Hi, I’m Viktor Bunin, a Protocol Specialist on the Bison Trails team. This newsletter is the first edition of our monthly update on eth2. It provides inside access to our thoughts on the most important information to know about eth2 as we prepare for Phase 0, the beacon chain launch.

—Viktor Bunin, Protocol Specialist

ETH2 PHASE 0 LAUNCH

Danny Ryan (eth2 lead) recently opened EIP-2982: Serenity Phase 0, an official PR to launch eth2 and begin a phased rollout of PoS onto Ethereum. I imagine that he did not do so lightly. This move speaks to his confidence that the launch is near.

The eth2 team released the first public checklist to track the progress of Phase 0. The most important card to track is Ceremony Day. On that day the team will deploy the deposit smart contract (required to start the beacon chain), release the final protocol spec, and announce the protocol launch date.

The swift arrival of Ceremony Day is dependent upon two things: the stability of eth2’s Medalla testnet and at least one successful dress rehearsal / dry run (deposit and genesis testnet).

• As you may have heard, Medalla was unstable last month due to a bug in one of the clients. Impressively, Medalla recovered successfully, the client bug was fixed, and the testnet has been stable since. If it continues to be stable, the testnet will have been running almost two months by the time of the Spadina dry run, and almost three months by the time mainnet is slated to launch in November.
• Spadina is the first dry run. It began on Tuesday, September 29th and is meant to run for three days. It got off to a slow start and had trouble finalizing; small errors in a client’s release process highlighted issues closer to the edge of the stack - CLI options, testnet configs, bootnodes, and genesis calculation bugs. The network was soon able to finalize and, although it would have been better for the dry run to go off without a hitch, it was good to identify these process-related issues now. It also showed that clients have generally become much more robust even in turbulent network conditions.
• As a precaution, there will be at least one more dry run prior to genesis. The next, and hopefully final, one is called Zinken and genesis is planned for Monday, October 12th.

Although Ceremony Day was originally slated for the first week of October, the addition of another dry run will likely push it back a week. If Zinken goes well, we expect Ceremony Day to occur shortly after.

Bison Trails speaks with various eth2 researchers and client teams every week. The focus now is getting ready for launch. We currently anticipate a mid-November mainnet launch and are preparing to help our customers participate.

IMPLICATIONS FOR TOKEN HOLDERS AND SERVICE PROVIDERS

Given the amount of participation in DeFi, Keep’s Stake Drop, and NuCypher’s WorkLock (where an astounding $125M of ETH was locked), it is clear ETH holders are actively looking for opportunities to deploy their tokens. There is cautious, but intense, excitement for eth2 staking. From our conversations, few ETH holders are willing to stake all their ETH, but most are planning to stake a portion.

Being early is important. Per eth2’s design, the first stakers will be earning a significantly higher rate of reward on their ETH. Service providers like exchanges, custodians, and wallets will find eth2 staking customers and their assets are highly sticky as staked BETH cannot be moved until Phase 1.5, which is two or more years away.

Most importantly, we expect to see a flight to quality in eth2 participation. Due to the expected wait before staked tokens become transferable, we expect ETH holders to prioritize working with companies they believe can stand the test of time and will continue to operate in the coming two to four years.

BISON TRAILS + ETH2 PRODUCT

Our team is putting the finishing touches on our product and completing end-to-end testing on the core eth2 features we will support. Clients can expect to make use of our:

• API management dashboard to create and revoke API token access to the eth2 validator management API
• Eth2 validator management API to create Ethereum deposit transactions, add eth2 validators, and monitor the status of these validators as they are scheduled
• Eth2 metrics to see their infrastructure health and real-time insights, using graphs and rich visualizations accessed from the Bison Trails platform’s dashboard

In addition to completing the feature work, our team is busy producing and refining our documentation to ensure the onboarding process is as smooth as possible.

After months of development, we're excited for our first clients to access the product and provide feedback so we can deliver the best product. We’re proud to support the network at launch and we look forward to working with you.

Have eth2 questions? Please don’t hesitate to reply to this email to ask or contact us here!

Thank you, –Viktor

Bison Trails: Pioneering Blockchain Infrastructure®

Bison Trails is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service company, based in New York City, specifically focused on blockchain participation. We’ve built a platform for anyone who wants to participate in new chains effortlessly (e.g. by running Cosmos Validators, Tezos Bakers, and Libra Validators, etc.)—without having to invest time and resources into developing any of the engineering, protocol, dev ops, or security competencies in-house. Our goal is for the entire blockchain ecosystem to flourish by providing robust infrastructure for the pioneers of tomorrow.

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