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- According to Prysmatic Labs, the release of Ethereum 2.0, phase 0, is still on schedule as all new features will be “frozen” until mid-October.
- A new publicly available checklist provides information on the progress towards mainnet of Eth 2.0.
Although Ethereum 2.0 still has no fixed start date, at least it has received a publicly available checklist with the tasks that need to be done before the release. In a Medium article, Raul Jordan from Prysmatic Labs, which provide the most popular client Prysm in the Medalla testnet for Ethereum 2.0, described the tasks in detail. The public checklist is intended to enable all interested parties to follow the progress towards mainnet from now on, “without having to speculate about deadlines”.
As Jordan stated, the much-needed update of the Ethereum blockchain is well on its way to market launch, as the fewest tasks are features, so a “feature freeze” could take place in October and ultimately a release of the mainnet in November is still on schedule. Regarding the tasks on the checklist, Jordan explained:
Out of these, only a few are features, which means that we can likely perform a feature freeze by mid October, allowing us to only work on security improvements and UX before going live. If all goes well, November is still looking good for a launch from our perspective.
What remains to be done before the launch of Ethereum 2.0?
According to the checklist, a key requirement for the launch of Ethereum 2.0 (phase 0) is the performance of two security audits for the Prysm client using Trail of Bits and Quantstamp. As Jordan reported, the fact that two separate organizations are independently auditing the code is very important to ensure the security of the stakers.
The audit by Trail of Bits focuses in particular on slashers, slashing protection and attack vectors of the core specification. “For optimization reasons, we sometimes deviate from the specification at certain points, and this audit will help determine the security of our approach,” said Jordan.
As the launch approaches, Prysmatic Labs will also eliminate the function of “hosted Eth1 nodes”. To participate in the testnet over the past months, stakers did not need to operate its own Eth1 node via this function. This will soon be dropped in order to simulate a test closer to the mainnet.
A new feature Prysmatic Labs is currently working on is the “voluntary exit” function via command line. This command guides “stakers through an interactive process in which they can submit an exit to their beacon node. Given exits are irreversible, a lot of steps are in place to ensure users know what they are doing before they successfully complete the process”.
Another feature on the roadmap includes optimizing peer-to-peer routing to ensure that Ethereum nodes “prefer well-behaved peers while restricting less useful ones. This allows “constraining peers based on some higher level scenarios […] to build a healthy network mesh based on the network performance of surrounding peers”.
The full list of tasks before the launch of Ethereum 2.0 or the Prsym client includes the following tasks:
- Second security audit
- Implement the Eth2.0 API standard in Prysm for client interoperability
- Completion of the exit function in Prysm
- A comprehensive web UI for Prysm
- Fuzz testing and fixing important bugs before mainnet
- Slasher improvements
- Slashing protection for key transport between Eth2 clients
- Weak subjectivity sync