Authored by Ben Adar

Lodestar update

The last few months have been very busy for the Lodestar team. We have made great leaps in the project and are getting close to being able to remain connected to public testnets (most recently Altona). The majority of our focus in the last month has been on hardening our beacon node and finishing updates based on the latest version of the spec, 0.12.x.

Our goal remains to join a testnet as a full peer. To accomplish this we need to finish hardening the beacon node. At this point, the work consists mainly in finding and fixing bugs, and completing the validator. Once we have the beacon node and the validator working, the next task is to ensure we can reliably propose blocks and participate in an interop setting.

For the newest version of the spec, 0.12.x, all that is left to complete is the Gossipsub v1.1 update. Gossipsub is an extensible pubsub protocol over libp2p, based on randomized topic meshes and gossip. Gossipsub v1.1 brings massive security updates, hardening against spam attacks, malicious peers, and more. This update will help not only Lodestar, but also the greater js-libp2p ecosystem. The update, and subsequent completion of the new spec, should be complete in the coming weeks. Look out for the announcement on twitter and discord!

Another major breakthrough for the team came through implementing Eth2fastspec, an extension of Eth2spec but optimized for transition speed. With Eth2fastspec we can now reliably sync using a "mainnet" configuration. Our sync speeds are ~10–100x faster, and don't degrade much over time. This is a major step towards finishing our current phase of the project and having a stable environment.

Web Work

We recently went live with https://lodestar.chainsafe.io/! The site showcases all the lodestar tooling websites we have so far! Check them out and experiment with the different web apps we have available. Let us know if you have any suggestions for any future web tools!

Keep up with our discord, twitter, and hackmd to be on top of the latest developments on the project. We're always eager to expand our team and collaborate with other open source projects. Reach out if you're interested in expanding the Eth2 typescript ecosystem and bringing Eth2 to the web!

Special thanks to Cayman Nava and Colin Schwarz