With the first specification of the hard fork of Eth 2.0, attention has turned to the planned merger of Eth 1.x and Ethereum 2.0.
Vitalik Buterin has suggested making some additional changes to the network as most people don’t see the Ethereum change a lot after that (minus some cleanups, more shards and of course our new favorite Ethereum word, rollups).
In two blog posts and when calling All Core Developers on Friday, Buterin asserted that removing features in Ethereum’s code bank shortly before or during the merger would be less useful or even harmful features. Buterin mainly focused on opcodes used in Ethereum’s virtual machine (EVM).
“We have a unique opportunity to make some backwards incompatible changes to the EVM that could be valuable to Ethereum in the long term,” Buterin said on GitHub on February 18. These changes are quite small but nonetheless non-zero. “
Make changes to the EVM
The boss on this list is the SELFDESTRUCT feature, which rewards anyone who destroys a contract that sits idly in the Ethereum state. The intended purpose of the opcode was to motivate the developers of Ethereum to practice “good hygiene” and destroy contracts when they were no longer needed. This would help reduce Ethereum’s long-term state size.
However, it didn’t really work out that way. Currently, the scaling function of Ethereum stands in the way of, among other things, making it “difficult to switch to another government storage format in the future,” said Buterin.
In fact, many people use the feature as a kind of discount in case Ethereum’s fees go up. These tokens, known as gas tokens, can be bought when gas is cheap and issued later when gas is expensive to reduce the cost of a transaction. Ethereum developers have considered removing the opcode from the EVM a number of times, most recently in September.
Changes to the EVM or other technical descriptions in the Ethereum Yellow Paper have not made everyone happy. Some decentralized application (dapp) developers have expressed frustration that features that their projects rely on may be removed, such as: B. the gas, with which dapps can check how much Gwei is still available in a contract execution.
It is unclear how much support the EVM clean box will get. Additionally, any changes to the EVM will come with numerous warnings in advance, Buterin said.
“The vast majority of uses don’t depend on anything that’s expected to break here,” Buterin said. “It’s a very small percentage.”
Pulse Check: The CoinDesk legend of Zelda begins
The CoinDesk Ethereum 2.0 validator, officially dubbed “Zelda” by Technical Director Spencer Beggs, was activated on February 17th. In the past six days, Zelda has earned 0.04 ETH, which is worth roughly $ 61.80 at the time of writing. At this rate, the annual percentage rate of return (APR) on our Validator operations is expected to be around 7%.
(Data from 02/23/2021 at 10:01 PM UTC)
Source: Etherscan
If you are not yet familiar with valid points and the subject of Ethereum 2.0 in general, be sure to read our 101 Explainer on Eth 2.0 Metrics to learn about the jargon and terminology used in this newsletter.
In the first hours after activating Zelda on Ethereum 2.0, our validation operations lost about $ 3.45 worth of ether. This was due to a file permissions issue that prevented Zelda from signing out of certificates. This is the most common responsibility required on an Eth 2.0 validation node. (The other less common responsibility is to suggest blocks.)
Updating file permissions and restarting Zelda was an easy fix that made our validation processes go green again within 24 hours.
Title: CoinDesk Eth 2.0 Validator Node (aka Zelda) Daily Income
Source: Beaconcha.in
Set up validator? Keep these points in mind
The first lesson you learned from that little mishap was this: remember to stay awake to activate your Validation Node to make sure everything goes smoothly from the start.
Most of the examiners, after depositing their 32 ETH on the Eth 2.0 deposit contract, are put on a pending queue before they can be activated on the network and be able to earn rewards. The time validators need to wait in the queue before activation can range from a few days to a few weeks.
Rough estimates of the exact day and time a validator will leave the queue based on the number of other validators also waiting in the queue to be activated can be found on the BeaconScan and Beaconcha.in block explorers.
Unfortunately, Zelda activation happened around 4:00 a.m., which is why most of the CoinDesk employees, including myself, were asleep. Had either of us been awake to activate the node, irregularities in our operations would have been noticed in advance and resolved more quickly.
Another important point is to keep the validation processes as simple as possible. Since the start of the network on December 1, 2020, around 132 validators have been shortened. The Eth 2.0 cut has more ramifications than the lack of some certifications. A slash occurs when a reviewer gives evidence of malicious behavior. The network may correctly or incorrectly indicate the actions of a validator as a potential attack or attempt to rewrite the blockchain history and data. This results in the Validator being forced to leave the network, which means they are no longer eligible to receive rewards for Eth 2.0.
A slash is a common occurrence when Eth 2.0 Validator Operators attempt to maximize rewards by setting up two computers to run a validator. When one of the computers goes offline, the other starts up automatically and takes over the validation processes. This sounds like a perfect idea for maximizing APR by running your Validator with virtually no downtime. However, this can lead to errors if the same validator is running on both computers at the same time.
As soon as the network detects cases in which a single reviewer suggests different blocks more than once or signs off for certificates, the processes can be shortened.
“It’s not worth the risk,” said Prysmatic Labs co-lead developer Raul Jordan in an interview with CoinDesk.
While it might be tempting to maximize the rewards by complicating the node setup so that there is never any downtime, it can come at the cost of losing the ability to earn rewards for your staked ETH.
For more information on Eth 2.0 slashing events and more commentary from Jordan, check out our weekly Mapping Out Eth 2.0 podcast series tomorrow.
Validated takes
- DeFi Lending Platforms Liquidate Record $ 115M Loans If ETH Price Falls (Article, CoinDesk)
- According to research, the Ethereum trading bot strategy made $ 107 million in 30 days (Article, CoinDesk).
- According to Kraken CEO, the ether flash crash was due to trading, not a system glitch (article, CoinDesk).
- Nyan cat NFT sells for 300 ETH and opens the door to the “Meme Economy” (article, CoinDesk)
- The Art Business and How NFTs Will Change It, with Nanne Dekking (Podcast, CoinDesk)
- Top auction house Christie’s accepts ether cryptocurrency for digital art sales (Item, CoinDesk)
- Why Ethereum Miners Accept EIP 1559 (Blog Post, Deribit Insights)
- Nvidia releases a new Ethereum ASIC mining chip (blog post, Nvidia)
- A list of EVM features that may need to be removed (HackMD post, Vitalik Buterin)
Factoid of the week
Fact of the week February 24th
Open communication
You can always reply and send an email to research@coindesk.com with your thoughts, comments or questions about today’s newsletter. Chat with us on Twitter in between reads.
Valid Points includes information and data directly from CoinDesk’s own Eth 2.0 validation node in the weekly analysis. All profits from this stake will be donated to a charity of our choice once the transfers are activated on the network. A full overview of the project can be found in our announcement post.
You can check the activity of the CoinDesk Eth 2.0 validator in real time via our public validator key:
0xad7fef3b2350d220de3ae360c70d7f488926b6117e5f785a8995487c46d323ddad0f574fdcc50eeefec34ed9d2039ecb.
Look for it on any Eth 2.0 block explorer site!
Finally, Will Foxley and I will continue the conversation about Ethereum 2.0 on a CoinDesk podcast series entitled “Mapping Out Eth 2.0”. New episodes are broadcast every Thursday. Listen and subscribe to the CoinDesk podcast feed for Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcasts, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Stitcher, RadioPublica, IHeartRadio or RSS.
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