2021-12-21 Besu Contributor Call

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

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

• 8 AM Tuesday San Francisco

• 11 AM Tuesday New York

• 3 PM Tuesday UTC

• 5 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:

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  • Keys will be divested over 6 month periods (allowing more and more funds to be withdrawn) 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)

Note: We did not have time to address these other items:

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 (Deactivated)) 

    • 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? 

• Future Topics

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