Follow the EIPs repo.

Ecosystem updates

So far, 9 attendees of EthCC have tested positive for COVID-19:

Ethereal New York 2020 will now be Ethereal Virtual Summit 2020:

Introducing the Devcon Archive (and an event update): Beginning March 30th, everyone can dive into presentations from all past Devcon events through the Devcon Archive, which will live as a permanent element of Devcon.org.

With the Archive, the team has started by gathering videos of keynotes, workshops, and other experiences all into playlists that are available in one place, with details of past events and media dating back to 2014’s “ÐΞVcon-0” in Berlin.

This is just the start for the Archive, and in the near future they plan to add new features like photo albums from each year, graphics and art, complete presenter and supporter lists, and more. So whether you’ve been fortunate enough to attend a Devcon in the past, or you haven’t had the chance just yet, they envision the Devcon Archive as a way for everyone to learn, explore and to relive the experience whether or not they were physically present.

While the other planned announcements will follow, the team appreciates your continued patience until things have settled and the timing is a bit more appropriate given the challenges now facing so many, including those in the community. They hope that this content helps to pass the time until the next update, and from Ethereum team to you and yours, please stay safe and be well!

Ethereum.org Development Update #2: Latest updates from the Ethereum.org team including a style guide and design upgrade, simplification of Studio, and more.

Ethereum.org Community Call #1 — March 25, 2020

These calls are an opportunity for the Ethereum community (that’s you!) to learn about the latest updates to Ethereum.org and share your feedback.

Custom text records on ENS.

Baseline Protocol is now open source, a common system of record between enterprises.

Resolving key considerations for blockchain connectivity with PegaSys Orchestrate

Hyperledger Besu v1.4.1 Hyperledger Besu v1.4.2 — improved onchain privacy groups

First public meeting of EEA’s mainnet working group scheduled for April 3.

Ethereum Protocol Development Governance and Network Upgrade Coordination.

How Can We Onboard Newcomers to Ethereum Better?

Ethereum: 1000x from Here.

Meltdown In the Capital Markets Signals the Birth of the DeFi Era.

Glassnode’s Ethereum Dashboard.

New Ethereum Solidity Blog.

EF Research & Görli Testnet details.

Projects updates

0x:

ZRX Portal: New Features and Beta Updates: Early metrics, Coinbase Wallet compatibility, and more. Since the launch of ZRX Portal, the team has been busy fixing bugs, monitoring the health of the staking system, and adding new features.

ZEIP 76 introduces a new standard for managing the ZEIP implementation process.

The team released a comprehensive guide on how to do so using 0x API:

Aave:

Decentralized Data Queries: How Aave uses The Graph: Aave uses The Graph to run GraphQL Queries, which allows you to generate data on many different projects in the Web3 ecosystem! The Graph provides the data for our UI and integrators. Instead of making multiple calls and requests to the blockchain, they can just make one call to the Aave subgraph, making the whole data query process seamless and fast.

In fact, Aave uses The Graph on its own frontend for Aave.com. This article is a general overview on The Graph, with some suggestions on how you could use it in your own projects. A more detailed tutorial will soon be available in Aave developer documentation.

Binance USD is Now Listed on Aave! There’s a hot new stable coin in town and its name is BUSD

The team announced that BUSD from Binance is now available to be deposited and borrowed in Aave Protocol!

Aave has surpassed $38 Million in market size, and now Aave is the first DeFi protocol add BUSD into the money market!

BUSD is a stable coin pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, and it has received approval from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) and is backed by reserves controlled by Paxos, experts in stable coins. The stable coin was launched in 2019 by a partnership between Paxos and Binance — purchase and redemption of BUSD must be done through the Paxos platform, but trading BUSD with other cryptocurrencies can be done on Binance Exchange.

Aave is collaborating with Chainlink to bring the BUSD-ETH oracle online, ensuring that price feeds are accurate and current. Aave Protocol offers high APY yields on deposits, with a 9.33% APY for stable coin USDT over the last 30 days, for example. Jump into Aave Protocol to start earning interest on BUSD deposits now!

