The Evolution of ETH 2.0 with Teku’s Ben Edgington

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online [Music] this week james and i chat with ben edgington lead product manager for teku an eth2 client he walks us through the eth2 timeline and how the ideas around this massive upgrade to the network have evolved we chat about the plan to

merge the eth2 proof-of-stake system with the existing eth network and how these two chains will work together going forward we also look at how l2s could potentially interact with this new setup now before we start off i want to share a quick tip to anyone who's thinking of jumping into the zk space professionally we actually have a zk jobs board on the website there you can find new opportunities to work for some of the best zk projects in the space i also want to remind you to sign up for the monthly newsletter zk mesh for all the latest on zk research articles tools and tips we send this out at the beginning of every month so that's the zk jobs board on the website or zk mesh and i've added the link to both

in the show notes this week's episode is brought to you by mina the world's lightest blockchain it is a project deep in the zk space and one that i am currently advising also the xero knowledge validator is actually a validator on mina now mina is a layer one crypto protocol that replaces the traditional blockchain with a zero knowledge proof ensuring a super light and constant sized chain that allows participants to quickly sync and verify the network mina offers a platform to build a private gateway between the real world and crypto the project has an active demo in partnership with teller finance for end to end data privacy showing how you can use mina to access your credit score and

prove that you meet credit threshold requirements for on-chain services without ever disclosing your actual score this is an amazing example of the power of zero knowledge proofs visit minaprotocol.com to find out how you can get involved and be sure to join the community there so thank you again mina protocol now here is our conversation all about eth2 with ben edgington [Music] so today james and i are here with ben edgington we're going to be talking about the state of ethereum i'm not going to say eth2 i hear that there's some conversation about like what is and what is not eth2 what isn't

what is not ethereum hopefully we can jump into that but welcome to the show ben thank you anna thank you james uh i am honored to be here long-term fan really enjoy your your output it's great thanks well thanks so much so i know i keep referencing this but we're coming off of this like six part l2 series that james was part of most of that so it was basically through that series we started i started to realize like i'm completely out of the loop on what's going on on the base level i know that we had uh danny ryan on last year maybe two years ago talking about the eth2 roadmap i've had a few people on maybe last year that gave hints of it

but i think this is the first time in a long time that we're going to be digging into the state of ethereum and having read some of the stuff you've been writing i feel like you're the perfect person to do this that's very kind i don't know about perfect but um i can certainly help guide you through the maze and you can be forgiven for not being up to date because things have evolved things have changed um and uh yeah it would be good to talk through some of that cool to start off let's hear a little bit about you kind of what was your journey to ethereum in the first place [Laughter] uh well where to start i had a very conventional career um to a degree so i studied mathematics at cambridge spent seven years there

somehow managed not to emerge with a phd but three master's degrees they they tried to teach me um group theory and i was highly resistant um which i regret now very much as i'm catching up now i spent three years at university of redding uh working on sort of supercomputer implementations of weather models that kind of stuff and that got me into the high performance computing thing i went and worked for hitachi um a massive japanese multinational first 10 years or so working on supercomputers and then branching out doing a lot of fintech stuff data center stuff and healthcare and all sorts of crazy things biometrics did you actually work in japan i visited japan many many times but i

i never spent more than a month or so at a time in japan i love japan it's it is i know james loves it too i am a huge fan of japan uh we did live there for a couple years oh wonderful i envy you is great yeah so i spent 19 years at hitachi had a very conventional career wore a suit and tie every day ended up moderately senior head of engineering for a group working in sort of fintech stuff in the uk with territory was europe middle east africa north america traveling the world but um yeah i just got to a point where i it wasn't yeah writing spreadsheets and doing budgets and and hiring plans was just not intellectually stimulating so i uh there just came a point where our

sales people were coming back and saying all our clients want to talk about is something called blockchain um this was early 2016. ben can you tell us what it is i was like okay let me look into that and then then just fell down the rabbit hole it just became an obsession um started it so ethereum was one it was proof of stake that hooked me and it started consuming all my evenings weekends and then eventually um one way or another i got a offer of a place at consensus which is where i am now have been for getting on for four years now and landed in the protocol engineering group which is a wonderful place to be style wise was this a huge shift i can imagine it

would be do you still wear a suit or [Laughter] tempting tempting um it was yeah everything changed right i mean it's proper mid-life crisis stuff so yeah here's a well-kept secret i mean between today between recording and this podcast going out i shall turn 52 years old congratulations yeah amazing yeah yeah i'm not sure congratulations is quite the right take but you know um and at that stage it was kind of comfortable path to retirement or do something crazy and i'd sort of sat on the sidelines during the dot-com boom all the people i worked with had gone off and joined startups and

and had the time of their lives and i'd sort of sat through it being very conventional and i thought this is this is the chance this is the last chance let's let's grasp it and uh and everything changes um and i love it cool that's awesome was 2016 when you actually started at consensus no that that's when i yeah 2016 was when i first became aware of ethereum and started getting into that it was um a year a year and a half later that i joined consensus got it so you would have joined consensus right during like boom time it sounds like yeah yeah that's right i mean we were growing phenomenally so i was employees something like 350 and within six months we were at about 1100.

