Ethereum 2.0 Client Secures Audit, Testnet Next Week

Ethereum 2.0 Client Secures Audit, Testnet Next Week

Sigma Prime’s Lighthouse has announced they have selected Trail of Bits to audit their codebase in January.

“We have selected and confirmed Trail of Bits as the firm who will be auditing the Lighthouse codebase. We expect this to start in January 2020 and look forward to working with such a highly reputable team,” Lighthouse said.

The security review was funded through Moloch DAO, a decentralized organization focused on raising funds for eth development.

Some $40,000 was raised with 568 votes in favor and none against in one of the biggest grant of the kind through the platform.

Making this audit one of the last step before the ethereum 2.0 genesis block this spring, starting with a public testnet which Lighthouse says should be out next week. They say:

“Over the last month, we have been working on building out the necessary features for a long-lasting public testnet.

These include, Eth1 integration (connection to an Eth1 node to vote on blocks and read the deposit contract), network update (shift to the new stream based specification and associated syncing re-write), discovery v5 interoperability, v0.9.1 specification update, new database storing strategy, AWS infrastructure and validator on-boarding (allowing public users to generate validator keys, interact with the deposit contract and join the network). Over the last month, all of these features have been independently completed.”

We asked to confirm whether this is the public testnet where all clients link with each other, or a client specific testnet, but have not received a response in time for publishing.

They mention a private testnet, which has been running for months and as far as we are aware can be run by anyone, with the actual testnet previously suggested to be close to launch.

The BLS standard has now been finalized, so the deposit contract should be out soon too. Meaning all appears to be ready for launch this December.

At least three months would then be needed for the testnet to run. Presuming all goes well, then the actual launch may afterall be in Q1 of 2020.

That’s the launch of the Proof of Stake (PoS) Beacon Chain, one of the biggest upgrade of ethereum that replaces miners with eth staking holders.

Once the deposit contract launches, then ethereans will be able to send their eth to the new chain where they won’t be able to do anything except for validating the PoS network.

They might be able to send the eth back to the current Proof of Work (PoW) chain once the finality gadget is out which links the two, but the aim is for everyone to transition to the new blockchain which is far more scalable due to sharding.

Sharding may be out around the end of next year, but more likely in 2021, when ethereum’s capacity increases 64x current capacity, allowing it to handle not far off from 100 million transactions a day to begin with.

There’s still quite a lot of work going on for sharding, so that may take some time, but for the Beacon Chain it now appears it’s more just about polishing everything.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com

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