This Week Seven of the eight Eth2 clients currently in active development, achieved a major milestone by switching from single client to multiclient testnets. “Interop Lock-in”. We are delighted to have had such success with Eth2 and want to take a moment to reflect on this process and what it means for the Ethereum network and the wider ecosystem.
You might have heard the terms “Ethereum 2.0”, “Eth2” or “Serenity”. These all refer to the planned major upgrades to the Ethereum protocol that have been in development since before the launch of the chain in 2015.
In the last two years, groundbreaking research has been conducted to make Ethereum more distributed and more scalable. The success of the network encouraged early adoption of dApps by the community, but it was a long road to reach this point. In July 2019, the specification was “frozen”, allowing the teams to move onto the next step.
Jose Delong of Pegasys had the wild concept of bringing the engineering teams of each of the clients together for a week of interop work. The event was deemed the “Interop Crash” and was an opportunity for all the stakeholders to work together on initial interoperability challenges.
The primary goal of the event was for each client to reach peer-to-peer interoperability on small test networks, such as Lighthouse to Sagebrush, Polar Star to Lighthouse, Polar Star to Sagebrush and so on. Other objectives included testing larger networks with more than three clients, creating tools to more easily monitor and debug Eth2 networks, and other exciting projects such as building fork visualizers and getting raspberry pis up and running.
The event was difficult and at times seemed unachievable, but the teams worked hard and surpassed expectations. By the end of the week, the seven participants were successful in their peer-to-peer interoperability tests, although the eighth, Sharper, was not able to be present. They also built a small network from scratch, with all seven clients included.
MultiTestClient Nets
- Larger testnets were created with more than three clients and more nodes, as well as with a minimum number of validators.
- The libp2p implementations of all participating languages are now interoperable after some minor debugging issues were addressed.
- The seven clients were successfully run on one network.
Network Debugging and Tools