um it was insane i mean we were i spent the first three months just interviewing constantly and uh grew uh large and yeah i mean we we know what happened i mean sort of uh the the bubble burst and yeah we shrank down to 303 you know back to 350 i don't know the exact numbers uh anymore and yeah it was a bit tragic um you know not not easy things but in this volatile market this sort of thing is inevitable we're on a nice upward curve again now so lots of hiring um hiring for for for my team so we'll talk about what i do in a bit i guess so if anyone's listening and there's uh has java chops get in touch cool writing uh consensus all the way up

and then all the way back down must have been a wild experience uh looking at it from the outside it seems so interesting it was a fascinating time uh and consensus has changed a lot and that that's an interesting topic all of its own but we had the motto when i joined him for maybe the first year year and a half pretty much the internal motto of the company was everything is an experiment and we were trying uh wild new governance models internal governance flat structures tokenization models for incentivizing all sorts of things you know really really trying to walk the talk i think it can be faulted to an extent that we

rarely completed experiments we started you know many many uh of these things and didn't really push through and see them through to a conclusion which is a pity but uh it could have been a different paradigm and now consensus feels a lot more conventional it feels much more like where i came from which uh we're in a different era now and i mean there have been some winners that have kind of shone through i feel like there's some projects that are so so key to the ecosystem today that come out of there yeah absolutely and you know things like um gnosis that have span out uh ages ago from consensus as well so uh there's been plenty over the history and you know there's a school of thought that this is a decent approach to

uh innovating and creating value you you start many experiments it's evolutionary right you kick off many many experiments explore the landscape and then you know you've got to kind of kill off your babies apply a um a selection function to it um and then you end up with the the the strong the survival of the fittest and that that's kind of how it's ended up though it can be a bit kind of brutal on the journey well uh you know i think that in that way it mirrors like the development of ethereum in a lot of ways going through this extremely like grandiose high concept experimental phase and then uh pulling back a little more recently into more uh directed engineering and actually like delivering on some of the

early promise yeah and this is one of my passions really is the sort of the how does ethereum get things done sort of way of looking at things um i like to feel i'm a little bit of a historian or kind of commentator on the distributed development model and um it's been really interesting to see how things evolve and um you know consensus was not a traditional startup by any means we were joe lubin was was awesome in just funding everything initially and just really bankrolling the whole experiment uh things are different now but he wanted to make a difference genuine and really you know put his put his money to work in that respect so

that that was great and you know i guess we we have the ethereum foundation playing a little bit of a similar role but not not certainly not the same uh this is sort of a side but is git coin a originally uh a consensus company or project yep um yeah just spun out so that's right bitcoin yeah it was incubated so that's one of the old old experiments and yeah that's wonderful that's terrific how that's come to maturity so the zero knowledge podcast has had a grant on there for some time and i've i've always been kind of amazed with the scope like they themselves also almost act like consensus they have so many experiments when you go on their website there's like grants and bounties and i mean i'm not actually following what

the latest is there's no governance but yeah there's there's a lot going on there it kind of mimics where it comes from um but one of my favorite projects i think in the space yeah totally totally um so let's dive in to ethereum because i think that's what you're here for that's what i'm curious about james i feel like you probably are keeping more up to date with all things ethereum so i'm glad you're here i try but there's an awful lot going on uh i'm gonna take a second uh plug ben's newsletter which is one of the best ways to keep it up to date ah yeah what is that uh right yes um i've been writing this thing what's new in eth2 uh for about two and a half years

it's uh sometimes feels like uh you know sometimes you regret you started something i don't know if you ever feel like it with the podcast you know oh no not another one but uh i'm pretty used to it now every every two weeks i try just to summarize what's going on it started off very technical it was really aimed at the devs nobody else was paying a lot of attention uh at the time um and as a way just to keep myself honest you know force myself to read everything that's out there keep up to date and just a forcing function to make sure that i was doing my job and i write that every two weeks you can find it at eth2.news and i just publicize it on twitter i don't have a mailing list i'm

far too lazy for any of that stuff so you know follow me on twitter and then you'll find out there is an rss feed that i maintain nice that's nice okay so like kind of let's go back to your story you're working at consensus you're hiring a lot but then at what point do you start to work really on the what was called at the time the eth2 roadmap yeah so uh i started at consensus in october 2017 uh i spent the first two three months thinking i was going to be doing enterprise ethereum stuff but don't tell my colleagues it bores me witless so i i just had this i had this sort of crisis moment uh you know i want to work on

mainnet stuff this is my passion this is what brought me here this is where i want to spend 100 of my time so talked over my colleagues and they were super supportive so i had a a a mandate and that was that was cool i spent the first couple of years actually building the r d team so my my work was to um assemble a team of research and development people with short and long term horizons and that was a joy i mean just opportunity to assemble brilliant people around me was and let them work on you know what they felt was important and yeah we have um zero knowledge group they've built building library uh gnark which is renting go to do zk snark uh implement a language it's very performant

i've heard of that that's come up in the zero knowledge chats in the past yeah yeah cool yeah that's one of the things and and moving into more e3 scaling stuff so my colleague nicola leoshon was an early hire and we got together and we got interested in what does the future of the ethereum protocol itself look like so we attended this scaling ethereum event in taipei in early 2018 it was basically around sharding and what do we do and at that point the plan was to do everything on the base chain right so danny ryan was working on putting the management contract for proof of stake on the base chain so it would just be a standard smart

