State – Earlybirds Invest https://earlybirdsinvest.com Latest Crypto News Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:13:16 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.11 https://i0.wp.com/earlybirdsinvest.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/cropped-New-Project-2024-12-17T235703.455.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 State – Earlybirds Invest https://earlybirdsinvest.com 32 32 240146708 What a weak August jobs report tells us about the state of the economy https://earlybirdsinvest.com/what-a-weak-august-jobs-report-tells-us-about-the-state-of-the-economy/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/what-a-weak-august-jobs-report-tells-us-about-the-state-of-the-economy/#respond Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:13:15 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/what-a-weak-august-jobs-report-tells-us-about-the-state-of-the-economy/

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report this morning, and the numbers aren’t looking good for the US economy, or President Donald Trump’s tariffs scheme.

What happened in the US economy last month? The US added just 22,000 jobs in August, according to the BLS, while unemployment reached 4.3 percent — its highest rate in years, though only a small increase from the month before.

Not only is 22,000 jobs far fewer than the 75,000 that had been predicted, but new revisions to data from previous months are making the economic picture look even worse: Rather than adding jobs in June, the BLS said Friday, the US lost 13,000 jobs.

Why does the jobs report matter? The jobs report is a closely watched indicator of the broader health of the US economy, and Friday’s flagging numbers are the latest sign that all is not well, especially as Trump’s tariffs, which took effect in early August, start to have a greater impact.

Friday’s report is particularly noteworthy given how Trump reacted to last month’s report, which also made substantial downward revisions to jobs numbers for May and June. Trump attacked the report’s accuracy and fired the director of the BLS, Erika McEntarfer. To replace her, he nominated E.J. Antoni, a deeply underqualified right-wing economist (who may have difficulty getting confirmed by the Senate).

What does this mean going forward? This is the second consecutive jobs report that has delivered bad news; a clearer picture of an economy in trouble, with no clear respite on the horizon, is starting to emerge. New inflation data next week could be yet more bad news if tariffs drive prices higher, as expected.

The one bright spot for Trump is that he’s now more likely to get the rate cut he’s been looking — and agitating — for when the Federal Reserve meets later this month, as the central bank responds to a slumping economy.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I’m looking forward to the new season of The Great British Bake Off, which returns today in the US. This New Yorker story, from former contestant Ruby Tandoh, is a delightful look at what it’s like to be on the show, from the application process to the tent itself. You can read it here, but fair warning: You might leave the piece craving a sweet treat. Have a great weekend and we’ll see you back here on Monday!

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Why can’t I set chain state obfuscation keys? https://earlybirdsinvest.com/why-cant-i-set-chain-state-obfuscation-keys/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/why-cant-i-set-chain-state-obfuscation-keys/#respond Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:27:16 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/why-cant-i-set-chain-state-obfuscation-keys/

Apparently it’s also applied to Bitcoin/Index/**

it’s not. The index is not obfuscated. If there is no obfuscation key, all zeros are recorded.

Is there a way to set the obfuscation key for a chain state?

no.

Why is the chain-state obfuscation key not the same as it is used everywhere else?

ChainState obfuscation was introduced for a long time before Blocksdir obfuscation took place. It was implemented by storing obfuscation keys directly in the database itself. Having the same obfuscation key can be a problem, as ChainState and BlocksDir don’t necessarily have to go together and ChainState can be deleted without deleting blocksdir.

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State Street issues $100M digital debt securities on JPMorgan’s proprietary blockchain https://earlybirdsinvest.com/state-street-issues-100m-digital-debt-securities-on-jpmorgans-proprietary-blockchain/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/state-street-issues-100m-digital-debt-securities-on-jpmorgans-proprietary-blockchain/#respond Thu, 21 Aug 2025 22:16:30 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/state-street-issues-100m-digital-debt-securities-on-jpmorgans-proprietary-blockchain/

State Street launched its first digital debt securities using JPMorgan’s Digital Debt Service, executing a $100 million commercial paper transaction.

According to an Aug. 21 statement, State Street Investment Management purchased the commercial paper for its Short Term Investment Fund. 

The debt securities are issued, settled, and serviced using blockchain technology, delivering streamlined institutional market access.

State Street Investment Management’s global head of cash management, Pia McCusker, described the commercial paper investment as demonstrating tangible technology benefits for institutional clients.

McCusker added:

“Our successful investment in the first commercial paper transaction in blockchain format for our Short Term Investment Fund demonstrates the tangible benefits this technology brings to our clients and positions them at the forefront of the digital transformation in fixed income markets.”

Regarding JPMorgan’s blockchain platform, it allows T+0 settlement as an option, representing a significant advancement over standard settlement cycles for short-term debt instruments.

The digital debt securities utilize smart contracts to automate payments, redemptions, and corporate actions, eliminating manual processing typical in traditional debt markets. 

State Street noted that the $100 million transaction validates blockchain technology’s capacity to handle institutional-scale debt issuances. At the same time, it maintains regulatory compliance and security standards expected from traditional debt markets.

Market modernization impact

Chief product officer Donna Milrod characterized the digital debt launch as advancing State Street’s integrated blockchain-based solution across front-, middle-, and back-office functions. 

Further, the launch reflects State Street’s digital strategy, incorporating on-chain wallet management and blockchain network interoperability groundwork.

JPMorgan Markets Digital Assets Team credit lead Emma Lovett described the digital debt platform as a significant advancement in digital issuance evolution. It provides clients with opportunities to explore blockchain applications in capital markets for efficiency improvements. The technology unlocks ecosystem-wide efficiencies across bond lifecycles.

The digital debt launch follows February reports that State Street was considering crypto custody services for institutional investors. 

A bank executive indicated that State Street planned to roll out crypto custody services next year, with the institution positioning itself alongside other major custody banks entering digital asset services. 

State Street’s blockchain-based debt issuance represents concrete progress toward digital asset integration beyond speculation about future custody offerings.

Mentioned in this article
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State of Crypto: Do Kwon Pleads Guilty https://earlybirdsinvest.com/state-of-crypto-do-kwon-pleads-guilty/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/state-of-crypto-do-kwon-pleads-guilty/#respond Sun, 17 Aug 2025 17:22:42 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/state-of-crypto-do-kwon-pleads-guilty/

Terra/Luna creator Do Kwon pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiring to commit fraud and one charge of wire fraud on Tuesday, following an earlier not guilty plea and a very lengthy extradition process.

You’re reading State of Crypto, a CoinDesk newsletter looking at the intersection of cryptocurrency and government. Click here to sign up for future editions.

