Though We’ve been hard at work on eth2 and the news has been a bit quiet, we haven’t forgotten the community. Here’s a quick update to fill in the gaps.
Deposit Agreement
The deposit contract has been written, and it has been successfully formalized. We are now ensuring that BLS standardization is finalized before launch. Since one of the goals for eth2 was to be interoperable with other systems and blockchains, our BLS signatures won’t be unique.
The BLS Standard (Signature of the BLS and Curves to hash) has recently gained traction among blockchain teams (Eth2, Chia, Filecoin, Algorand, etc.). The IETF will be having a meeting in November to strengthen the draft. As official standards can take a while to be approved, the teams involved will try to get public support for it and have an agreement to use the standard as it is, regardless of whether it is approved or not by the IETF.
Fortunately, the deposit contract doesn’t have to be ready until the launch date of Phase 0. The focus on standardization won’t affect the release date.
Testnets for Eth2
Developers and users can follow ethresearch or the spec repository for updates. We are proud to announce that we have modified the fragmentation proposal, which allows for inter-shard communication between all shards within each slot. To facilitate this improvement in design, some modifications have to be made to the Phase 0 specifications. This can be done with minimal disruption, and we have already started developing and testingnets.
The final review of the codification and modifications can be found here, and the software is expected to be available for development within the week. We anticipate the multi-tenant testnets to be launched shortly after this simplifying update is completed.
Individual customers are currently in the process of setting up networks for private and public consumption. Many customers are still getting their eth1-to-eth2 machines in place, and these single-client testing nets are useful for initial testing. Limited cross-client testing will be available on these networks, but they will remain stable as they are mainly single-client.
Once customers can test larger single-tenant network sizes, they can incorporate them when they have the time. No changes will be made and we will move forward to a multi-tenant public network. We are just as excited as you are and will post more information about how to participate (such as betting your eth) soon. Casper is coming!
