Testnets, testnets, testnets!
tl;dr
Medal testnet
Following the excellent stability of Altona and based on conversations with eth2 customer teams, Medal – the next multi-client testnet – will have a MIN_GENESIS_TIME of 1596546000 (or for those of you who don’t think about Unix time — August 4, 2020, 1 p.m. UTC)!
This is a major step forward from Altona in the sense that Medalla is a testnet built for And maintained by the community. Multi-client testnets prior to Medalla were considered “devnets”, managed primarily by client teams and EF members (see the Altona section of my last post for a more complete explanation), but with the launch of this network, the stability and health of the channel will be almost entirely in the hands of the community (your hands ✋🤞🤟!).
Note that MIN_GENESIS_TIME is the first string can start, but the chain will not start until the minimum number of validators has also been reached. In order to stay true to mainnet specifications, Medalla will start with no less than 16,384 validators (524,288 ETH). In the event that the minimum deposits (16,384 of them) are not reached before 1 p.m. UTC on August 2 (48 hours before min genesis), the chain will start later than MIN_GENESIS_TIME. It is All right.
In summary, genesis will take place 48 hours after both conditions are met. We will all be on guard, watching the deposits, and when the time of genesis is known, we will make a lot of noise about it 🎉
We will also release a version of the “Launchpad” validator for Medalla – an educational interface for validators to make deposits. More details on this are imminent
We will not have less than four fully operational customers at Genesis — lighthouse, nimbus, prismAnd teku. As usual, we strongly encourage customer diversity to add strength and resilience to the network (see discussion about Eth2’s many clients). Feel free to check out the customer documentation, play around with compiling and configuring, and stop by their Discord servers to ask questions 🙂
In addition to the four clients listed above, I fully hope polar star be on the net to some extent at first, and we might even have another surprise customer joining the mix.
Another exciting announcement: Medalla special aura POAP for those participating in the launch! Stay tuned for more details 🏅
Attack networks beta-0 launch
Calling all Whitehats 1337 h4x0rz👩🍳!
Three attack networks were launched this week (flagship-attack-0, prism-attack-0And teku-attack-0), each with a $5,000 bounty to bring him down (i.e. disrupt the finality for at least 16 continuous epochs).
These initial attack networks are intentionally simple (1 client each) and small (4 nodes each). should be quite easy to disassemble. Discover the README for more details and getting started notes, and join the R&D Ethics #netattacks channel for discussions and advice.
Following the beta-0 For attack networks, we will increase the size and complexity of attack networks and add more complex challenges with larger bounties.
Oh! and a honorable mention 🏆 thanks Jonny (TXRX) for successfully eliminating flagship-attack-0the discovery. Although this didn’t crash the testnet, it did discover a critical bug! Thanks Age (Sigma Prime) for the quick solution.
update on the progress of the eth1+eth2 merger
I would like to take stock of the progress of the eth1+eth2 merger and give a huge Congratulations to Mikhail (TXRX) and Guillaume (geth) for their excellent work.
The current vision for the future of Ethereum is for the current chain to be integrated into the new eth2 consensus as a shard. This is the marriage of eth2 (consensus) clients with eth1 (highly optimized user layer) clients into a single system. The high level of customer relations is found here; A more detailed scope of the merger discussed by Mikhail is here; and a discussion on the architecture of a Geth-based eth1 engine (called Catalyst) by Guillaume est here.
Since writing the articles above, Mikhail and Guillaume have worked to bring these concepts to life. Guillaume’s Catalyst — a version of geth that defers its consensus to RPC calls (i.e. an eth2 client) — is built and ready to go; and Mikhail’s phase 1 implementation runs fully sharded eth2 simulations with selected shards deferring block production and validity calls to a local, truncated eth1 engine.
The next step is to connect these two together for an end-to-end eth1+eth2 simulation!
Another excellent job Mikhail and Guillaume. I’m incredibly excited about this and that it’s happening alongside the impending launch of the Beacon Channel 🚀