The narrative

Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon, who created the TerraUSD stablecoin and its counterpart Luna (LUNA) token, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities, commodities or wire fraud and wire fraud

Why it matters

Terra and its related ecosystem blew up in spectacular fashion in 2022, with Luna falling from an all-time high price of nearly $120 to less than 10 cents over the course of five weeks. UST broke its peg, and the event was the first domino in the various other crypto company bankruptcies over the course of 2022.

Breaking it down

In 2021, Do Kwon repeatedly assured investors that Terra and Luna were safe investments, through tweets and appearances on programs like CoinDesk TV.

On Tuesday, he apologized as part of his guilty plea.

“Between 2018 and 2022 in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, I knowingly agreed with others to engage in a scheme to defraud, and did in fact defraud, purchasers of the cryptocurrencies issued by my company, Terraform Labs,” he said, going on to say he made “false and misleading statements” about why UST regained its peg.

As part of his plea deal, the Department of Justice agreed to recommend a prison sentence of no more than 12 years, and Kwon can apply for an international prison transfer once he’s served 50% of his sentence. One of Kwon’s attorneys noted that there are still outstanding charges against him in South Korea, the country Kwon tried to get himself extradited to during his extended stay in Montenegro.

Kwon’s statement spoke to that: “The purchasers who I defrauded were in the Republic of Korea, the Southern District of New York and elsewhere,” he said.

Read more.

Tuesday

  • 14:30 UTC (10:30 a.m. ET) Do Kwon pled guilty to two charges tied to the operation and eventual collapse of the Terra/Luna stablecoin ecosystem.
  • (D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals) Two judges on a three-judge appeals court panel ruled that a district court did not have appropriate jurisdiction in blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, writing in part that, “The plaintiffs point to no regulation, order, document, email, or other statement, written or oral, purporting to shut down the CFPB” and that “the government does not claim the power to ‘shut down’ the CFPB.” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a tweet afterward that the circuit court had “sided with my [Department of Justice] attorneys in our effort to dismantle the CFPB.” The circuit court panel did open the door for a potential en banc hearing with the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
  • (The Washington Post) The White House removed IRS Commissioner Billy Long after he clashed with the White House over sharing confidential taxpayer information, the Post reported. CNN also reported that the IRS did start “sharing sensitive taxpayer data [last] week with immigration authorities.”
  • (The Associated Press) States are starting to take action against the possibility that Big Tech firms’ datacenters are driving up residents’ electricity prices.
  • (Bloomberg) Bloomberg published an analysis of Tron creator Justin Sun on its Billionaires Index, saying he owns over 60 billion TRX (~$4.9 billion) — “the majority of its supply” — as well as $3.55 billion in other crypto holdings and $3.73 billion in HTX holdings. Sun filed for a temporary restraining order to block publication (although the page was already published), with exhibits confirming that his team shared wallet addresses and other information with Bloomberg to help the news organization verify his holdings.
  • (Politico) The fallout from the hack of the federal court database system PACER continues.
  • (Reuters) Reuters has a detailed report out about Meta’s artificial intelligence policies, from large language model chatbots inviting people to real addresses to enabling these technical models to engage with minors using language that seems to be more suitable for people who aren’t minors. Some of these provisions were changed after Reuters asked about them, the news organization reported.
  • (New York Magazine) This is a lengthy and bonkers deep dive into two individuals accused of kidnapping an Italian crypto investor in New York. It is well worth your time to read.

If you’ve got thoughts or questions on what I should discuss next week or any other feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at nik@coindesk.com or find me on Bluesky @nikhileshde.bsky.social.

You can also join the group conversation on Telegram.

See ya’ll next week!

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The 1.x Files: The State of Stateless Ethereum https://earlybirdsinvest.com/the-1-x-files-the-state-of-stateless-ethereum/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/the-1-x-files-the-state-of-stateless-ethereum/#respond Thu, 14 Aug 2025 04:00:03 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/the-1-x-files-the-state-of-stateless-ethereum/

In the last edition of The 1.x files, we did a quick re-cap of where the Eth 1.x research initiative came from, what’s at stake, and what some possible solutions are. We ended with the concept of stateless ethereum, and left a more detailed examination of the stateless client for this post.

Stateless is the new direction of Eth 1.x research, so we’re going to do a pretty deep dive and get a real sense of the challenges and possibilities that are expected on the road ahead. For those that want to dive even deeper, I’ll do my best to link to more verbose resources whenever possible.

The State of Stateless Ethereum

To see where we’re going, we must first understand where we are with the concept of ‘state’. When we say ‘state’, it’s in the sense of “a state of affairs”.

The complete ‘state’ of Ethereum describes the current status of all accounts and balances, as well as the collective memories of all smart contracts deployed and running in the EVM. Every finalized block in the chain has one and only one state, which is agreed upon by all participants in the network. That state is changed and updated with each new block that is added to the chain.

In the context of Eth 1.x research, it’s important not just to know what state is, but how it’s represented in both the protocol (as defined in the yellow paper), and in most client implementations (e.g. geth, parity, trinity, besu, etc.).

Give it a trie

The data structure used in Ethereum is called a Merkle-Patricia Trie. Fun fact: ‘Trie’ is originally taken from the word ‘retrieval’, but most people pronounce it as ‘try’ to distinguish it from ‘tree’ when speaking. But I digress. What we need to know about Merkle-Patricia Tries is as follows:

At one end of the trie, there are all of the particular pieces of data that describe state (value nodes). This could be a particular account’s balance, or a variable stored in a smart contract (such as the total supply of an ERC-20 token). In the middle are branch nodes, which link all of the values together through hashing. A branch node is an array containing the hashes of its child nodes, and each branch node is subsequently hashed and put into the array of its parent node. This successive hashing eventually arrives at a single state root node on the other end of the trie.

Radix

In the simplified diagram above, we can see each value, as well as the path that describes how to get to that value. For example, to get to V-2, we traverse the path 1,3,3,4. Similarly, V-3 can be reached by traversing the path 3,2,3,3. Note that paths in this example are always 4 characters in length, and that there is often only one path to take to reach a value.

This structure has the important property of being deterministic and cryptographically verifiable: The only way to generate a state root is by computing it from each individual piece of the state, and two states that are identical can be easily proven so by comparing the root hash and the hashes that led to it (a Merkle proof). Conversely, there is no way to create two different states with the same root hash, and any attempt to modify state with different values will result in a different state root hash.

Ethereum optimizes the trie structure by introducing a few new node types that improve efficiency: extension nodes and leaf nodes. These encode parts of the path into nodes so that the trie is more compact.

