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title: What's New in Eth2 - 25&nbsp;February&nbsp;2022
tags: [newineth2]

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description: The latest update on Ethereum 2.0 development
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# What's New in Eth2 - 25&nbsp;February&nbsp;2022

![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 88 at [eth2.news](https://eth2.news/)

## Top picks

Danny Ryan with [Ethereum Proof of Stake and Our Solar Punk Future](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N10a1EBhBc) at EthDenver is a good watch.

And Preston Van Loon captures nice and succinctly why Ethereum 2.0 [is still a thing](https://youtu.be/TQN7QL2lsy0?t=146) :heart: Ignore the bores who will tell you otherwise.

## The Beacon Chain

Non-event of the week was the release of [a paper](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4036000)[^fn-paper-citation] claiming that, during the first 8 months of the beacon chain's life, 478 slashing violations had gone undetected and thus unpunished.

[^fn-paper-citation]:  He, Zhiguo and Li, Jiasun, Contract Enforcement and Decentralized Consensus: The Case of Slashing (February 16, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4036000 

This definitely falls into the Big if True magnitude of claim. It would mean that slashable offences were occurring four times more often than we thought. And, worse, that they weren't being detected, effectively rendering the whole slashing mechanism useless.

Particularly worrying was that one of our own team's validators is listed as an offender, and we _know_ we haven't done anything funky with the configuration, so it could only mean a client bug :scream:

To cut a long story short, the Eth2 devs immediately swung into action and pretty quickly realised that, as each of the slashing violations was investigated, it [turned out](https://twitter.com/ajsutton/status/1493797849792139264) to be [bogus](https://hackmd.io/@paulhauner/Hk0Ddl9J5) based on actual beacon client data. All the evidence pointed to [an indexing bug](https://twitter.com/beaconcha_in/status/1493852832524611584) in the beaconcha.&#x200b;in explorer, which the paper's authors [confirmed](https://twitter.com/mysteryfigure/status/1493816572087087105) had been their only source of data. The entire premise of the paper appears to be incorrect.

I've [said](https://hackmd.io/@benjaminion/wnie2_220211#Research) many times that I genuinely welcome engagement and scrutiny from the academic community of what we're doing here: it's hugely important. But I am really puzzled by the approach that seeks to publish an "Aha, Gotcha!" paper without any review by the core devs. Had the findings been [run by](https://twitter.com/dannyryan/status/1493948543609937923) us early on we could have saved everybody a heap of time, not to mention embarrassment.

On the positive side, we got some [better tooling](https://github.com/ConsenSys/teku/pull/4994) out of it, found the beaconcha.&#x200b;in bug, and enjoyed a small [comedy moment](https://twitter.com/mysteryfigure/status/1493795400117100551). (Yes, Paul H is running a ETH2.0 client.)

Tl;dr: nothing to see here.

## The Merge

More excitingly, the [Kiln v2](https://hackmd.io/@n0ble/kiln-spec) Merge spec is out. This adds a couple of things to what we have running on [`merge-devnet-4`](https://twitter.com/parithosh_j/status/1494311072345600004), and makes one breaking change.

  - Authentication has been added to the EngineAPI.
  - It provides for an optional heartbeat feature that checks whether the two paired clients (Eth1 and Eth2) are correctly configured.
  - `random` has been renamed to `prevRandao` following discussion at the last All Core Devs meeting. This is the breaking change.

Don't forget that you can keep up with client implementation progress with the [Kiln tracker](https://notes.ethereum.org/@timbeiko/kiln-milestones), and with overall progress at the [Merge readiness checklist](https://github.com/ethereum/pm/blob/master/Merge/mainnet-readiness.md).

### Kiln public testnet

Launch of the public Kiln testnet is expected early or mid next week. Not all clients support authentication on the engine API, but this is optional for now. As long as everybody renames `random` to `prevRandao` in time then we should be good to go.

As a reminder, we are expecting that this will be the last dedicated testnet before we start forking existing testnets for the Merge. Kiln v2 should be the final Merge spec, barring some possible non-substantive clean-ups.

If you have any questions about Kiln feel free to drop them in this [Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/t19lbh/kiln_the_merge_testnet_with_parithosh_j_marius_v/) and Pooja can get them answered by Marius and Pari at next week's PEEPanEIP recording, [Kiln - the Merge testnet & Goerli shadow forking](https://twitter.com/poojaranjan19/status/1497265185458774018).

## Staking

Rocket Pool [reached 1%](https://twitter.com/Rocket_Pool/status/1495571529819901954) - onwards and upwards! Anthony Sassano wrote about it in [The Daily Gwei](https://thedailygwei.substack.com/p/pooling-our-resources-the-daily-gwei). And my friend Sephiroth of Allnodes wrote about Rocket Pool for [Nasdaq.com](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-rocket-pool-is-democratizing-staking-for-ethereum-investors)

Superphiz wrote [a brief-ish history of client diversity on the beacon chain](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/sz5owa/a_hopefully_brief_history_of_client_diversity_on/). Phiz talks about the development of [pools.invis.cloud](https://pools.invis.cloud/) which provides an excellent insight into where the main responsibility lies for our current lop-sided client distribution.

On diversity, another great post from Attestant [explains](https://www.attestant.io/posts/helping-client-diversity/) how their Vouch "multi-node validator" can help to improve client diversity. Note that Vouch now [supports Nimbus](https://twitter.com/AttestantIO/status/1495828169433268224) as a beacon node.

