What's New in Eth2 - 3 October 2019

Edition 27. Archive. Trouble viewing? Load original.

Ben Edgington (PegaSys, ConsenSys — but views expressed are all my own)

The 🎂 Anniversary 🎂 Edition

What's New in Eth2 is one year old! 🎉 🎈 ✨

I often find myself sitting here at midnight, wearily pasting links, desperately trying to dredge up something interesting—or at least not totally dumb—to say: yes, sometimes I do regret embarking on the whole thing 😰.

But, remarkably, there has never been a shortage of material: Eth2 is alive! And enough of you have told me that you appreciate the updates that I'm very happy to press on into a second year, fully expecting that the next year's journey will be every bit as thrilling as the last. Thank you for reading; thank you for the encouragement!

And remember, loyal readers, true gratitude looks something like buying me a beer in Osaka 🍻.

The Interop Lock-in

The Legend of Interop will live long.

The "official" account is Danny Ryan's. My own account is less official, but has more pictures.

The Prysm team, the Lodestar team, and Whiteblock have also all posted some reflections on what truly was an extraordinary week.

The Nimbus team is making progress creating a multinet that provides a convenient way to run different teams' clients alongside each other. Five clients now supported!

Thoughts on Roadmaps

I frequently get asked about the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap. It's kind of an occupational hazard.

Now, I gave my thoughts on roadmaps for open source, open community developments like ours in an article a few months ago. In short, analogously to Linux: Trying to impose a roadmap on this process is unlikely to improve it.

Nonetheless, one correspondent asked me some quite specific questions this week, and I thought I'd fill some space with my answers as they are kind of FAQs. Remember, I have no authority on this, or any special inside knowledge, so please treat my answers with appropriate caution.

1. I remember reading that the phase 1 specs would be frozen on September 30, i.e. exactly 3 months after the phase 0 specs were frozen. Is that still the target date?

This was the call on 29 August. Justin Drake actually said that the target was for the Ph1 spec to be complete, but not frozen by end September. There's a PR currently open to rework the Ph1 shard chains spec, so that target seems to have been missed. But nonetheless, it's close.

2. I remember reading that phases 1 and 2 are much "simpler" than phase 0 (~400 lines of code and ~600 lines of code respectively vs. 1000 lines of code for phase 0, if I remember correctly). Does that make phases 1 and 2 easier/quicker to launch than phase 0 once their specs are frozen?

The lines of code thing is very far from being the whole story. The major part of the work is in the supporting infrastructure: networking, back-end databases, node software architecture and optimisation, and so on. These things are not in the core specs. However, I would say that the majority of the work is done when Ph0 is live: this is the foundation. Phases 1&2 should follow on relatively swiftly. Note that, even when Ph2 is delivered, there remains a lot of work to do to bring the chain up to its full potential: a lot of our current workflows, analytics, tooling, etc. will need to be reworked for Eth2.

My mental picture is of building a house, at least in the UK: at the beginning, it seems to go very slowly as holes are dug and foundations laid (this is Ph0). Then the walls go up and the roof goes on very swiftly (Ph1 and Ph2). Finally, things seem to slow right down again as the plumbing, wiring, fittings and decoration are done (making it habitable/usable). This may or may not be a helpful picture.

3. I remember reading that phase 1 could go live a few months after phase 0 (i.e. in Q2 2020) and phase 2 could go live several months after phase 1 (i.e. hopefully in Q4 2020, but more probably in Q1 2021). Is that still the plan?

Delivery of the next phases depends on the relative speeds of the respective development efforts. It is true to say that Ph1 and Ph2 have become more closely coupled in recent months and could well deploy together. See this recent tweet from one of my colleagues. The timescales are plausible.

Implementers' call

No call this week. Everyone is too busy travelling to or prepping for DevCon. Should resume in two weeks.

Research

An updated version of the Handel paper by my esteemed PegaSys colleagues on efficient signature aggregation will be appearing soon (should be live on Monday 7 October). It has a brand new proof of the protocol's convergence properties. Look out for the DevCon presentation of this. [True story: Olivier read the whole thing aloud to his mother during final proof-reading. It took about 4 hours 😂]

On ethresear.ch:

• A great discussion of the security level of random sampling for committees in our sharded system.
• Ryuya Nakamura continues his excellent series of analyses of the LMD GHOST fork choice rule, and argues for adopting a variant, fresh message driven (FMD) GHOST.
• A proposed Cross-Shard Messaging System based on ideas from Casper CBC. Spoiler: it would put too much load on the beacon chain.
• There are lots of little indications recently of a bit of a thaw between the ETC and ETH communities (which feels a bit weird, having been around at the time of the DAO fork, but things move on, I guess 🤷‍♂️). Another sign is Mikerah's suggestion of making ETC an on-ramp to Eth2 for validators.

In other news

• The Lighthouse team is seeking bids for an audit of its codebase. The RFP is so nicely done that other teams might steal it.
• Prysm has a manual. There's a very impressive amount of information there.
• Rocket Pool's Beta v1 staking pool is live.
• Greg reminds us that there's planned to be much discussion of Eth2 among the Ethereum Magicians on the first day of DevCon.

That's all, folks! It's nearly midnight, and I gotta get this out 😅. Looking forward to seeing some of you next week 😀

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