Patricia

In this modified Merkle-Patricia trie structure, each node will lead to a choice between multiple next nodes, a compressed part of a path that subsequent nodes share, or values (prepended by the rest of their path, if necessary). It’s the same data and the same organization, but this trie only needs 9 nodes instead of 18. This seems more efficient, but with the benefit of hindsight, isn’t actually optimal. We’ll explore why in the next section.

To arrive at a particular part of state (such as an account’s current balance of Ether), one needs to start at the state root and crawl along the trie from node to node until the desired value is reached. At each node, characters in the path are used to decide which next node to travel to, like a divining rod, but for navigating hashed data structures.

In the ‘real’ version used by Ethereum, paths are the hashes of an address 64 characters (256 bits) in length, and values are RLP-encoded data. Branch nodes are arrays that contain 17 elements (sixteen for each of the possible hexadecimal characters, and one for a value), while leaf nodes and extension nodes contain 2 elements (one partial path and either a value or the hash of the next child node). The Ethereum wiki is likely the best place to read more about this, or, if you would like to get way into the weeds, this article has a great (but unfortunately deprecated) DIY trie exercise in Python to play with.

Stick it in a Database

At this point we should remind ourselves that the trie structure is just an abstract concept. It’s a way of packing the totality of Ethereum state into one unified structure. That structure, however, then needs to be implemented in the code of the client, and stored on a disk (or a few thousand of them scattered around the globe). This means taking a multi-dimensional trie and stuffing it into an ordinary database, which understands only [key, value] pairs.

In most Ethereum clients (all except turbo-geth), the Merkle-Patricia Trie is implemented by creating a distinct [key, value] pair for each node, where the value is the node itself, and the key is the hash of that node.

DB-patricia

The process of traversing the trie, then, is more or less the same as the theoretical process described earlier. To look up an account balance, we would start with the root hash, and look up its value in the database to get the first branch node. Using the first character of our hashed address, we find the hash of the first node. We look that hash up in the database, and get our second node. Using the next character of the hashed address, we find the hash of the third node. If we’re lucky, we might find an extension or leaf node along the way, and not need to go through all 64 nibbles — but eventually, we’ll arrive at our desired account, and be able to retrieve its balance from the database.

Computing the hash of each new block is largely the same process, but in reverse: Starting with all the edge nodes (accounts), the trie is built through successive hashings, until finally a new root hash is built and compared with the last agreed-upon block in the chain.

Here’s where that bit about the apparent efficiency of the state trie comes into play: re-building the whole trie is very intensive on disk, and the modified Merkle-Patricia trie structure used by Ethereum is more protocol efficient at the cost of implementation efficiency. Those extra node types, leaf and extension, theoretically save on memory needed to store the trie, but they make the algorithms that modify the state inside the regular database more complex. Of course, a decently powerful computer can perform the process at blazing speed. Sheer processing power, however, only goes so far.

Sync, baby, sync

So far we’ve limited our scope to what’s going on in an individual computer running an Ethereum implementation like geth. But Ethereum is a network, and the whole point of all of this is to keep the same unified state consistent across thousands of computers worldwide, and between different implementations of the protocol.

The constantly shuffling tokens of #Defi, cryptokitty auctions or cheeze wizard battles, and ordinary ETH transfers all combine to create a rapidly changing state for Ethereum clients to stay in sync with, and it gets harder and harder the more popular Ethereum becomes, and the deeper the state trie gets.

Turbo-geth is one implementation that gets to the root of the problem: It flattens the trie database and uses the path of a node (rather than its hash) as the [key, value] pair. This effectively makes the depth of the tree irrelevant for lookups, and allows for a variety of nifty features that can improve performance and reduce the load on disk when running a full node.

The Ethereum state is big, and it changes with every block. How big, and how much of a change? We can ballpark the current state of Ethereum at around 400 million nodes in the state trie. Of these, about 3,000 (but as many as 6,000) need to be added or modified every 15 seconds. Staying in sync with the Ethereum blockchain is, effectively, constantly building a new version of the state trie over and over again.

This multi-step process of state trie database operations is why Ethereum implementations are so taxing on disk I/O and memory, and why even a “fast sync” can take up to 6 hours to complete, even on fast connections. To run a full node in Ethereum, a fast SSD (as opposed to a cheap, reliable HDD) is a requirement, because processing state changes is extremely demanding on disk read/writes.

Here it’s important to note that there is a very large and significant distinction between establishing a new node to sync and keeping an existing node synced — A distinction that, when we get to stateless Ethereum, will blur (hopefully).

The straightforward way to sync a node is with the “full sync” method: Starting from the genesis block, a list of every transaction in each block is retrieved, and a state trie is built. With each subsequent block, the state trie is modified, adding and modifying nodes as the complete history of the blockchain is replayed. It takes a full week to download and execute a state change for every block from the beginning, but it’s just a matter of time before the transactions you need are pending inclusion into the next new block, rather than being already solidified in an old one.

Another method, aptly named “fast-sync”, is quicker but more complicated: A new client can, instead of requesting transactions from the beginning of time, request state entries from a recent, trusted ‘checkpoint’ block. It’s far less total information to download, but it is still a lot of information to process– sync is not currently limited by bandwidth, but by disk performance.

A fast-syncing node is essentially in a race with the tip of the chain. It needs to get all of the state at the ‘checkpoint’ before that state goes stale and stops being offered by full nodes (It can ‘pivot’ to a new checkpoint if that happens). Once a fast-syncing node overcomes the hurdle and get its state fully caught up with a checkpoint, it can then switch to full sync — building and updating its own copy of state from the included transactions in each block.

Can I get a block witness?

We can now start to unpack the concept of stateless Ethereum. One of the main goals is to make new nodes less painful to spin up. Given that only 0.1% of the state is changing from block to block, it seems like there should be a means of cutting down on all that extra ‘stuff’ that needs to be downloaded before the full sync switchover.

But this is one of the challenges imposed by Ethereum’s cryptographically secure data structure: In a trie, a change to just one value will result in a completely different root hash. That’s a feature, not a bug! It keeps everybody certain that they are on the same page (at the same state) with everyone else on the network.

To take a shortcut, we need a new piece of information about state: a block witness.

Suppose that just one value in this trie has changed recently (highlighted in green):

Simple trie

A full node syncing the state (including this transaction) will go about it the old-fashioned way: By taking all the pieces of state, and hashing them together to create a new root hash. They can then easily verify that their state is the same as everyone else’s (since they have the same hash, and the same history of transactions).

But what about someone that has just tuned in? What’s the smallest amount of information that new node needs in order to verify that — at least for as long as it’s been watching — its observations are consistent with everyone elses?

A new, oblivious node will need older, wiser full nodes to provide proof that the observed transaction fits in with everything they’ve seen so far about the state.

