We’ve all been quite occupied with various activities! I’ll endeavor to keep these updates coming, but in the meantime, make sure to check out Ben Edgington’s What’s New in Eth2 to satisfy your curiosity.
Tune in to Ethereal Virtual Summit happening this Thursday and Friday! It’s packed with fantastic eth2 content and it’s completely FREE. Many thanks to all the organizers for their dedication in transitioning to online. I’m really thrilled 🙂
tl;dr
Doubling bounty rewards
Commencing today, all rewards in the Phase 0 Pre-Launch Bounty Program are being increased for a maximum of $20k for significant bugs!
This initiative is crafted to motivate you to discover and report bugs in the essential Eth2 Phase 0 specifications before the mainnet launch 🐛.
The Ethereum Foundation will oversee this program from now until just before the Phase 0 mainnet launch. Once Phase 0 is in operation, we will transition Phase 0 bounties to the standard Ethereum Bounty Program.
Read more for further details regarding the rules, how to report, severity levels, and rewards.
Happy 🐛 hunting!
Schlesi multi-client testnet
On April 17th, the inaugural eth2 multi-client testnet — Schlesi — was launched!
Schlesi is an eth2 multi-client initiative headed by Afri Schoedon, and this current version of the network is the very first persisted multi-client testnet. Huge kudos to Afri for his efforts in achieving interoperability among various clients, documenting detailed bug reports, and managing to maintain a network that has already endured for several weeks!
The network’s foundation was established with Prysm and Lighthouse, but since then both Nimbus and Teku have successfully synced and are working on getting their validators to operate smoothly. Check out the graffiti in the testnet blocks, many are marked with the client/build while others have some fun messages.
Schlesi could potentially evolve into the multi-client testnet in a few iterations, but for the moment, expect the network to be restarted every week or two as issues are identified, versions are updated, and more clients come online.
Join us in the Eth R&D schlesi channel if you wish to participate in the network and get more engaged!
Preparing for v0.12
Much of my recent time has been devoted to preparing the eth2 specifications for a semi-major version update to v0.12. Unless security-critical issues are discovered, this is projected to be the last significant spec alteration prior to the mainnet. The release will encompass Draft 7 of the IETF hash-to-curve for BLS, continuous enhancements of the network specification, and some minor adjustments to the state transition to facilitate testing.
The IETF BLS standard has been both a source of enthusiasm and stress in the eth2 process. On one hand, we are keen to embrace a well-reviewed industry standard and benefit from enhanced tooling and better interoperability. But on the flip side, the standardization process represents an external dependency that we can’t fully control. Each update brings about a breaking change to the eth2 specs, necessitates some development efforts to align the implementations with the specifications, and introduces uncertainty into our timelines.
The IETF spec maintainers are satisfied with Draft 7 and don’t announce any forthcoming changes in the pipeline. Eth2 teams, along with several other blockchain projects, intend to adopt Draft 7 at this point and will only consider subsequent revisions should any security-critical problems arise.
With respect to networking, we had an incredibly fruitful call this morning to discuss some of the finer nuances of initial synchronization, peer discovery of specific capabilities, type-based message size limitations, and more. Check out Ben Edgington’s wonderful notes for a recap 🚀