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Deploy prover on devnet

This document shows you how to deploy a docker-compose file for running a fully-functional, local development network (devnet) for Ethereum with proof-of-stake enabled.

The configuration uses Prysm as a consensus client, with either geth or erigon as an execution client.

The setup is a single node devnet with 64 deterministically-generated validators1 to drive the creation of blocks in an Ethereum proof-of-stake chain.

The devnet is fully functional and allows for deployment of smart contracts and all features that come with the Prysm consensus client, such as its rich set of APIs for retrieving data from the blockchain.

Running a devnet like this provides the best way to understand Ethereum proof-of-stake under the hood, and gives allowance for devs to tinker with various settings that suit their system design.

Running the devnet

  1. Checkout this repository and install docker.

  2. Run the following command to fire up the devnet containers:

    docker compose up -d
    

    You should see the statuses of the containers as shown below:

    $ docker compose up -d
    [+] Running 7/7
    [+] Running 10/10
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-create-beacon-chain-genesis-1  Exited
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-create-beacon-node-keys-1      Exited
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-beacon-chain-2-1               Started
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-beacon-chain-1-1               Started
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-geth-genesis-1                 Exited
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-geth-import-1                  Exited
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-erigon-genesis-1               Started
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-validator-1                    Started
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-erigon-1                       Started
    ✔ Container eth-pos-devnet-geth-1                         Started
    
  3. Stop the containers with this command: docker compose stop.

  4. Before each restart, wiping old data with make clean.

  5. Inspect the logs of launched services with this command:

    docker logs eth-pos-devnet-geth-1 -f
    

Available features

  • Starts from the Capella Ethereum hard fork.
  • The network launches with a Validator Deposit Contract deployed at the address 0x4242424242424242424242424242424242424242. This can be used to onboard new validators into the network by depositing 32 ETH into the contract.
  • The default account used in the go-ethereum node is at the address 0x85da99c8a7c2c95964c8efd687e95e632fc533d6, which comes seeded with ETH for use in the network. This can be used to send transactions, deploy contracts, and more.
  • The default account at 0x85da99c8a7c2c95964c8efd687e95e632fc533d6 is also set as the fee recipient for transaction fees proposed by validators in Prysm. This address will be receiving the fees of all proposer activity.
  • The go-ethereum JSON-RPC API is available at http://geth:8545.
  • The Prysm client’s REST APIs are available at http://beacon-chain:3500. For more info on what these APIs are, see here
  • The Prysm client also exposes a gRPC API at http://beacon-chain:4000.

Type 1 prover testing procedure

The aim of this devnet setup is to use Polygon Type 1 Prover to test Erigon state witnesses.

The following steps create some test data.

  1. Start the devnet up with docker compose up. If you had previously run this command, you might want to wipe old data with a make clean to avoid running from a previous state.
  2. Wait for blocks to start being produced. This should only take a few seconds. You can use polycli monitor to quickly check that blocks are being created.
  3. Generate some load and test transactions, by using a tool like polycli to create transactions.
  4. Once the load is done, and if you ran docker in detached mode, you can stop the devnet with docker compose stop.
  5. Checkout and build jerrigon from the feat/zero branch. You can use make all to build everything.
  6. Create a copy of the erigon state directory to avoid corrupting things

    sudo cp -r execution/erigon/ execution/erigon.bak
    sudo chown -R $USER:$USER execution/erigon.bak/
    
  7. Now we can start the Jerrigon fork of Erigon. This will give us RPC access to the state that we created in the previous steps.

    ~/code/jerrigon/build/bin/erigon \
     --http \
     --http.api=eth,net,web3,erigon,engine,debug \
     --http.addr=0.0.0.0 \
     --http.corsdomain=* \
     --http.vhosts any \
     --ws \
     --nodiscover=true \
     --txpool.disable=true \
     --no-downloader=true \
     --maxpeers 0 \
     --datadir=./execution/erigon.bak
    
  8. With the RPC running we can retrieve the blocks, witnesses, and use zero-bin to parse them. In one particular test case below, about 240 blocks worth of data were generated. So, seq 0 240 was used for generating ranges of block numbers for testing purposes.

    # Create a directory for storing the outputs
    mkdir out
    
    # Call the zeroTracer to get the traces
    seq 0 240 | awk '{print "curl -o " sprintf("out/wit_%02d", $0) ".json -H '"'"'Content-Type: application/json'"'"' -d '"'"'{\"method\":\"debug_traceBlockByNumber\",\"params\":[\"" sprintf("0x%X", $0) "\", {\"tracer\": \"zeroTracer\"}],\"id\":1,\"jsonrpc\":\"2.0\"}'"'"' http://127.0.0.1:8545"}' | bash
    
    # download the blocks (this assumes you have foundry/cast installed)
    seq 0 240 | awk '{print "cast block --full -j " $0 " > out/block_" sprintf("%02d", $0) ".json"}' | bash
    
  9. At this point, we’ll want to checkout and build zero-bin in order to test proof generation. Make sure to checkout that repo and run cargo build --release to compile the application for testing.

    The snippets below assume zero-bin has been checked out and compiled in $HOME/code/zero-bin.

    After compiling, the leader and rpc binaries will be created in the target/release folder.

    # use zero-bin to convert witness formats. This is a basic test
    seq 0 240 | awk '{print "~/code/zero-bin/target/release/rpc fetch --rpc-url http://127.0.0.1:8545 --block-number " $0 " > " sprintf("out/zero_%02d", $0) ".json" }' | bash
    
    # use zero-bin to generate a proof for the genesis block
    ./leader --arithmetic 16..23 --byte-packing 9..21 --cpu 12..25 --keccak 14..20 --keccak-sponge 9..15 --logic 12..18 --memory 17..28 --runtime in-memory -n 1 jerigon --rpc-url http://127.0.0.1:8545 --block-number 1 --proof-output-path 1.json 
    seq 2 240 | awk '{print "./leader --arithmetic 16..23 --byte-packing 9..21 --cpu 12..25 --keccak 14..20 --keccak-sponge 9..15 --logic 12..18 --memory 17..28  --runtime in-memory -n 4 jerigon --rpc-url http://127.0.0.1:8545 --block-number " $1 " --proof-output-path " $1 ".json --previous-proof " ($1 - 1) ".json"}'
    

Operational notes

  • Pay attention to memory usage on the system running zero-bin. Certain transactions can consume a lot of memory and lead to an out-of-memory (OOM) error.
  • You’ll want to run zero-bin on a system with at least 32GB of RAM.
  • When you run zero-bin, a local file will be created with a name like prover_state_*. This file needs to be deleted if any of the circuit sizes are changed.
  • There is a useful script in zero-bin to run a range of proofs.

Important

Both the state witness generation and decoding logic are actively being improved.

We expect that the following transaction types or use-cases to prove without any issues:

  • Empty blocks (important use case)
  • EOA transfers
  • ERC-20 mints & transfers
  • ERC-721 mintes & transfers

Shortcuts

  1. There is a shortcut that creates the genesis file allocations for our mnemonic which has already been hard-coded into the genesis file. However, if you want to use a different testing account, use the one below.

    polycli wallet inspect --mnemonic "code code code code code code code code code code code quality" | jq '.Addresses[] | {"key": .ETHAddress, "value": { "balance": "0x21e19e0c9bab2400000"}}' | jq -s 'from_entries'