Announcement

We are excited to announce that Pier Two has received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to build a consensus light client in C#. The goal of this project is to develop a lightweight .NET library that allows applications to track Ethereum's consensus in a peer-to-peer manner.

The library will maintain direct connections to Beacon nodes and be able to request light client data for tracking the sync committee. This committee, made up of a small group of validators, is responsible for enabling light clients to securely track Ethereum’s consensus.

Furthermore, this project builds upon our previous work which involved implementing the discv5 protocol as a library in C#. This discovery mechanism is used by Beacon nodes in the consensus layer of Ethereum for discovering each other. The codebase for this project has been open-sourced on GitHub. As the project is currently under active development, many changes will be coming over the upcoming weeks.

Background

To understand the significance of this project, it's important to consider the core principles and challenges of the Ethereum network. Ethereum is all about providing a credibly neutral platform that is accessible to anyone with a device and an internet connection. At its core, it's a decentralized system that puts power in the hands of the users. It allows them to independently verify any changes happening within the network, enabled with the ability to run a full node. However, the steep hardware requirements and experience of running a full node limit the ability of users to verify.

Fortunately, Ethereum supports a lightweight solution that allows resource-constrained devices to follow its consensus. This is possible by tracking only a subset of validators known as the sync committee. In the sync committee, there are 512 validators that are rewarded for generating a signature every 12 seconds for the last block. The sync committee rotates approximately every 27 hours, with validators being randomly sampled for selection.

There are two possible ways to track the sync committee: relying on an RPC connected to a full node or communicating directly with nodes using Libp2p in a peer-to-peer manner. The latter method is the most accessible for users as it allows them to directly interact with the Ethereum network without relying on a centralized RPC provider.

Find Out More

If you are curious to learn more about light clients in general, we have written blog posts that you can access using the following links:

We're excited to be contributing to the development of more accessible, decentralized technologies and can't wait to share more updates as our light client project progresses.