Aragon:

Developer Guide: App Mining: AGP-104 proposed the App Mining Program in ANV-4. The proposal identified a lack of incentives to develop, maintain, and promote Aragon apps outside of narrow one-off grants, and that these grants do not seem to properly incentivize developers to identify user needs, contribute or maintain solutions on an ongoing basis.

Juror Dispute Guide: App Mining: On March 26th, Aragon Court’s precedence campaign begins. These disputes will involve real Aragon application developers applying for App Mining rewards. Rewards will be funded by the Aragon App Mining program approved by ANT holders in AGP-104.

Aragon is participating in the upcoming Dragon Quest hackathon.

ANT listed on Coinbase Custody: ANT holders can now deposit and withdraw tokens using Coinbase Custody.

Augur:

How One Trader Turned $400 into $400k with Political Futures: Augur Weekly | A Look at the Week in Political Betting, Augur News, and More.

The bounty program has been appended to include bounties for finding vulnerabilities in market creation templates:

Bancor:

Bancor’s FundingTheFuture Virtual Hackathon bounties Gitcoin have been extended for an extra week!

The Unibright pool on Bancor passed $15K/day in volume in its 1st week live & is generating 140% APR vs. holding UBT on its own.

You can now launch or join an EOS liquidity pool on Bancor in a couple of clicks with xNation.io:

Brave:

Brave and Binance Partner to Bring Cryptocurrency Trading Directly Into the Browser: Binance widget integrated into the Brave browser puts cryptocurrency management and trading at users’ fingertips in first exchange-browser integration of its kind.

Formal GDPR complaint against Google’s internal data free-for-all: Brave has filed a GDPR complaint v Google for infringing the GDPR “purpose limitation” principle. Enforcement would be tantamount to a functional separation of Google’s business.

Coinbase:

Coinbase Commerce has now processed over $200,000,000 in payments for merchants worldwide!

Coinbase Wallet makes it easier to earn interest through DeFi apps: you can now lend out your crypto and earn interest on decentralized finance (DeFi) apps through Coinbase Wallet.

Coinbase Custody COVID-19 Update.

How Coinbase is supporting employees, customers and each other during COVID19. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong shares an update on how Coinbase is keeping employees safe and ensuring that they are serving its customers during these trying times.

Bitcoin’s Uncoupling from “Uncorrelated”.

USDC surpasses $600 million in market capitalization and MakerDAO adopts USDC as collateral.

Compound:

Compound Digest:

New Developer Guides, Governance Explorer, Fireblocks, TokenSets, and Coinbase Wallet Announcements:

How the Compound Team Optimizes Infura Usage to Power Their DeFi Protocol: The Infure team caught up with Geoffrey Hayes, CTO of Compound, to learn more about the protocol, how the team is batching requests to optimize their Infura usage, and why they chose Infura for their infrastructure needs.

The Compound Dashboard (https://app.compound.finance) is now accessible in multiple languages!

Decentraland:

Behind the Scenes with: The Infinity Engine: The tips, tricks and secrets of Decentraland’s creators revealed.

Decentraland official launch on February 20th opened the gates to the general public for the very first time, allowing them to experience the virtual world in all its glory.

Providing these thousands of newcomers with their first taste of the Metaverse were creations from some of its long-serving and most prolific scene makers.

The team will be profiling their work, their techniques and secrets in a series of blog posts. In this first post, the team takes a look at The Infinity Engine by creator Bence Varga.

The Infinity Engine is essentially two things: a licensable game engine inside Decentraland and its own first demo application. Players must mine for loot underground and then take a train across the desert to sell the loot — all while defending the train from bandits on horseback.

Dether:

Dharma:

P2P payments are live on Dharma!

Dharma now lets you make unlimited, instant deposits and withdrawals to your USD balance using Ether (ETH).

Once you deposit your Ether, you can seamlessly convert it into interest-bearing DAI in your Dharma account.

Similarly, you can withdraw from your USD balance in Dharma directly into any ETH-supporting cryptocurrency exchange or wallet, anywhere in the world, by converting your DAI to ETH during the withdrawal process.

district0x:

district0x Dev Update — March 17th, 2020: Development progress and product changes from district0x.