Witness

In very abstract terms, a block witness proof provides all of the missing hashes in a state trie, combined with some ‘structural’ information about where in the trie those hashes belong. This allows an ‘oblivious’ node to include the new transaction in its state, and to compute the new root hash locally — without requiring them to download an entire copy of the state trie.

This is, in a nutshell, the idea behind beam sync. Rather than waiting to collect each node in the checkpoint trie, beam sync begins watching and trying to execute transactions as they happen, requesting a witness with each block from a full node for the information it doesn’t have. As more and more of the state is ‘touched’ by new transactions, the client can rely more and more on its own copy of state, which (in beam sync) will gradually fill in until it eventually switches over to full sync.

Statelessness is a spectrum

With the introduction of a block witness, the concept of ‘fully stateless’ starts to get more defined. At the same time, it’s where we start to run into open questions and problems with no obvious solution.

In contrast to beam sync, a truly stateless client would never keep a copy of state; it would only grab the latest transactions together with the witness, and have everything it needs to execute the next block.

You might see that, if the entire network were stateless, this could actually hold up forever– witnesses for new blocks can be produced from the previous block. It’d be witnesses all the way down! At least, down to the last agreed upon ‘state of affiars’, and the first witness generated from that state. That’s a big, dramatic change to Ethereum not likely to win widespread support.

A less dramatic approach is to accommodate varying degrees of ‘statefullness’, and have a network in which some nodes keep a full copy of the state and can serve everyone else fresh witnesses.

  • Full-state nodes would operate as before, but would additionally compute a witness and either attach it to a new block, or propagate it through a secondary network sub-protocol.

  • Partial-state nodes could keep a full state for just a short number of blocks, or perhaps just ‘watch’ the piece of state that they’re interested in, and get the rest of the data that they need to verify blocks from witnesses. This would help infrastructure-running dapp developers immensely.

  • Zero-state nodes, who by definition want to keep their clients running as light as possible, could rely entirely on witnesses to verify new blocks.

Getting this scheme to work might entail something like bittorrent-style chunking and swarming behavior, where witness fragments are propagated according to their need and best connections to other nodes with (complementary) partial state. Or, it might involve working out an alternative implementation of the state trie more amenable to witness generation. This is stuff to investigate and prototype!

For a much more in-depth analysis of what the trade-offs of stateful vs stateless nodes are, see Alexey Akhunov’s The shades of statefulness.

An important feature of the semi-stateless approach is that these changes don’t necessarily imply big, hard-forking changes. Through small, testable, and incremental improvements, it’s possible to build out the stateless component of Ethereum into a complementary sub-protocol, or as a series of un-controversial EIPs instead of a large ‘leap-of-faith’ upgrade.

The road(map) ahead

The elephant in the research room is witness size. Ordinary blocks contain a header, and a list of transactions, and are on the order of 100 kB. This is small enough to make the propagation of blocks quick relative to network latency and the 15 second block time.

Witnesses, however, need to contain the hashes of nodes both at the edges and deep inside the state trie. This means they are much, much bigger: early numbers suggest on the order of 1 MB. Consequently, syncing a witness is much much slower relative to network latency and block time, which could be a problem.

The dilemma is akin to the difference between downloading a movie or streaming it: If the network is too slow to keep up with the stream, downloading the full movie is the only workable option. If the network is much faster, the movie can be streamed with no problem. In the middle, you need more data to decide. Those with sub-par ISPs will recognize the gravity of attempting to stream a friday night movie over a network that might not be up for the task.

This, largely, is where we start getting into the detailed problems that the Eth 1x group is tackling. Right now, not enough is known about the hypothetical witness network to know for sure it’ll work properly or optimally, but the devil is in the details (and the data).

One line of inquiry is to think about ways to compress and reduce the size of witnesses by changing the structure of the trie itself (such as a binary trie), to make it more efficient at the implimentation level. Another is to prototype the network primitives (bittorrent-style swarming) that allow witnesses to be efficiently passed around between different nodes on the network. Both of these would benefit from a formalized witness specification — which doesn’t exist yet.

All of these directions (and more) are being compiled into a more organized roadmap, which will be distilled and published in the coming weeks. The points highlighted on the roadmap will be topics of future deep dives.

If you’ve made it this far, you should have a good idea of what “Stateless Ethereum” is all about, and some of the context for emerging Eth1x R&D.

As always, if you have questions about Eth1x efforts, requests for topics, or want to contribute, come introduce yourself on ethresear.ch or reach out to @gichiba and/or @JHancock on twitter.

Special thanks to Alexey Akhunov for providing technical feedback and some of the trie diagrams.

Happy new year, and happy Muir Glacier hardfork!

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Crypto Iris Scans Raise Red Flags, Says China’s Ministry of State Security https://earlybirdsinvest.com/crypto-iris-scans-raise-red-flags-says-chinas-ministry-of-state-security/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/crypto-iris-scans-raise-red-flags-says-chinas-ministry-of-state-security/#respond Thu, 07 Aug 2025 05:26:16 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/crypto-iris-scans-raise-red-flags-says-chinas-ministry-of-state-security/

China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) has warned that some cryptocurrency projects are using biometric tools, such as iris and facial scans, to collect sensitive personal information through token giveaways.

In a public notice released on August 6, the agency said these actions could harm individual privacy and pose a risk to national security.

The MSS pointed to a foreign company that had gathered iris data from people around the world while claiming to distribute crypto assets. According to the bulletin, this data was later transferred to another location.

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Although the company was not named, the description closely resembles Worldcoin, a project led by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, which trades its WLD
WLD


$0.9597

token for eye scans and operates in over 160 countries.

The ministry described iris scanning as a precise method typically used in secure environments. Because iris patterns are stable and unique, they can serve as long-term digital identifiers. If stolen, these details cannot be changed like passwords or PIN codes.

The MSS also said poor handling or storage of face data could result in leaks, which might lead to identity theft, financial fraud, or even access to restricted areas. It also claimed that intelligence services in other countries had used fake facial data to carry out spying operations, including entering sensitive workplaces.

The agency advised people to ask questions before agreeing to any biometric scan and to understand how their data will be used and stored.

Meanwhile, the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) recently warned about the growing use of crypto kiosks in scams. What did the agency say? Read the full story.


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Coinbase presents a darkly comic take on the state of the UK with ‘Everything Is Fine’ campaign https://earlybirdsinvest.com/coinbase-presents-a-darkly-comic-take-on-the-state-of-the-uk-with-everything-is-fine-campaign/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/coinbase-presents-a-darkly-comic-take-on-the-state-of-the-uk-with-everything-is-fine-campaign/#respond Sun, 03 Aug 2025 10:50:46 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/coinbase-presents-a-darkly-comic-take-on-the-state-of-the-uk-with-everything-is-fine-campaign/

Crypto advertising is often characterized by big promises and technological jargon. Yet, Coinbase’s “Everything Is Fine” campaign stands out for its wicked humor, cultural savvy, and unapologetic take on inflation, the housing market, and the general state of the United Kingdom in 2025.

