Strange times. I hope you are all well and continue to take care of yourself, your families, and your communities.
The quick update is a little late. I apologize. I will continue to watch your videos regularly after this one. Eth2 looks good. Phase 0 is stable, client teams are crushing it, and promising research on a stateless future has been published.
tl;dr
v0.11.0 Release after audit
Specification version v0.11.0 — LAN party –It was released last week. This release represents a “post-audit” Phase 0 specification prepared for the long-running multi-client testnet.
It includes limited changes to the core consensus, rather than focusing on improving the network protocol, including cleaner synchronization protocols, DoS enhancements, and better network/chain separation. release notes For details.
Our clients are working hard to integrate these changes while continuing to work on stability, optimization, and multi-client experimentation. In fact, the client team is working through March to lay the foundation for the upcoming multi-client testnet. Currently – Teku syncs Prysm, Prysm syncs Lighthouse, and most DiscoveryV5 implementations can find each other.
Release Combination of GHOST and Casper paper
released this week Combination of GHOST and Casper On arXiv. This work formalizes the core consensus components of eth2 (Casper FFG and LMD-GHOST) and shows how they work together to form a secure live system. This article builds on concepts first presented in the original. Casper Friendly End Device paperLayer this onto a more specific proof-of-stake, slot-based context (e.g., the context of an eth2 beacon chain).
This document was written in parallel with the development of the Phase 0 specification. This not only influenced the design of the specification, but also highlighted some important special cases that needed to be addressed. We are excited to release it to the world for public consumption, comments, feedback and critique.
This work “Mini Specs” Although presented by Vitalik, the lion’s share of the work was led and completed by Yan X. Zhang and students at San Jose State University. We would like to give special thanks to Yan and his students: Diego Hernandez, Thor Kamphefner, Khiem Pham, Zhi Qiao, Juhyeok Sin, and Ying Wang for completing this important milestone in eth2.
A polynomial promise of statelessness.
Vitalik recently published an interesting ethresearch post. Using polynomial promises to replace state roots. This post proposes the utilization of polynomial promises to replace traditional Merkle tree accumulators for blockchain state and data. If this research direction proves fruitful, it could solve one of the key problems in stateless Ethereum research by reducing “witnesses” (i.e. proofs of state required to process a block) from ~0.5MB to around 1-10kB. .
To be more clear, Ethereum is working hard to transition to a more “stateless” model (see 1x research). and update. Polynomial promises could be the key innovation we’ve been looking for to make this statelessness a reality by significantly reducing the statelessness overhead on block size.
Although incredibly promising, some of this research and magic math brand new. We need to not only pay more attention to these new and exciting technologies, but also invest more time in better understanding their complexities and pros and cons.
Some IETF BLS instability
The IETF BLS standard recently incorporated final changes to the specification based on external feedback regarding various applications and domains. before hash_to_base was not friendly Applies to embedded systems, applications that require some type of domain separation, and applications that use SHA-3 instead of SHA-2.
light of These concerns, hash_to_base Replaced with . new and improved hash_to_field. The spec maintainers do not expect any more substantive changes to the spec, and these changes will be officially released soon as “Draft 6”.
As far as encryption standards go, we don’t want to be in the position of eth1 using the Keccak256 hash function. That said, it’s one of the only major applications that uses it. Being on an encrypted island not only hinders interoperability between applications, but also hinders the development of a wide range of robust implementations.
We are closely monitoring the development of the IEFT standard, but in light of recent changes we will not be rushing to deploy mainnet deposit contracts (which in effect will be locked into the BLS specification) before the target eth2 launch date. We will continue to evaluate the stability of the IEFT standard going forward and do not expect this to be a bottleneck in its rollout.
In other news, we will soon be launching a deposit interface and deploying deposit contracts for our upcoming long-running multi-client testnet. More details about this next time🚀.