An overview of the latest Eth2 updates

Source | What’s New in Eth2

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who supported me on the Gitcoin Grant! There were over a hundred contributors. I was so touched that I will definitely continue to work on the annotated spec. We don’t have a grant page for Teku, and I get asked about this sometimes, but if you want to support Teku, consider donating to other projects supporting Eth2 in this round.

Phase 0: Beacon Chain

It’s been over ten days since the genesis of Eth2, and the beacon chain has been running normally!

The genesis event went very smoothly. The genesis party jointly organized by the Ethereum Foundation and EthStaker was very interesting and has over 50,000 views on YouTube. The live broadcast hosted by Ethhub also provides podcasts and YouTube playback. Coin Jazeera reported on the genesis of Eth2 in its unique style.

It is suggested that the proposer of the Genesis Block record some meaningful information in the Graffiti field (any 32 bytes will do), as follows:

Mr F was here

Vitalik seemed to approve! According to Hudson’s tweet, “Mr. F was associated with the band Queen and Vitalik signed autographs.”

As confidence in Eth2 grows, deposits continue to accumulate in the deposit contract. Progress can be viewed here.

Translator's note: As of the time of publication, ETH has been staked, exceeding 1% of the total ETH. There are 33,427 active validators, 12,683 validators in the queue, and the current activation queue is about two weeks long.

You can follow Eth2 Rewards Bot on Twitter to get the beacon chain status. I am happy that there was only one invalid deposit out of 45,000, and it was only 1 ETH.

Network participation has been hovering around 99%, which is a very healthy indicator. My Teku node is also running fine with a low CPU usage and low memory usage, perfectly synced. This is in line with my previous predictions.

Barnabé Monnot did a comprehensive analysis of the first 1000 epochs (about 4.4 days). Overall, the beacon chain is running in an orderly manner.

Confiscation

The most dramatic thing is that there have been five notable large slashing events so far. It’s worth noting that getting slashed may not be as severe as it sounds. The current penalty that will be immediately applied is only 0.25 ETH out of 32 ETH, and there may be other penalties beyond that. The main pain point is that your ETH is now locked in the beacon chain and is unusable until some kind of exit mechanism is established.

• The first validator to be slashed was 20075, who proposed a contradictory block (ambiguous). According to reports, the user ran two validators with the same key.

• The next ten validators to be slashed were all from Ankr’s Stkr service for making contradictory proofs. According to Ankr’s report, the cause of the incident was a failure in their (home-brew) slashing protection infrastructure, and the validator was allowed to perform a wraparound vote (one of the prohibited validator behaviors) after restarting. Clients have built-in protection against wraparound voting, so it is not clear what went wrong.

• The third validator 18177 was fined for double proposal. Contradictory blocks at the same height contained different graffiti. The most likely cause was using the same key to run validators in different locations, probably to try to get "POAP".

• 4. The fourth slashed validator 25645 was also fined for double proposal. The validator stated on the EthStaker forum that he set up two validators with the same key.

• The fifth validator to be slashed was 7635, for providing two proofs for the same target checkpoint.

At least three of the above slashing incidents were caused by something we have repeatedly warned you about: running validators with the same key in multiple locations at the same time. Please do not do this at all!

You may be trying to configure redundancy. This is the wrong idea! Short-term offline (a day or two) will not have a big impact on the validator's long-term reward total, and it is preferable to being slashed. In the words of Vitalik: "don't try so hard"! Carl Beekhuizen explains this in more detail in the article Perfection is the enemy of the good on the Ethereum Foundation blog. Raul Jordan from the Prysm client team also wrote an Eth2 Slashing Prevention Tips to help everyone avoid slashing, which applies to all clients.

Regarding slashing, Alon Muroch of Blox Staking wrote a post on minimum slashing protection. This is in line with the native slashing protection that Teku added a while ago: simplicity is beauty. Alon's post does not include block proposals, but there is not much content in this part.

Testnet

The current testnet is Pyrmont, which is currently running smoothly (90% of validators are run by client teams and EF). There is currently no queue to enter, and we hope to use Pyrmont as the main testnet until at least the end of January.

tool

What I love about this community is that whenever there is a need or opportunity, there are people who will show up. This is also true for the growing ecosystem of tools.

• Thanks to Beaconcha.in for launching a mobile app to monitor validators. I am using it and it is great.

• Beacon node and validator script installation (currently only the Lighthouse version of the Pyrmont testnet)

• CoinCashew has included a section in their client installation tutorial on how to use Google Cloud’s free service to monitor the node’s uptime. Here is a video tutorial

• Since we’re talking about Google, here’s another article from Nansen about using Google BigQuery for ETL on Ethereum 2.0 that I hadn’t noticed before.