contract there was a test net for that and so on and we thought we were going to do sharding the same way we were looking at putting a sharding manager contract on the base chain and so all the conversation at that event was around building out proof of stake and scalability on the base chain using using contracts and the turing completeness of ethereum to sort of do everything that was necessary to to make it happen uh that'll change and we can we can come back to that but it wasn't even eth2 at that stage that was the sort of serenity play yeah the we upgrade to the main chain using its smart contract capabilities and then this is the the final goal this we're at the end point the serenity this is reminding me of another episode

that i i think i did like two years ago with the prismatic team because it was in that episode where i learned one shift from that original idea which was the idea of building a eth2 separate that was like a separate sharded blockchain and that there was going to be a way to almost like lock in eth1 as one of these shards or something like that i remember there was like this idea that actually it was a total new standalone project right yeah so you were there during this phase what like what would you call what is that era of the eth2road map yeah i call it the serenity years i mean that's still the serenity ones even when they have a separate one well so we're coming to that so at this point at this point we're still

on on the original sort of trajectory uh and this is how it's supposed to work out so got interested in that started working on that and then around june 2018 we all met in berlin and it had basically async you know before the meeting we had realized that this had many flaws that we weren't going to be able to solve so we basically ripped up the whole thing and started with a blank sheet of paper you know a blank hackmd document in mid 2018 and just said okay we're going to build a different chain we'll leave ethereum as is and alongside it so that's a kind of single track cartway and we're going to build this super highway alongside it running on proof of stake

and at some future day we will migrate all of ethereum into this new super highway infrastructure um but they will run as two separate projects for for the time being got it and that was what the prismatic team had had come on the show to tell us about right exactly so that's the beacon chain um i caught i call that the beacon chain era so that's uh that's what we started there and that was kind of inspired the language and some of the design features was inspired by the dfinity blockchain that just published their paper using bls signatures uh to do committee management that was the last time they had published anything publicly for many years until

recently that's right because i i don't think they liked us you know lifting bits but it immediately went dark yeah i remember that week very well because i was in berlin for fun and kept running into people and getting pulled into uh you know design sessions for these things it was a great week yeah yeah that was fun here's a good time okay so now we have covered the beacon chain era or we've we're in the beacon chain we've started the beacon championship we've started it what what happens in the beacon chain era yeah so we should look at some of the motivations for ripping up the the old designs so part of it and mostly it's around limitations of the base chain if you are going to we would have had to have made protocol

modifications to favor protocol transactions so instead of just running smart contract you know d5 stuff or whatever on the base chain we would have had to start running protocol stuff you know sharding management and proof of stake management on the base chain that would have had to have sort of like privileged messages because you can't neglect running the protocol because everything depends on that and that meant quite a lot of changes on the base chain you couldn't do it all in a smart contract in short you know we would have had to change other things and also the capacity of the chain was not sufficient so we could have only sustained a limited number of nodes we were looking at um a minimum stake of 1500 ether at that point to sort of put a cap on

the number of no of validators on the network and that you know that really even at ether prices in those days that was uh going against the spirit of trying to bring in the broadest range of steak as possible oh wait 1500 per state that's what somebody would have needed to stake oh that was the minimum okay okay right yeah that's pretty high yeah okay yeah it was a finger in the air number but it would have been of that magnitude oh and the other thing was that we realized that the sharding and the proof of stake the consensus both relied on having stake on having slashing um and you know had a lot of common mechanisms you know committees to manage a lot of it was in common it didn't make sense to run it as two separate

protocols there seemed to be a lot of synergy in bringing them together so we could organize the in order to do sharding we needed committees but it turns out committees are pretty handy for doing the proof of stake and making that manageable as well so we were able to sort of combine a lot of the work and just make the whole thing more coherent and more efficient the jasper roadmap it was uh it was never my favorite uh name but uh you know sharding plus casper right exactly sharding plus we we're on gaspar now you know we have the uh the consensus mechanism is ghost and casper so this is gaspar okay

there's even a paper about it actually yeah we we actually did a whole episode on gasper two years ago maybe all of these links by the way i'll add in the show notes in case anyone wants to revisit those yeah yeah so lots of good stuff just kind of converged uh at that time so you know some brilliant mind somewhere i mean danny ryan got involved at that point as a kind of project manager but without authority in a sense i mean sort of only the authority which the people he was managing that is us teams kind of you know allowed him to take um but it turns out that he's very trustworthy and um is uh makes very good decisions and so people trust him a lot so

he's more of a coordinator but really spark you know made the whole thing happen um justin drake had come in earlier that year with a lot of new ideas in terms of the cryptography and i think it sort of catalyzed some new thinking that really helped proto lambda came a little bit later as dietrich he's just brilliant at algorithmic things and helped really shape the spec and the testing and you know work with the client teams to make efficient implementations sounds good so yeah from that june point client team started getting involved um danny says now is probably too early i i don't know but um the prism team were already up and running they were trying to do a

sharding implementation they were running it on geth they had a fork of geth they pressed on with that for a little while after the sort of beacon chain uh idea had taken hold but eventually they abandoned that because it it was not going to work uh based on on geth it had to be a a fresh implementation they started prism at that point uh we came in writing codes uh in consensus in my team uh around october that year if i recall correctly this is 2019 uh 18 18 still okay was this the time because i remember there was like this explosion of clients was that around this time where there was like 12 that's right it might not have been ever

quite that many but there were at least eight relatively serious the ef funded at least eight yeah and we didn't receive any ear funding for us so that makes mine wasn't there one that was like named something to do with kanye you're thinking of uh dean eigenman yeah exactly the yeast oh yes yeah he was uh riding that in swift with eric too um i i don't know yeah i think it's been shelved for a while we'll see he might revisit it one day yeah well uh you know it's it's interesting to like go back over this because uh so few people were around and like tapped into this when it was going on and uh you know me as an outsider uh

and ben as an insider on this have very different like experiences and good overlap here my take on all of this happening like the june 2018 meeting in berlin and you know going on to implementations uh was basically that uh relatively competent organizers and uh coordinators like ben and like danny got involved and just completely transformed the whole research process yeah that's kind of to say i this tension between research and delivery is is always interesting in in any organization um and it's hard to get right i mean a lot of cycles were were quote wasted whether wasted or not i'm not sure but

rewriting code um i know all of the teams have rewritten you know hundreds of thousands of lines of code um uh i'm in prison all the most because they started first but it's all part of hammering out the the protocol so the protocol was largely built and designed by the ef research team so it was danny vitalic uh justin charway proto-lambda were largely sort of shaping the protocol but with feedback you know everything was in the open it started life in a hackmd dock which was horrible eventually got migrated to github had all the comments pulled out and deleted so it was just python code

and this is kind of controversial right i mean it it's the spec is python standard python code you can run it uh with python i mean proto has a um a framework where you can just execute the spec and this is very cool in some ways um because implementers understand this and you can generate the test cases directly from spec which is uh super useful for you know any any issues that arise but there was a process of sort of purifying it and all of the rationale and everything was kind of ripped out and uh i've i've tried to reverse this um i've got a annotated spec thing which uh one day i might finish we can put a link in the show notes vitalik's also done uh

similar as well just to try to recapture i've done a lot of github archaeology on you know why is this constant sets to 64. or you know why was this design decision made and not that one or how did this change over the development of the of the spec so um just for so future generations you know for when they come to this thing yeah that is the archaeology going but it's the comments you're saying it's the comments that would have given the context and without them a lot of this is lost so you have to kind of refined it yeah yeah i i don't know what the reasoning was there on that but it is basically just lines of python uh now which is not a terrific spec language i mean it's not strongly typed

which is something i would prefer to see it's kind of doesn't lend itself directly to formal analysis so so part of the the consensus research team some of the the the team i put together are working now on rewriting the spec in daphne which is a formal specification language right and it's it comes from microsoft um they believe it's one of the i think they said to me it was one of the three largest daphne projects that have ever been attempted and they are proving formally verifying the beacon change specification and i've got another colleague in in r d alex who is has a transpiler for the spec so he transpiles it um

into kotlin and that helps him to identify issues with typing and things which which helps so so there's a lot of work kind of going on off or spinning off this spec just to make sure it's all sound so but this this is still the beacon chain era so like now i'm very curious because if there's been an evolution are these things still useful so the plan i was three phases zero one and two of course uh phase zero beacon chain we deliver proof of stake and it just sustains itself it doesn't do anything it doesn't i can't transact with anyone in on it but it sustains itself and we we built that we delivered that it went live last december

december the first it's been running six months and has been almost incident free we had a minor wobble a few weeks ago but apart from that it has performed superbly so we proved we can do proof of stake under relatively benign circumstances now the plan was then to build sharding phase one so data shards to to bolt them on and then phase two was to make the shards executable in some way so that you could you know run sharded smart contracts or whatever and then finally to yeah we have this fully functional uh ethereum like chain running with scalability with proof stake and then we import

all of eth1 onto that so phase zero phase one phase two we delivered phase zero since then this will change okay okay that's that's where the change happens whoa that's even a um kind of uh relatively recent version of the roadmap as well the phases have gone through a few iterations um over the years yeah uh used to be i remember the original like seven phase pie in the sky road map uh i think the the three phase is much more reasonable but my recollection of the original three phases was beacon chain sharding and then execution on the shards uh with the merge being a separate out of the main word map piece yeah i don't think we ever really

nailed down this is part of the problem we never really nailed down what the later phases would look like they were yeah there were teams working on this so within consensus we had the quilt team who was still around um they uh were working on what would execution environments look like in this sharded world looking at e wasm i remember a uh design session in brooklyn a couple years ago uh with execution environments and it was good yeah a lot of cool ideas but in the end i think the design space was just too big the the problem was too poorly specified and the overhead of adding a second interpreter in is uh pretty large right i mean he was

um uh despite hopes for it a lot of people were looking for it i i don't know exactly what the issues were but there were things around just in time execution not necessarily being reliable about not being able to do crypto quite fast enough um and and things like that so uh maybe these were some outward issues maybe they weren't but in the meantime other things happened and sort of changed the the road map so phase zero happened now we're talking december 22 2020 right yeah okay so that happened and like that amount that you had said this the minimum amount that you'd have to have in order to be a staker on eth2

at the time obviously went down profoundly um it went down to 32 eth and people have deployed like we now sit at a time where that has been like people are they're locked in they've so phase zero's out and they've locked in their their 32 eth correct yes yeah we have a hundred and sixty thousand ish uh validators deposits um as of today which is uh over five million ether uh whatever ten depending on the day of the week you know ten billion plus dollars worth of eat state it wasn't worth that much when we started but yeah it's uh it's something like four

