What's New in Eth2 - 11 March 2022

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

Edition 89 at eth2.news

Top picks

Marius's thread on testing the Merge is this week's winner. Primarily due to his accomplished use of memes. But also because #TestingTheMerge is the most important contribution you can make right now to getting Ethereum onto proof of stake asap.

A reminder that Superphiz and I have been recording regular recaps of the news on the Mondays after I publish. Look out for it on the EthStaker YouTube. YouTube says that one of them has over 1000 views - y'all need to get out more.

And don't forget to support your favourite Eth2 projects in Gitcoin Grants Round 13 which opened this week.

The Beacon Chain

Big milestone! Ten million ETH has been staked on the beacon chain 🥳

Beaconcha.in reports "only" 9,912,398 ETH is staked by live validators as I write. The remainder is in the queue waiting to be activated, so it will be 3 or 4 days yet until we see 10m actively validating. It will correspond to an astonishing 312,500 validator instances.

Ten million is an interesting milestone as it was one of the modelling assumptions we used when the beacon chain was originally designed. The rate of influx of stake does not seem to be slowing, and may even increase as validator income rises due to miner tips post-Merge. But the beacon chain is handling it all just fine. The participation rate chart shows incredibly high network participation over recent months, sometimes touching 99.77%.

In other beacon chain news, Fredrik Svantes published an Ethereum Foundation blog post Secured #2: Public Vulnerability Disclosures. This links through to the disclosures repository listing all known security incidents that affected Eth1 and Eth2 clients. Here's the Eth2 list. It's generally not possible to say much about security issues as they happen, but I love the after-the-fact transparency.

Speaking of security, a patch to the fork choice spec has been merged that addresses the LMD balancing attack that we discussed last month. This is not a breaking change, and clients can update to the new spec at their leisure.

The Merge

Wen Merge?

Superphiz reads the tea leaves.

Announcing the Kiln testnet

In a slight change to the plan, an additional devnet (closed testnet) was inserted into the schedule, merge-devnet-5. Things went well. The launch of the public Kiln testnet was was pushed back by ten days or so to allow for better docs and client releases. As Danny explained on the devs' call, the delay to the testnet is not expected to delay the Merge at all.

So, the Kiln Merge testnet is underway! This is very likely the final dedicated testnet we'll run before the Merge event itself. The proof of work genesis was on Thursday (10th); the proof of stake genesis (the beacon chain) occurred today (11th); and the terminal total difficulty (TTD) is set such that the actual transition to proof of stake should happen sometime mid next week.

Update: Looks like we need to raise the TTD due to some miners coming on board with GPUs. It's mission save Marius's weekend! Please contact Pari or Marius if you are running a PoW miner on Kiln. (I can't wait to be done with PoW once and for all; I won't miss this kind of nonsense.)

Expect to see a blog post about Kiln from the Ethereum Foundation on Monday.

Testing the Merge

For an in-depth introduction to the Kiln testnet, to #TestingTheMerge, and what you can do to help, check out the PEEPanEIP episode with Marius and Pari. Presentation slides are here.

Some getting started guides are already emerging, and I'll list a few below. A slight note of caution - unless you are super-eager, it's worth waiting a couple of days until your favourite client has made a release with the Kiln parameters baked-in. We'll be doing that for Teku early next week and it will save a degree of messing about. While Teku does fully support Kiln right now, there are various parameters you need to specify and some flags are changing name. With the next release it should all be super-smooth.

That said, for the eager:

• Rémy Roy has updated his Merge testnet guide for Kiln. This uses Lighthouse and Geth. Rémy and Superphiz made a video tutorial of it today.
• Short and sweet instructions for Prysm and Geth from Terence.
• Accidental Green has a detailed walk through for Teku and Geth.
• Chris Hobcroft also brings instructions for Teku and Geth.

Remember, folks, that diversity of Eth1 clients will be just as important as diversity of Eth2 clients post-Merge. I expect some write-ups for Besu and the others to be coming in the next week or two. Please don't overlook these excellent clients in your testing and Merge set-ups.

