EPF Dev Update #10

This update contains my work done on weeks 11 and 12 of the EPF (2023-09-25 to 2023-10-08).

tl;dr:

• Wrote an article explaining how Lighthouse starts a beacon node.
• Had a breakthrough on my understanding of how all the layers fit together.
• I'll be giving a talk on the ethStaker’s Staking Gathering at Devconnect!

Lighthouse Beacon Node Startup

On my last update, I mentioned that I went through the Lighthouse codebase trying to understand how it starts a beacon node. I learned a lot from that so I decided to write an article explaining what I learned.

In the article, I explain everything that happens from the moment you start a beacon node from your terminal up to the moment when lighthouse calls the Engine API endpoints necessary to start the beacon node.

Here's the article.

How all fits together

Writing the Lighthouse article helped me make sense of how the execution clients, consensus clients and PBS providers fit together and comunicate with each other.

This made me understand what specific endpoints would I need to implement on a portal client for it to be able to replace an execution layer client.

I will be writing everything down, making diagrams and asking for feedback on the coming weeks. This way, I'll be sure that I didn't make any mistakes.

All of that will be condensed into the Engine API flows article I mentioned last week.

Devconnect talk

I'll be giving a talk on the ethStaker’s Staking Gathering!

Along with Jason Carver from the Trin team, we'll talk about Replacing execution clients in staking setups… which is what I've been working on during the EPF.

We've already started coordinating the talk with Jason. So far we've only discussed how we want to split the talk and the general direction we want to give it. We'll figure out the details in the coming weeks.

For now, I have to write the Engine API article I mentioned in the previous section. It's content will probably be very similar to what I'll say on the talk.