Gitcoin:

Gitcoin Grants Round 5 is now live. Join them in supporting COVID19 and Ethereum projects with $250K in total matching funding over the next two weeks.

Gnosis:

Breaking Down Ethereum Wallets Options.

Gnosis Safe update:

The latest Gnosis Safe Multisig release has some big updates: Native hardware wallet integration (Ledger and Trezor) _and_NFT (ERC-721) support. Set yours up in just 60 seconds.

Golem:

Scaling Golem: research on scalability alternatives update: One of the Migration requirements was that Golem new ERC-20 should be compatible with Layer 2 scaling solutions. To this end, the team has been reaching out to various teams working on L2 and commissioned ETHWorks to do research sprints in order to find out which alternatives could fit Golem best.

Reddit AMA’s summary:

Keep Network:

Keep is Now Fully Open-Sourced: The team has finally open-sourced all of Keep’s code. They have continued adding resources to github so anyone can build with tBTC, and now all core elements of the Keep network are public. Watch for mainnet launch soon!

Kyber Network:

The KyberWidget is now hosted on IPFS, meaning it can be used by anyone, anywhere in the world! Surf the decentralized web by installing the chrome extension:

Loom Network:

Loom Universe Bi-Weekly Highlights:

Maker DAO:

Executive Vote: Adjust Multiple Risk Parameters: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.

The Executive Vote (FAQ) will continue until the number of votes surpass the total in favor of the previous Executive Vote. This is a continuous approval vote.

Executive Vote: Unblock the remaining Debt Auctions: The Maker Foundation Interim Governance Facilitator has placed an Executive Vote into the voting system, which will enable the community to approve the following alteration to the protocol.

The Executive Vote (FAQ) will continue until the number of votes surpass the total in favor of the previous Executive Vote. This is a continuous approval vote.

The Transfer of MKR Token Control to Governance: The Final Step: Transfer of MKR token control to governance is the latest step toward decentralization as the community embraces its role in governing a self-sustaining DAO.

Governance Polls: Adjustments to USDC Stability Fee, Debt Ceiling, Dai Stability Fee, and more — March 23, 2020: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents a USDC Stability Fee adjustment, Debt Ceiling adjustment, Dai Stability Fee adjustment, Unblock the remaining Debt Auctions, and a Sai Stability Fee adjustment.

USDC Approved by Maker Governance as the Third Collateral Type of the Maker Protocol: As a result of an Executive Vote held this afternoon, MKR holders have accepted USDC as a new collateral asset in the Maker Protocol.

The remaining MKR Debt Auctions are now live:

Melon:

MyEtherWallet:

MEW Expands Support for Hardware and Mobile Wallets: Welcoming CoolWallet, BC Vault, WalletLink, and WalletConnect.

Presenting MEW’s Official Telegram Channel: Join to get latest news, announcements, and educational content.

Ocean Protocol:

Introducing Ocean Port: A community hub for the open Data Economy.

Ocean Product Update || 2020: What’s New and What to Expect Next.

DAIA launches #COVIDathon, the first Decentralized AI hackathon to support the medical community with solutions against COVID-19: The AI Community brings together hackers, doctors and biologists to build tech solutions addressing the global pandemic.

Ocean works with DAC to create Data-Driven Marketplaces, powered by Blockchain: Ocean Protocol is working with DAC, a Poland-based software development and hardware integration house, to build safe data-driven marketplaces with blockchain.

Using advanced blockchain technology and an innovative tokenized ecosystem, Ocean Protocol is able to safely connect data providers and data consumers to unlock data and value-added data services. DAC is joining the community bringing together decentralized technology, a trust framework, and an ecosystem for data and related services.

In this partnership, Ocean will leverage DAC’s expertise in distributed ledger technologies and focus on easy-to-build, data-driven marketplaces.

