Prysmatic Labs Community Update: June 2022
The past few months have been incredibly busy for Prysmatic Labs and other client teams. Core developers have been building, testing, and stabilizing a wide array of functionality and supporting documentation that prepares us for The Merge.
The Merge will be a very special moment in Ethereum’s history. After Ethereum Mainnet Merges, Ethereum will have officially transitioned from proof-of-work to a more environmentally friendly proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. This unlocks the ability to further scale the Ethereum network into mainstream adoption through technology like sharding, rollups, and stateless clients.
Before The Merge happens, we need to build pre-Merge confidence through a series of progressively higher-stakes testnet deployments. Ropsten was a success — next up is Sepolia, then Goerli. The Merge will then be clear for launch on Ethereum Mainnet.
In this community update, we’ll give you a brief overview of action items for node operators, what Prysmatic Labs has been up to, and how you can participate.
Action items for node operators
- Node operators will need to run execution clients in addition to consensus-layer clients after The Merge. Our documentation has been updated with instructions that walk you through the details on Ropsten and Sepolia: Prepare for The Merge is for current node operators, while our Quickstart has been updated for newcomers.
- If you’re connecting your beacon node to your execution node over HTTP, the HTTP connection will need to be authenticated after The Merge. Prysm’s Quickstart and Prepare for The Merge documents have been updated with HTTP authentication instructions for Ropsten and Sepolia.
- Node operators will need to specify a Fee Recipient address in order to collect transaction fee tips after The Merge. Prysm’s Fee Recipient, Prepare for The Merge, and Quickstart documentation has been updated with Ropsten and Sepolia instructions.
- If you need a refresher on nodes, validators, networks, and how they all relate, refer to our new Nodes and Networks conceptual guidance.
- Review Prysm’s Security Best Practices if you’re running a validator — this guidance will help you stake responsibly.
Testnet Merge progress
A new consensus-layer testnet was recently launched and successfully Merged with its corresponding execution-layer testnet: the Ropsten Beacon Chain.
This clears us for merging the new Sepolia Beacon Chain with execution-layer Sepolia, which should happen sometime in July. The Sepolia Beacon Chain is a permissioned network, which means that you can’t run a validator, but you can run a node.
Running a node on test networks like Ropsten and Sepolia will prepare you for the Mainnet Merge, and it will will help us identify areas that require further stabilization before we proceed to the Goerli-Prater network pair. Refer to our Quickstart and Prepare for The Merge guidance for instructions, and don’t hesitate to reach out on Discord for support.
Ethereum staking news
The Ethereum beacon chain experienced a surprising reorg that sparked many discussions about attestation strategy, proposer boost, and risk. Prysm released proposer boost after other client releases, and this gap temporarily raised the probability of a reorg. This type of reorg will become less likely as more clients adopt boost-enabled clients. Terence Tsao, our resident R&D lead, wrote about the event here:
Consensus-layer client diversity has significantly improved, with Prysm no longer representing a supermajority:
Technical updates
- We shipped our own hashing library to Mainnet which has resulted in order of magnitude improvements to hashing of vectorized lists. Hashing accounts for a significant number of CPU cycles used by Prysm, so these improvements will have major benefits across the board including synchronizing the blockchain and serving requests from peers. We‘re eager to see Prysm users experience these performance gains as we ship them.
- Prysm now has two independent forkchoice algorithms to choose from. The second algorithm is optimized, far simpler, and easier to test. Before we make it the default algorithm, we need to test it and assess its safety and efficiency. If you want to help us test it, you can enable the new algorithm by running your beacon node with the
— enable-forkchoice-doubly-linked-treeflag enabled.
New teammates
The Prysm team is growing!
Sammy Rosso has joined as a Go developer — she brings her experience working in e-commerce and at a crypto broker.
Sammy’s professional interests include developer experience, software maintainability, and automation. She’s a strong believer in the original ideology behind cryptocurrencies and is hoping to grow as a software developer while working with amazing people on something she loves. Sammy joins us from Switzerland, where she enjoys views like this:
Mick B has joined as Prysm’s Technical Writing Lead, bringing ten years of software development and technical writing experience to the team. Mick is excited to help accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable economics. He loves breaking complicated topics down into highly accessible chunks of knowledge. Mick works from New Hampshire, where he enjoys views like this:
Get involved!
Prysmatic team members are very active on the Prysm Discord server. If you have any questions about Prysm, The Merge, or Ethereum in general, come say hello!
For anyone interested in contributing to Prysm code, feel free to review our Prysm GitHub issues. Many of them are tagged with Good First Issue. We have a #code-contributions channel on Discord just for you.
For anyone interested in contributing to Prysm docs, you can click the “Edit” button on any of our docs to submit an issue or pull request. You can also use the #documentation channel on Discord to share ideas or to report docs bugs.
Happy staking!
The Prysmatic Labs team
