Eth2 Progress Update: First Launch, Beacon Chain, Conferences, Research, and more

Broad consensus decision of the week: Eth 2.0 merger

Recently there was a slash! After two full months without any slashing incidents, there was a separate slashing incident on April 16. Unfortunately I don't have any more information on this forfeit.

Recently, a security warning was released for the Blst encryption library, which I believe is used by all four mainnet clients. Although the vulnerability appears to be difficult to exploit, all clients have been updated to the fixed version. A few other bugs were also fixed. If you haven't updated your node recently, I recommend you do so. (None of Teku's releases use this vulnerable version of Blst, but it's always good to keep it updated.)

There is a new proposal to fix potential finality delay attacks. In a recent dev meeting, we discussed this a bit: implementing it doesn't require a dedicated fork to be coordinated, and we can implement it separately from the Altair upgrade.

Altair

Altair is the Beacon Chain upgrade due in mid-2021.

Despite the release of the alpha.3 version of the specification, there are no major updates from the previous issue. It's just some tinkering and clarification. A character modification I proposed was also merged into the PR??

The Eth2 team continues to focus on the implementation, targeting a June or July deployment.

ETH broke through the $2,600 mark with an intraday increase of 5.78%: According to data, ETH rose in the short term and broke through the $2,600 mark. It is now reported at $2,600.09, with an intraday increase of 5.78%. The market fluctuates greatly, so please do a good job in risk control. [2021/8/1 1:27:46]

Merge

"Merge" is a plan to move Ethereum to the proof-of-stake chain as quickly as possible. Developers are likely to be able to merge this year. That's an ideal scenario; a more realistic estimate is the first quarter of 2022.

Prysm also implements a demonstration of interoperability with the Eth1 merge client Catalyst. (Teku implemented last August, Lighthouse last month.)

Mikhail Kalinin wrote a detailed specification of what current Eth1 proof-of-work clients need to do to prepare for the transition to proof-of-stake. Not much has actually changed, and I'd love to have multiple execution layer clients available when the merge does kick in.

There have been regular meetings to discuss the merger. The meetings were not broadcast live, but the agenda and minutes were made public.

As always, the hardest part of the whole thing is the naming. Mikhail summed up the heated discussions on the Telegram and Discord groups. In the end, we decided to call what was on the merged beacon chain the "consensus layer" and what was on the merged EVM/Eth1 the "execution layer". See Mikhail's documentation for more details.

BiKi Yubibao launched USDT and ETH Smart Pool Wealth Management Activities: According to BiKi official website, the professional version of the platform Yubibao has been launched at 10:00 on March 20 (GMT+8) The 20th phase of USDT annualized income, the second phase of ETH You can participate in the smart pool financial management with a minimum of 10USDT or 0.1ETH, and the financial management income is T+1. You can participate from 10:00 to 23:00 every morning, and the income will be adjusted according to market fluctuations.

"BiKi Yubibao Professional Edition" is an investment and wealth management product based on blockchain asset income, which provides users with a lazy financial management method with stable and continuous income. For popular projects, we will set minimum thresholds and holding requirements, give priority to providing benefits to BiKi users, and add stable income channels. [2021/3/22 19:06:51]

Rayonism Project

Rayonism aims to coordinate more people to build and demonstrate a developer testnet that implements merging and sharding, and even go a step further by adding Optimism rollup to the testnet.

Work on the project took place during the month-long EthGlobal Scaling Ethereum Hackathon, which was attended by essentially (if not all) Eth1 and Eth2 related teams.

A kickoff meeting was held on April 7th, and a detailed meta specification has been drawn up. To track progress and get involved, readers can join the Rayonism Discord channel.

ETH breaks through the $350 mark with an intraday increase of 0.84%: Huobi Global data shows that ETH has risen in the short term, breaking through the $350 mark, and is now at $350.06, with an intraday increase of 0.84%. The market fluctuates greatly, so please do a good job in risk control. [2020/9/26]

Protolambda will be offering optional informal "office hours" to participants on the Discord language channel #rayonism-calls at the following times over the next few weeks.

Testnet

The Nimbus team gave a good introduction to the Prater Network on Twitter. We encourage all stakers who are testing on the Pyrmont network to migrate to the Prater network in the coming weeks, as we intend to experiment a little with Pyrmont, which may lead to a bit of instability. Here is the Launchpad for the Prater Network.

Tools

The CLI (command line interface) of the deposit contract has been upgraded to now allow depositors to specify an Eth1 address for withdrawals instead of a BLS12-381 withdrawal key. This greatly simplifies usability and enables moderately trustless staking pools.