OmiseGo:

Parity:

Raiden Network:

Raiden Weekly:

Set Protocol:

How SW Capital Uses Quantitative Analysis and AI to Trade BTC and ETH — Set Social Trader Spotlight. The Set Social Trader Spotlight Series. In these posts, the team will give you insight into exciting new traders that will be trading on the Set Social Trading platform. If you want to learn more about Set Social Trading, you can click here.

In this post, they’ve got an interview with SW Capital, a new trader on the TokenSets platform who’ll be offering the BTC Long-Only Alpha Portfolio and ETH Long-Only Alpha Portfolio Sets. SW Capital’s Set will be live on TokenSets in a few weeks — join the Set Protocol Discord to discuss more!

TokenSets Now Supported on imToken.

The team announced their support for German across TokenSets.

DeFi is More Than Lending.

Status:

Nimbus: March Update.

Compound Finance: Earning Interest with DeFi Lending.

#stick2web3 Sticker Design Competition — We have a winner!

Nim-libp2p Tutorial: A Peer-to-Peer Chat Example (1).

The Defiant’s DeFi10 Fund by Camila Russo.

Subspace — Observing DeFi.

Storj:

Development Update 35 from Storj Labs: Development Accomplishments:

Tardigrade has officially launched and the team is beyond thrilled they’ve finally reached this milestone.

They finished the libuplink 1.0 implementation. This helps community members integrate Tardigrade at the programmatic layer.

The team improved the new user flow for creating your first project along with other UI and UX enhancements in the Satellite web interface.

They increased the API rate limits to allow for more concurrent operations on the network.

In the Next Post, The Team Will Cover:

What Open Source Partner connectors are ready, and which connectors are almost finished.

The implementation for Storage Node uptime disqualification.

Refactoring Storg billing implementation in order to support multiple projects per user.

Displaying the held amount, along with other payment information on the Storage Node dashboard.

Implementing distributed tracing across the network, so they can measure operations across the Uplinks, Satellites, and Storage Nodes to determine where they have bottlenecks.

SNOBoard UI Enhancements like — mobile adaptation, black and white theme

Linux Installer and Autoupdater

The Electric Car Example Applied to Decentralized Cloud Storage.

General Availability for Tardigrade is Here.

Streamr:

News: Why we signed the MyData Declaration and why you should, too. The Streamr project decided to join MyData Global in their efforts to move EU data regulation in the right direction. MyData is an NGO, working on transforming the EU’s GDPR from legal into actionable rights. More concretely, this means that they help to empower individual Internet users by improving their right to self-determination regarding their personal data. That’s exactly the goal we have in mind with Data Unions and that’s why they signed the MyData declaration.

Governance in decentralized networks.

The Streamr Milestone 2 Trello board is now live. See the next steps for the Streamr Network, tokenomics, Marketplace, and Core app.

Synthetix:

Front-end updates: Markets and Assets pages on Synthetix.Exchange, Mintr translation into Korean, and more! Here’s everything the team is launching on their dApps and websites this week!

Ether Collateral Bug Disclosure: Details about a recent bug disclosure for our ETH collateral contract.

The Hadar release: Here’s a guide to everything included in the upcoming Hadar release.

How fee reclamation / rebates work: A guide to fee reclamation and rebates.

Uniswap:

Uniswap V2: Uniswap V2 is the teams’ second iteration of Uniswap and includes many new features and improvements. This article will serve as a high-level overview of these changes including:

For full details check out the:

Uniswap V2 code is open source and has been deployed to the Ropsten, Kovan, Rinkeby, and Goerli testnets. The team is optimistic it can be deployed to mainnet in Q2 of this year. However, keep in mind this is a target and not an announced release date.

Zilliqa:

Zilliqa welcomes Michael Conn as Head of Corporate Development: Commercial expertise will help Zilliqa diversify revenue streams and strategically grow business.

Zilliqa & Quora Inner Circle AMA.

Zilliqa’s new Neo Savant IDE is now live:

Other project’s updates:

GridPlus Mini Update: March 24, 2020: Justin Leroux gives us a brief update on GridPlus including details on the teams continued work on hardware & firmware for the Lattice1, their work on GridPlus Energy and more.