Released on Thursday, Coinbase’s dark satire was quickly spotlighted by Ad Age for its wit and originality, marking a creative shift in how financial brands tackle the everyday anxieties facing consumers.

Coinbase presents a satirical mirror on financial reality

Created in partnership with the agency Mother and directed by the acclaimed Steve Rogers, “Everything Is Fine” coincides with a moment of heightened public awareness about economic instability.

The commercial opens with reassuring narration (“Everything is fine”), but the imagery starkly and comically tells a drastically different story: a leaking roof collapses, houseplants wilt, wallpaper peels, and rats scurry around amid the garbage. Each visual is a metaphor for inflation, the state of the economy, and the fragility of financial security, realities that traditional institutions rarely confront so openly.

Unlike most crypto ads, “Everything Is Fine” doesn’t shout about technological utopia or imminent riches. Instead, it leans into the quiet dread and surreal comedy people feel when their money seems to be shrinking in value while daily life gets more expensive. The result is a campaign that’s instantly relatable and eerily memorable.

Creative strategy: humor and honesty

Instead of scaring viewers or bombarding them with technical jargon, Coinbase and its creative team use deadpan humor and universal symbols of decline (filthy streets, dirty clothes) to capture what so many consumers feel: that official reassurances don’t always match their lived experience.

Perhaps the most on-point moment of the ad is the part where an affluent couple in a convertible pulls up, saying:

“We’re off to Dubai, it’s time to jump ship.”

This is a commentary on the exodus of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) from the UK, with an estimated 16,500 millionaires leaving the country in 2025 so far, according to Henley & Partners. These figures mark the steepest annual increase in millionaire outflows ever recorded, more than doubling the number from the previous year, with many opting for friendlier pastures like Portugal or Dubai.

The commercial unsurprisingly sparked a lot of comments from the crypto community. Former What Bitcoin Did podcast host, Peter McCormack, congratulated Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, saying:

“This is brilliant.”

As a Brit based in Bedford, UK, and now hosting The Peter McCormack show, which dives into the issues affecting the country, if anyone has a finger on the pulse of UK society, it’s McCormack.

“Everything Is Fine” exemplifies a new phase of advertising in crypto, where the best campaigns don’t simply explain blockchain; they reflect culture, poke fun at the absurd, and use storytelling to build trust, making Coinbase feel radically more human than competitors still pitching dreams.

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$24,000 in No-Strings-Attached Cash Coming To Residents in One US State As New Guaranteed Income Program Announced https://earlybirdsinvest.com/24000-in-no-strings-attached-cash-coming-to-residents-in-one-us-state-as-new-guaranteed-income-program-announced/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/24000-in-no-strings-attached-cash-coming-to-residents-in-one-us-state-as-new-guaranteed-income-program-announced/#respond Sat, 02 Aug 2025 04:15:06 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/24000-in-no-strings-attached-cash-coming-to-residents-in-one-us-state-as-new-guaranteed-income-program-announced/

A US-based non-profit is launching a new guaranteed income pilot program that will give thousands of dollars to people to use as they wish.

The Georgia Resilience & Opportunity (GRO) Fund says the Freedom Futures guaranteed income pilot program will provide a no-strings-attached monthly income of $500 for 48 months, or $24,000 for the entire period, to selected participants in the state.

Applicants for the program must be 18 to 25 years of age and must either be enrolled in high school or in a tertiary institution of learning partnering with the nonprofit. The applicant’s household income must be at or below double the federal poverty level.

Participants in the guaranteed income pilot program will also be eligible to receive investment capital on top of the $500 monthly income.

“Freedom Futures provides an investable sum of over $20,000, which can be used towards the following wealth-building purposes: homeownership, entrepreneurship, higher education, or investing in a retirement account.”

To receive the investment capital, participants will have to undertake financial education to enable them to make informed decisions. The investable sum will be handed out starting in the third year of the Freedom Futures guaranteed income pilot program.

Applications must be submitted by the end of the day on August 27th. Applicants will be required to provide various documents, including proof of identity and income. Successful applicants will be notified within weeks of the application deadline passing.

“If you are selected, you can expect to receive your first income supplement payment in September 2025.”

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Goldman Sachs on the Prowl for Takeovers, Eyeing Up BNY Mellon, State Street and Other Institutions: Report https://earlybirdsinvest.com/goldman-sachs-on-the-prowl-for-takeovers-eyeing-up-bny-mellon-state-street-and-other-institutions-report/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/goldman-sachs-on-the-prowl-for-takeovers-eyeing-up-bny-mellon-state-street-and-other-institutions-report/#respond Sun, 27 Jul 2025 21:43:39 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/goldman-sachs-on-the-prowl-for-takeovers-eyeing-up-bny-mellon-state-street-and-other-institutions-report/

Banking giant Goldman Sachs is looking to take over smaller financial institutions, with several firms already on its radar, the New York Post reports.

In an op-ed for NYP, finance journalist Charles Gasparino says that a CEO of a financial services giant revealed that, because of more lax regulations, banks are on the prowl for acquisitions.

Says the unnamed source,

“Because of the Fed’s supervisory relaxation, big bank deals are going to happen… Everyone is talking.”

Gasparino says that one possible takeover target for Goldman is State Street, the Boston-based financial services giant serving institutional investors with a market valuation of about $30 billion. A State Street spokesperson had no comment on the matter, however.

BNY, formerly known as Bank of New York Mellon, is reportedly another target for Goldman.

Goldman and BNY recently announced a joint venture to launch tokenized money market fund services using a blockchain developed by Goldman. Gasparino says the venture is the precursor to a merger later on.

According to “people close to Goldman,” a more immediate deal could unfold within the private credit or non-bank lenders space.

Besides looking to invest in smaller financial firms, Goldman is also bullish on US equities, while leaning bearish on US Treasury yields.

Due to a forecast of rate cuts coming earlier than expected, Goldman Sachs strategists raised their 12-month outlook for the S&P 500 index from 6,500 to 6,900. They also increased their year-end target from 6,100 to 6,600.

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The State of Eth2, June 2020 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/the-state-of-eth2-june-2020/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/the-state-of-eth2-june-2020/#respond Sat, 26 Jul 2025 19:48:36 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/the-state-of-eth2-june-2020/

A huge thank you for excellent input and feedback from Sacha Saint-Leger, Joseph Schweitzer, Josh Stark, and protolambda.

