Amphora: Major Merge Milestones

Earlier this year, Rayonism Hackathon It was launched to create an architectural prototype for Ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake. The transition, also called a merge, “merges” the two chains by keeping the existing beacon chain (eth2) and execution layer (eth1) clients and making the beacon chain drive the consensus of the execution layer. This approach is the most recent in a series of iterations on the Ethereum roadmap (for more information see here).

Rayonism has proven that this is a sound architecture, but there are still several things that need to be designed, implemented, and tested, including the transition from real Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). To achieve this, the customer team met in person last week. Eth2 Interop since 2019) for a workshop called Amphora 🏺.

Below is an overview of the key points achieved during the workshop and the path from here to The Merge.

Amphora Milestone

The purpose of the event was to enable the execution and consensus layer client teams to resolve outstanding issues in the specification and reach a series of development milestones. Each milestone brings our customers closer to a fully functioning merged devnet that has transitioned from PoW to PoS. Representatives from Besu, Erigon, EthereumJS, Geth, Nethermind, Nimbus, Lighthouse, Lodestar, Quilt, and Teku attended the workshop in person. The Prysm team participated remotely with several members of the aforementioned teams.

that much Amphora Milestone The goal was to first ensure that clients adhere to the specification, then gradually add complexity and eventually increase the number of different clients that can interoperate.

At the first milestone, M1, clients simply need to implement the merge specification. Most teams completed it before the workshop even started! To help customers validate their implementation several – test – Suite provided.

Then, through milestones M2, M3, and M4, the client team set up a developmentnet with increasing technical complexity and node diversity. In M2, the Execution Layer (EL) and Consensus Layer (CL) teams were paired one-on-one and launched the development net after merging. This allowed us to communicate successfully through both layers. Engine API In the PoS context.

M3 is where the Amphora Workshop goes one step further than Rayonism. The customer set up a temporary developmentnet with the transition from PoW to PoS.

Conversion is based on PoW difficulty. That is, if the difficulty of a block equals or exceeds a certain value, TERMINAL_TOTAL_DIFFICULTYor TTD, which is considered the final PoW block. The execution layer then starts listening to the PoS consensus layer for new blocks. To ensure a robust implementation for each team, the EL team had to connect to two CL clients to traverse M3 and vice versa.

The M4 was the actual target of the event. Having multiple EL and CL clients on Devnet who have gone through a full PoW to PoS transition. In other words, M3 is about one-to-one devnet, while M4 is about many-to-many.

After achieving this goal for some teams before the end of the workshop, we set our sights on an additional goal: M5.

a lasting artifact

This milestone aimed to transform Amphora from a short-term event to a long-term infrastructure that the community can use. M5 required the client team to not only run a full transition to all client combinations, but also start a devnet that would persist beyond the Amphora event.

On the last day of the workshop, minutes before the final dinner was served, the M5 was attacked. A network of 10,000 validators across 100 nodes and several client implementations launched under PoW have reached M5. TERMINAL_TOTAL_DIFFICULTYWe successfully completed the chain by switching to PoS 🎉!

The M5 devnet successfully concludes its post-merge just a few minutes before the end of the workshop dinner. Photo by Ben Edgington.

beyond the amphora

Amphora’s success gives The Merge great momentum. The client team now Clear task list They need to work on it, and enough progress has been made to start reaching out to a larger portion of the Ethereum community.

A more stable version of the M5 Amphora devnet was released yesterday. pithos, was fired. This network is now active (Explorer here), we look forward to an open call exploring how developer tools and other core Ethereum infrastructure can best prepare for the transition from PoW to PoS.

Client teams and researchers will continue to iterate on the Merge specification to fix issues identified during Amphora and respond to feedback from the community. The specifications will be finalized in the coming weeks and a new stable testnet will be released soon.

thank you

The work achieved during Amphora exceeded all our expectations. For this we would like to thank our client team and researchers. Without them, no specification would have been written or implemented.

Moreover, thanks to you ConsenSys, chain safe and Ben Edgington Thank you for the great coverage of the workshop.