ENS Adds Custom Text Records: The ENS Manager now supports custom text records which means people can use ENS to store a wide range of information without the ENS team having to add a new record type for each new use case.

Backstop syndicate is live. Pool your DAI to buy MKR at a favorable price, if an auction should drop that low.

flops.live to track the MKR auctions.

MetaCartel Virtual Hackathon Goes Live This Week: Dragon Quest, MetaCartels first virtual hackathon, goes live on April 1st and will run until the end of April. Partners include Aragon, DappHero, 3box and there is over $7,000 in prizes and bounties! Visit the Github page for more details.

OpenLaw: smart clauses for digital legal agreements.

TheSandbox partnering with Atari to feature their titles.

Aztec Protocol Update: Aztec is now actively working on ZK-ZK Rollup, or in shorthand, ZK² — so-called because it comprises SNARKs at two or more layers: ‘Lower Level’ ZK-SNARKs each representing a private transaction. ‘Upper Level’ ZK-SNARK, which is the Rollup SNARK, succinctly proving the correctness of the Lower Level SNARKs. Additionally, Aztec will soon allow you to send private payments at 100 tps on mainnet, with both balance privacy and user privacy baked in.

UMA Announces “Priceless” Synthetic Tokens: UMA’s new DeFi contract design allows for synthetic tokens that have no on-chain price feed, are multi-sponsored to pool risk and are completely synthetic ERC20 tokens.

CoinMetrics Announces Series A; The $6 million funding round was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from FMR, LLC, Castle Island Ventures, Communitas Capital, Collaborative Fund, Avon Ventures, Raptor Group, Coinbase Ventures, and Digital Currency Group.

Wyre Launches International Support: 20+ new countries (including Australia, Denmark, Norway) have been added to Wyre’s Apply Pay/Debit Card widget.

Fuel Labs Releases Yul+: Yul+ is a new low-level intermediate language for the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Balancer Labs Raises $3M: The seed round was led by Accomplice and Placeholder with participation of CoinFund and Inflection.

DEX.AG Updated: User balances page, transaction history page and lots of general UX/UI upgrades were added to dex.ag last week.

DeBank Now Live: DeBank is an interface into the world of DeFi (similar to Zerion) that supports apps such as TokenSets, Uniswap, PoolTogether and others.

Microsponsors Now Live: You can now mint and auction your time as NFTs using the Microsponsors marketplace (powered by 0x).

Introducing Ceramic Protocol: Ceramic is a new permissionless protocol for creating and accessing unstoppable documents that serve as the foundation for a connected, interoperable web without silos.

Furucombo, a GUI for combining DeFi transactions into 1.

TrustlessFund, a timelock for ETH and tokens.

LEND721, an NFT borrowing platform, is live on mainnet.

Mailchain’s Dapplaunch, a web3 email marketing tool.

You can now play Austin Griffith’s Galleass game on xDai:

Opinion and research articles

A Quick Garbled Circuits Primer by Vitalik Buterin.

AZTEC’s Plookup tables for faster SNARK verification of digital signatures.

Using machine learning classifiers and SNARKs to detect improper video transcoding in Livepeer.

ICL paper says bZx flash loan attackers left money on the table.

Podcasts

Authereum: Reshaping the Future of Ethereum Wallets on Into the Ether: Chris Whinfrey, co-founder of Authereum, joins the podcast to talk about his team’s recent launch. Authereum is a new smart contract wallet that is looking to rethink the wallet experience on Ethereum. While still non-custodial, Authereum allows a traditional username and password login experience that people are used to. This allows users to login on any device or browser. Authereum also has a unique approach to fees and is currently paying them for all users. They then discuss the futures features coming as they get out of Beta, including social recovery.

Into the Ether Livestream: Coronavirus impact on markets, Eth2 progress, money printing and DeFi on Into the Ether: David Hoffman, Mariano Conti, Preston Van Loon, Trent Van Epps, Justin Leroux and Andrew (cyber_hokie) hoped on a livestream with the hosts to talk about a variety of Ethereum topics. They discussed the coronavirus impact on global and crypto markets. Then they hoped in to the current state of Eth2 as well as what’s on the horizon. They also talked about crypto narratives and if this is the time for crypto to shine as the world is printing money and finally we wrapped up with some talk about DeFi.