I spend a lot of my time explaining and answering questions about eth2, and I mean a lot. Some of this on a deep and technical level as I help communicate research and specifications to technical contributors, but more and more these days I’m fielding questions from the community about eth2 progress, direction, motivations, design decisions, delays, and more. I actually really enjoy these conversations. I get super excited as I explain eth2, come up with new ways to describe various components, or find the right analogies depending on the audience to get the gears turning and the light bulb to switch on.

But this dynamic/conversational method, while valuable, leaves a ton of the community in the dark. I get asked the same questions time and time again, and more concerningly, I get asked the same questions 6 months later! Clearly there is an information problem. This information exists, but it is scattered across the web — research posts, specs, spec explainers, public calls, public channels, reddit, blog posts. My first attempt after devcon5 to bridge the information gap between those deep in eth2 and the rest of the community manifested itself as a new blog series, “eth2 quick update”. These are little snippets to help follow along, but I’m realizing they don’t really communicate the bigger picture. The bigger picture does get communicated and discussed on podcasts, AMAs, and conferences, but, even then, a written form will still aid these efforts.

So here we are. This post is aimed at the community, to provide you with a comprehensive look at what eth2 is today: where it’s going, what it might become, and what it means for you, the Ethereum community. I will attempt to provide the right amount of technical substance to illustrate the motivations, the vision, the current state of the project, and the work to come, without getting bogged down in too much math or deep jargon.

This post might also be useful for those deep Ethereum technical experts that have to date kept eth2 at arms distance. No worries, I understand. This project is big, complicated, and always seemed like it was far enough in the future that you could ignore it while you solved the pressing problems at hand. Hopefully this post will help you better understand the things to come.

As for the eth2 folks, you might also get something out of this post — a broader perspective on where we’re at now, and how I’m thinking about the things to come.

Disclaimer: this is how I, Danny Ryan, personally see things today. There are many voices and opinions driving the ever growing, ever evolving eth2. This is just a snapshot of a slice of my interpretation.

eth2, wtf

“Eth2 is a scalable proof-of-stake infrastructure”

If you’ve heard me speak at all in the past 6 months, you’ve heard me say this time and time again. Eth2 is built for Ethereum and ultimately is Ethereum. It aims to be a more secure and scalable context for the current Ethereum mainnet, providing little disruption to the way things are done today. At the same time, it provides an upgraded context for us to grow into.

Since before Ethereum launched, it was known that a single blockchain paradigm would not provide enough bandwidth to serve as the backbone of a new decentralized internet. Ethereum related proof-of-stake and sharding research traces its history back to as early as 2014. Both proof-of-stake and sharding aim to answer the following question: Given a certain amount of capital backing a crypto-economic system, can we improve security and throughput while still allowing consumer hardware to participate in consensus and follow the chain? While I won’t get into the history here, this exploration took years and was marked by many false starts. In the end, the answer is a resounding yes, and has manifested itself as the eth2 project.

Eth2 is an ambitious, multi-year project that will be rolled out in phases. This is widely documented and discussed, but I’ll give you a quick, not-so-technical look at what these entail.

Phase 0

Phase 0, the Beacon Chain, is the core of the new consensus mechanism. This is where all the system level activity and orchestration happens. Phase 0 is all about coming to consensus with hundreds of thousands of consensus entities (validators), distributed across thousands of nodes around the world.

Due to the technical requirements of distributing subsets of validators across shards in phase 1+, we need to be able to handle a huge amount of validators. Much of the engineering complexity stems from this requirement. Other non-sharded, proof-of-stake mechanisms have 100s or maybe 1000s of validators, but eth2 is designed to have a bare minimum of ~16k validators with the expectation that this figure will be in the hundreds of thousands within a couple of years.

Phase 1

Phase 0 is about coming to consensus, whereas Phase 1 is about coming to consensus on a lot of stuff. This “stuff” comes in the form of many shard chains. You can think of a shard chain as its own blockchain with approximately the same complexity as Ethereum today, but living under the eth2 consensus (i.e. living under and built/controlled by the Beacon Chain). The validators from the Beacon Chain are given random short-term assignments to build and validate shard chains, making crypto-economic commitments to the state, availability, and validity of each chain back into the core system.

Today, we expect there to be 64 shards to start, and for the total data available to the system to be in the 1 to 4 MB/s range (YES, that’s a ton of data).

Phase 1.5

Phase 1.5 is the integration of Ethereum mainnet into the new eth2 consensus mechanism as a shard (existing as one of the many shards created in Phase 1). Instead of the Ethereum we know and love being built by a proof-of-work mining algorithm, it will be built by the eth2 validators. For existing applications and users, this hot swap of the consensus mechanism will largely be transparent. Applications will continue chugging along, but developers will now have a much more powerful system to build on (better security properties, proper economic finality, more layer 1 data for rollups and other fun applications).

Phase 2

Phase 2 is the addition of state and execution on more shards than just the original Ethereum shard. There are many forms that this can take. Figuring out which form, and the details behind it, is a hot bed of research and prototyping today. I’ll discuss that a bit more in sections below.


Okay, so we have all these phases coming and Phase 0 actually feels like it’s just around the corner. But that roadmap still sounds a little long. What should I actually expect from eth2 during the phases of the upgrade?

Great question! In general, expect a wave of upgrades that increasingly touch more of Ethereum and more of the community at each step. As a user, you can either get involved early with staking in Phase 0, or you can simply wait until Ethereum fully migrates into eth2 at Phase 1.5 (a transition which should be seamless from the point of view of both dapp developers and users). Regardless of how engaged you choose to be and at what phase, there are important milestones and benefits worth being aware of as this all starts to roll out.

The first is that I know a lot of you are die-hard ETH holders who are anxious to get in on the staking action. To all the potential validators out there, especially the hobbyists, Phase 0 is for you. Phase 0 comes with its own risks and time horizons that will make it unappealing for some participants, so I personally hope this phase is a boon both for hobbyists and long term Ethereum believers. This is a unique chance to get in on the ground, to help influence the vision over time, and to receive a higher ETH reward for being an early adopter.

What about Phase 1? Is there anything useful we can do with all this data before the integration of Ethereum into eth2? Yes, glad you asked!

Layer 1 data is incredibly useful even without native computation. In fact, the most promising layer 2 scaling solutions in the past 12 months are these so called “rollup” chains (both optimistic and ZK) which scale with the availability of layer 1 data. The eth2 data layer is expected to provide Ethereum with somewhere between 1 and 4 MB/s of data availability which translates into massive scalability gains when coupled with rollup tech. But due to the initial disjointedness of Ethereum and the new sharded universe at the start, making claims about the eth2 shard data is hard. That’s one of the reasons EIP 2537 is so important for Ethereum mainnet. With a native BLS (new eth2 signing algorithm) precompile, we can write an efficient eth2 light client as a solidity contract, opening up the ability for Ethereum applications to make claims about data in eth2 before the Phase 1.5 integration.

