welcome to this week eth2 quick update!
tldr;
Shasper joins Prysmatic’s testnet.
Parity’s eth2 client, Shaspersuccessfully joined Prysmatic’s first Sapphire testnet public Multi-client eth2 testnet. It’s an exciting start many The multi-client testnet is scheduled to launch next month.
You can now pull down the Shasper codebase and connect to the Sapphire testnet using a few commands. If you want to give it a try, follow the instructions. here.
Eth2 block explorer released
no one but two (!) The eth2 block explorer was recently released. These two block explorers are currently monitoring: Sapphire Testnet from Prysmatic LabsWhen validators build a beacon chain, they provide slot-specific information.
Bitfly has been released. beaconcha.in They blocked Explorer a few weeks ago and keep adding to it. Interesting features Until that day. Etherscan has just been released. block explorer Yesterday seems to be full of cool features and data. Both will be great options to monitor Prysmatic and other testnets as they come online.
We’re excited to see more and more user/developer tools being built around the eth2 client and testnet 🙂
First eth2 networking call
Up until this point, we’ve relied on github issues/pull requests, ad hoc chats, native eth2 calls, and in-person meetings to configure the networking components of the eth2 specification. This largely worked. good enoughHowever, researching and designing networks to support sharded blockchain protocols is a problem that requires increasingly specific attention and resources.
For this purpose, we first eth2 networking related calls this week. This call is not live-streamed like a regular eth2 call, but is public and visible to all contributors. Thanks to the p2p networking experts from various eth2 teams for driving this call. Although I was initially resistant due to the additional coordination overhead, the first call was very informative and I look forward to the next call.
As always, Ben Edgington (call notes) and Mamy Ratsimbazafy (call notes) You took great notes. There are still a lot of details to learn, and our next call will be in about two weeks.
Thank you to Will Villanueva from the Quilt team for organizing the event. First eth2 Phase2 Community Call. Similar to new networking and light client calls, Phase 2 progresses far enough to warrant regular calls to keep research and development more organized.
This first call served as a general update and survey of the various ongoing threads across the many teams and individuals involved. You can read the note here. Follow-up calls are for in-depth work sessions on specific technical issues.
The main goal of Phase 2 is to get through the initial phase of stateless protocol research and use the findings to narrow it down to a more concrete plan to implement in 2020. These requests are a great step toward this goal.
Forkchoice status modification
Researchers at San Jose State University, led by Yan Before publishing a task, they may include the latest justified/completed block in a branch of the block tree in the interconnection of FFG+GHOST. ~ no In fact, the block is marked as justified/confirmed on-chain. Leaving these “unfeasible” branches in the fork selection can lead to a situation where the validator’s vote may be inconsistent with local finality information, and in certain scenarios may lead to live failures. You can learn more about this specific scenario and the proposed solution. here.
To solve this scenario we Fixes under review It’s in the spec repository. This fix is expected to be released within the week.
Specification and Implementation of the New BLS Standard
The long-awaited BLS standard was recently released for public comment. IETF Meeting 106. you can check presentation and slide For yourself. The presentation went as planned and the standard is expected to be adopted by several blockchain projects.at last) to IETF. We expect EF and many other projects to more formally announce their intended uses soon in order to more semi-officially specify this standard before the lengthy IETF process is completed.
I have two draft pull requests ((One) (2)) It is being reviewed in the specification repository and implementation of new standards is also in progress. Under review at py_ecc. Once the review is complete, we will generate a new BLS test vector that can be generally used by eth2 clients. The goal is to transition the testnet to the modified BLS scheme in January.
The BLS standard also removes one of the final impediments to launching eth2 deposit contracts. Runtime Verification is currently finalizing a report on the formal verification and analysis of the deposit contract bytecode. The report is scheduled to be published for public review by the end of the month, after which we finally Start this 🚀.