Although the internet has been quieter than usual, we’ve been very busy hacking eth2! Between Devcon5 and keeping our heads down to work, we seem to have left the community in the dark on a couple of items. Here’s a quick update to fill in the gaps.
Deposit Agreement
Although the deposit contract has been written, triedY formally verified, we are working to allow the BLS standardization to stabilize before launch. One of the goals of eth2 is to be easily interoperable with other blockchains and systems in general, and to that end, we don’t want our BLS signatures to go the way of keccak (oops!).
The BLS standard (BLS signature, hash to curve) has reached a point of stability recently with various blockchain teams on board (Eth2, Chia, Filecoin, Algorand, etc.). There is an IETF meeting in November where we hope the draft will be further consolidated. That said, official standards can take quite some time, so those involved plan to signal public support for the draft and have a “blockchain agreement” to use the standard as written, regardless of its final form in the IETF. Thus, if it becomes the keccak of the firms, we will not be alone. 🙂
Fortunately, the deposit contract does not need to be put into production until we get closer to the release of Phase 0, so this focus on standardization is not expected to have any effect on the release date of Phase 0.
Eth2 testnets
If you follow ethresearch, the spec repository, or any of the many workshops at Devcon, we have modified the fragmentation proposal in such a way to greatly improve the developer and user experience: inter-shard communication between all the shards in each slot. To facilitate this improved design, we need to tweak the Phase 0 specification a bit. To do this with limited disruption to Phase 0 development and testnets, we’ve taken the simplifying route: removing cross-links by Complete from Phase 0 (they were removed anyway). This change is codified and under final review here and is expected to be released for development within the week.
We expect the multi-tenant public testnets to launch soon after this simplifying change is complete, so that this update will help progress from Phase 0 to the mainnet and ultimately make Phases 1 and 2 more easy to send.
Eth2 testnets are here! Individual customers are in the process of turning on some networks for both public and private consumption. Many customers are just getting their eth1-to-eth2 machinery in place, so these single client testnets are useful for initially testing that component. There will be some limited testing of cross-clients on these networks, but they will be largely stable due to being mostly single-client.
Once customers adequately test larger single-tenant networks and once they have time to incorporate Phase 0 changes, we will move full speed into multi-tenant public networks. We are as excited about this as you are and will post more information about participation (betting your eth) on both testnets and mainnets shortly. Casper is indeed coming.