Page History

(Meeting Link: ⁨https://zoom.us/j/97540031823?pwd=dEJrRW1LakFlWnZPelI3VGxoVjg2dz09)dEJrRW1LakFlWnZPelI3VGxoVjg2dz09#success

EMEA/AMER Friendly Time -  (https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20201012T150000&p1=224&p2=179&p3=1440&p4=195&p5=47)

• 8 11 AM Tuesday San Francisco
• 11 AM 2 PM Tuesday New York
• 3 5 PM Tuesday UTC
• 5 8 PM Tuesday Paris/Berlin
• 1 AM Wednesday Brisbane

Agenda

•  Housekeeping
  • Antitrust notice - https://www.linuxfoundation.org/antitrust-policy/
  • This meeting is being recorded
  • Please Mute unless speaking
  • If you have a question use the raise hand feature

Discussion Topics:

Besu Incentive Program

• Goals 
  • Teams free to do what they want with validator value and validator tx fees (rewards) 
  • Keys will be divested over 6 month periods (allowing more and more funds to be withdrawn) 
• Provide long-term incentives to folks that are building Ethereum Mainnet clients 
• Offered to all mainnet client teams (execution and consensus) 
• EF will provide validator keys at a later time depending on incentive program milestones
• Performance metrics
  • Taken over a monthly time frame
• Over 95% attestation and block proposal inclusions 
• Avoid slashing for these validators - slashed validators will be removed from the program
• Consensus client issues - EF will not penalize execution layer client for consensus issues on the other client 
• Execution layer has to be quick enough (performant) to create the block 
• Interoperability 
  • Trust in this process by EF - good faith interop (could use canary nodes for combinations that are less tested)
• Why Now?
  • Prepping for the Merge
  • Helps measure performance and confirms meeting protocol expectations
• How do we run this program across the Besu community? 
  • This is a big ask for time from community members - Not all should be forced to be node operators
• Concerns are:
  • All maintainers can't run a release 
  • Data not shared from ConsenSys with the community
  • Lack of transparency from ConsenSys team on roadmap
  • Money will make this open source project more challenging with the community 
  • PRs that need to be reviewed in timely manner
• Ideas for Incentivizing Besu community
  • Near term idea: Bounty program
  • Near term idea: Clear benchmarks/requirements for operator validator nodes
  • Medium/long term idea: Besu DAO

Next Steps:

1. More detailed document around Incentive Program on Wiki
2. Agenda for next call (potentially off-cycle):
   1. Incentive program (30 mins)
      1. Cost of running nodes
   2. Besu maintainer progress/community concerns (30 mins)

If we have time...

General Announcements

• Release updates
  
  • Release process in general, plan for diversifying who can make a release.(Justin Florentine )
    • How many maintainers required to sign off on a release?
  • GAR-E - what does it still need to reduce friction?
  • What role (if any) does CircleCI have in releasing?
• Work Updates
  • Static code analysis (Justin Florentine)
    • Example output here: https://sonarcloud.io/dashboard?id=hyperledger-cicd_besu
    • How do we know when we should turn on build gating?
  • Matrix/Rocketchat discussion
    • asking the community (Grace Hartley) 
    • Fill the survey when is coming out
  • Ongoing Vert.x upgrade Justin Florentine
  • Discussion of the Ethereum Foundation announcement
• Other Business 
• Open Forum
  • Design process proposal for further modularization:
    • transaction pooling and block building is a hot topic lately. Justin Florentinewould like to start a design for factoring out block building much like we did with the EVM. What design artifacts should we produce (if any) prior to submitting PRs?
  • Inactivity clause for moving maintainers to emeritus status - the current guide says a quarter of inactivity. Do we want to extend that? 6 months? Longer? 

    > A general measure of inactivity will be no commits or code review comments for one reporting quarter, although this will not be strictly enforced if the maintainer expresses a reasonable intent to continue contributing.

• Future Topics

View recording: 

TBA

1. ConsenSys team to review Danno and Antoine's proposals regarding decentralizing management of funds. Several of the ConsenSys maintainers reviewed the proposals. I also reviewed. We've come up with a revised proposal to try to address our near-term needs while giving us time to fully formulate a long-term solution. We tried to incorporate elements from the other proposals and also wanted to consolidate our feedback into one proposal rather than sharing disjointed comments.

2. Share the details of the EF's Incentive program on a Wiki page: Sajida drafted up an overview of the program. It can be found here.
 
3. Share the Validator Nodes requirements: I just published the recommendations here. The ConsenSys team pulled together its high-level requirements. We are happy to have a conversation about this with the folks who are interested.
  
4. Community Practices Improvements: Apologies, I have been out sick a few days this week so I haven't made as much progress on implementing some of these as I hoped this week. I will be following up on them early next week. However, Sajida has gone ahead and published a draft Besu Roadmap for 2022, which is a great start.

View recording: