Ben’s Ethereum stuff

The Main Things

• Since February 2024 I have been at OP Labs, scaling the world computer.
• I am founder and erstwhile product owner for the Teku Ethereum consensus client at Consensys. I joined Consensys in October 2017, spending the first two years building the fabulous PegaSys R&D team before moving over to the product side to bring Teku to life.
• I am writing the definitive technical book on Ethereum’s proof of stake protocol. It’s called Upgrading Ethereum, or sometimes just “The Eth2 Book”. At last count, around 135,000 words of my own, and 367 pages in the PDF version.
• I wrote 100 fortnightly editions of “What’s new in Eth2?” in the four year run-up to The Merge.
• My greatest Tweet (so far). My least deserved Tweet.

Other writing

• A little of my crypto origin story.
• The Eth2 Annotated Specification. Vitalik likes it 😀 (this was the precursor to The Book).
• Explainers:
  • BLS12-381 for the Rest of Us, a (moderately) accessible description of elliptic curve construction, focusing on BLS12-381. There’s a lot in there.
    • (Generous endorsements from Mihailo Bjelic and Alex Stokes, and a reference in footnote 1 of this paper by no less than Jens Groth 🎉)
  • An explainer and toy example of the data recovery scheme we plan to use in Eth2.
  • Other things have mostly been folded into The Book now.
• Ethereum 2.0 Consensys Blog Posts:
  • State of Ethereum Protocol #5 How 30+ ETH 2.0 Devs Locked Themselves in to Achieve Interoperability (September 2019).
  • State of Ethereum Protocol #4 Welcome to the Bazaar (July 2019).
  • State of Ethereum Protocol #3 Exploring Ethereum 2.0 Design Goals (January 2019)
  • State of Ethereum Protocol #2 The Beacon Chain (October 2018).
  • State of Ethereum Protocol #1 Ethereum 2.0 introduction (August 2018).
• eth2.info: curated resources for learning Ethereum 2.0. (This is out of date and unmaintained; mostly superseded by The Book.)
• Articles:
  • The Block Op-Ed (January 2021) on the Eth2 roadmap for 2021.
  • Coindesk Op-Ed (October 2020) on the upcoming Beacon Chain launch.
  • Coindesk Op-Ed (December 2019) on Eth2’s distributed development model.

Presentations

• Video:
  • Ethereum Engineering Group Scaling Ethereum with EIP-4844 (January 2023). I’ve since fixed up some of the wonky maths in the slides.
  • I enjoyed moderating a somewhat spicy panel discussion on Client Diversity for EthGlobal (October 2021).
  • A Brief History of Ethereum’s future with the Ethereum Cat Herders (July 2021).
• Slide decks:
  • Internal PegaSys/Consensys presentation slides on Ethereum 2.0 (5 November 2018).
  • Ethereum London meetup presentation slides on Ethereum 2.0 (17 October 2018).
  • Ethereum Paris meetup presentation slides on Ethereum 2.0 (9 October 2018).
  • A path to Ethereum 2.0 presentation slides (6 July 2018).

Code

Although I write quite a lot of code for my own use, I am not fundamentally a “dev”. I wrote a chunk of Teku in its early days (especially for the cryptography layer), but most of that has now been superseded by proper code and professional cryptographic libraries.

• c-kzg - a library for polynomial commitments and data recovery for use in Eth sharding. Parts of this have been adopted officially for the Cancun–Deneb EIP-4844 upgrade.
• Github

Ethereum core dev things

• Eth2 implementers’ call notes:
  • Recent calls (up to March, 2023).
  • Prior calls: 190711, 190815, 190829, 190919, 191024, 191107.
• Eth2 networking call notes.
• Issues raised on the Eth2.0 specs repo
• EthResear.ch:
  • Articles
  • Discussion

Podcasts

• I co-hosted Coindesk’s weekly Mapping Out Eth2.0 podcast with Christine Kim for about twenty episodes from March to August, 2021.
• Others:
  • Infinite Jungle, reunited with Christine for an episode (February 2024).
  • Web3 Builders with Evan Van Ness and Will Foxley, mainly about holding Lido accountable to its decentralisation commitment (October 2023).
  • Strange Water with Rex (September, 2023)
  • The DeCent People with Matt Leising (November, 2022)
  • Galaxy Brains with Alex Thorn (September, 2022).
  • The Defiant with Camila Russo (September, 2022).
  • Thinking Crypto with Tony Edward (September, 2022).
  • The Economist’s Babbage podcast discussing The Merge (September, 2022).
  • Web3 Innovators with Conor Svensson, October, 2021, March, 2023.
  • Zero Knowledge, The Evolution of Eth2.0. (July 2021)
  • Compass Mining, The Clock is Ticking on Ethereum Mining. (July 2021)

In the news

Having done a fair few press interviews over the years I was privileged to end up as one of the key spokespeople for Consensys around The Merge. I’ll just cover some highlights of that here.

• Press:
  • Forbes (Faisal Khan, July 2023): “After The Merge, Ethereum Looks To Rollups - And Bigger Challenges Ahead”.
  • Fortune (Taylor Locke, September 2022): “Inside the Ethereum merge: Behind the scenes of the historic event, according to the people who made it possible”.
  • The Times (September 2022): “Bitcoin rival ethereum cuts power consumption by 99.95%”.
  • BBC Sounds (September 2022): “The Merge: A cryptocurrency revolution”.
  • The Economist (September 2022): “The future of crypto is at stake in Ethereum’s switch”.
  • Coindesk (Sam Kessler, Sage D. Young, September 2022): “Monitoring the Merge: What a Successful Ethereum Upgrade Will Look Like”.
  • Bloomberg (Olga Kharif, August 2022): “Crypto Confronts Own Y2K Moment With Ethereum Network Upgrade”.
  • The Block (Adam Morgan McCarthy, September 2022): “Ben Edgington: The Merge gets rid of ‘proof of waste’”.
  • The Block (Kristin Majcher, Kari McMahon, September 2022): “The Merge: 10 key people behind Ethereum’s biggest upgrade yet”.
  • Protocol (Tomio Geron, September 2022): “The Merge is Ethereum’s insurance against government control”.
  • El Economista (Rodrigo Riquelme, September 2023 - Spanish): “Proof of Stake es una nueva etapa para Ethereum: Ben Edgington”.
  • Business Insider (Morgan Chittum, August 2022): “An Ethereum developer who’s spent the past 4.5 years on its network upgrade shares why the Merge will be the single-most important event in crypto history since the invention of bitcoin and ether”.
  • Business Insider (Morgan Chittum, August 2022): “The Merge: Web3 VCs, a crypto exec, and a blockchain developer share the 3 biggest misconceptions about Ethereum’s upgrade”.
  • BTC Echo (Moritz Draht, June 2022 - German): “Wie Ethereum mit dem “Merge” zum dezentralen Weltcomputer wird”.
• Live broadcasts:
  • CNBC Crypto World (September 2022): “Devs prep for Merge”.
  • CGTN Europe (September 2022): “Ethereum goes green: ‘People with clear conscience can invest in it’”.

Ancient History

• LLL (the original EVM smart contract language):
  • LLL reference documentation.
  • LLL/Solidity compiler PRs.
  • LLL ERC20 token on Github.
  • LLL SHA1 benchmark comparison with Solidity/assembly.
• Others:
  • Ethereum Yellow Paper pull requests.
  • Yellow Paper Cheat-Sheet
  • Quorum/Docker configuration.
  • Set up a local Raiden test network.
  • Ethereum Stack Exchange activity.
  • Reddit /r/ethereum activity.
  • Notes on running a Parity node on a QNAP NAS box (old — 2016 vintage — but gold).

Other stuff

• POAPs, and GitPOAPs.
• Twitter/X
• LinkedIn - lol 😁

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Contact me on ben@<this.domain>, or DM on Twitter.

benjaminion.eth | 0xD262d146E869915444d0f34EcDAAbAB5aB43007e