At the end of August, Whiteblock received a joint grant from the Ethereum Foundation and ConsenSys. Read our blog post for more details and find the official announcement from the EF here.

“Whiteblock is funded to continue Eth2.0 network testing and testnet / interoperability support. Whiteblock will analyze the libp2p gossipsub implementation, continue to work with implementers to help refine the networking stack and specification, and advance interoperability efforts.”

Our grant work started in mid-August and will continue for the next few months. We believe in transparent execution, so we will be releasing periodic updates for the community.

INTEROP LOCKIN

During EthBerlin, Zak Cole collaborated with Protolambda and Danny Ryan to draft and distribute an ETH2.0 client implementer survey in preparation for the impending interop lockin. This survey covered a variety of topics related to interoperability, spec conformance, and general development progress. The survey and its responses can be found in the interop directory within the ETH2.0 project management repo.

The interop lockin is going down between Sept. 10–14 in Canada where our very own Antoine Toulme has been appointed technical coordinator. Antoine will be joined by Daniel Choi and Rene Lubov in order help facilitate productive coordination and collaboration in achieving exercise goals.

During this lockin, members of each client team will be working face-to-face for a focused week of development exercises in preparation for the public launch of ETH2.0. Similar to Whiteblock’s previous interop workshops, the goal is to achieve basic interoperability between clients (establishing handshakes, initial sync, and gossiping), launching 1-on-1 testnets, and ironing out any issues with the code. While this may seem like a lofty goal, these exercises will ensure an expedient and successful public launch.

Here’s a video of our previous work coordinating an interop workshop:

ETH2.0 NETWORKING

On the ETH2.0 networking front, Zak Cole met with the wonderful folks from Protocol Labs at ETHBerlin in order to kick off a productive collaboration on Whiteblock’s gossipsub testing efforts. As we continue our ETH2.0 network testing efforts , we will be working closely with Protocol Labs as well as the libp2p community to analyse gossipsub functionality and performance.

In order to ensure the success of our efforts surrounding ETH2.0 networking and libp2p as a community-owned and contributor-driven project, Whiteblock is looking to hire a dedicated engineer to contribute to libp2p’s open source codebase . While we’re actively interviewing for this position, we encourage anyone interested in getting paid to help build the distributed web to send us an email at with the subject line “libp2p engineer.”

Check back at the end of next week for an update on the outcome of the lockin and what we’re working on next.

Outside of grant work, we’re pushing towards the beta release of Whiteblock Genesis — the easiest to use distributed systems testing platform. Sign up for early access to the private beta here .

Originally published at https://whiteblock.io on September 6, 2019.