and a half percent of all eath supply which is a huge vote of confidence i mean you know i'm humbled by this this is and it's not even doing anything yet i mean it's paying out rewards but you can't get those rewards i mean until we finish the job we you know they're not even accessible so it's a it's a big act of faith um and uh cool so the change that you're talking about the change that happened from those three phases did that change actually happen before december 2019 like when it actually launched was there a new version of these three phases or has the change happened after yes december 2020 we started the beacon chain but i think it'd have been apparent for a little while that

we weren't landing on good solutions in protocol for executable sharding so this how do you do cross chart transactions does every um movement of ether involve across our transaction where's the ether managed it was under specified as i say and and better options came along uh i think and so that that's what changed so i think there'd been an awareness for a while that phase two as we called it wasn't really delivering a clear direction um so when an alternative came up that was grasped i mean we we ran with that around when did that happen when and what is it what is the new alternative right so two things happen fairly

close together so um first of all um uh vitalik published the roll-up centric road map um post which i think he put on the um ethereum magicians forum which is an interesting place for it but it's uh uh and you know roll ups uh as you well know have been sort of bubbling away for for quite a while but after we've sort of gone down the dead end of plasma and emerge from that and data availability was really sort of understood this vision of a base layer that was pretty dumb but provided lots of data availability and an ecosystem of roll-ups which actually look quite like executable

shards um to to a great degree it kind of solved the problem it meant that in protocol we don't need to solve the problem anymore we've we can leave that to other people and they're much less constrained than we are because if they go wrong they're not going to break the whole thing they might break their roll up but they're not going to break the whole protocol whereas if we go wrong we break the whole protocol so that means that out of the protocol you can do many more experiments we're back to this kind of evolutionary thing you can you're much less constrained you can try all sorts of wacky implementations you can do zk stuff you can do optimistic stuff and that really meant that we no longer had to deliver phase two we we could stop thinking about that it's it's not our problem anymore

we we just need to make sure that people can run roll ups on this thing and and we're done so is sharding still in those phases is that still on the roadmap yep so to support this roll-up ecosystem we need the data availability layer so sharding now is not executable in protocol so you can't run shardy smart contracts and so forth in layer one but we will be providing a huge amount of data availability so a 64 shards but each shard is quite fat um i think the current estimate is about two megabytes per second of data availability which is something like 500 times more than we currently have on on the ethereum chain

can i try to picture what this would actually look like so if there's the base chain there's the roll-ups that are sort of like shards are there like dummy shards also kind of like next to the roll-ups or is it inside the base it's inside the base so the shards hang off the beacon chain so the the beacon chain is like the conductor for the system it sets the heartbeat the tempo for the slots that come every 12 seconds it coordinates the the actors in the system so you've got the committees that vote on various things and so forth and the shards are managed by the beacon chain so the beacon chain decides which validators will be validating any given shard at any given time

and the shards checkpoint themselves we call the crosslinks onto the beacon chain so that then you can construct proofs about what the shard did what his state is at any given time so that that's in protocol and the but we only have one engine we have just one evm in this model and so when your roller only needs to deal with that one evm that one contract environment it doesn't have to worry about um where it's running it's just got this one interface to the whole thing so you kind of you know you build the beacon chain and then you build the shards that are coordinated by the beacon chain and then you build the roll-ups that use the shards exactly so the roll-ups to to be effective to to gain their their

speed up and um be able to get the throughput that's being uh speculated about need data they're data-hungry and the data is the shards so we we end up with 500 to 1000 times more data in the sharded world than we have today so that multiplies the effectiveness of your rollups yeah zk rollups especially are limited by how much you know data they can just shove onto the chain yeah yeah so that's a nice synergy see so we have this we already have this kind of data sharding phase phase one in the road map and with the roll-ups then these two cooperate very nicely so you can do roll-ups today and then they get turbocharged when we put sharding in so

that's the the synergy that's that's the joy of the the design that's the roll-up side of things which killed off our execution environments our executable shards in protocol and simplified things for us the other thing that happened was it's kind of backlash against proof of work and this uh whole nfts are killing the planet sort of thing you know my my 17 year old daughter gave me a big lecture about this and i said i i i've got good news for you i'm i'm i'm here to to kill proof of work this is this is my life's work so um but you know this narrative um we had this eip 1559 um this sort of threat of a miner's revolt um which i don't think will come to

anything or hasn't come to anything and probably never would but it just raised the profile that miners aren't always our friends um and just planted the kind of seeds of doubt for people and for various reasons it just became expedient to turn off proof of work as soon as we possibly can yeah this is before kind of elon musk started uh getting involved with all this kind of thing and there's the you know the the momentum against proof of work is just building and building so there's no going back now so and uh yet another of my colleagues uh mikhail kalinin came up with a proposal about a month after vitalik did his roll-up centric road maps about october last year which he called the executable beacon chain

and it's super simple basically we'd couple existing e1 clients with existing eth2 clients over a very simple api between them and we switch our proof of work and we turn on proof of stake so now you're instead of being driven by the proof of work cadence the eth one client we're calling it the execution engine is driven by the beacon chain cadence and he came up with a beautiful clean design for this and we realized we could implement it very straightforwardly um there's barely any research and development to do and could deliver proof of state very quickly so that's that's the current trajectory that's very exciting is that phase two now though is this yeah we don't talk about phases anymore

