ckETH: a canister-issued Ether twin token on the IC

General
218

The minter seems to be back on track since the last proposal 132474 was just adopted.

What happened?

  1. Proposal 132415 was executed at 2024.09.11 09:28 (UTC) and successfully replaced the Ethereum JSON-RPC provider Ankr (rpc.ankr.com) with eth-pokt.nodies.app from Pocket Network.
  2. Unfortunately, at the same time the Ethereum JSON-RPC provider LlamaNodes eth.llamarpc.com was down and constantly replying with no response. This seems to have been resolved since the ckETH minter did make progress around 2024.09.11 22:00 (UTC) but had stopped since then.
  3. The logs show that responses from the Ethereum JSON-RPC provider Pocket Network (eth-pokt.nodies.app) differ between the replicas resulting in consensus failures. Proposal 132474 replaced the Ethereum JSON-RPC provider Pocket Network (eth-pokt.nodies.app) with the Ethereum JSON-RPC provider BlockPi (`https://ethereum.blockpi.network/v1/rpc/public).

Future Plans

Currently, the ckETH minter uses JSON-RPC providers that do not require API keys and there are unfortunately not that many that also support IPv6 connectivity. Our goal to improve the current situation is to use the EVM-RPC canister, that does use JSON-RPC providers with API keys, to be able to use more providers. This will also allow us to use a more robust strategy (e.g. require consensus between responses from 3 providers when 4 are queried), so that a provider being down would not impact the availability of the ckETH minter. This does require some changes:

  1. on the ckETH minter, to be able to communicate with the EVM-RPC canister. Those changes are already implemented and could be activated via an upgrade proposal.
  2. on the EVM-RPC canister (see this post for more details), which are currently on-going.

That means that we are doing steady progress on that front and should be able to use the EVM-RPC canister in the next few weeks.

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