P2P networking #5, July 29, 2026

Protocol Calls & happenings
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Agenda

– Clients updates
– Topic streams extension (Marco)
– Bundling attestations EIP (Sukun)
– Networking simulator (Anton)
– Chainscope (Csaba)

Meeting Time: Wednesday, July 29, 2026 at 15:30 UTC (60 minutes)

GitHub Issue

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Meeting Summary:

This meeting focused on client updates and technical presentations for the Ethereum Lighthouse ecosystem. The team discussed client updates from Daniel and Aarsh, including GLOA support deployment to DevNet 7 and plans to revamp peer scoring in PRISM for better instrumentation and observability. Marco presented an extension to GossipSub called “topic streams” that helps remove head-of-line blocking issues and reduces overhead for topic names by allowing separate streams for different message types. Anton shared his gVM simulator, which can handle mainnet-scale simulations with up to 8,000 nodes and 16,000 messages, taking 20 minutes to complete with 500GB of RAM usage. Csaba presented ChainScope, a comprehensive crawler and analysis tool that maps the Ethereum network, tracking over 200,000 node IDs across 77,000 distinct IPs and monitoring protocol evolution, client distribution, and network metrics. The conversation ended with discussions about attestation bundling, where Sukun proposed an EIP for batching attestation messages at the network level to achieve 45-50% bandwidth savings, while Daniel presented ideas for in-network aggregation using a tree structure to avoid overlapping aggregates, with both approaches potentially combining for even greater efficiency gains.

Click to expand detailed summary

The team discussed client updates and upcoming presentations. Daniel reported deploying GLOA support for partial data columns to DevNet 7, while Aarsh mentioned completing GLOA implementation and planning to revamp peer scoring in PRISM for better instrumentation and observability. Bosul shared updates on engine APIs and CAIC listener integration, and Csaba discussed gas pool improvements and v5 migration testing across EL clients. The conversation ended with Marco preparing to present about topic stream extension.

Marco presented an extension to GossipSub that addresses head-of-line blocking issues by splitting messages into separate topic streams, reducing overhead from topic names and enabling interleaving of different message sizes. The implementation is ready in Go with an interrupt test available for validation.Anton demonstrated a new GVM simulator capable of running mainnet-scale simulations with up to 8,000 nodes, achieving results within 20 minutes and 500GB RAM usage, validated with less than 1% error compared to Shadow simulations.Csaba showcased Chainscope, a comprehensive network crawler and analysis tool that maps over 200,000 node IDs across 77,000 distinct IPs, tracking protocol adoption, node distribution, and network statistics across multiple Ethereum chains and clients.Sukun and Daniel discussed proposals for attestation bundling and in-network aggregation, with Sukun presenting an EIP for bundling up to 10 attestation messages for 45% bandwidth savings, while Daniel explored tree-based aggregation structures achieving up to 70% bandwidth savings. The discussion highlighted potential synergies between the two approaches for combined efficiency gains.

Next Steps:

  • Aarsh: Write a design doc on the changes planned for revamping peer scoring in PRISM, and share it on the Telegram channel when done.
  • Bosul: Discuss the topic of piggybacking the custody field to purchase update with Daniel and the Lighthouse team if time allows after presentations.
  • Marco: Post the link to the topic streams draft spec (Spec 729) and the presentation slides.
  • Marco: Request another implementation of the topic streams extension for interop testing.
  • Anton: Make the gVM simulator easy to use for everyone.
  • Anton: Investigate making the simulator deterministic, possibly by modifying Quiche or using Shadow for syscall interception.
  • Csaba: Publish the public URL for Chainscope in the next few days.
  • Sukun: Collaborate with Daniel and others to include in-network aggregation ideas into the attestation bundling EIP, or create a separate hack MD for collaboration.

Recording Access:

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YouTube recording available: https://youtu.be/iOysOKXuD_c