As discussed above, Phase 1.5 is huge. Eth2 is built for Ethereum and at this point, eth2 becomes Ethereum. All of the applications we know and love become integrated in the upgraded eth2 consensus mechanism, retaining the feature-set we are used to while simultaneously opening up the vast new landscape of a secure proof-of-stake consensus with native access to a highly scalable data layer. This is the meat of the process in my opinion. This is the moment of grand success as we anchor Ethereum fully into its new reality.

Beyond that, additional scalability gains will likely be made over time by enabling state/execution on additional shard chains. This may come in the form of the EVM or a new VM called eWASM. Regardless of the choice of VM, the existing Ethereum EVM shard and the new shard chains will be able to interact and communicate natively via the Beacon Chain, completing the multi-execution, sharded vision.

See? It’s a journey, but there are major gains to be made along the way.

The difficulties of this approach, and why it’s worth it

So many validators

A key component of sharding relies upon the random sampling of consensus participants (validators) into committees to validate a subsection of the protocol (e.g. a shard). Given enough validators in the protocol, and an attacker of an assumed max size (controlling 1/3 of the validators, say) it becomes mathematically improbable (vanishingly so, think probability on the order of 1 / 2^40) for the attacker to overtake any one committee and corrupt the system. This allows us to design the system such that anyone with a consumer machine (e.g. a laptop or maybe even an old phone) can become a validator (since validators are assigned to subsections of the system, and validating any subsection can be done with the compute resources of a single machine).

This is what makes sharding incredible and, at the same time, hard. For one, we must have enough validators to make this random sampling safe: which means eth2 has far more expected validators than most (I think any) other proof-of-stake protocol. This introduces challenges in every layer of the process — from research, to consensus mechanism specification, to networking, to resource consumption and optimizations in clients. Each additional validator induces load on the system that must be accounted for at every stage in the process. Eth2 client teams have accomplished the Herculean task of managing the consensus of hundreds of thousands of validators so that we can safely and efficiently integrate many shards come Phase 1.

So many shards

Another fundamental design decision that makes what we’re building so hard is that, in Ethereum, we choose to gain scalability without compromising on decentralization.

It’s not hard to scale a blockchain to tens of thousands of transactions per second, if we don’t care about users actually being able to validate the chain for themselves, or about guaranteeing that the data is actually available to the network. The complexity of a sharded consensus mechanism is required so that the system can be broken up into bite-sized validate-able chunks. Spec’ing and implementing such a consensus mechanism is quite simply a difficult task.

So many clients

A core tenet of Ethereum is that Ethereum is protocol first. Ethereum is the abstract set of rules that makes up the protocol rather than any specific implementation of those set of rules. To that end, the Ethereum community has encouraged many client implementations since day 0. On Ethereum mainnet today, this comes in the form of besu, ethereumJS, geth, nethermind, nimbus, open-ethereum, trinity, and turbo-geth. And in the eth2 landscape, this manifests as cortex, lighthouse, lodestar, nimbus, prysm, teku, and trinity.

The multi-client paradigm has many significant advantages:

  • Having many clients allows for a wider exploration of ideas, algorithms, and architectures (each client brings their own approach and point of view). There is a healthy cross-pollination in this process as we all build more robust systems.
  • Clients often have different design goals. This leads to a more diverse set of users and applications as time progresses. Clients may be more or less focused on any of the following — performance, security, horizontal scaling, UI/UX, light clients, browsers, resource constrained devices, etc, etc.
  • With many production grade clients on mainnet, a significant attack that can bring down any one client (e.g. a DoS attack) is met with resilience as the rest of the clients stand strong. This was seen very early in Ethereum’s history during the “Shanghai DoS Attacks” when a series of DoS attacks were able to bring down geth and parity but never both at the same time.
  • Each client serves as a gateway to a programming language community. The foundation of a client in a particular language opens and invites experimentation and innovation in that language. The base tooling around the client often snowballs into a robust ecosystem of tools and contributors in that language. The multi-client paradigm reinforces the gravitational well that is Ethereum.

With these distinct advantages come some difficulties:

  • The spec and testing must be air-tight to avoid any accidental forking on mainnet. If there is only one implementation of the protocol, then that implementation becomes the protocol. In the single client case if there were any sort of consensus “bug” hit on mainnet, then it would become baked into the reality of the protocol. This isn’t great from a purity perspective, but it eliminates any risk of an accidental fork. As a counter to this difficulty — if we have a healthy distribution of clients on mainnet (e.g. no client has more than 1/3 of total nodes/validators), the network can remain live even in the face of a single client having a consensus issue.
  • Coordination of N clients at best results a linear overhead compared to just a single client, but in some cases might induce a quadratic overhead (N^2). There are techniques we employ to reduce this overhead — e.g. consensus (and soon network) test suites — but it will always be there in some capacity.

State of eth2 clients and testnets

Phase 0 eth2 clients have become quite sophisticated pieces of software over the past 2 years, being able to handle the distributed consensus of hundreds of thousands of validators across thousands of nodes. We are currently in the testnet phase and inching closer to launch every day. I expected the last mile to be long. It turns out that it is.

I ask you during this period before launch, to get out of your comfort zone and try multiple clients. There are many tradeoffs between them and you’re going to have to get your hands dirty to find out which works best for you. As discussed above, Ethereum operates in a mult-client paradigm. To gain the benefits of this paradigm, we need users to run a diverse set of clients (to create a healthy distribution across all the types of clients).

Beyond that, there are anti-correlation incentives built into the protocol. In extreme situations in which a major client accidentally causes validators to either go offline, or commit a slashable offence, if your validator’s behaviour is correlated with that client, you will be penalized much more than if you did something wrong but uncorrelated with others. In other words, in these situations it’s much better to be running a minority client rather than a client with a huge portion of the network.

To be absolutely clear — if there is more than one viable and secure client, it is your duty to run minority client software to promote a healthy distribution of client software on the network.

Also, don’t be shy. If you run into issues with the docs, let someone know. If you see a typo, submit a PR. If something crashes or a bug pops up, please-please-please report it on github or the client discord. You are the beta users and with your help we can make this better for everyone.

