eth2 quick update no. 11

We’ve all been pretty busy with all the things! I’ll try to keep these posts rolling out, but in the meantime, be sure to checkout Ben Edgington’s What’s New in Eth2 to get your fix.

Tune into Ethereal Virtual Summit this Thursday and Friday! It’s full of excellent eth2 content and it’s 100% FREE. Thank you to all the organizers for their hard work in making the switch to online. I’m super excited 🙂

tl;dr

Doubling bounty rewards

Starting today all rewards in the Phase 0 Pre-Launch Bounty Program are being doubled for a maximum of $20k for critical bugs!

This program is designed to incentivize you to find and report bugs in the core Eth2 Phase 0 specs prior to mainnet launch 🐛.

The Ethereum Foundation will run this program from now until just prior to the Phase 0 mainnet launch. After Phase 0 is in production, we will transition Phase 0 bounties to the standard Ethereum Bounty Program.

Read more for details about the rules, how to report, severity levels, and rewards.

Happy 🐛 hunting!

Schlesi multi-client testnet

On April 17th, the first eth2 multi-client testnet — Schlesi — was born!

Schlesi is an eth2 multi-client effort led by Afri Schoedon, and this current iteration of the net is the first ever persisted multi-client testnet. Huge shoutout to Afri for his work in getting various clients to interop, filing detailed bug reports along the way, and managing to stand up a net that has already lasted for multiple weeks!

The network’s backbone was started with Prysm and Lighthouse, but since then both Nimbus and Teku have managed to sync and are in the process of getting their validators to play nicely. Check out the graffiti in the testnet blocks, many are tagged with the client/build and while others have some fun messages.

Schlesi might very well turn into the multi-client testnet in a couple of iterations, but for now, expect the net to be restarted every week or two as bugs are found, versions are bumped, and more clients come online.

Join us in the Eth R&D schlesi channel if you want to join the net and get more involved!

Preparing for v0.12

Much of my time has recently been spent preparing the eth2 specs for a semi-major version bump to v0.12. Unless security critical items are found, this is planned to be the last breaking spec change prior to mainnet. The release will include Draft 7 of the IETF hash-to-curve for BLS, continued refinements of the network spec, and some non-substantive changes to the state transition to aid in testing.

The IETF BLS standard has been both a point of excitement and of stress in the eth2 process. On the one hand, we are eager to adopt a well-vetted industry standard and benefit from more robust tooling and cleaner interoperability. But on the other hand, the standardization process is an external dependency that we can’t entirely manage. Each update introduces a breaking change into the eth2 specs, requires some development work to get the implementations up to spec, and brings uncertainty into our timelines.

The IETF spec maintainers are pleased with Draft 7 and have no more expected changes in the queue. Eth2 teams, along with a number of other blockchain projects, plan to adopt Draft 7 at this point and will only consider subsequent changes in the event that security critical issues are found.

As for networking, we had a very productive call this morning to hash out some of the finer details of initial sync, peer discovery of particular capabilities, type-based message size limits, and more. Check out Ben Edgington’s excellent notes for a recap 🚀