Astrophotography

Release

v1.1.0-beta.1 -- Astrophotography -- marks the shift from Altair alpha to beta pre-releases. This follows the launch of the first devnet including all mainnet clients, a milestone that means all client teams have worked through the entirety of the Altair specs, provided technical feedback, and managed to interoperate.

Now that we have reached a beta release of Altair, there will be no more breaking changes made to Altair consensus specs unless critical security issues are found.

In addition to the symbolic beta release, this release greatly increases test coverage of Altair. Huge shout-out to @hwwhww and @ralexstokes on this front.

Finally, @mcdee did some analysis on the choice of 4 for target sync committee aggregators and showed that this number was insufficient for there to be a high probability of at least one aggregator per subnet per slot. This configuration value was bumped to 16. See #2514 for more details and analysis. (Note: this is the only substantive change within beta.1)

PR showing full diff can be found here: #2513

Altair

Networking

• Set number of target sync committee aggregators to 16 (#2514)
• [non-substantive] Rename a few instances of signature to message (#2509)

Testing, repo, etc

• Increase Altair test coverage (#2499, #2503, #2502, #2505, #2507, #2511)