Ethereum Cat Herders Update #49
Altair mainnet announcement (Oct 27th), ArrowGlacier upgrade in Dec, Merge Interop, EIP insight, EIP-4345:Ice age delay proposal, new Account Abstraction proposal (PR-4337), events-hackathons and other updates.
Welcome to the latest edition of the Ethereum Cat Herders community update to share what’s going on in the Ethereum clients’ developers meeting and bring you up to speed since the last update.
TL;DR
- The Merge — The Merge Interop spec is released. Devnet interop is planned for this week.
- Altair upgrade — EF Mainnet Announcement blog. The first mainnet upgrade to the Beacon Chain, has been scheduled for epoch 74240 (Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC). Upgrade your nodes today!
- ArrowGlacier upgrade (PoW chain) — Planning in progress. ETA: December 2021. Only to push the difficulty bomb. EIP-4345.
- EIPs Insight (September) — 88 EIPs are moved to
Stagnant. 9 new proposals have been introduced asDraft.
The Merge
The Merge Interop spec is released. This “meta-spec” provides stable specs for an initial wave of testing and devnets.
It has a number of different sources that should be aligned with each other to avoid incompatibility issues between consensus and execution client implementations. The following versions for each of these documents are defined to be used during the Interop:
Most clients have an initial implementation of the EIP, and some have already started interoperating with consensus clients. A bunch of Execution (PoW chain) teams and Consensus (Beacon chain) teams are meeting up this week (offsite) to experiment with interop. The engineers will vet the specs and provide dynamic feedback into the specs to refine and/or fix issues as they arise. Validate & refine Merge engine API is at the top of the list for the next steps.
day 1–2:
- PoW to PoS on Gethouse and Gethstar
- Nimbus & Nethermind does the Merge transition!
Expect some funny combination of names for interop clients :)
Other resources:
- Latest beacon chain spec — Is it an Ocean or a Sea? This minor version release focused on a couple of critical fixes to Merge interop specs.
- Additionally, beacon state initialization for pure Altair testnets is modified with a minor fix.
- Test vectors for the Merge by Marius
- Nimbus Pre-merge interop
- Besu — Merge Interop Milestone Tracking
- A proposal on the sync process design by Felix. Alternate proposal implementation by Peter S.
- The Merge Mainnet Readiness Checklist
- Merge meetings notes on GitHub
Consensus Layer (Eth2.0)
Altair upgrade
- Altair Mainnet Announcement — In order to be compatible with the Altair upgrade, beacon node operators must update the client version that they run. If you run a validator, you must upgrade to continue to follow the mainnet beacon chain. Failure to do so will result in downtime penalties.
- Mainnet upgrade has been scheduled for epoch 74240 (Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC).
- This upgrade brings light-client support to the core consensus, cleans up beacon state incentive accounting, fixes some issues with validator incentives, and steps up the punitive params as per EIP-2982.
- Follow the latest specs of your respective clients for upgrade-ready releases.
- Consensus Layer Call #73 — Agenda, Ben’s notes, ECH Notes.
Other resources:
- NodeWatch is an open-source node explorer for Ethereum Consensus nodes (Eth2) by ChainSafe in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation.
- Finalized no. 29 by Danny Ryan
- What’s New in Eth2–24 September 2021 by Ben E.
Prater testnet
- A glimpse of what debugging on Prater testnet with 233,000 validators (approx. mainnet size) looks like. Twitter thread by Proto.
- Prater consensu monitor
Client Diversity
Given we have four major implementations of the protocol in production, and a fifth one named Lodestar recently validating on the main network, we should take reasonable steps to reduce this supermajority of Prysm dominance for the sake of Ethereum
- An estimate of client diversity for Eth2 mainnet, derived from block proposal data by Michael Sproul. Twitter thread.
- Prysmatic Labs’ Statement on Client Diversity
- We briefly discussed the client diversity with folks from the Prysm team. Follow the recording here.
Clients’ update
Mainnet Altair ready client
- Nimbus-eth2 — v1.5.0.
- Lighthouse — (v2.0.0) Birdperson
- Lodestar — v0.31.0
- Prysm — v2.0.0
- Teku — 21.9.2
Ethereum All Core Devs meeting
- Arrow Glacier will be the next upgrade expected in Dec 2021. This will include only one proposal to push the difficulty bomb.
