Ethereum Foundation Announces Eth2 Staking Grants, Testnet
- The organization has announced the “Eth2 Staking Community Grants” round, in an attempt to support a more “delightful” staking experience.
- A number of client developers have also released a 16,000 validator testnet with v1.0 mainnet configuration, and are expected to release a 100,000 validator version next week.
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The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is now sponsoring the creation of tools, documentation, and resources for Eth2 staking, the organization said on 11 November.
According to the announcement, anyone is free to submit proposals for grants connected to staking, with the deadline being 22 December. The organization stated that, while the staking community has already made great contributions to the project, it was still in its early days, and that the “Eth2 Staking Community Grants” round was needed to support a “more delightful” staking experience.
This was not the only Ethereum 2.0 development this week, with EF researcher Protolambda leading other client developers in launching a 16,000 validator testnet with v1.0 mainnet configuration. Called the Toledo devnet, the platform is meant for initial v1.0 testing and developer experimentation. A secondary 100,000 validator testnet, called Pyrmont, is expected to be launched sometime next week, which will mimic the mainnet conditions as closely as possible.
While it is likely that Pyrmont will be supported through the Beacon Chain genesis, it will probably not be the last testnet to be released. Danny Ryan, a core researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, stated in the latest “Eth2 Quick Update” that an option of building a new, long-term testnet with better stability and UX properties is being discussed.
With all that said, it seems like people are not staking their ETH to the deposit contract as quickly as EF would have hoped. Currently the deposit contract only has a little over 63,000 ETH staked, from the 524,288 ETH needed in order for the genesis of the Beacon Chain to happen.
- MetaMask Bridges was designed to aggregate multiple blockchain bridges in one place, making it easier and more secure for users to transfer their assets from one network to another.
- The new feature currently supports the Ethereum, Avalanche, BNB Chain, and Polygon blockchains, as well as the Connext, Hop, Celer cBridge, and Polygon Bridge.
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- Over the weekend the Ethereum PoW network fell victim to a replay exploit, with the attacker executing the same transaction on two chains at the same time.
- The exploit was caused by a contract vulnerability in the Omni cross-chain bridge, and did not affect the ETHW network itself.
- Ethereum’s PoS upgrade, also known as the Merge, was executed at 06:44 AM UTC on 15 September, combining the existing blockchain with the parallel Beacon Chain.
- The move has reduced Ethereum’s energy consumption by more than 99%, which is equal to 0.2% of the global electricity consumption.