Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Consensus Specifications¶
To learn more about proof-of-stake and sharding, see the PoS documentation, sharding documentation and the research compendium.
This repository hosts the current Ethereum proof-of-stake specifications. Discussions about design rationale and proposed changes can be brought up and discussed as issues. Solidified, agreed-upon changes to the spec can be made through pull requests.
Specs¶
Core specifications for Ethereum proof-of-stake clients can be found in specs. These are divided into features. Features are researched and developed in parallel, and then consolidated into sequential upgrades when ready.
Stable Specifications¶
| Seq. | Code Name | Fork Epoch | Specs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Phase0 | 0 |
|
| 1 | Altair | 74240 |
|
| 2 | Bellatrix ("The Merge") |
144896 |
|
| 3 | Capella | 194048 |
|
| 4 | Deneb | 269568 |
In-development Specifications¶
| Seq. | Code Name | Fork Epoch | Specs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Electra | TBD | |
| 6 | Fulu | TBD |
Outdated Specifications¶
| Code Name or Topic | Specs | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Sharding |
|
|
| Custody Game |
|
Dependent on sharding |
| Data Availability Sampling |
|
Accompanying documents can be found in specs and include:¶
Additional specifications for client implementers¶
Additional specifications and standards outside of requisite client functionality can be found in the following repos:
Design goals¶
The following are the broad design goals for the Ethereum proof-of-stake consensus specifications:
* to minimize complexity, even at the cost of some losses in efficiency
* to remain live through major network partitions and when very large portions of nodes go offline
* to select all components such that they are either quantum secure or can be easily swapped out for quantum secure counterparts when available
* to utilize crypto and design techniques that allow for a large participation of validators in total and per unit time
* to allow for a typical consumer laptop with O(C) resources to process/validate O(1) shards (including any system level validation such as the beacon chain)
Useful external resources¶
For spec contributors¶
Documentation on the different components used during spec writing can be found here: * YAML Test Generators * Executable Python Spec, with Py-tests
Online viewer of the latest release (latest master branch)¶
Consensus spec tests¶
Conformance tests built from the executable python spec are available in the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake Consensus Spec Tests repo. Compressed tarballs are available in releases.
Installation and Usage¶
The consensus-specs repo can be used by running the tests locally or inside a docker container.
To run the tests locally:
- Clone the repository with git clone https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs.git
- Switch to the directory cd consensus-specs
- Run the tests with make test
To run the tests inside a docker container:
- Switch to the directory with cd scripts
- Run the script ./build_run_docker_tests.sh
- Find the results in a folder called ./testResults
- Find more ways to customize the script with ./build_run_docker_tests.sh --h