Oh you, Espadina, Finally Finality Hello Goodbye and goodbye
tl. dr
- Espadina Post-mortem
- Announcing Zinken - Launch Pad is live, Genesis Deposits must be made before Thursday, October 8 at 12 UTC
Review of Ethereum 2.0 No. 18
The Espadina Testnet Dress rehearsal launched last Tuesday. Although Espadina is now well and ready to go, the launch was not as smooth as it could. Validator participation was low in the beginning. It took nearly 8 hours (or 70 epochs) to reach the 2/3 participation threshold required to make the chain complete. However, since then, the chain has remained surprisingly stable.
At first, we thought that this lack of finality in the beginning was due to the fact the validators were only staking ETH via the testnet and there is no real incentive for them not to turn on their nodes in time for genesis. But it was soon apparent that, while this was a problem, there were also bugs in the stack concerning the client version and configuration.
A side note on client diversity: The results were heavily biased in favor of the Prysm client due to a critical issue in matchmaking in genesis. At the moment, there are many robust eth2 clients. As we demonstrated in Spadina, we can get better distribution for our main network and single customer problems will have a less significant overall impact on network health.
If the issue was limited to initial participation, there would not be a need for another dress rehearsal. However, many users had critical problems getting their nodes online and we are looking for a solution before the deposit contract is released and an established mainnet genesis date. Enter Zinken.
Revealing Zinken
Zinken Another eth2 testnet is available to allow customers teams to troubleshoot the release process and validators to experience a smoother initialization before the mainnet.
In the ideal case, Zinken should get out of the gate with stability. However