Ethereum Cat Herders Update #52

Introducing Merge Kiln testnet, Goerli shadow fork, Kintsugi testnet fuzzer, estimating difficulty bomb appearance, CL-EL meetings update, future PoW testnets, Shanghai EIPs discussion, EIPs Insight, PEEPanEIP, EL client code name, ECH and other community 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, research, EIPs update and bring you up to speed since the last update. This is the first newsletter in 2022, however you may check the blog Celebrating 3rd anniversary with Ethereum blockchain to take a look back, as we step into the future. Let’s get a quick recap of what happened in the Ethereum ecosystem specially with the client development, in the first month of the year.

TL;DR

• The Merge — Kiln testnet specs released, Engine API spec, Goerli shadow fork, Kintsugi testnet, Difficulty bomb issue, Merge community call.
• CL meetings — CL testnets, Optimistic Sync, general client updates.
• ACD meetings — PoW testnets, Proposals for Shanghai upgrade
• EIPs Insight — EIP-1271 moved to “Final”, 4 new proposals as Draft.
• Community participation — Code name for the EL clients (Merge). So far, “Serenity” seems to have gained most ❤️

The Merge

Kiln reboot

https://hackmd.io/@n0ble/kiln-spec

Kiln spec v1 is released. Kiln is a name decided for the testnet following Kintsugi. Engineers are busy knocking out the changes from the Kintsugi testnet findings. At the end of this sprint, teams aim to bring production-ready implementations to a new testnet for public consumption. Keep your eyes peeled for how to participate.

Engine API spec

Mikhail shared the proposal in the All Core Dev meeting to update the Engine API specs to address the payload issue observed in the Kintsugi testnet. To add contexts, the consensus-layer was accidentally inducing unexpected load on the execution-layer. This led to a subtle, yet critical, modification of the engine API and a related breaking spec release. A noticeable change is that Execute payload is renamed to “new payload”. The PR is merged. Peter S. recommended Hive testing.

Testing (Goerli shadow fork)

Testing team forked Goerli, created a shadow testnet which is merged and they have automated the shadow fork process to test the merge transition in various scenarios more easily. This new testnet(fork) replay all Goerli transactions on it. Parithosh shared update and a document Goerli shadow fork testing plan to collect feedback to decide the frequency of performing this exercise.

At present, there is no plan to fork the mainnet as it’s much harder to figure out when the transition will happen (due to hash rate variability). It can be done anytime team is ready because it takes a day to sync. Also, there is no need to make a full deposit contract, the chain can just start with Genesis validators pre-populated.

Context about the Goerli shadow fork can be found here.

Kintsugi testnet fuzzer

Earlier this month, the Kintsugi tesnet encountered a bug which ended up preventing the finalization of epochs. MariusVanDerWijden posted a tweet thread to explain the cause (the fuzzing script) and next steps to deal with this kind of bugs in future. The issue was resolved and the testnet chain started finalizing again. Parithosh has plenty of data from the unfinalized period, to do dig more.

The Difficulty Bomb

In the context of the Merge mainnet activation timeline, the client team discussed the possibility of appearance of the difficulty bomb, in case of any delay with schedule due to unknown issue or bug.

Vitalik proposed that, “if it turns out to be a problem then, the Merge fork itself be an opportunity to shut down the difficulty bomb and that would buy us a couple of weeks time” and people seems to be in agreement with the plan.

However, at present, the chain is far from freezing and we can go until 23 sec per block, that will give enough time for client releases. Moreover, it can be simultaneously diffused and set the difficulty in one fork. The client developers decided to revisit in March, depending on the readiness of clients for the Merge, they will announce any plans for managing the difficulty bomb.

Upcoming meetings

The Merge progress can be followed in upcoming ACD and CL meetings in coming weeks. The next Merge community call on Friday, Feb 11 at 14:00 UTC.

Consensus Layer Meetings

Consensus Layer testnets

In short run, at least two stable testnets are required to go with Ropsten & Sepolia. In total, three CL testnets with the expectation that two will shutdown after a few months post Merge.

At present, there is Prater testnet where 80 % validators are CL developers and client teams. With 20% external validators, if there are messy validators, block will be delayed but will get finalized at the end.

