Over the past year or so I’ve become increasingly interested in blockchains/cryptocurrencies, especially Ethereum - a blockchain famed for its executable smart contracts.

The project is to undergo a major upgrade over the coming years, resulting in Ethereum 2.0

The upgrade aims to address scalability issues of Ethereum 1.0 via ‘sharding’ - which essentially means breaking up the blockchain into multiple blockchains. These multiple blockchains will communicate through a root chain, known as the beacon chain. In addition to this new architecture, Ethereum 2.0 will replace the proof of work (POW) consensus algorithm with proof of stake (POS). The upgrades are to be rolled out in phases, phase 0 being the introduction of the beacon chain and proof of stake.

Before phase 0 goes live (sometime later this year?), I thought I’d get involved in the public Topaz Testnet for Ethereum 2.0 and give Prysmatic Labs beacon node and validator client a try.

Each validator has to have a minimum of 32 ETH staked (in this case, test Göerli ETH). Validators receive an income for being online and validating slots. However, they are also penalised for being offline or for doing something unscrupulous, such as double voting.

The Prysm beacon node and validator client doing its thing

At the time of this screenshot, there were around 90 nodes registered to eth2stats -

Topaz Testnet - validator map

After a few weeks of validating, my validator has managed to bring home ~0.25 Göerli ETH, which works out at about 10.6% APR. I’m quite happy with this considering that I’ve been offline quite a lot over the period due to poor internet connectivity. My validator has also proposed 4 slots, which as a bonus allows you to ‘graffiti’ a message into the blockchain 😊

Proposed slots viewed on Etherscan