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A release candidate has been published for Phase 0, though Medalla still needs more participation.
ETH 2.0 developer Ben Edgington recently posted an update to highlight the latest news from Beacon Chain testing and development. The primary update was the publishing of version 1.0.0 release candidate 0 for Beacon Chain which contains a number of improvements and configuration tweaks that are detailed in the post.
Your newest news in #Ethereum 2.0 is here! https://t.co/97X85jdCzM
Sorry it's a bit late, and a bit rushed. I took some time off; it was nice 😎
Back now, refreshed and raring to go 🚀
— Ben Edgington ⟠ benjaminion.eth (@benjaminion_xyz) October 18, 2020
Additionally, there were upgrades to the Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) signature scheme and hardened denial of service attack resistance.
The deposit contract is ‘good to go’, he added with Beacon Chain genesis coming 6-8 weeks later. This is still an estimate however and there has been no official launch date announcement.
Edgington warned about depositing to fake contracts, many of which are expected in the run-up to the real thing;
“Many fake deposit contracts and Launchpad front-ends will erupt in the coming days. Look out for the official announcements: do not send Eth to random contracts; this is not DeFi.”
ETH 2.0 Testnet Update
The Zinken testnet, which ran last week, ran smoothly enough for the team to turn their thoughts now towards the real thing, he added. The programmer commented that testnets are not ‘cutting it’ anymore and Phase 0 needs to be launched asap.
“Medalla, meanwhile, is suffering from very low participation. I think people are getting a bit bored of testnests. It’s time to move on.”
At the time of writing, there was only 45% network participation on the Medalla testnet according to beaconcha.in, it needs 66% to reach finality.
#Medalla has been fighting to resume finality for some time now.
Validators, help save it!https://t.co/xXNWn4XTzM pic.twitter.com/7OgfKWtdOe
— Etherscan.io (@etherscan) October 19, 2020
ETH 2.0 bug bounty programs are running to test various clients such as Teku, Lighthouse, and Prysm, with a $50k bounty for finding critical issues.
Prysm Still Dominant
He added that the network really needs more client diversity for successful testing and Prysm still dominates.
Prysm has been hard at work developing its own ETH 2.0 client and recently announced a web-based graphical user interface with a dedicated staking portal. Lighthouse has just upgraded to version 0.3.0 which introduces a raft of improvements.
There was some discussion on tokenizing stakes which theoretically enables greater returns but could lead to centralization issues, and more research into rollups.
In conclusion, the developer thinks that the time for testing could be coming to an end and the real thing needs to go live as soon as possible, maybe within the next two months.
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