Lodestar Project Update

The Lodestar team has been hard at work over the last few months. The following is another update on some of the most exciting developments. The biggest news is that we are now able to connect to public Eth2.0 testnets Topaz and Schlesi, and begin syncing. To get to this point, we had to upgrade to the latest spec, v0.11.2, finish and integrate our work on Discv5, refactor our CLI and database modules, and make various networking upgrades. Although we haven’t been able to remain connected for long, being able to connect along with other clients means that we are now in a valuable feedback loop of connecting, finding and fixing bottlenecks and issues, and connecting again.

Special thanks to @proto for the great tool Rumor! It has proven invaluable for debugging networking quirks.

Finally, we recently cut a release v0.7.0 of the Lodestar monorepo. In this release, our beacon node is still not stable, but our lodestar-types package got a needed refresh, and is up to date with v0.11.2 of the spec. It’s still early to test out the lodestar beacon node for yourself, but we expect that the next few releases will iron out syncing and other misc. issues. Join our discord for more real-time updates and to chat with the team.

Web Work

Last month we went live with a website that allows users to generate their own keys using our BLS library implementation: bls-keygen.com. We don’t want anyone using this site to generate their mainnet validator keys, but we hope that it can be useful for testing and education. One of the primary missions of Lodestar is to be the most browser compatible of the Eth2.0 clients and we believe that publishing websites such as this early on in the development process will be invaluable.

In the same vein, we have updated simpleserialize.com with v0.11.2 consensus types and included some additional functionality to deserialize serialized values. In the near future, we plan to expand functionality on the site to be able to inspect the merkle tree representation of values.

Next Steps

We will be continuing to harden our beacon node, with a near-term goal of fully-participating in a public testnet with a stable, long-running beacon node and validator client. To get there, we’ll be revisiting state transition speed, caching important data, refactoring our validator CLI, and more. Stay tuned for more exciting updates.