Farmer minds his crops
An optimistic outlook
The fields are aflame
tl;dr
- Medalla chugging alongside easily
- Consumer variety is a should
- eth1+eth2 (Part 1.5 aka The Merge) end-to-end demo
- Testing and audits proceed as we strategy Part 0 launch
Medalla trying good (after some enjoyable)
A quiet testnet is a suspicious testnet.
When you’ve adopted Medalla in any respect up to now few weeks, you will be very conscious of the most important 5-day incident that occured on Friday, August 14th. Take a look at Prysm’s autopsy for particulars on the technicals and timeline, and Ben’s current weblog posts ([1][2]) for a high-level evaluation. Consumer groups labored by way of the weekend following the incident, deploying sync and peering patches to resolve the extremely fragmented community.
Whereas the incident induced unbelievable stressors on the testnet, it gave all purchasers an opportunity to harden themselves in opposition to a few of the wildest of eventualities. I can truthfully say that consumer software program is a lot extra sturdy following this incident. I will really sleep just a little bit higher now main as much as eth2 mainnet launch.
Because the incident, Medalla has chugged alongside fairly easily: now with 39k energetic validators and one other 12k within the activation queue (that is 12 days value)!
Consumer variety is a should
Whereas there are numerous [excellent, viable, robust, usable, etc] eth2 purchasers below energetic growth, the community is at the moment dominated by a single consumer — Prysm.
There’s good historic purpose for this — Prysm has prioritized early testnets, group engagement, and usefulness for properly over a yr now. Kudos to the Prysmatic staff. Group constructing is concurrently extremely tough in addition to essential to our business and open supply at massive.
That mentioned, the incident on Medalla was considerably amplified by the failure of the dominant Prysm consumer, and as we transfer towards mainnet, we, as a group, should consciously search to treatment this. As somebody who has tried all of the eth2 purchasers on Medalla, I can let you know first-hand that the majority purchasers are sturdy and properly documented, and all consumer groups are actively engaged on discord and github that can assist you work by way of any points you could run into.
Defend your self
Consumer variety not solely makes the eth2 consensus extra sturdy, but additionally helps defend you in excessive eventualities: because of the anti-correlation incentives present in eth2, the extra your detrimental behaviour is correlated with that of others, the extra you extra you stand lose.
For instance, suppose 60% of the community goes offline for a number of days due an outage in client-A, however client-B and client-C stay steady and on-line. Though the chain will proceed to be constructed by B and C, the chain won’t finalize because of the >33% outage. When you run client-A, you stand to lose an rising quantity every epoch that the finality outage continues (we name this an “inactivity leak”). Whereas in case you run client-B or C, your stability is protected because you stay on-line. [Note — an inacivity leak is much worse than normal offline penalties.]
Suppose that as an alternative a minority client-B (with 20% of the community) experiences a important error inflicting a consumer large outage. On this case, the chain can proceed to finalize (since 80% of the community are nonetheless collaborating). There is no such thing as a “inactivity leak” incurred by the offline validators, solely regular penalties. So these working client-B, solely obtain minor penalties in comparison with the primary situation above.
Shoppers making it straightforward to swap
Along with the group efforts to attempt new purchasers, consumer groups are working onerous to make sure that switching purchasers is each straightforward and protected. With the addition of some cross-client requirements, you will quickly be capable of hop from one consumer to a different with minimal downtime and no threat of unintentional slashing.
Such requirements, which forestall consumer lock-in, are a important element to a strong eth2 community. Ease of adjusting software program will allow the group to extra shortly resolve points (just like the Medalla incident) if/when a single consumer fails.
eth1+eth2 end-to-end demo
One of many main targets of eth2 is to succeed in Part 1.5 (aka The Merge), at which level the prevailing Ethereum chain’s consensus can be built-in into eth2. From there on, the chain we all know and love can be constructed by proof-of-stake validators as an alternative of the present power hungry proof-of-work consensus.
The transition to Part 1.5 is designed to be as seamless as doable to present customers and purposes. Eth1 purchasers stay the work horses for state, transactions, and execution. By leaving the overwhelming majority of this person layer untouched, Ethereum will be capable of leverage present instruments and APIs to energy transactions and dapps, identical to they do immediately.
To this finish, Mikhail (TXRX) and Guillaume (geth) not too long ago launched an end-to-end demo of a multi-sharded beacon chain (with an eth1 chain as a type of shards). Within the video of the demo launched, Mikhail sends plenty of transactions to the eth1 shard chain utilizing an unmodified metamask pockets.
You possibly can take a look at and play with a dockerized model of the eth1+eth2 demo, or in case you want to go a bit deeper, you possibly can construct and run from supply.
Continued testing and audits, eyeballing Part 0 mainnet
Enterprise as regular on this entrance.
Consumer groups are working their asses off, auditors are digging into each nook and cranny, and preparations are being made for mainnet launch 🚀