Quotes | ETH increased by more than 2.50% in 1 hour: According to Bitfinex data, ETH is currently quoted at $143.00, an increase of more than 2.50% within 1 hour, with large fluctuations, please do a good job of risk control[2018/12/29]

Valid8r has released v1.0.0, a "protection system" that checks the configuration of your beacon chain staking settings.

This might be a useful resource: Beaconcha.in has data identifying staking pools by Eth1 addresses.

InsideTheSim calls on everyone in the community to answer questions in the FAQ section of the website The Eth 2.0 Merge. There is already quite a lot of high-quality content-zce out there. Everyone, let's add bricks and tiles!

Vitalik has posted a lot over the past few weeks. First, inspired by Justin Drake's guest post on Bankless, Vitalik published "A brain dump on PoS vs PoW arguments (common version of PoS vs Pow arguments)". (I highly recommend Justin Drake's episode - two full hours! He gives a solid and not-too-technical insight into why Proof-of-Stake fundamentally provides better security than Proof-of-Work.)

Vitalik also recently posted some brief explanations on Reddit about various Eth2 ideas and concepts. This article is about staggering shard blocks to achieve faster block times (Shard block staggering for faster block times), an idea he first proposed on Ethresear.ch a few years ago. There is also a discussion of Single secret leader election protocols. Neither article is part of the agreement, but they may be put into the roadmap at a later date.

Market | ETH fluctuates violently, please pay close attention to the market: the current ETH price is ¥2523.51, and the change in 1 hour exceeds ¥25.99, the fluctuation is relatively large, please pay close attention to the market trend, and do a good job of risk control, the data comes from Bitfinex[2018/8/8]

Vitalik also published a very valuable article "Why sharding is great": an in-depth explanation of the technical properties.

Protolambda has produced another batch of epic charts. You can click on each section to expand it. (Original and best content-zce is here, although some elements are a bit outdated, such as crosslinks).

Pintail published an in-depth analysis article on staking rewards. If you've ever wondered why some validators have proposed so many blocks while others (like mine) have so few, this post has the answer. Lakshman Sankar added some comments, which Pintail also linked into a simple spreadsheet for calculating rewards.

Beacon Book published the first update "Beacon Book: Update 001". I've had the pleasure of proofreading this and I'm very much looking forward to it. In total, 46 people are involved in spreading the word about Ethereum 2.0. This reminds me: we are doing something very important.

Elias Simos of Bison Trail continues his Eth2 profile with a fourth profile: this time with Jacek Sieka from Nimbus. I like this series very much, if only because different interviewees can bring different perspectives in each interview. Interestingly, Jacek used to be engaged in high frequency trading; and Adrian Sutton of the Teku team was also a high frequency trading veteran.

Viktor Bunin also published a great Eth2 update - issue 13, also from Bison Trails.

Danny Ryan released Finalized no. 25, which includes Rayonism, Blst warnings, and calls for proposals for public beacon chain security + testing.

Tim Beiko recently left Teku™ and is no longer a colleague of mine, but has joined the Ethereum Foundation™ and has done an excellent job of responding to outsiders' doubts about the future of Ethereum. Well worth a read!

Coindesk's latest Mapping out Eth2 podcast:

What Eth 2.0 Meant in 2014, and What It Means Today

Popularity: Navigating Ethereum's North Star - We spoke to Coogan Brennan about his series on setting up individual stakers.

Experts on elliptic curves may be happy to see Vitalik's article "Request for cryptographic primitive: vector commitment for elliptic curve points with algebraic properties"

Also Vitalik's article, a simplified proposal for capping the number of validators at any point in time, say 500,000. This is done to maintain a high level of security while not overloading nodes with the need to handle a larger number of validator activities.

implementers meeting

The 61st meeting was held on 8 April. There were technical problems with the live broadcast, but the recording was uploaded after the meeting. It's just that you can't see the face?

Meeting Agenda

Meeting video

My shorthand, and live tweets from Alex Stokes.

Merge meeting

The first merger meeting took place on April 1. The main goal of the meeting was to review the proposed merge spec with the Eth1 client maintainers and gather feedback. My impression is that after the meeting everyone felt quite confident about the process now.

April 21, 2021 8:00 am Beijing time: deadline for soliciting responses for beacon chain security and testing proposals.

April 16th - May 13th: Scaling Ethereum Hackathon including Rayonism.

I posted about Teku's performance advantages compared to other clients. True, Teku's advantage is slight, but I'm still very proud of this team! /u/torfbolt gives similar results when comparing the performance of various clients in Rocketpool Beta 3.

Source | What's New in Eth2

Author | Ben Edgington

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