Testnets

We are currently running small public devnets, which we restart approximately every one to two weeks. I say “devnet” because they are first and foremost for client team developers to work through bugs, optimizations, etc. They are public and you’re welcome to join, but be aware that they aren’t yet long-lived like Goerli or Rinkeby. The most recent launch, led by Afri Schoedon, is the Witti testnet running the v0.11 spec (check out the README here if you want to run some nodes).

Client teams are actively upgrading to the v0.12 spec which integrates the latest version of the IETF BLS standard. From there, we’ll transition the devnets to v0.12 as we continue to increase the size of the nets, inducing more and more load on the clients. After we have 2-3 clients reliably kicking off successful v0.12 nets and running at high load, we’ll do a more public testnet where you will run most of the nodes and validators. The intention here is to create a long-standing multi-client testnet that mimics mainnet as much as possible (where users can reliably practice running nodes and test anything else they want). The ideal is to spin this up just once and to sort through any failures while maintaining the net. But depending on the presence, and severity, of failures, we might need a couple runs before we get there.

In addition to the normal testnets, we’ll also provide an incentivized “attack net” where client teams operate a stable testnet, and we invite you to try to break it in a number of different ways. For successful attacks, the EF will provide ETH rewards. More info on this soon — so stay tuned!


While tooling for eth2 is quite nascent, it’s an exciting and growing effort. As mentioned above, tooling often stems from a client codebase and the efforts of the client team, but more and more hands are getting involved everyday. To better interact with, understand, secure, and enhance eth2, we as a community need build out and build upon basic eth2 tooling.

I want to give a huge shout-out to the teams and individuals that have already provided immense value with their eth2 tooling, and I want to welcome everyone else to build new tools and to extend and enhance what’s already there.

Eth2 tooling is a green-field opportunity. This is an incredible chance to dig in, provide real value, and make your mark.

The following is a sample of the work in progress, but there’s a great deal more to do!


And here’s a sample of some open tooling ideas:

  • Eth2 validator alerts: provide a service that alerts node operators when their validators are not performing optimally
  • Validator deposit tracking: help bridge between the current Ethereum and eth2 explorers by tracking the validator deposit process
  • Validator protection via proxies: use a proxy to track validator messages to ensure your client can’t send unsafe messages

And so much more — this is the type of contribution that is not limited to a spec. Creativity is important. If you want to contribute, talk to eth2 client teams to get started.

State of eth1+eth2 integrations

In an Ethereum client today (e.g. geth, etc) almost all of the complexity lies in handling user-level activity — transaction pool, block creation, virtual machine computation, and state storage/retrieval. The actual core consensus — proof-of-work — is rather simple in protocol. Most of the complexity is handled by sophisticated hardware outside of the core protocol.

On the other hand, an eth2 client is entirely consensus. In proof-of-stake and sharding, many complexities are brought in-protocol to achieve the goals of a scalable consensus.

This separation of concerns makes for a beautiful pairing of eth1 and eth2 clients.

There is initial work being done on merging the two by members of the geth (EF) and TXRX (ConsenSys) teams. The work involves (1) defining a communication protocol between eth1 and eth2 clients, (2) adding a consensus engine to eth1 clients that can be controlled via the communication protocol, and (3) prototyping and simulating eth2 phase 1 behaviour to test the coupling. We expect to see some concrete results on these points this summer.

You can read more about the high level eth1+eth2 client relationship here, and about the technical scope of the merger here.

State of execution and communication across shards

As mentioned, the exact path to enable execution across many shards is a hotly researched and debated area. There are many questions to answer. For example:

  • How many shards should be enable with execution?
  • For additional shards, do we use EVM or eWASM for the virtual machine?
  • How do we efficiently structure and process cross-shard transactions?
  • What changes do we need to make to existing EVM to support cross-shard transactions?
  • Can/should execution and account structures be generally extensible?

The eWASM (EF) and Quilt (ConsenSys) teams have conducted a great deal of research in these areas over the past 12 months. It turns out the solution domain is huge, and although we now have a good handle on the breadth of the domain, the recent focus has been on digging into simple, tangible solutions to be able to test, prototype, and really ground the conversation. Out of this was born eWASM’s Eth1x64 initiative (read about the high-level view of the project and check out some recent specs under discussion).

There has been rapid progress in bringing the abstract cross-shard ideas into concrete specs for discussion and ultimately prototypes. Keep an eye on this area of progress, especially if you are a dapp developer. We intend to have something you can understand, play with, and provide feedback on in the coming months.

Relationship of Stateless Ethereum to eth2

There is another major R&D effort happening in parallel to eth2 called “Stateless Ethereum”. Stateless Ethereum is an effort to solve the state size growth problem. It allows participants to validate blocks without having to store the entirety of the state locally. Right now, there is an implicit input in the Ethereum state transition function: the entirety of the state. With Stateless Ethereum, proofs (witnesses) about the requisite state will be provided inside of blocks. This allows a block to be transitioned/validated as a pure function of just the block.

What this translates to for users is a world in which you can follow the chain, and even follow portions of the state that you care about, without storing all of the state. Some network participants likely will store all of the state (block producers, block explorers, state-for-a-fee providers), but the vast majority of participants will become some shade (less than full) of stateful.

For eth2, this is an important technical mechanism to ensure that nodes and validators can validate and secure the protocol without the burden of storing the full user state of each shard. Instead, validators will likely opt-in to being block producers for some set of shards, while the baseline validator may only validate stateless blocks. Stateless Ethereum is an incredibly valuable addition to the eth2 vision, keeping the base of the sharded protocol very thin. While we’re planning on eth2 operating statelessly, we do have a few options in the event that the stateless path does not ultimately prove viable (although I’m pretty confident in statelessness myself 😄).

I won’t get any deeper into Stateless Ethereum for this post. Just know that it’s an exciting parallel R&D path to ensure Ethereum’s sustainability in the long term. If you’re curious to learn more, check out Griffin’s The 1.x Files blog series.

tl;dr

Eth2 is a huge undertaking to provide an upgraded, next-generation, highly-scalable and secure, decentralized consensus to Ethereum. There are dozens of teams and hundreds of individuals working each day to make this a reality. The path we’ve chosen is difficult, but immense progress has and continues to be made.

The core of this new mechanism is just around the corner.

If you’re an aspiring validator, now is the time to dig in. Support the multi-client paradigm by trying out multiple clients, and help instill a strong base of rich client diversity from eth2’s genesis.

If you’re a user or dapp developer, keep pushing on Ethereum today while we continue to prepare this more secure and scalable context for you. When the time comes, the swap to eth2 will be as seamless as possible.

Thank you to the incredible teams and individuals keeping Ethereum alive and well today; thank you to all those of you preparing for Ethereum’s future in eth2; and thank you to all the users and developers that make Ethereum awesome 🚀

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