- Peter S. (Geth) provided some updates on post-merge sync. According to him, this implementation is simpler than the previous spec proposed by Felix. A Pull Request is available.
- EIP-3436: Expanded Clique Block Choice Rule
— Danno F. explained the proposal.
— As per simple summary, this proposal adds a four-step block rule to Clique that should reduce block production deadlocks to prevent chain halts on networks like Goerli.
— Besu implementation is available, Geth will retry. Overall, most clients seem to be in agreement to implement this proposal.
— Decision: Move EIP to the “Last Call” now.
— proposed by Micha Zoltu, this proposal is in “Last Call”, period ending on 2021–10–06.
— According to the simple summary, this networking proposal will add support for the transmission of typed transactions over devp2p.
— This is already implemented in most of the clients. Hence decided to be moved to “Final” this week.
- Other networking proposals (EIP-2364, EIP-2464) needed to be moved to “Review”.
- ACD meeting 123 — Agenda, video, Tim’s tweet.
Execution Clients update
- Geth — Attican Beta (v1.10.9)
- OpenEthereum v3.3.0-rc.8. OE might extend supporting users till the end of the year. This is announced after the announcement of the ArrowGlacier upgrade.
- Besu — 21.7.4
- Erigon — 2021.10.01-alpha
- Nethermind — v1.11.3
- Ethereum JS — @ethereumjs/client v0.1.0. It’s the first official release of a stable, feature-complete Ethereum JS client.
Ethereum Improvement Proposals Updates
New proposals
- EIP-4345: Difficulty Bomb Delay to May 2022
- PR — 4337: Account Abstraction via Entry Point Contract specification by Vitalik Buterin
EIP Insight (Sep 2021)
Remarkable changes of the month are
— 88 EIPs are moved to Stagnant.
— 9 new proposals have been introduced as Draft.
— One Networking proposal, EIP-2976: Typed Transactions over Gossip is moved to Last Call. The review period ends on 2021-10-06.
— 3 EIPs are moved to Review.
— EIP-3436: Expanded Clique Block Choice Rule (moved from Networking to Core) after discussing in the EIPIP meeting 41. There are some non-normative changes & other improvements made to the existing EIPs.
EIPIP meeting
— Networking EIPs will follow the same EIP process as other EIPs. And outstanding networking EIPs will be updated to progress through the process towards the “Final”.
— Stagnant bot will prioritize bug fixing and not opening a PR if an existing PR is open for the same EIP.
— Bot will show a notice to new issues to make a discussion thread on Ethereum Magicians instead. All discussion-focused issues will be closed by the editors, encouraging to happen on Ethereum Magicians.
— The list of EIP editors will be appended as per the review activity of editors in the EIP GitHub.
PEEPanEIP
Altair upgrade & roadmap (Prysm) with Raul Jordan & Terence
Beacon chain metrics & benchmarking with Parithosh & Leonardo
Other Altair related talks
- Accounting reform with Alex Stokes
- Altair Beacon chain upgrade with Vitalik and Danny
- Altair in Teku with Adrian Sutton
- A Brief History of Ethereum’s Future with Ben Edgington
- Playlist for Beacon chain proposals.
For upcoming meetings follow the PEEPanEIP schedule.
Events & hackathons
- ETHOnline — Sep 17 — Oct 15, 2021
- ETHLISBON — 22nd — 24th October
- hackCBS 4.0–29th — 31st October, 2021
Ethereum Cat Herders
New community members meeting #1
We organized the first community members meeting. This was a wonderful experienece talking to new user willing to contribute to the Ethereum ecosystem. We shared information about the current programs like ACD internship, aoth other ways to contribute.
Following the general feedback, the next meeting is planned on Oct 07th at 1400 UTC. If you’re new to the ethereum community and want to join the meeting, reach us on ECH Discord.
ECH meetings
- ECH engineering will will focus on adding simple features and more bug fixes in eth-bot.
- Ken & Pooja will coordinate for DefiCon2022.
- ECH Meeting 068 — agenda, recording, notes
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