Lodestar Bi-weekly Update #3
Authored by Mikerah
ChainSafe Systems' bi-weekly update on the development of our JavaScript/TypeScript ETH2.0 client, Lodestar. This update was written by Mikerah & Gregory.
We have had TONS of progress over the past 2 weeks. We are excited to share the high level details with the community. As always, if you have the technical skills and want to contribute, just hit us up on our gitter channel.
Lodestar
We made a lot of progress in the last two weeks on the Beacon Chain. We have one outstanding PR, once merged all our state transitions will be implemented, this includes slot, block and epoch processing as well as the fork choice rule (we expect lots of optimizations to come, it's a naive implementation). Once all the kinks are out on the state transitions, we can commence simulation work and benchmarking, which is ahead of schedule at this point! Testing has a been our main focus this month, and we're happy with the progress we've made, closing in on ~80% coverage on state transition helper functions.
BLS-js
We're almost ready to release BLS-js, and soon enough developers will be able to use BLS signatures with aggregation in their own projects. We decided to port Herumi's BLS signature library using Wasm.
Note: that Herumi's implementation uses the SHA256 hash algorithm.
SSZ-js
We have updated SSZ-js to the latest specification and it is packaged for use in node.js. Our next release should have it browser ready, and potentially available via CDN.
Gossipsub-js
We are in the process of debugging our gossipsub code before merging the waiting PR. We have been in contact with the js-libp2p team and are trying to get support in js-libp2p-switch for some missing functionality that the gossipsub implementation is dependent on.
Interested in Contributing?
We all know you want to!
Here are some issues to help you get started:
You can also go through our various repositories' issues tracker to find other issues that might be of interest to you. We try to make these as easy and straightforward as possible so that you become one of our beloved contributors. If you want to get your hands a little more dirty, you can tackle issues that are not marked with the Good First Issue tag. These issues are probably hard in some way for us too. Any help with these is greatly appreciated! All of our repositories have contributing guidelines. For more info, you can check out Sharding repo with everything you need to know to get involved.
As always, you can follow ChainSafe on Twitter and check out our Lodestar Gitter channel.
Donations
We are a group of open source developers seeking to improve the Ethereum ecosystem through all of our projects. All of our open source work is fully funded by grants and donations by the Ethereum community. If you are interested in giving a one time donation, you can send ETH or DAI to our address: 0x3990a27b2dA3612727dD3A9cf877C94465C32776. If you are interested in continuously supporting us, you can donate through Gitcoin's subcription based grants program and pay in any token you like.
