One of the downsides of moving from working on the Ethereum consensus layer is that you often need a real execution node sync’d, and they don’t have the near instantaneous checkpoint sync. So recently I bit the bullet and custom built a PC to run a whole bunch of different Ethereum chains on. I’m really quite happy with the result.

After nearly 5 years working with the ConsenSys protocols group, I’ll be finishing up at the end of January.

Mostly just so that I can find the recordings more easily later, here’s the recordings of DevCon VI talks I gave in Bogotá.

The process of producing attestations and getting them included into the chain has become more complex post-merge. Combined with a few issues with clients causing more missed attestations than normal there’s lots of people struggling to understand what’s causing those misses. So let’s dig into the process involved and how to identify where problems are occurring.

When debugging issues on the beacon chain, it can be useful to download all blocks on a particularly, potentially non-canonical fork. This script will do just that.

Obol Network are doing a bunch of work on distributed validator technology and have hit some challenges with the way the beacon REST API determines if validators are scheduled to be aggregators.

In the beacon chain spec, the chain is justified when at least 2/3rds of the active validating balance attests to the same target epoch. Simple enough, but there’s a couple of little quirks that are easy to miss.

One of the common concerns people raise about checkpoint sync is the risk that someone might hack Infura and return malicious initial states causing nodes to sync and be stuck on the wrong chain. Given users usually don’t verify the initial state and Infura is currently the only publicly available service supplying initial states, there is certainly some risk there but how concerned should we really be?

Apart from being awesomely fast, checkpoint sync also exists to ensure that you can safely sync despite the limitations of weak subjectivity. The initial state you use is considered trusted - you are telling your beacon node that this state is the canonical chain and it should ignore all others. So it’s important to ensure you get the right state.

Let’s just admit it, weak subjectivity checkpoints have failed…

Recording of my talk on Checkpoint Sync and Weak Subjectivity at EthStaker’s gathering as part of DevConnect 2022.

In Teku, we’ve come up with a new way to both serialize/deserialize objects to JSON and generate OpenAPI documentation from the same declarative source. This significantly reduces the amount of boiler-plate code we have to write and also avoids a lot of bugs where the generated JSON diverged from the OpenAPI.