Eth Is Money with David Hoffman on Epicenter: In this episode the hosts are joined by David Hoffman, Chief of Operations at RealT, a company which tokenizes realestate assets into security tokens. He is also well known for numerous pieces he has written on Ethereum and DeFi and is co-host of the POV Crypto podcast. Hear them as they talk about his writings, how tokenizing real estate assets works, Bitcoin on Ethereum, the feedback loop problem and effects of the USD in DeFi, and a debate on whether Ether is an asset.

No BTC, No Ethereum Killers: Activist Investing in Crypto with Vance Spencer on Blockcrunch:The hosts was joined by Vance Spencer from Framework Ventures, an activist crypto fund bullish on DeFi and governance. They discussed:

- Why Framework doesn’t hold BTC

- The case against Ethereum killers

- Speculation as a use case: Chainlink, Synthetix

- The new winners in the crypto fund space

Chris Burniske: A Blank Slate of State on Unchained: In this essay, Chris Burniske of Placeholder Capital talks about what kind of world crypto entrepreneurs are creating and want to be creating with the systems they build. He talks about different kinds of values, the dangers of only pursuing market values, and why crypto has a unique opportunity now to recalibrate those market values and incorporate more of the societal virtues we hold dear. Then he dives into which values he hopes to imbue into crypto networks and how that informs his thinking as a VC in the space.

Economic Bandwidth on Bankless: While the internet revolution is all about data, the crypto revolution is all about value. Scaling the internet is all about scaling data bandwidth, but scaling crypto is all about economic bandwidth. Join Ryan and David as they explore the concept of economic bandwidth and how it relates to crypto-systems.

Ether: The Triple Point Asset on Bankless: Join Ryan and David as they explore the boundaries between asset types, and discover where Ether lies in relation to these three classes. Additionally, Ryan and David compare and contrast the economic and financial institutions that make up the world we know, and how they relate to these three classifications.

The MakerDAO Situation & The Ethereum Foundation with Alex Van De Sande on The Block Experience: Last week’s podcast was with Alex Van de Sande, a huge innovator in the Ethereum community and also Founder of Unilogin. Alex has worked on the Ethereum Foundation where he specialised in UI/UX and pushing forward the boundaries of blockchain technology. They discussed The MakerDAO situation which recently unfolded and also his opinions on the market..

Videos

Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of Money | AI Podcast #80 with Lex Fridman:

Berlin Ethereum Meetup — February 2020 Edition:

Mathias Baumann & Erik Kundt — what’s new in Solidity

Sina Mahmoodi — Stateless Ethereum

EthCC videos are online.

David Hoffman’s articles as videos.

Finance

Information from Etherscan.io (March 31st, 2020):

by Carl Beekhuizen

Sharding is one of the many improvements that eth2 has over eth1. The term was borrowed from database research where a shard means a piece of a larger whole. In the context of databases and eth2, sharding means breaking up the storage and computation of the whole system into shards, processing the shards separately, and combining the results as needed. Specifically, eth2 implements many shard chains, where each shard has similar capabilities to the eth1 chain. This results in massive scaling improvements.

However, there’s a less-well-known type of sharding in eth2. One which is arguably more exciting from a protocol design point of view. Enter sharded consensus.

Sharding Consensus

In much the same way that the processing power of the slowest node limits the throughput of the network, the computing resources of a single validator limit the total number of validators that can participate in consensus. Since each additional validator introduces extra work for every other validator in the system, there’ll come a point where the validator with the least resources can no longer participate (because it can no longer keep track of the votes of all of the other validators). The solution eth2 employs to this is sharding consensus.

Breaking it down

Eth2 breaks time down into two durations, slots and epochs.

A slot is the 12 second time-frame in which a new block is expected to be added to the chain. Blocks are the mechanism by which votes cast by validators are included on the chain in addition to the transactions that actually make the chain useful.

