Blox Beta is Live and Introducing Decentralized Staking Pools
It’s November – Blox Beta is up and running, Blox Decentralized Staking Pools have been announced, and the deposit contract for the Beacon Chain HAS JUST BEEN RELEASED! It’s go time people – get ready for mainnet Eth2 staking as soon as December 1st. 🥳🚀
Featured
- Lessons learned from low participation in Medalla. 🏅
- Blox is diversifying, say hello to Lighthouse and Teku. 👋
- Alon chats about decentralized staking pools on the r/ethstaker community call. 🔊
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The Implications of Low Participation in Medalla
It’s been a rough road for the Medalla testnet over the last few weeks as participation has been low and the network hasn’t been able to finalize. After the success of Zinken, it would appear that validators have shifted their focus away from Medalla as we all eagerly wait for the Beacon Chain. The network forged on despite participation challenges, and a number of client specific issues were identified:
As of time of writing, Medalla is back on track as inactive validators have been removed from the network. Yet the major lesson learned over the past few weeks has been the importance of client diversification:
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Blox Beta Product Updates
And so diversify we did… If you’re running a validator with Blox you’ve likely noticed a number of recent version updates. We’ve been mainly focused on getting our attestation rate on Medalla up to where we want it to be (our aim is 99.9%), so we have been reviewing our product to identify improvements, as well as developing a mechanism that enables us to integrate with multiple different clients; starting with Lighthouse, and then Teku. This implementation will allow us to easily move between clients should any one in particular be experiencing issues.
Another project that we have been working on is developing a validation mechanism for parsing node data and checking our attestation history. By adding additional nodes and implementing this mechanism, we will remove our dependency on explorers to verify attestations.
There are a whole lot more features and improvements coming down the pipeline, so make sure to download Beta today, start staking goETH and real ETH as soon as genesis takes place.
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r/Ethstaker Community Call #10 with Alon
Last but not least, our CEO Alon had the chance to join the r/Ethstaker Community Call last week and chat about Eth2 decentralization, staking with Blox, our upcoming work with the Ethereum Foundation on Secret Shared Validators for Decentralized Staking Pools and the tokenomics of our native token, CDT.
Alon started Blox Staking because of his commitment to decentralization and trustlessness in blockchain – and for the sheer reason that he wanted a convenient way to stake his ETH without giving up his private keys. You can watch him speak more about it, here.
By the time the next Bulletin rolls around, it is very likely that mainnet genesis will have taken place! Stay tuned for the mainnet staking deposit flow implemented into your Blox app in the very near future, and staking with real ETH in no time!
To the Moon,
Team Blox
