The Ethereum Foundation is working with Consensys and Co on the deposit contract User Interface (UI), an early version of which has previously been leaked.

More information on the User Interface will apparently be revealed at EthCC in just over a week in Paris, which hopefully won’t be cancelled unlike Edcon’s over-reaction.

As for timeline, we’re told a good guess would be the smart contract hopefully is ready by April, but the date for the “deposit ceremony” is to be determined.

An update by Ben Edgington of PegaSys points out a malformed deposit might, as you’d expect presumably, potentially lead to loses.

The easy solution is to have a well-formed deposit, but this edge case highlights the fact BLS signatures are not verified on ethereum 1.0, the current Proof of Work (PoW) blockchain, with Edgington sharing a proposal by others that suggested eth1 can just upgrade to verify the signatures.

Eth2 doesn’t necessarily have to wait for the eth1 hardfork we’re told. That’s an ambitious option to wait for the eth1 hardfork for BLS. It’s a good enhancement, but not “required,” presumably because it doesn’t affect well formed deposits.

Another matter raised in the update is that there might be “some changes to the proposed BLS hash to curve standard.”

We’re told these are a possible minor change for the BLS standard hash-to-curve spec, but it’s unlikely to be a blocker.

Finally an audit report on the Beacon chain was expected last week, but that hasn’t been published.

Edgington points out numerous updates have been made to eth2.0’s networking specification addressing DDoS preventions and the like with the dev “wondering if these are prompted by the recent security audit.”

As usual you’d expect some recommendations from an audit and if there are any needed changes there is usually close cooperation to address them first before releasing the final report, at which point the work is kind of done.

So now we’re told the audit report is planned to be published in early to mid March, in just a few weeks.

These are all estimates which might change, but it appears the eth2 devs and researchers are on track to meet the rough timeline that might begin in a few weeks with the launch of spec version 0.11 which incorporates all the audit changes.

That spec version gives the greenlight for a multi-client testnet which might launch perhaps in April, with the deposit contract logically planed for a May launch by our estimate, hopefully at the Ethereal Summit in New York.

Then the final spec version one goes out, and at that point as far as we are concerned it’s as good as live, but the actual genesis block has a target date of 30th July.

Thus two months for the deposit contract, three for the testnet, makes it perhaps a bit of a tight timeline from now, but April is two months from here so there’s quite a bit of room to bruce up the code to the point it reaches the level of near ready to go.

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