The topic of client diversity within the Ethereum community has been broadly addressed to increase awareness. As of today, there are 4 implementations of an execution layer client and 5 implementations of a consensus layer client being used in production environments. This is because an Ethereum node is made up…

Light clients allow users to interact with blockchains without having to run a full node. This provides greater security, privacy, and resiliency compared to a traditional client-server model. For a blockchain to support light clients, it needs to have a consensus mechanism that allows users with limited hardware resources to…

Aim of this article To maintain the reliability and security of Ethereum there is a reliance on over two-thirds of all active validators to be honest. Motivating such honesty is the responsibility of carefully devised rewards and risks for validators. While participating in the network would typically return profitable yields, malicious actions, including double…

A comprehensive and digestible technical summary of the Arbitrum network. Originally published on Jun 4, 2021 (under Tracer). Arbitrum is a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum. …

Aim of this article Years of research and development has seen a complete overhaul of the Ethereum consensus layer, the layer which determines how blocks are created and validated, which first came into effect in September 2022 (The Merge). Due to these recent rapid changes it is difficult to find resources explaining what has…

In our previous articles, we introduced you to the Discv5 protocol, covering topics such as node identity, record management, and communication. However, in order to fully understand the protocol, it’s important to delve deeper into the role of topics in improving the discovery process. Topics provide a way for nodes…

In our last discussion, we introduced the Discv5 protocol and explained how nodes manage their identity and their neighbours. By using an identity system, nodes are able to establish secure and verifiable connections with other nodes in the network. As we move forward, we’ll dig deeper into how nodes find…

Have you ever wondered how Ethereum nodes discover each other within the network? If so, this series is for you! In this first blog post, we explain the Discv5 protocol, focusing on node identity and record management. Our goal is to explain the various components of the protocol in an…

Nodes without full chain history and state data are likely to have poor peer connections and may be disconnected frequently when they cannot provide the requested data to their peers. Not all nodes are created equal. “Light client”, in the context of Ethereum, typically refers to the DevP2P LES network…