without that do we just phases are behind us i think that's really interesting is because we essentially like had this huge expansion of seven original phases and then we progressively narrowed it to the things that are actually valuable and worth doing and you know now we've moved past phases and i think where we are is we have the beacon chain and we just want to add shards and the merge and that's everything that's left to do and they're not dependent on each other right right so there is a degree of independence we've talked about the ordering do we do sharding first do we do a proof of stake first and uh in principle we could do it either way that sort of wins the uh the cultural winds are pushing us to do proof of stake

first i felt that maybe sharding might have been a better choice my my concern is almost nobody that's been working in what we've called the e2 space until now has had eth one experience um with their sort of oh and so i my team's a bit of an exception we've got a couple of devs in the team who worked on basu our main net client for for a few years so but how slowly things move within the um ethereum world the all-core devs meetings and so forth and just the and and you know perhaps rightly because it's guardian of a huge amount of value and and you don't want to break anything and uh we've had the luxury of moving fast um without you know many constraints on the uh eth2 side of things

but i think we're going to hit a bit of a brick wall now when we've done this merge um we and we can talk about mechanics in the merge when we we've kind of brought each one and these two together and things are going to slow to a crawl so my concern was if we don't do sharding first it's going to take years but we'll we'll see we'll see we can we can add it without breaking anything i think so um you know we can test it separately you know speaking of all cordev calls you know i do see danny ryan there pretty regularly and the merge is a very frequent topic uh are you you know as a as an eth2 team are you optimistic that the merge is going to happen later this year i'm optimistic it's going to happen uh i don't think it's going to happen

later this year uh that would be nice and i think you know that meme that sort of uh thing about it happening this year is an illustration what i just said right that came from a poll of eth2 developers that justin drake ran and we're we're all gung-ho and yeah this we move at the speed of light but you know once we crash into the ethereum one world things move more slowly and more cautiously and quite rightly in my experience peter and martin take their responsibilities to the network extremely seriously yeah absolutely and and it's got to be that way and you know i'm kidding a little bit about about the the the uh caution but it is absolutely necessary but i think as

slightly in um a different world from what we've been used to definitely so now let's dive into the merge because i mean i've seen it pop up but i haven't dug into it yet and i'm super curious to hear what's the plan what's what is the plan for this merge that probably won't happen this year but will happen it will happen and i early next year is the kind of expectation read that as as you will i'm not going to put a date on it um i think didn't vitalik go on lex friedman and say this so now it's locked in it's locked podcast history vitalik is a notorious optimist though it's also not the one on the hook for

delivering the software quite quite um so there's work to do on the uh what we've called the eth2 side uh up to now so this is we're rebranding the uh eth2 clients as consensus clients we're just running the proof of stake operation so that's teku which is my client and prism and lighthouse and nimbus so are there four now yeah there are four that are functional on the main net now uh load star are doing great work so that's come from chainsafe um they're writing in typescript and javascript and i'm not sure if they plan to be a fully functional mainneck client i i doubt it but they they want to run like clients and provide a lot of infrastructure stuff

which is which is uh great yeah super good so for currently active mainnet clients on the consensus side proof of stake consensus side and then you've got the the cluster of uh eth1 clients which we're rebranding execution clients um on on that side so geth obviously basu which is the consensus's client and uh nether mind uh aragon i think if that's right that's the open ethereum rebranded once more or rewritten no aragon is turboget rebranded oh right what happened to open open ethereum is that anywhere or in short it's now been deprecated and um gnosis has

adopted uh eragon and will be supporting that and and putting resources into that going forward which is unfortunate because i would love a high quality rest client i i think aragon is is in multiple languages and is modular and you can uh this is part of its value proposition uh it is very modular so we've got uh work to do on both sides uh but it's relatively lightweight work so the eth1 side will be responsible for all transaction management so that's the execution layer so it retains the transaction gossip the mempools that it currently has uh the discovery mechanisms that it currently has

and its own networking protocol and everything remains untouched um the only thing that significantly changes is that we take out the proof-of-work module from that client obviously and then we put in an api so that the execution client will produce and will insert blocks into its block tree on demand so now if we go over to the proof of stake side so i'm on the beacon chain i'm running teku for example uh when it's my turn to produce a block so um i get selected by the randall process that we have to to produce a block for the network then i will ask my attached execution node give me a block and

it will hand over a block and i will just put that block as is into my beacon chain block and that gets gossiped on the beacon chain side where i know it's going to be a bit strange but like where is the evm is that still back on the first version right exactly so the state management the transaction management the execution of transactions all happens on the execution client hence the name uh which is the old eth1 clients uh there so we you know transitioning the nomenclature is a bit painful because you always have say yeah just so people get the idea eth1 execution whatever but yeah that that stays there so we don't we don't need to touch that which is the the beauty of this this proposal

yeah to make it a little like more concrete i think under this proposal when you're running the ethereum chain you'll run geth which will manage the evm and all the normal evm transactions and you will also run teku at the same time and geth and tekku will coordinate between themselves to produce blocks or to validate blocks yeah exactly right so you're making a very like strict separation between the execution the evm and the consensus part which will be run by another program entirely yeah yeah it's very clean and this has so many advantages first of all it it retains all the work that's already been done we're really not throwing

anything away except for the proof of work uh mechanism it means that all of the application layer stuff still talks to their eth1 execution node as they always have we might come to some of the challenges but by and large uh almost everything remains exactly as it always has so minimal if any changes to to dabs and um uh applications and so forth how do the two sides of these like i know you don't want to use the term eth1e2 but i haven't picked up the new term yet but like how do they talk to each other exactly so there's an rpc interface of some sort um between the two and this is going to be something we'll be talking about for a year i i just joke with mikael you know

