The latest blog post from ConsenSys developer Ben Edgington suggests that things are getting very close to the highly anticipated launch of Phase 0 of Ethereum 2.0.
The first part of this milestone event is the deployment of the deposit contract which has already been slightly delayed as developers wanted to wait for an audit on a performance and security focused signature library called blst.
Edgington stated that the results of this are expected this week although there are still a few rough edges and improvements to be made.
“The important thing is, as Danny reported on this week’s devs’ call, that the audit is going well, results are expected next week, and then we can ‘pull the trigger on everything’.”
No tricks, but plenty of treats: your latest bumper edition of What’s New in #Eth2 is out!
Get all the #Ethereum 2.0 news at the usual place, https://t.co/97X85jdCzM
Find out if I’m foolish enough to predict the date of the deposit contract deployment ??
— Ben Edgington ? benjaminion.eth (@benjaminion_xyz) October 31, 2020
He also advised waiting a while for those not totally confident in staking at the outset, so this may be the case for the majority of ETH holders initially.
Medalla Gets a Reboot
The Medalla Beacon Chain testnet is about to be reinitialized after a three week hiatus due to validator inactivity. The network needs two thirds of the validators to be online and participating for it to reach finality but that figure dropped to around 50% recently.
In order to get things running again, inactive validators are being booted from the pool to make way for those that wish to join and participate. According to beaconcha.in there are currently over 3,890 validators in the exit queue while 9,426 are waiting to join.
Edgington has blamed the lack of validator participation general testnet fatigue, adding that there was a large drop when the Zinken network was launched.
“This is the problem with unincentivised testnets: there’s no cost to abandoning.”
He mentioned that the period has given client developers time to iron out technical issues with their software though there is still a diversity issue with one Ethereum client dominating the tests.
Ethereum Price Update
There is little doubt that the official deployment of the deposit contract followed by the announcement of Beacon Chain genesis will drive momentum for Ethereum prices.
At the moment, ETH has managed to regain the $400 level a few hours ago but it is largely being pulled up by its big brother which topped $14k over the weekend, hitting its highest price since January 2018.
The next target for Ethereum lies at a resistance zone around $420. Above that, there is very little in the way of a move back to its 2020 high of $480.
