Source | What's New in Eth2
Author | Ben Edgington
recommended this week
Source | What's New in Eth2
Author | Ben Edgington
Some good podcasts to listen to this past week:
beacon chain
➤ Danny Ryan participates in Epicenter: Ethereum Foundation – An Eth2 Progress Update (Ethereum Foundation – Eth2 Progress Update)
➤ Vitalik conducts an important three-hour interview as a guest on the Lex Fridman Podcast
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Beacon chain has been running continuously for more than six months, 🎂 Apart from the unexpected event that Prysm stopped producing blocks for a few hours, its operation status has been very good. There was more slashing than I thought, but most of it was caused by a single servicer, and overall the number of slashing incidents was small. To the best of our knowledge, all slashes were due to misconfigurations by node operators (either individuals or staking services) and did not involve client or protocol vulnerabilities. Note that validators are only slashed for violating protocol rules, not for being offline: if you follow basic good behavior and advice, you will not be slashed.
Staking
Omni Analytics has been visualizing the function and health of your network. Lots of nice charts comparing validator behavior on the Medalla testnet and mainnet, and a preview of the network health panel. (Oddly, they seem to ignore the connection between §3.7/3.8 and §3.9: Forced exit due to slashing)
tool
Want to stake on Windows? Well the Lighthouse client is joining and other clients have implemented support. If you've gone the Windows route, these tips will keep your setup looking good no matter which client you choose.
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merge work
Interpretive resources
The Merge refers to the conversion of Ethereum from the Proof of Work chain to the Proof of Stake beacon chain operation.While the Rayonism project demonstrated the overall viability of The Merge, it did not explore an actual switch from PoW to PoS. Mikhail recently published the technical design of the handoff process, and there are a lot of things to be careful about. Prior to a merger, the behavior of existing miners is likely to be the least predictable, so various scenarios need to be considered in planning.first level title
Interpretive resources
Real scaling in blockchain is not easy. Otherwise, we would have achieved it long ago. Vitalik in his article
The Limits to Blockchain Scalability (blockchain expansion bottleneck)
Jeff Lau's series of tweets explained the merge work to us.
Media and other resources
About SSZ, everything you want to know but dare not ask.
Learn about the Kate (KZG) Commitment and Verkle Tries. These are important cryptographic tools that can be used to move to stateless Ethereum and ensure data availability in shards.
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Media and other resources
James Beck interviewed my excellent colleagues Sajida Zouarhi (product manager of the Besu Eth1 client) and Mikhail Kalinin (in charge of the technical design of the merge) and summarized them in an article: Charting The Path To Proof of Stake Ethereum proof of path to Ethereum). This is a teaser tweet, but the full interview is well worth a watch.
NBC News wrote about Proof of Stake with some narration from Danny Ryan. I'm especially like, "This is a fundamental breakthrough for humanity, we can now do things we couldn't do otherwise".
A three-hour interview with Vitalik and Lex Fridman (audio version here, first eight minutes of commercials), here are some extras:
➤ "Craig Wright is a liar... sue me" (0:57:39 and 2:22:42)
If you don’t want to listen to all of them, YouTube videos can jump to different topics, among which Eth2, PoS and expansion-related discussions are all good.
research work
Christine and I had a discussion on Coindesk's Mapping out Eth2.0 podcast. In the May 27th episode, we discussed how to deal with security breaches in the decentralized ecosystem, and on June 3rd I touched on Bitcoin's attempt at environmental friendliness. Not the most coherent in terms of expression, but all interesting.
Coindesk's Valid Points publications: The Risks and Rewards of Sharding and Why Staking on Eth 2.0 Is Becoming Lucrative for Exchanges
Protolambda published his thoughts on the post-merger sharding route, summarizing the challenges ahead. A lot of work is going on behind the scenes.
regular meeting
implementers meeting
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regular meeting
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implementers meeting
The 65th meeting took place on 3 June.
➤ Meeting Agenda
➤ Conference video
The meeting was longer and more interactive than we are used to. Discussions were held around three themes (not recorded in detail in my notes, if you are interested, I suggest you watch the conference video).
First, whether to change the reward structure for the Sync Committee in the Altair spec. The current approach can lead to significant discrepancies in the rewards received by validators who perform equally well. Improving this is largely undisputed, and the main discussion is which of the following two proposals should be adopted: the proposal from Potuz, and the proposal from Vitalik. Both proposals were fine, but Vitalik's version ended up being adopted.
The second also discusses Jacek's proposal to incorporate the history block root accumulator into the state, and whether this is best done in one protocol or across two protocol upgrades. At this stage, there are some suggestions for not adding more to the Altair, but all agree that the basic concept is sound. Finally, the release of the final Altair specification (Alpha 7) has been delayed until next week to allow for more discussion on this.
Third, Rocket Pool’s Joe Clapis cameos proposing 0x02 withdrawal vouchers for a fair distribution of transaction rewards across the combined staking pool. The matter is not urgent, so this is an overview of the issue.
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merge meeting
➤ Meeting Agenda
➤ Conference video
The session included discussions on the merge transition process, the API between consensus and execution clients and whether to store the ExecutionPayloadHeader or the full ExecutionPayload in the beacon state, and how to handle difficulties with merged opcodes.
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recent activities
On June 23 at 1300 UTC, the Ethereum Foundation will conduct an Eth2 team AMA on /r/ethereum
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other information
➤ Danny Ryan: Finalized no. 26, a brief update on Altair, Rayonism and the progress of the merger.
