Edition 89 at eth2.news
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.
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.
Superphiz reads the tea leaves.
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.
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:
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.
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
Alex Stokes has written a nice withdrawals meta-spec which is very helpful as I was finding it hard to keep track of this.
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!
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?
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.
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!
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.
Call #83 took place on the 10th of March.
ACD Call #133 took place on the 4th of March.
Lots of Merge-and-beyond topics covered:
Looks like we could end up with two Eth2 books
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