In eth2 staking there are penalties for a non active validator, to encourage validators to perform their duty. A validator which is inactive for a significant amount of time will see his balance decrease until it reaches 16ETH, in which time that validator will get ejected from the the active validator stake.
Here is how long it will take.

Every epoch a function called get_attestation_deltas is called which calculates for each validator the rewards and penalties under those 5 parameters: attestation source, target head, inclusion delay and inactivity leak.

The first 3 components (source, target, head) are all calculated…

Thank you Shay from the Prysm team for reviewing the code changes and enabling this to become a production feature.

Problem statement

The basic eth2 phase 0 slashing conditions premise dictates that a validator can’t forget past signed messages without a penalty. It’s a simple rule, don’t sign the same message but with different parameters (double voting) or try to change history by signing a message “deleting” a previous one (surrounded and surrounding votes).
There are 3 types of slashing events:

For an eth2 validator to perform an effective slashing protection it needs 2 things: 1) the spec slashing conditions and 2)…

This is the second part of a two part post explaining in details BLS signatures and how they work.
For part 1 click here

Point at infinity

A point at infinity is an important concept in elliptic curve math. Its basic definition is a point which is both infinitely high and low in the y direction. We can also imagine the point at infinity as the identity of the group (a special type of element of a set with respect to a binary operation on that set, which leaves any element of the set unchanged when combined with it).

Group points have an…

Bitcoin and ethereum both use elliptic-curve cryptography for generating keys and signing transactions. The algorithm they both use is called Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), which represents a secure way of signing a message (a transaction for example) using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).

When work started on eth 2.0 (transition to POS and sharding), all of a sudden simple ECDSA signatures just didn’t cut it anymore as the number of signatures to verify was too big and would take too long on the average machine (See Justin Drake’s post). Eth2.0 latest spec definies 64 committees for every block and…

“1 CPU, 1 vote” was the philosophy on which Satoshi built bitcoin on. The idea was to distribute control over a financial system to the masses where everyone and no one would control it.
Everyone because it will require a collective consensus to change or do anything on the network, for example create new transaction entries, but it can’t (and shouldn’t) take just one (or a small sub-set of the collective) to take it over.

Bitcoin’s proof-of-work was later found very susceptible for hardware optimisations which resulted in a high barrier of entry for anyone who wanted to become a…

“1 CPU, 1 vote” was the philosophy on which Satoshi built bitcoin on. The idea was to distribute control over a financial system to the masses where everyone and no one would control it.
Everyone because it will require a collective consensus to change or do anything on the network, for example create new transaction entries, but it can’t (and shouldn’t) take just one (or a small sub-set of the collective) to take it over.

Bitcoin’s proof-of-work was later found very susceptible for hardware optimisations which resulted in a high barrier of entry for anyone who wanted to become a…

It’s an exciting time at Blox, 2019 is full of hopes and we would like to kick it off with a big product release and some announcements. Actually 10 of them.

1. Blox and Blox Business products are now a unified single product, aimed at crypto professionals, businesses and enterprises. For the past few months, significant parts of the product were only available to our Business users. It all changes now. The evolution of the (business) product began with a simple request (from our partner), to build a solution for tracking and management on a corporate level, a solution that could…

It is always important to reflect back on your work, evaluate it, notice accomplishments and understand how you can do better in the future. For that end we are proud to go back and mark the events that shaped our company to what it’s now.

January 2018 — new offices

For 6 months we’ve been in our investor’s offices, eToro. We grew and took more and more space until a point where we felt we needed our own home. In January 2018 we moved to a prime location in the heart of TLV.