Original source:《What's New in Eth2》
Original Author: Ben Edgington
Original compilation: ETH Chinese
There is no Eth2 coin. Anyone who offers you Eth2 tokens is a liar. (obviously I need to say this)
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First recommendation of the week
The eighth AMA of the EF research team. (Translator's Note: The Chinese version of the expansion part of this AMA)
It's coming!
We've finally spoken publicly about a possible merge date!
In case anyone still doesn't know, at the consensus layer developer meeting on July 14th, the developers proposed September 19th[1] as the planned target for the merge.
Please treat this target date with sufficient caution. This is not a goal that has to be achieved without breaking the boat, but a writing point to help everyone make plans. Many node operators have a lot of work to do between now and then, and these goals help them focus. Tim Beiko's cheese analogy compares the certainty of the mainnet date to the consistency of burrata cheese.
At the meeting, we discussed doing Goerli's Bellatrix upgrade on August 8th and targeting the 11th for the Goerli merger. The TTD (Termination Total Difficulty) for Goerli's merger is expected to be selected early next month, but the latest I've read is that Bellatrix may move up to August 4th, with TTD on the 10th. Keep in mind that these dates are targets: due to PoW hashrate and some weird Proof-of-Authority (PoA) process on the Goerli testnet, TTD progress is subject to variability across all networks, so it can vary by a few days.
test merge
Sepolia
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In the last update, we have successfully merged the Sepolia testnet into Proof of Stake. TTD was reached and the first merged block was produced on July 6th at 1400 UTC, only 24 seconds behind the target time thanks to precise hashrate adjustments. Anthony Sassano hosted the Sepolia Watch Party with fellow EthStaker folks. This time it was much shorter than Ropsten's time.
Immediately after the merger, network engagement dropped to about 70%, which is a bit concerning. The large number of dropped validators turned out to be entirely due to user error when configuring the nodes. Over the next few hours, as people fixed their bugs, participation went back to 95%, which was effectively 100%, because 5% of validator keys were lost at some point.
The node configuration issue was mostly related to the way we performed the testnet merge: first setting up a fake TTD and then upgrading to a real TTD. This is necessary to prevent people from hitting TTD with 30x hashrate before the Bellatrix fork, as we saw with Ropsten. This is not required on mainnet. In fact, the lesson we need to learn is to make the user experience as smooth as possible, which was strongly reflected in the mainnet merger plan at the consensus layer developer meeting last Thursday.
In short, the Sepolia merger was a success! No clients experienced merge-related issues. But we need to pay attention to the user experience problem on the configuration client.
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Mainnet shadow fork
The eighth mainnet shadow fork (MSF8) is going very well. Besu regressed to proposing empty blocks (but still kept proposing, which kept the beacon chain running), and Erigon didn't sync up in time. Other than that, everything went fine.
MSF9 still has some problems. Here's an excerpt from my consensus layer meeting minutes, as reported by Pari:
- Lighthouse node synchronization is aborted, and it will not catch up until the next epoch. A fix is in progress and has now been deployed.
- Besu: 4/5 nodes encountered invalid blocks - seems to be the same problem as before.
- Nethermind is offline (on purpose). In MSF8 they ran into the same problem that Ropsten had. So on MSF9, they ran a number of different configurations trying to reproduce it, and they did.
- Erigon nodes are not synced in time. Snapshots will be used in future tests.
- Nimbus nodes: Pari messed up the configuration.
So, not very well. After the Nimbus configuration issue was fixed, the blockchain successfully started finalizing again.
When you are testing the merge, don't forget that MEV-Boost also needs to be tested if you plan to use it. Flashbots has some news on this front.
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prepare for the merger
New columns added this week. Now that we know that a merger is certain to happen, both stakers and non-stakers need to start preparing.
To this end, Superphiz has launched an Ethereum merged media resource that allows the community to contribute together. This is a treasure trove of education about mergers. Contributors get GitPOAP!