We'll always have Paris

The Ethereum Cat Herders hosted a call today to decide what to name the execution layer upgrade that will enable the Merge (the consensus layer upgrade is called Bellatrix). And the winning name is… Paris

Post-Merge

Alex Stokes has written a nice withdrawals meta-spec which is very helpful as I was finding it hard to keep track of this.

Tooling

Video of the Kurtosis workshop fractionally missed making it into the last edition. Kurtosis is "a platform for doing development and testing of distributed systems". The team has put together an Eth2 module that's proving useful for Merge testing, and the workshop was excellent. Tim Beiko is a fan!

Staking

I asked Lido for a progress report on their Road to Trustless Staking – which, in my view, is among the most important staking developments underway – and Izzy delivered.

Phiz has been churning out the content. Here's How to stake on Ethereum, March 2022 Edition. His latest State of the Stake is styled "The ravings of a lunatic", and who am I to disagree?

But seriously, it's a solid – if slightly sweaty – rant on client diversity.

The splendid Ethereum Pools Twitter account has put up a public dashboard, so you can do your own research.

Also for statistics nerds, Rated has analysed how well their metrics model, and also predict, actual validator earnings.

Jim McDonald brings us an Attestant Special with Evaluating Beacon Nodes 2022. Attestant runs their own Vouch technology that is able to select the most valuable block from among those generated by the four beacon chain clients, which allows them to evaluate the clients' relative performance. It's a fascinating read. Note, however, that (according to my own discussions with Jim) performance on Mainnet is quite different from that on the testnet. Hopefully he will publish a follow-up on that.

Something Jim is concerned about is the likelihood of block builder centralisation post-Merge. I share these concerns and have been agitating for more potential block builders for some time, both on- and off-record. But the economics of it all do seem to favour a monopoly in block production.

Media and stuff

Elias Simos has picked up again his series of interviews with people in the Ethereum 2 space, this time with an interview with Luke Youngblood of Coinbase. Reminder: Coinbase is probably the single largest entity staking on the beacon chain.

Amy Castor explains Ethereum's move to Proof of Stake in the MIT Technology Review. It is mostly accurate!

Research

Guillaume Ballet has been quietly plugging away on the Condrieu testnet. This implements Verkle trees in the execution layer, which is an important prerequisite for moving Ethereum towards statelessness in future.

Regular Calls

Eth2 Implementers

Call #83 took place on the 10th of March.

• Agenda
• Video (Looks like we only got the first 15 mins or so - Danny had to kill his VPN for bandwidth, that may have truncated the recording.)
• My quick notes.

All Core Devs

ACD Call #133 took place on the 4th of March.

• Agenda
• Video
• Tweet notes from Tim Beiko.

Lots of Merge-and-beyond topics covered:

• Kiln devnet and testnet updates
• Much discussion around whether to make the chain's "head", "safe head", or "finalised head" the default that is provided by the Eth1 RPC API.
• Planning for the post-Merge Shanghai upgrade, including withdrawals.
• Protolambda presented shard blob transactions, also a possible candidate for inclusion in Shanghai. The need for a trusted set-up ceremony was discussed.

In other news

• Lighthouse Update #40.
• Nimbus March update
  • Also, Nimbus has moved to CalVer. Where Teku leads, others follow
• Stereum Update #3.
• The Ethereum Foundation has opened an Academic Grants Round. A total of $750,000 is available. Proposals are due April 22, 2022.
• The latest on Distributed Validator Technology:
  • The Obol Proto Community is live!
  • Figment has taken a look at Obol and seems to like what they see.
  • SSV Community Digest Issue #14. Ben Affleck (loved him in The Accountant) likes his emojis 🥦

And finally…

Looks like we could end up with two Eth2 books

I knew that Kelvin was working on this a couple of years ago and I was collaborating with him a little. But it all went very quiet for almost two years, Kelvin had joined Optimism, and I assumed the project was dead. Since I've been itching to write the definitive Eth2 Book for a long time I finally plunged in towards the end of last year. Anyway, I'm now in touch with Kelvin again, and we'll take a view on where to go with this. One potential outcome is simply that we end up with two books - I expect they will be quite different and would complement each other. After all, there are already no fewer than three books on the history of Ethereum out there. We'll see.

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