[Rated.network](https://www.rated.network/) makes a reappearance this week, partly to correct the URL of their [announcement article](https://mirror.xyz/ratedw3b.eth/eDj9Fr0LgNWFL71DtyGfXp_ocVVYrCjJlQAGiLHCFWU), and partly because they have some front-end improvements, and a [new API](https://www.rated.network/api-doc). Their ultimate goal is to crowd-source transparency around the performance of staking services.

In a big leap forward for distributed validator technology (DVT), a [technical specification](https://github.com/ethereum/distributed-validator-specs) was released. My colleagues in ConsenSys Protocols R&D are currently working towards formally verifying this. Superphiz wrote a [mini-explainer](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/snrsax/how_dvt_solutions_like_blox_ssv_and_obol_relate/) on DVT if you are wondering what I am talking about, and [Carl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSt6McTVNVE) and [Aditya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbCy51LT4yg) both gave excellent short talks about DVT at EthDenver last week.

Finally, Tim Beiko kicked off a conversation about [staking UX](https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1493974771901468674). I have mixed feelings about this - maybe I'll discuss it with Phiz in our recording as I know this topic is close to his heart.

## The Great Explainers

Another [Jacek special](https://twitter.com/jcksie/status/1493524432719073284): how Nimbus uses [Era files](https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth2/pull/3394#issue-1138386544) for efficient and flexible handling of historic block and state data.

## Research

The Danksharding workshop happened on February the 14th. Here's the [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9oudTr5BE4). Dankrad ran through the proposed new data sharding (or data sampling) design for an hour, and then Vitalik walked through his [blob-transactions proposal](https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/blob_transactions). Slides, links to Eth Magicians' discussion threads, and other resources are linked from the [workshop overview](https://notes.ethereum.org/@hww/workshop_feb_2022).

In related news, Protolambda and team(s) put together a [prototype](https://twitter.com/protolambda/status/1495538286332624898) of blob-transactions at EthDenver. I should explain that blob transactions are an intermediate step towards full danksharding that could be implemented in the first post-Merge upgrade (known as Shanghai at the moment). These will bring some big scalability benefits for rollups.

Also slated for Shanghai are validator balance withdrawals. Activity is picking up on that front. Two versions are being explored, [pull](https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/pull/2759) withdrawals, and [push](https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/pull/2836) withdrawals, the latter being [prototyped](https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/24468) in Geth. Afaics, the "pull" version is automatic once a validator has exited and become withdrawable, and the "push" version is initiated by a beacon chain message. (Maybe. Tbh I have no idea.) Lots of discussion on the PRs linked, and here's a [Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ralexstokes/status/1496991439938633733) with some more goodies.

Also on [ethresear.ch](https://ethresear.ch/):
 - Vitalik looks at [inner product arguments](https://ethresear.ch/t/what-would-it-take-to-do-das-with-inner-product-arguments-ipas/12088?u=benjaminion) as an alternative to KZG commitments for data availability sampling. The main motivation is to avoid the trusted set-up required for polynomial commitments, but I don't see that as a big deal. (When he says "the risk in practice is high" he means "low".) Anyway, an interesting read and primer on the topic.

## Regular Calls

### Implementers

Call #82 took place on the 24th of February.

*   [Agenda](https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/484)
*   [Video](https://youtu.be/fqPk576t5iw)
*   My [quick notes](https://hackmd.io/@benjaminion/r1nwpZHe9)

We did some planning for the Kiln public testnet. Not all client teams are fully up to speed with the new Kiln v2 spec yet, but a workaround was proposed so that we can get the testnet up sooner rather than later.

We talked a little about stake/reward withdrawal mechanisms - some [design work](https://twitter.com/ralexstokes/status/1496991439938633733) is ongoing.

And Dankrad and Aditya gave us a walk through of their proposed methodology for [identifying the "safe head"](https://notes.ethereum.org/@adiasg/safe-head). The background to this is that currently an Eth1 node exposes information about the head of the PoW chain on its APIs. The options for doing this post-merge will be richer: there will be the "finalised head" (which has a strong guarantee about non-reversion), the actual head that the beacon node is working with (to be called the "unsafe head"), and the "safe head" which is a head block we are confident will not be reverted, given some assumptions about how much an attacker is prepared to lose. Unless the chain is under active attack or stress then the safe head will lag the actual head by only a few seconds, and is the one that will be exposed by the Eth1 node by default.

## Upcoming events
  - In case you haven't heard, Devconneeeeeeect is [happening](https://devconnect.org/) in April. Keep an eye on the [schedule](https://devconnect.org/schedule) for when tickets to the various events become available.

## In other news

  - GitCoin is publishing a book, [Proof of Stake](https://proofofstake.gitcoin.co/), which is a collection of Vitalik's writings over the years. Subtitle, "The making of Ethereum and the philosophy of blockchains".
  - Issue 2 of Under the Surface, from Stereum: [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxVcT6FsZAQ) (6 mins), and [Blog](https://stereum.net/under-the-surface-002/). Icydk, Stereum is building a graphical UI for staking.
  - Lodestar has been [added](https://twitter.com/ChainSafeth/status/1494400426870988807) to the Ethereum Foundation's [bug bounty programme](https://medium.com/chainsafe-systems/lodestar-joins-the-consensus-layer-bug-bounty-5716bcdebf60).
  - Lodestar again: Dapplion did a walk through of some upcoming changes planned for their [SSZ implementation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8g6gfzQnD0).
  - And it's a hat-trick from Lodestar! Here's a [Complete Setup Guide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xo85F-_fag) video.

## And finally...

Feeling too miserable about world events to put anything funny here today. Had a long talk with my daughter this evening about the evils of fascism. We went deep into what it means to defend our freedoms. And I remembered that this, ultimately &ndash; memes and drama and tech and friendships aside &ndash; is why I crypto.

* * *

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