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