Over the next few weeks, Infura will host a series of workshops covering various aspects of the merger. Follow ConsenSys on the Crowdcast to get the latest news on when it starts, and to watch the recording. I heard that the first meeting was very successful with over 9,000 people attending or watching the recording. The next issue will be on Tuesday the 19th and will be "Personal Pledger Forum: What you need to do to prepare".
Speaking of Infura, in this video EthStaker's Rémy and Yorick discuss using Infura or any similar provider as a staker post-merger.
Here is a quick merge setup guide with Lodestar.
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pledge
pledge
Over the past few weeks, Lido's defenders have been on the podcast. And its backlash, I found the podcast Unchained's Ryan Berckmans and Alexandre Bergeron very insightful. Ryan's rebuttal starting around 41:39 is excellent. A few stinging quotes here, but there's a lot more to it -- the entire podcast is really good.
I think this is going to be a long battle for the soul of Ethereum... Lido's centralization is probably the biggest problem ever.....probably the biggest community problem since the DAO fork... In the long run, this is a very potentially damaging problem.as well as,
Elsewhere, you may have seen this silly self-promotion this week and worried too much about it. This "major exploit vulnerability" is actually a well-known issue, and they'd be silly to tweet about it. The crux of the matter is that the IP addresses of Eth2 validators are discoverable, which could be exploited by attackers to DDoS block proposers, for example, by stealing their MEV. There are multiple ways to defend against this attack, but the correct long-term solution is Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE). However, SSLE is still in the research phase - I'd like to see more developments in this area.
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Interpretive resources
foobar wrote a really good Ethereum Proof of Stake overview. The sections on misconceptions and glimpses into the future are really good.
Ladislaus published a useful FAQ about MEV and mev-boost (for node runners). In any case, all stakers will be affected by MEV-Boost after the merger. This article will help you have an overall grasp of MEV-Boost.
Zellic (a smart contract auditing company) has produced a very good guide for Ethereum application developers - "ETH2 Proof of Stake: What Developers Need to Know". We try to make the merge have minimal impact on the application layer (EVM). Still, there are implications for smart contract writers and application developers, so go check this out!
ethereumpools.info explained the rewards after the ethereum merger before, this time they explain the penalties.
For my book, I still wrote a few short chapters on committee and aggregator selection. Now I am thinking about writing Casper FFG next, and its content will be more.
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media and others
At the DevConnect conference in Amsterdam, the Layer 1 workshop presentations are finally all public. We talked a lot about the post-merger forward-looking topic. You may see some familiar faces 😉
The Ethereum Cat Herders' Know Your Client series continues:
Erigon & The Merge, presented by Andrew Ashikhmin and Igor Mandrigin
Prysm & The Merge presented by Terence Tsao and Potuz
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Research
Oisín Kyne of Obol wants to propose some changes to the way validators handle aggregation responsibilities. This is to allow more flexibility in implementing distributed validator technology.
regular meeting
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Ethereum Core Developers Meeting
The 142nd Ethereum Core Developers Meeting was held on July 8th. This is the last time it was held on a Friday! From July 21st, we moved to Thursdays. This is the end of an era.
- Agenda
- Tim and Christine's Twitter history
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Consensus Layer Developer Meeting
The 91st meeting was held on 14 July
- Agenda
- Conference video
In addition to the merge plan and shadow fork review, we also spent some time discussing delaying the start of MEV-Boost to a little bit after the merge to simplify the debugging work we need to do (fewer changes). In the end, we agreed to simplify the proposal slightly.
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Merge Community Meeting
The fifth merged community meeting was held on July 15th.
- Agenda
I haven't had time to watch this video yet, but Christine also documented it in the tweet mentioned earlier.
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follow-up activities
Friday, July 29th, 1500 UTC: EthStaker Validator Merge Preparation Workshop. Please complete the Google form before the workshop to help them prepare.
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other news
- Ethereum Core Dev Meeting Update 012 by Tim Beiko, as good as ever
- Stereum update. They've been very busy lately.
- MEV-Boost status update for Flashbots - July 1-15, 2022. If you're running a validator, don't miss these updates; there's something big going on.
- Michael Sproul uses a new tool called blockdreamer to improve blockprints.
- Hildobby's Eth2 staking dashboard has been enriched.