• BLS Horcrux from Stakewise uses Shamir’s Secret Sharing to trustlessly create BLS Threshold Signatures

• My colleague Adrian Sutton showed how to use the chaind tool (from Medalla data competition champion Jim McDonald) to monitor node performance. (Adrian found a bug related to endianness in it)

• Protolambda provides test generators for client APIs

• This is a new project that creates an interface for monitoring Eth2 node status and is currently seeking contributors.

Pledge Service

There are currently some lists of staking service providers:

• Stakefish

• Staking Ether

• Beaconcha.in

The EthStaker community is forming an Ethereum due diligence committee to evaluate staking services. You can view previous discussions here.

The pledge service that everyone uses may appear here.

Roadmap

Vitalik updated his Eth2 roadmap and added a progress bar.

The main changes highlighted are the eth1/eth2 merge process we noted earlier, and that we will now be working on sharding and client side work in parallel. The main possible solution for the merge is the executable beacon chain, currently being prototyped by Mikhail Kalinin.

Vitalik also proposed some protocol changes that may be implemented in the short to medium term. One challenge for clients is how to handle epoch transitions in a timely manner: the first few blocks of epochs are often orphaned in the Pyrmont testnet, and the proofs at the beginning of the epoch are often incorrect. This problem has not yet affected the beacon chain, but it is one of the goals of the proposal to solve this problem as soon as possible.

In the shorter term, an alternative withdrawal mechanism is also under discussion. The current mechanism is that once you stake, you need to keep the BLS private key to withdraw your deposit from the beacon chain in the future, but the specific withdrawal mechanism has not yet been designed. This is not a big problem for individual stakers, but it is not the case for trustless stake pools, because they need to manage withdrawals through a smart contract. Since the merger of Eth1 and Eth2 may come sooner, it is still necessary to plan for this mechanism, at least to reach a certain degree of certainty in the implementation method. We discussed some proposals in the last issue, and Dmitry Shmatko also published his proposal.

Lakshman Sankar wrote a post in support of staking pools and discussed them at EthStaker 12th community meeting. Since then, a PR has appeared in the spec, and Superphiz has some comments on it. The content in this PR is technically not difficult and does not even require a fork of the beacon chain. It is good to have consensus on clear commitments.

Articles and Media Resources

Resources on configuration and staking:

• Coogan Brennan’s Running a Validator series 2

• Tyler Underwood, self-proclaimed non-technical person: Eth2 on MacOS: A non-technical beginner's guide

• Graeme Blackwood of Argent: A designer’s guide to being an Eth2 validator. His decisions throughout the process were mostly sound, except for one confusing one (did you spot it?) [1]

Superphiz:

• Phiz and Defi Dad appeared on Yield TV to discuss how to participate in Eth2 staking (first 20 minutes)

• He continues to post short videos every day discussing important topics related to staking. Here is Superphiz’s State of the Stake playlist

About Proof of Stake:

• Yule Souza Andrade’s series of tweets: Advantages of PoS (Simplified Version)

• Vitalik on the Bankless Podcast: Why PoS?

• My ConsenSys colleague Meredith Baxter made a video demo of Teku’s snapshot sync https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz3flfj50Ig and explained long-range attacks in PoS.

Messari:

• Messari and BisonTrails released a 70-page report: “ETH 2.0: The Next Evolution of the Cryptoeconomy”. Registration required, but worth the download. Written by Wilson Withiam and Ryan Watkins.

• Wilson Withiam’s series of tweets reviewing the history of Eth2 (appetizer for the full report)

• Ryan and Wilson discuss the report on the Bankless podcast. Video, Podcast.

• They also participated in the Unchained podcast (one hour long, transcript available)

It’s clearly the season for Ethereum 2.0 related reports. Delphi has also released a report, but it’s only available to members.

008Viktor Bunin of BisonTrails has been outputting content about Eth2, here are 007 and 008.

Afri participated in Outlier Ventures’ Eth2 AMA on Crowdcast.

Finally, Alon Muroch of Blox Staking attended a community meeting for Secret Shared Validators on December 11. Here is his slideshow showing how SSVs can power trustless staking pools, and the pros and cons of each.

Regular meetings

Implementers Meeting

The 53rd Implementers Meeting was held on December 3rd.

• Meeting Agenda

• Conference Video

• My shorthand notes from the meeting, and Mamy's notes

No big news, we discussed the development of the testnet. Bottom line: we will continue running Pyrmont until the end of January.

network

We had our regular networking meeting on the 10th, the first in three months.

• Meeting Agenda

• My shorthand

There are a lot of good discussions there and you need to participate to understand the details.

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