Welcome to this week fast eth2 update! A handful of new eth2 testnets went live and I got them last week everything works on my laptop. There is still a lot of work to do, but it is becoming concrete :).
tldr;
Complete phase 0 audit which will be carried out by the least authority
We are excited to announce an upcoming audit of the eth2 specifications which will be conducted by Less authority. This is a comprehensive security audit of the eth2 core phase 0 specifications focusing on critical elements such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, resource misuse attacks that could lead to unintended forks/adversary chains, network-related attacks, any attack impacting funds, and more.
Least Authority is a leading expert in mechanism and incentive design, decentralized/distributed systems architecture, and blockchain systems analysis. The Ethereum Foundation has already engaged with Least Authority on work in the past, such as a discv5 audit and a gas economy analysis and proof of workand we are excited about this opportunity to work with them again. A comprehensive security audit is essential to the successful launch of Phase 0, and we look forward to the initial report which will be released in early February.
Lighthouse launches testnet with mainnet setup
Last week, Sigma Premier launched their long-awaited Lighthouse public testnet. This impressive testnet executed mainnet specification configurationand at its peak, it easily managed 16,815 active validators!
As Sigma Prime said at the launch of this network, “we’re going to start trying to crash this testnet and I think we’ll succeed”, and they did. After recovering from 100+ epochs of non-finality due to two of their validator-heavy nodes going offline, the Sigma Prime team decided to take down the network to fix some bugs, work on new optimizations and start from scratch. Soon. Discover the postmortem here. As noted during today’s eth2 call, the team intends to relaunch the testnet tomorrow, opening it up for public use after initial stability testing.
Don’t forget to be a active Participate in these first testnets if you feel able: if something is unclear in the documentation, let them know. If you have difficulty compiling, open a ticket. If there is a typo in the readme file, correct it! This goes for all clients and for open source software in general. The more you actively give back in this process, the better things will be for everyone.
P.S. Sigma Prime is recruiting a full-time employee experienced Rust developer work on Lighthouse. Check it out!
Nimbus integrates native nim-libp2p
Earlier this year, the Ethereum Foundation, Protocol Labs and Status co-funded a grant for Nimbus create a native Nim language libp2p implementation. This implementation was to be integrated with the nimbus eth2 client and become a p2p networking option for resource-constrained devices.
We are pleased to announce that Nimbus recently integrated this native implementation in their codebase and plan to restart their testnet with it next week. This is an important milestone for both Nimbus and the p2p community as a whole, due to Nim’s ability to compile succinct and efficient code for most computer architectures. Team Nimbus continues to kill it: they truly are a powerhouse when it comes to engineering! P2P all that!
beaconcha.in adds support for Lighthouse
Bitfly open source eth2 block explorerbeaconcha.in, just additional support for Lighthouse! You can take a look herebut things are currently dormant until Lighthouse restarts its network.
We’re very excited to see multiple client implementations integrated, helping to create common interfaces for external software to query and understand eth2’s internals. This tool and others will be crucial to monitoring, understanding and interacting with upcoming testnets and eventually the mainnet!
Eth2 specification release schedule
We have released the eth2 specifications version v0.9.3 — rm signature_root and have v0.9.4 with a test patch and network update in the queue. These are the last of v0.9.x series of minor updates since the Phase 0 thaw in October. These recent specification releases were primarily intended to ensure that the phase 0 beacon chain is flexible enough to accommodate new phase 1 partitioning designbut some cleanups, bug fixes, improved testing and network updates have also been added to the changelog. Many of these changes have been informed and driven by continued customer progress on testnets and general preparation for mainnet.
The next planned release is for early January. This v0.10.0 this version will be dedicated to the integration of new BLS standards in eth2 core specifications. THE v0.10.x The release series with production-grade BLS should be the target for the final testnets and ultimately the mainnet release. There is still work to be done, but a heroic and comprehensive effort is now being made to make it happen. Thank (or fund/tip/etc!) customer teams. These engineers are building something truly incredible for all of us :rocket:.