he's trying to kind of nail down are we doing jason rpc are we doing yeah what does it look like and this is the kind of thing that devs would love to bike about forever but basically it's just got a couple of end points one is um give me a block so the beacon chain says to the ether one node the execution node give me a block and uh when it's it's turn to propose it and the other one is insert this block so i'm a proof of stake node on the beacon chain i receive a block over the network i extract the execution part of that and i i hand it over to my attached eth1 node so we can insert it into this block tree in updated state this is really nice because you know

making the separation between the execution client and the consensus client means that you can swap out either side whenever you need to hypothetically if when we want to add sharding this is so much easier because we can swap out the consensus client because there is this strict separation between them right and we are trying to make the interfaces as standardized as possible so that you can mix and match execution and consensus clients and so forth so yeah i try not to think too far into the future what what might happen that's one way to do your head in in this face but uh yeah we're trying not to close off any options i mean that's that's a lot a big

part of the goal i want to go back to the roll-up centric view and what like what does this new scenario mean for a roll-up like what is it then doing is it interacting with both of these because we talked about the two the two sides the execution chain and consensus chain talking to each other but like would a zk roll up have to talk to both so the uh smart contract execution is all happening on the execution side so that's on your old eth1 client and that's all that your roll-up would need to speak to um in order to do its work when we have shardy in place as i mentioned uh the evm will have to be made aware of those shards and hence the roll-up will have to become aware of those shards

i don't know what that looks like yet we haven't uh spec that out as far as i know i think it's still really fuzzy for me as well you know it seems like the roll-up will need access to the shard data which means there's probably some crosstalk between the two clients again uh some extension to the client interface but i don't think we have any idea what it looks like yeah something we're working on at the moment is light client protocols so um part of this altair upgrade uh hard fork in the old lingo we're doing on the beacon chain in couple of months is to put in infrastructure that makes it very easy to sync up a like client so in a sharded world by definition you don't want to be following

all the shards otherwise you gained nothing right so the idea is to make it as easy as possible to get information about what's happening on charts that you're not directly attached or directly following uh all of the activity on so this light client protocol becomes very important and then you know you gain some information some data over the like client network you want to prove that it is correct so you know you you execute a merkle proof based on data that the evm has access to and then you know that you've got the correct data that that shared out a band but you can verify it with data that's available in band let's bring it back to the merge itself what will the process actually look like

right so at the moment stakers run an eth2 client and an eth1 client alongside each other eth1 client only provides uh data about the deposits that have been made so it's not there's only a very very loose one-way coupling between uh the clients at the moment now before the merge uh which dates tbd early next year stakers will need to update their clients uh to be merge compatible and uh there will be a mechanism by which at a certain difficulty on the network the eth1 client will stop following proof of work and for his very next block will follow the beacon chain instead is difficulty in this context difficulty of proof of work

correct yeah and honestly speaking i'm a bit hazy on the reasons for choosing difficulty but in this context it's uh um there is a good rationale for it but i i i don't recall the details on that so i'll put my hand up there but um the the idea is that we specify a network difficulty approval work hashing difficulty and at that when that is hit then uh that's a total difficulty from the beginning of the chain not not accumulated difficulty yeah not a target right right so when we hit that then for the very next block the eth1 client doesn't listen to proof work anymore it listens to the beacon chain and the whole thing is seamless i mean it's beautiful we'll drink champagne and and rejoice

wow so it's almost like you you upgrade out the consensus of the execution chain and then you turn on the other one yeah yeah so the beacon chain is is always running it's always there it's doing its duty and the proof of work will be running as well and it's the eth one client triggers it and just flips over from proof of work to proof of stake at that point stops listening to the one starts listening to the other will all operators have to run both nodes forever like are they running two clients then at the same time yes basically um you could probably at this stage get away with having them separated or having a um an eth one client serving several eth2 nodes or

or something like that however we are very keen on data availability guarantees and that means eth1 data as well as you know the data that's available on the execution client so they need to be more and more tightly coupled as as we as we go down that route and uh running two clients may sound like a lot but i think for anyone running a node it's very normal processes talk to each other all the time this isn't like big overhead yeah yeah exactly and has you know good stakes stakers not like me are already running two clients i mean i i use infuriate for my ether one data but that's my other dirty secret but okay i want to go back to the difficulty

thing for a second because now it's a brain teaser i i think that the reason to do accumulated difficulty it is is because it is the thing that is uh least possible for a cabal of miners to influence right and that's one of the big risks um around the merge is minor behavior at that point you know in in our favor everyone knows that ethereum is moving to proof of stake you know i i was aware of it five years ago and yeah it's taken a while but it's not you know it's not kind of controversial we're not changing the rules uh i also think that ethereum kind of uh uses miners as a boogeyman way too much in practice we've never seen a minor cabal

impact any uh major chain yeah yeah this is fair but uh i am hoping it will be smooth but um we need to take reasonable precautions against the likely scenarios or even unlikely ones that that might play out yeah and uh it's you know it's good to just you know select the thing that is most difficult to manipulate to just head off any possibilities yeah yeah so i think this leads us to today we know now the plan of today is there anything that we can look forward to in the future like is there anything you're looking at i know the road map is very different now there seems like there's one big i guess there's a few upgrades and then there's one big thing which is this merge

