SOTS #15: The world's simplest description of staking software

Transcript

hi there uh it's super fizz today is november 28th 2020. um and so i've actually tried a few times to create this very short video that talks about the three pieces of software involved in running an ethereum beacon chain validator and the reason i mess it up is i keep introducing vocabulary that is more complex than i can easily uh describe in two minutes but the thing i'm describing is actually pretty simple it's running three pieces of software that work together to produce a validator um and so i'm gonna try again and

uh really try to to not include vocabulary that would have to be um defined somewhere else and so in order to become a validator three pieces of software are required the first thing that's required is a data feed from the ethereum one network and so you get this data feed in one of two ways you can run an ethereum one client like geth besu open ethereum or another mind and so this eth1 chain monitors the deposits of ethereum that go into the deposit contract

and so that's really the only relationship it has to the beacon chain is that eth1 client looks for those 32 ether deposits and every time one comes in it tells the next piece of software the beacon chain hey there's a new validator hey there's a new validator um that takes us to the second piece of software the validator i'm sorry the beacon chain client and so the beacon chain client monitors this new chain the beacon chain by adding blocks and monitoring the eth1 chain for these new validators and it's sort of the uh this beacon chain client is the center

of all of everything we're doing um it is basically the chain monitor uh and so the third piece of software that we're looking at is the validator client the validator client is often bundled with a beacon chain client and you may not even know they're separate so if you're running one of the four mainnet launch beacon chain validator clients you're looking at something like nimbus teku prism or lighthouse and so you'll often find the beacon chain and validator bundled together but the role of the validator as the third piece of software is to help you interact with the beacon chain

with your validator that means you submitted 32 ether to to the deposit contract the beacon chain because it's monitoring the ether one chain sees that deposit and then it's it allows your validator to interact with the beacon chain and so the jobs of your of your validator are to propose blocks on the beacon chain and to um kind of confirm blocks on the beacon chain and that is the thing that you actually get paid to do so you run these three pieces of software um with the pinnacle being running a validator and the job of the validator is to attest to blocks

which says yes that's a good block and to propose new blocks on the beacon chain i hope that helps you understand the whole ethereum staking software bundle i know it can be overwhelming but once you've played with it for a while it does make a lot more sense i hope that helped super fits out bye-bye