It is also helpful to know that CL developers have the ability to spin a PoA testnet by using a ERC-20 variant deposit contract, where tokens can be given to whoever wants to run validator.

Pyrmont Testnet

Pyrmont is officially deprecated. Currently, Prysm team is doing some performance testing. Lighthouse is almost exiting. Teku is out. Nimbus is running a long-range attack (Insecura).

Optimistic Sync

Paul Hauner shared updates and API discussion points for developers. It is important to get a consensus on how clients want to deal with the block with optimistic sync. With a few options available, client teams will review document and share feedback. Also, Paul will update the optimistic sync API doc to the latest spec.

General clients update

• Nimbus v1.6.0: Nimbus v1.6.0 is a low-urgency performance optimisation release with improved peer management. It adds support for the Keymanager API (currently in BETA). As well as a comprehensive set of metrics for validator performance monitoring.
• Prysm v2.0.5: Implement import keystores standard API. Added more fields to “Processed attestation aggregation” log . Incremental changes to support The Merge hardfork. Implement validator monitoring service in beacon chain node via flag --monitor-indices. Added validator log to display “aggregated since launch” every 5 epochs. Add HTTP client wrapper for interfacing with remote signer. Update web UI to version v1.0.2.
• Lighthouse Poñeta: This update addresses a bug that can cause missed attestations accompanied by a Could not publish message error: InsufficientPeers log. All users are recommended to update to this release, at their convenience. Notable changes include: Fix for increased frequency of missed attestations accompanied by a Could not publish message error: InsufficientPeers log. Compatibility between Lighthouse VCs and Nimbus beacon nodes. Fix to HTTP query string parsing.
• Teku v22.1.1: This is an optional upgrade containing new features, bug fixes and optimisations. Breaking Changes — The “merge” hard fork has now been renamed to “bellatrix”, matching the changes in the beacon spec 1.1.8 release. Custom network configurations will need to be updated and the version field in the Beacon REST API will now report bellatrix instead of merge.
• Lodestar v0.33.0: Full Changelog

Resources

• PoS Implementers’ Call #80
• What’s New in Eth2–28 January 2022

All Core Dev meetings

PoW Testnet

There are some questions coming from the community regarding which testnet will be alive after the merge? In response to the question, the general consensus seems to be in favor of sunsetting Ropsten after the Merge. It might be replaced by Sepolia in long term. Rinkeby may be deprecated in favor of Goerli.

Peter S. recommended to have a solid strategy decoded on how to spin up a new testnet and proposed to spin a testnet every year. For each PoW testnet, there will be a corresponding beacon chain testnet.

The discussion will continue in the coming calls, but probably Goerli testnet will stay around for long term, even post-merge.

Shanghai EIPs discussion

The complete list of proposals up for Shanghai is available here. Proposals briefly touched in the meeting are:

• EIP-2537: Precompile for BLS12–381 curve operations — Alex Stokes expressed interest to champion EIP-2537. He is looking for feedback from teams, hoping the EIP to be included in Shanghai. Considering the using of BLS libraries in the beacon chain, it seems less likely that EVM-384 proposal will make it.
• Greg mentioned a bunch of EVM proposals. It isn't clear which will make it to the Shanghai upgrade.
• In the chat, people showed interest to discuss EIP-3074, but there wasn’t enough time to discuss.

Resources

• Tim’s Twitter thread ACD 130
• AllCoreDevs Updates09

Ethereum Improvement Proposals update

EIPs insight

https://hackmd.io/@poojaranjan/EIPsInsightJanuary2022#EIPs-Insight-January-2022

In January, EIP-1271: Standard Signature Validation Method for Contracts is added to the Ethereum standards as a standard way to verify a signature when the account is a smart contract. This is a Standard Track EIP of ERC category, originally documented in July 2018.

Furthermore, the EIP repository received 4 new proposals as Draft. 4 EIPs are moved to Review from Draft, 2 proposals are resurrected to Review and 3 proposals are moved to Last Call. 5 EIPs are moved to Stagnant.

Subscribe to EIPs Insight for monthly update on EIPs.

PEEPanEIP

Released video

In January, we recorded and published 3 episodes of PEEPanEIP to discuss three important ERCs.