but um yeah what do you what do you see coming down the line the really interesting thing about this this whole thing is we've almost gone back to the sort of serenity plan of upgrading the eth1 chain in place and that's one reason why this eth2 naming is sort of being deprecated a bit because we it's not east 2.0 building a whole new chain and and then throwing away the old one anymore it's like bringing in incremental upgrades to the existing ethereum chain so kind of short and mid-term we we deliver the merge so that gets uh ethereum onto proof of stake uh we deliver data sharding that's pretty well specced at the moment implementations of that are just starting

now um and we're testing it out the design and then there's this whole you might have seen vitalik's kind of massive diagram with boxes everywhere and arrows going everywhere of of you know his his mental model of ethereum's future um and there's all sorts of things on there around bringing zero knowledge proofs in in protocol to simplify many things um uh make ourselves a bit more future proof post quantum all of that kind of thing just loads and loads of things going on this is one of ethereum's things uh we are always innovating and that's kind of one of the things i really love about it um and philosophically sets us apart from certain other blockchains but

um we didn't go into that are there some upgrades that have to happen on the network before all of this like is are there other things kind of planned this year yeah so uh we'll do the merge likely early next year um so this year we've got this altair upgrade which is introducing uh the light client protocols so that light clients can sync up uh efficiently and as we mentioned that will be an important part of the sharded world and we've got some accounting reforms going in there just to lighten the load on clients and make some things more reliable and so on we've got a couple of consensus things some sort of theoretical attacks have been outlined in a couple of papers which while exceedingly unlikely would be nice to just deal with so we never have

to talk about it again they will probably follow that their sort of fork choice for all changes so we can do that at any point we we don't need to do it in a hard fork so so those things will happen this year and then early next year uh with a fair wind we will get the merch done we will have a cleanup fork yeah two to three months after that we will have the famous moment where we enable uh withdrawals of people's stake so you can get your rewards out and your and your stake you'll be able to stop validating if you wish and uh yeah long-awaited uh moment so that would just be sort of paying back some technical debts you know which which we incur as a result of getting the the move to proof of stake done early

uh and then shouting so you know ben we we've chatted on and off for a few years and you know that i have a lot of opinions on the process and on eth2 do you have any insider perspective on all of this i'd love to hear a bit more about all the people involved and how it all came together it's a really interesting question when i sort of reflect on uh gently quite quite a lot because it is kind of miraculous to me right i mean what what are the ingredients that have made this in my view so successful and not everyone will agree it's hugely successful and i think there are a number of factors of the openness you know we are trying as hard as we can to

do everything in the open involving client teams now funded to a large extent by the ethereum foundation not not us but in many cases yet autonomous you know on on a very loose reign has definitely helped make doing spec developments broadcasting our calls that we do doing all of that in the open is is kind of winsome it's attractive people smart people want to get involved with this and we see this time and time again when we've had need people have come in and you know there are people like proto-lambda who just kind of threw himself into it there's kind of barnabay at the ethereum foundation who's really digging down into proving things about how the protocol is working and it i think smart people are

attracted by this and the challenges and the freedom and the possibilities and somehow it kind of comes together and it's not the most beautiful or elegant and we don't have gantt charts and you know deliverables and milestones but it works uh we built this beacon chain and delivered it it was 2018 to 20 20 two and a half years from nothing i mean it was a it was literally a blank document and that might sound like a long time but that's the whole r d and protocol development as well as the implementations and productization and we had viable things a year

before we actually went live it took a year to make do the productization and the hardening and the security audits and all of that stuff so that's incredibly fast i mean you know compared to the the old world i come from that's amazing to me so yeah that's some of the the where with all i think you know danny ryan is a magician he's just superb at coordinating people and just making sure people know what they need to do stepping back when when he needs to but stepping in when he needs to and i think a large part of the kind of success of the outcomes is is down to him as well yeah i mean what else uh what else james um what are your observations you know i i have an incredibly high

opinion of danny ryan as well i think that uh when he came in and started working marks the real like turn around in this process i i wouldn't disagree um a few weeks ago tyrone was on the show as a co-host and sort of made a comment around as ethereum and these these systems are kind of more and more developed they start to look a little bit like polka dot i find it very controversial that he said it but i am curious what what you make of a statement like that if you're seeing anything like that it's an interesting observation and i've heard it um elsewhere as well i'm not really well versed in in pogdot these days but

from my limited understanding there are definite similarities in the way things are emerging with the the shards coordinated by the base chain and um the rather the roll-ups i should say uh coordinated by the the evm and so forth like you know parachains and so on so you know it may not be an accident i mean for for one thing vitalik and uh gav worked together for a long time and you know a lot of the ideas had their genesis back in 2014 time frame um a lot of the sort of early work was was done then and it also might be the case that you know there aren't that many ways to solve this problem i mean it could be that designs converge because they're decent designs to

to solve the problem but yeah it's it's definitely interesting cool all right ben thank you so much for coming on the show and going on this journey with us it's been a real pleasure thank you both uh i've absolutely loved it thanks so much for coming it's always a pleasure to see you i still have fond memories of that dinner in osaka yeah terrific and i'm still trying to figure out whether you do in fact have the the best hair in crypto um i'm gonna ponder that one a little longer very cool all right thanks again and thanks to the podcast producer andre the podcast editor henrik and to our listeners

thanks for listening you