With lots of exciting things to share with you from Prysmatic, we will now bring you biweekly development updates from our team and the greater research around sharding for the Ethereum protocol. Without further ado, let’s begin!

Technical Updates

Updated Sharding Phase 1 Specification

The Ethereum Research team has updated their sharding specification with an important roadmap and glossary.

ETHResearch Post by JustinDrake

You’ll notice some important changes from our previous post, in which we mentioned terms such as validator and Validator Manager Contract (VMC), which were in charge of processing transactions into collations and reaching consensus on the canonical shard chains. In this new scheme, we now separate the consensus layer from the block proposal/state execution layers. This means that we will isolate the responsibility of proposing collations to actors known as proposers, and we will have agents known as collators (previously known as validators) that are responsible for reaching consensus on longest, valid shard chains. It is critical we use the correct terminology moving forward, as different actor’s responsibilities are markedly different.

Old term versus new term

At Prysmatic, we are currently implementing phase 1 of the updated sharding spec, which will consist of the proposal/collator interactions to create shard chains, but will not consider state execution of transactions. This will be a minimal implementation of sharding in a multi-phase sharding roadmap. It’s intended as a foundation for our first production release, and to be delivered as a set of CLI tools that run on a local testnet.

Updated Prysmatic Labs Documentation

All of our documentation has been updated to match the new spec’s changes. You can read about how to run our implementation on your local computer so far, or read our comprehensive sharding README in our repository here.

Internal Team Updates

Team Meeting #3

Core Team Meeting #3

In our latest team meeting, we discussed the separation of collation proposals and consensus. In the updated Phase 1 spec, there will be no state transition or state execution, and we will simply focus on the creation of collations and consensus through cryptoeconomic incentives. This is discussed in our video as well as in our updated documentation.

In our current coding sprint, we are working hard on delivering a working proposer/collator architecture as part of a local testnet. See our open projects, issues, and pull requests in our repo here.

Community & Latest Research

Sharding Research Summit @ Taipei

Sharding research workshop in TPE

Recently, all the major sharding implementation teams gathered at an internal workshop in Taipei organized by Hsiao-Wei Wang to discuss latest research. Details are mentioned in her post and everything that was discussed at the workshop is included in this resource list.

Ethereum 2.0: The Ethereum Foundation’s Sharding Vision

From JustinDrake’s post on ETHResearch

Collaboration With Other Sharding Teams

A few other teams are working on sharding client implementations, and we are all communicating through the Ethereum foundation’s official Gitter channel on sharding. The two main Sharding Manager Contract Implementations are in Vyper and Solidity, and the teams have planned to agree on a single contract ABI for phase 1.

Fundraising

$100k Ethereum Community Fund Grant Announcement

We recently received a $100k grant award from the Ethereum Community Fund in Tokyo for its kickoff event.

Left: Ethereum Community Fund creators | Right: Raul Jordan speaking on the importance of sharding

The aim of the Ethereum Community Fund (ECF) is to provide both funding and connectivity, while shaping the strategic direction of the space towards mainstream adoption through the development of infrastructure and compelling end-user applications. — ECF Network Website

$100k Ethereum Foundation Grant Announcement

Thank you Ethereum Foundation! We are excited to learn the results of the first wave of grants. We believe what makes Ethereum great is the foundation team’s willingness to engage with the open source community to drive progress. Scalability still has a long way to go, but the future will bring great things.

$50k Recent Donation from District0x

We are also extremely humbled to have received a $50k donation from District0x

district0x is a network of decentralized markets and communities powered by Ethereum, Aragon, and IPFS. Utilizing these technologies, district0x aims to allow for new means of group coordination through economic incentives, making it possible to disintermediate marketplaces and to allocate voting rights to their participants. To learn more about the district0x Network, check out their white paper, follow on Twitter, or chat with the team on Telegram.

Interested in Contributing?

We are always looking for devs interested in helping us out! If you know Go or Solidity and want to contribute to the forefront of research on Ethereum, please drop us a line and we’d be more than happy to help onboard you :).

Check out our contributing guidelines and our open projects on Github. Each task and issue is grouped into the Phase 1 milestone along with a specific project it belongs to (smart contract related tasks, collator node tasks, etc.).

As always, follow us on Twitter, drop us a line here or on our Gitter chat and let us know what you want to help with — we need all the collaboration we can get! 🎉

Official, Prysmatic Labs Ether Donation Address

0x9B984D5a03980D8dc0a24506c968465424c81DbE