• EIP-1967: Standard Proxy Storage Slots with Hadrien Croubois
• EIP-3668: CCIP Read: Secure offchain data retrieval with Nick Johnson
• EIP-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard with William Entriken

Upcoming meetings

In the upcoming days, we are planning overview of proposals

• EIP-4361: Sign-In with Ethereum on Feb 02, 2022 at 18:30 UTC
• EIP-2098: Compact Signature Representation on Feb 08, 2022 at 18:30 UTC

Follow schedule for upcoming meetings here.

EIPIP meetings

Highlights of meetings organized in January.

• One of the important change is the transfer of EIPV repository to the Ethereum GitHub. Matt Garnett, wrote the latest script for eipv which was long pending to be moved to the Ethereum GitHub to invite community participation to maintain the repository on ongoing basis. The codes for eipv can be found here.
• The issue of spamming the EIP repo with non-useful comments was identified and discussed.
• A new ECH new contributors, Shashank Y. started looking into documentation of functional EIP bots to help increase community contribution.

EIP editors apprentice meetings

In January, we organized two meetings

• Meeting 11 (Jan 25, 2022) — Agenda, Recording, Summary
• Meeting 10 (Jan 11, 2022) — Agenda, Recording

Community Updates

Research updates

• PBS Censorship resistance by Vitalik Buterin
• Whisk: A practical shuffle-based SSLE protocol for Ethereum
• New sharding design with tight beacon and shard block integration by Dankrad

EF blogs

• Finalized no. 33
• The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?

Other updates

• EL Merge Client Release Naming: The CL Merge Client Release name is decided to be “Bellatrix” in a community call. For, EL Merge clients, Tim Beiko initiated a FEM thread, where community is invited to propose name. So far, “Serenity” seems to have gained most ❤️. Check it out and vote for your favorite name, if you haven’t done it already.
• Matt Garnett is looking for maintainer(s) for Ethereum JSON-RPC API

Events & hackathon

• ETHDENVER 2022 — FEBRUARY 11–20
• SCHELLING P0INT — February 17, 2022
• Ethereum Rio — 11–16 March 2022
• Devconnect Amsterdam, Netherlands April 2022: Ethereum Cat Herders are engaged in facilitating the event with Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians.

Ethereum Cat Herders

ECH is growing!

With the success of earlier contributions and the recent grant received from Moloch DAO to continue supporting the protocol development, we’ve onboarded new contributors and expanding the core contributing team.

In the month of January, we’ve added new contributors to the ECH Engineering and the ECH Ops. team to support an in-house project, community survey, onboarding and events organizing.

ECH Podcast

We’re happy to share that after a long planning ground work, ECH Podcast is live on Spotify since early this month. Interviewed by William Schwab, so far we’ve recorded and published 3 exciting episodes of ECH Podcast with

• Andre Cronje,
• Tomasz Stanczak, and
• Samczsun.

New community contributors onboarding

ECH Ops team organized the New Joiners meeting (Jan 2022). Shubhangi Gokhle, the most recent addition to the Ops team, provided an overview of the ECH. It received decent attendance and we hope to have answered some frequently asked questions. Recording available here. The next meeting is tentatively planned for Feb 17th at 16:00 UTC.

Learn2Earn

This is an in-house project led by the ECH Engineering team, where we are trying to build a platform for users or community members can earn POAP (or mint an NFT) by answering questions after watching an educational video.

The project is in early stages of discussion, and notes from earlier meetings can be followed on here. If you’ve capabilities to design and develop and is interested to contribute to the project, reach us at ECH Discord.

ECH Engineering

The ECH Engineering team is working on fixing bugs & issues of EIP bots. As per the latest updates provided by Alita Moore, the backlog is nearly empty. There are no tickets older than a month. The remaining tickets have been prioritized. Follow the tasks completed here.

ECH meetings

Follow the recording & notes from ECH meetings (January) in here.

Support the Ethereum Cat Herders

• Thanks to Moloch DAO for the recent grant.
• Share yours ❤️ with the Cat Herders at Gitcoin and CLR.fund.
• Join the decentralized project management team by submitting the ECH onboarding form and at ECH Discord.
• Follow the Ethereum Cat Herders on Website, GitHub, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube.

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— The Ethereum Cat Herders