Eth2’s Altair upgrade goes off smoothly, with 98.7% of nodes now upgraded
Read the full article by Keira Wright here
Key Points:
The Altair update will introduce Beacon Chain to the Ethereum mainnet.
The Ethereum 2.0 Altair Beacon Chain update has gotten off to a successful start, with 98.7% of nodes already upgraded.
The upgrade brings light-client support to the core consensus, cleans up beacon state incentive accounting, fixes some issues with validator incentives, and steps up the punitive parameters (penalties for offline validators) per Ethereum Improvement Proposal 2982.
Paul Hauner is the lead developer and reviewer of the Altair code in Lighthouse, an Ethereum 2.0 implementation. Hauner told Cointelegraph:
“Altair introduced two primary changes. Firstly, it added support for light clients, which are low-resourced nodes that follow the chain with fewer features and slightly weaker security assumptions. Think of a lightweight node on your phone or in your browser. Secondly, it increased the penalties for being offline and for slashing. These penalties were set low from genesis, so we didn’t penalize users who were just learning the ropes. The merge will increase these penalties even more. Apart from these two primary changes, there was a handful of efficiency and tidiness.”
In order to be compatible with the Altair upgrade, beacon node operators needed to update their client version, a process that only took around 10 minutes.
Although participation dropped as low as 93.3% during the first epoch after the upgrade, it quickly increased to around 95% and has since risen to around 98.7%.
“It looks like we have practically all the validators online and running Altair now. It’s hard to tell on these privacy-preserving systems, but I’d say we have no more than 1%–2% still offline,” said Hauner.
Ethereum 2.0 developer Jeff Coleman tweeted, “If they don’t fix it they will cross a threshold and be ejected.”
“I believe full ejection would happen once they drop below 16 ETH, which would take a pretty long time since the network is still finalizing,” said Coleman.
“The protocol sees no difference between a validator that didn’t upgrade and one that’s just temporarily offline due to a power or network issue. Those that didn’t update just need to update and then restart their nodes. They’ll start validating again once their node catches up with the Altair chain,” explained Hauner.
“This is our one and only real-life practice run at upgrading the beacon chain before the merge. If it goes badly (perhaps because many stakers did not upgrade their clients in time) then it will certainly push back the merge date.”