1242368b58
https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/pull/3360 effectively extends the valid lifetime of an attestation/aggregate to 2 epochs - this means that an aggregate that was published at the beginning of a slot now is valid per the gossip rules up to 2 epochs later. Then net effect of the above change is that peers are allowed to republish old aggregates and attestations and libp2p will not stop the spread with the settings we recommend - instead the messages will have to be stopped with the "attestation cover rule" or similar, even though they have been observed already. Significant amounts of this kind of spam have been observed on the aggregate channel in particular leading to a 5x increase in aggregate traffic as some clients republish these old messages in spite of the "attestation cover rule" which should have stopped them - this simple change will provide an additional layer of protection against such bugs.
Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Consensus Specifications
To learn more about proof-of-stake and sharding, see the PoS documentation, sharding documentation and the research compendium.
This repository hosts the current Ethereum proof-of-stake specifications. Discussions about design rationale and proposed changes can be brought up and discussed as issues. Solidified, agreed-upon changes to the spec can be made through pull requests.
Specs
Core specifications for Ethereum proof-of-stake clients can be found in specs. These are divided into features. Features are researched and developed in parallel, and then consolidated into sequential upgrades when ready.
Stable Specifications
| Seq. | Code Name | Fork Epoch | Specs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Phase0 | 0 |
|
| 1 | Altair | 74240 |
|
| 2 | Bellatrix ("The Merge") |
144896 |
|
| 3 | Capella | 194048 |
|
| 4 | Deneb | 269568 |
In-development Specifications
| Code Name or Topic | Specs | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sharding (outdated) |
|
|
| Custody Game (outdated) |
|
Dependent on sharding |
| Data Availability Sampling (outdated) |
|
|
| EIP-6110 |
Accompanying documents can be found in specs and include:
Additional specifications for client implementers
Additional specifications and standards outside of requisite client functionality can be found in the following repos:
Design goals
The following are the broad design goals for the Ethereum proof-of-stake consensus specifications:
- to minimize complexity, even at the cost of some losses in efficiency
- to remain live through major network partitions and when very large portions of nodes go offline
- to select all components such that they are either quantum secure or can be easily swapped out for quantum secure counterparts when available
- to utilize crypto and design techniques that allow for a large participation of validators in total and per unit time
- to allow for a typical consumer laptop with
O(C)resources to process/validateO(1)shards (including any system level validation such as the beacon chain)
Useful external resources
For spec contributors
Documentation on the different components used during spec writing can be found here:
Online viewer of the latest release (latest master branch)
Consensus spec tests
Conformance tests built from the executable python spec are available in the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Consensus Spec Tests repo. Compressed tarballs are available in releases.