An epoch is comprised of 32 slots (6.4 minutes) during which the beacon chain performs all of the calculations associated with the upkeep of the chain, including: justifying and finalising new blocks, and issuing rewards and penalties to validators.

As we touched upon in the first post of this series, validators are organised into committees to do their work. At any one time, each validator is a member of exactly one beacon chain and one shard chain committee, and is called on to make an attestation exactly once per epoch — where an attestation is a vote for a beacon chain block that has been proposed for a slot.

The security model of eth2’s sharded consensus rests upon the idea that committees are more or less an accurate statistical representation of the overall validator set.

For example, if we have a situation in which 33% of validators in the overall set are malicious, there is a chance that they could end up in the same committee. This would be a disaster for our security model.

So we need a way to ensure that this can’t happen. In other words, we need a way to ensure that if 33% of validators are malicious, only about ~33% of validators in a committee will be malicious.

It turns out we can achieve this by doing two things:

Ensuring committee assignments are random Requiring a minimum number of validators in each committee

For example, with 128 randomly sampled validators per committee, the chance of an attacker with 1/3 of the validators gaining control of > 2/3 committee is vanishingly small (probability less than 2^-40).

Building it up

Votes cast by validators are called attestations. An attestation is comprised of many elements, specifically:

a vote for the current beacon chain head

a vote on which beacon block should be justified/finalised

a vote on the current state of the shard chain

the signatures of all of the validators who agree with that vote

By combining as many components as possible into an attestation, the overall efficiency of the system is increased. This is possible since, instead of having to check votes and signatures for beacon blocks and shard blocks separately, nodes need only do the math on attestations to be informed about the state of the beacon chain and of every shard chain.

If every validator produced their own attestation and every attestation needed to be verified by all other nodes, then being an eth2 node would be prohibitively expensive. Enter aggregation.

Attestations are designed to be easily combined such that if two or more validators have attestations with the same votes, they can be combined by adding the signatures fields together in one attestation. This is what we mean by aggregation.

Committees, by their construction, will have votes that are easy to aggregate because they are assigned to the same shard, and therefore should have the same votes for both the shard state and beacon chain. This is the mechanism by which eth2 scales the number of validators. By breaking the validators up into committees, validators need only to care about their fellow committee members and only have to check very few aggregated attestations from each of the other committees.

Signature aggregation

Eth2 makes use of the BLS signatures — a signature scheme defined over several elliptic curves that is friendly to aggregation. On the specific curve chosen, signatures are 96 bytes each.

If 10% of all ETH ends up staked, then there will be ~350,000 validators on eth2. This means that an epoch’s worth of signatures would be 33.6 megabytes which comes to ~7.6 gigabytes per day. In this case, all of the false claims about the eth1 state-size reaching 1TB back in 2018 would be true in eth2’s case in fewer than 133 days (based on signatures alone).

The trick here is that BLS signatures can be aggregated: If Alice produces signature A, and Bob’s signature is B on the same data, then both Alice’s and Bob’s signatures can be stored and checked together by only storing C = A + B. By using signature aggregation, only 1 signature needs to be stored and checked for the entire committee. This reduces the storage requirements to less than 2 megabytes per day.

In summary,

By separating validators out into committees, the effort required to verify eth2 is reduced by orders of magnitude.

For a node to validate the beacon chain and all of the shard chains, it only needs to look at the aggregated attestations from each of the committees. In this way it can know the state of every shard, and every validator’s opinions on which blocks are and aren’t a part of the chain.

The committee mechanism therefore helps eth2 achieve two of the design goals established in the first article: namely that participating in the eth2 network must be possible on a consumer-grade laptop, and that it must strive to be maximally decentralised by supporting as many validators as possible.

To put numbers to it, while most Byzantine Fault Tolerant Proof of Stake protocols scale to tens (and in extreme cases, hundreds of validators), eth2 is capable of having hundreds of thousands of validators all contributing to security without compromising on latency or throughput.

Roadmap

Vitaliks eth2 and beyond flow chart:

An annotated version of Vitalik’s Eth2020 roadmap.