Ethereum 2.0 Progress Update: Merged testnet progresses smoothly, short-term focus on the implementation of EIP-1559

Note: The original author is Ethereum 2.0 developer Ben Edgington. In the latest review of "Ethereum 2.0 New Progress", he mentioned the beacon chain, staking, Altair update, Rayonism and merger. He also stated that due to the smooth progress of Rayonism, the merging teams (Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0) will focus on non-merger matters for a period of time, namely the implementation of the London hard fork (EIP-1559) and Altair upgrade respectively.

Have you read something so great that you want to write something yourself? This is one of those articles: Responding to Common Criticisms of Ethereum. It has nothing to do with Ethereum 2.0, but I’ve included it at the beginning of the article anyway, simply because everyone should read it.

Beacon Chain

Slashing events still occur occasionally. In the past two weeks, the beacon chain network has experienced two slashing events, and the reasons are difficult to explain.

People trying to migrate to different clients may have disrupted the process in some way. If you encounter such a situation, please contact us, we want to understand them. Since the genesis of the beacon chain, less than one thousandth of validators have been slashed in total, and the vast majority of them are operated by a single staking service provider.

Staking

Martin Köppelmann (citing SparkPool) made a comment about staking centralization. As always, things are not as simple as they appear. I hope that in due course, the launch of Rocket Pool and the implementation of validator withdrawals will help ease the pressure towards centralized staking among certain providers.

Elias Simos of Bison Trails created a dashboard about Ethereum 2.0 Liquid Staking. These are staking pools that accept less than 32 ETH and provide some kind of staking derivative token that can be used in DeFi protocols, and Lido is leading this.

Altair

We revisited the plans for the Altair update in our recent developer call. Nothing much has changed since the last time: testing on the federated testnet in early June to finalize the spec, followed by an upgrade of the existing testnet in July.

The alpha.6 version of the Altair specification has just been released (codenamed "Prosstellar Evolution"). The main update is a reorganization of the configuration constants to make it easier to create testnets with different parameters, among other things.

Alpha 6 also adds a ResourceUnavailable response on the network layer. Clients that are in the process of syncing can use this to indicate that they do not have a block that other nodes might expect them to have. Clients receiving this response can decide whether to treat it as bad behavior and disconnect the sender, or reduce the wait time on the sender until syncing is complete.

The plan is to make Alpha 6 stable as a basis for an initial multi-client testnet.

Regarding Altair, Vitalik also created an annotated specification‌.

Rayonism

The Rayonism Ethereum Proof of Stake (PoS) hackathon concluded last week. Over the course of four weeks, developers built two merged testnets, with the Steklo testnet running for a day and the Nocturne testnet running for a week.

Nocturne got off to a great start, and it got even better. Of course, this also involved a dozen combinations of Ethereum 1.0/execution clients and Ethereum 2.0/consensus clients, and from what I could tell, it ran pretty smoothly throughout the week. There were some issues with voting and transaction processing on Ethereum 1.0 blocks, but nothing fundamental that could derail the merge process.

Despite showing less than initially ambitious (e.g. no attempt at sharding), Rayonism was a huge success, which bodes well for the merge process. Big kudos to everyone involved! Especially Protolambda for his impressive and unrelenting coordination work.

As Proto mentioned, even though the hackathon is over, it is not the end of Rayonism. In due course, extension goals will be addressed (such as validator exits and sharding). Other things that need to be implemented and tested are the new state synchronization protocol and the transition process from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS).

The Merge

As Rayonism progresses smoothly, the merging teams (Ethereum 1.0 and Ethereum 2.0) will focus on non-merger matters for a period of time, namely the implementation of the London Hard Fork (EIP-1559) and the Altair upgrade respectively.

As always, the main topic of discussion around the merge in recent days has been timing. Rayonism has proven that the whole thing is technically feasible, but there is still a lot of work to be done, such as on the Ethereum 1.0/implementation client side.

While Ethereum 2.0/consensus client developers have largely expressed a desire to complete the initial merge this year, at least one Ethereum 1.0/implementation client team has expressed reluctance to do so. At this point, my personal view is that the merge is more likely to occur in the first quarter of 2022 rather than this year. There are other views that: "Ethereum is still 6 months away from PoS", which is Preston Van Loon published in "The Defiant".

We can be sure that (a) all Ethereum core developers strongly want the merge to happen as soon as possible, and (b) it should happen only when the preparations are right, and we won’t put the network at risk by rushing. You can follow the #allcoredevs Discord channel and join the discussion.

After the merger

The majority view is to make the merge as simple as possible so that it can be implemented as soon as possible. This means that a staking exit mechanism is currently excluded (this mechanism is expected to be released in a few months). Nevertheless, Dmitry Shmatko from the ConsenSys TX/RX team has been working on the design and specification of exits, including partial withdrawal of staking rewards.

Recommended popular science articles on Ethereum this week

1. Carl Beekhuizen estimated the power consumption of the combined Ethereum network, and said that Ethereum would use 99.95% less power than PoW under the PoS consensus mechanism. Apparently this is about two thousand times more energy efficient, and PoS has better security properties (@jack is completely wrong on this point), and this article makes some good comparisons.

2. Coogan Brennan has written a great article explaining how to use Teku's checkpoint sync feature (along with Infura). Infura is optional, but very handy.

3. Setting up a monitor-free authenticator at home. This is very similar to my own setup, except with the Teku client instead of Lighthouse.

Research

On etresear.ch:

1. Georgios Konstantopoulos proposed a simple withdrawal credential rotation scheme‌. This would allow stakers who lose their withdrawal keys to rotate their keys. However, this is controversial, so read the comments alongside this proposal to get a sense of the trade-offs involved.

2. A year after Vitalik proposed the ideal vector commitment scheme, someone proposed a Hyperproofs proposal.

3. Practical smart contract sharding‌.

Regular conference call

1. PoS implementers

The predecessor to the PoS Implementers Call was the Ethereum 2.0 Implementers Call, which took place on May 20.

1. Agenda

2. video

3. My notes‌, and a tweet from Alex Stokes‌.

As usual, the talk was short and sweet, focusing on status updates and plans surrounding the Altair upgrade.

2. Merger implementer

The fourth conference call for the merger implementers was held on May 13.

1. Agenda

2. video

3. Text transcription

If you're willing to spend 45 minutes discussing the merits of JSON RPC vs. other APIs, you'll enjoy this session.

Endless discussions around APIs are a long-standing tradition in the core developer community.

This merge call and the previous merge call happened during the off-week between the PoS implementers meeting. To reduce sleep disruption for developers in incompatible time zones, we agreed to move these calls to before the PoS calls. It will be a marathon, but it makes sense, and one day we may finally merge these calls, with the next merge call being on June 3rd.

Other News

1. Want to become an Ethereum core developer? Read this first, then check out the Ethereum Foundation’s Core Developer Apprenticeship Program.

2. A quick video showing the progression from Teku to Altair‌ (7 minutes);

3. Updates from the Lighthouse and Nimbus client teams;

4. The Lighthouse research report is the work of the Sigma Prime team funded by the Decentralized Foundation and is available here.

And finally...

I laughed when I saw this tweet from Zooko three years ago, and I laughed again when I saw it last week:

“A rare look at cryptocurrency’s transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).”

Yes - that's what we're going to do!