Page last updated: October 12, 2020

The Eth2 Medalla Data Challenge

Up until 20 October 2020, the Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring a Medalla data analysis and data visualization blog post challenge. Here are all the details you need.

Calling data scientists, data engineers, data visualizers, developers, and anyone interested in digging into Ethereum data!

The Ethereum 2.0 Medalla testnet is live. Validators are validating. Attesters are attesting. Blocks are propagating. Which means, data, lots and lots of data. And the Ethereum community needs your help to make sense of it all.

  • What data visualizations can show the health of the Medalla test network?
  • Aggregation performance. Latencies. Validator effectiveness. Gini coefficients. Block rewards. What compelling story can you tell with Medalla data?
  • What performance and behavior patterns can you find among different classes of validators (for example hobbyists, institutional players, exchanges, and stakers)?
  • What patterns exist in slashings?
  • What other data can you collect and analyze on Medalla?
  • What new tools can you build to collect and analyze data on Medalla?
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Wait, how do I get started with Medalla? See how to stake on the Medalla testnet

The challenge

Document your best Medalla data insights in the most readable blog post possible – for prizes!

The Ethereum Foundation are running this challenge because there's a lot to learn and discover from Medalla testnet activity. Your findings will give the Ethereum community —from beginners to core researchers— important insight into Medalla, the last step en route to Phase 0, the Beacon Chain.

If Medalla proves stable, mainnet launch is next! And so, this is a critical moment to get involved in the Ethereum community 🚀

How to submit

Anyone is free to submit, here's how:

  1. Collect and analyze Medalla data – See tips for getting started
    • Either with existing tools
    • Or for the extra ambitious, build your own tool and tell us about it!
  2. Detail out your work in a blog post
  3. Submit!
Submit blog post

You may submit more than one blog post! So long as each posts focuses on a different visualisation or piece of analysis or tooling for building public datasets

In addition to the prompt questions above, here's a wishlist of data analysis avenues to explore.

A group of Ethereum community members will evaluate your submissions and awards will go to the top blog posts 🏆

Deadline ⏰

The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, October 20

Prizes 💸

Up to USD \$15,000 per blog post

That is, you may win up to USD \$15,000 for each quality submission.

Entries must be considered sufficiently insightful by the community judging team to be eligible for rewards.

Requirements

  • Blog post must be in English.
    • There are no length requirements.
  • Blog posts must be public and original.
  • Data analysis or visualization must concern Medalla testnet data.
  • Tools and scripts used (and created) must be open source and referenced in the blog post.

Judging criteria

Surprise us with your creativity! But here are some judging criteria considerations:

  • Overall quality and clarity of data analysis or data visualization.
    • Quality of insights into Medalla, clients, and Eth2 in general.
  • Insights that lead to substantive changes in client implementations or specifications.
  • Analyses or visualizations that help a non-technical audience gain insight into the network.
  • Quality of contribution to the Eth2 tooling ecosystem (if applicable).

How to get started

  • Join the testnet via the Medalla testnet launchpad and run / sync a client (or multiple clients). The launchpad will give you more details.
  • Experiment with a client API for single node statistics.
  • Experiment with rumor to get data from group of clients.
    • rumor is an interactive shell to run the Eth2 network stack, attach to testnets, debug clients, and extract data for tooling.
  • Dig around a block explorer:
  • Crunch some numbers and spin up some graphs
  • Publish your analysis or visualization!

Helpful resources

Support

For any general support questions about your submission, please email eth2+medalla@ethereum.org.

For technical questions about Medalla, ideas or direction for your data analysis, tooling, clients, and all things Eth2, we invite you to head over to the community-driven ethstaker Discord. Ethstaker is a community-driven Eth2 resource for the fledgling validator community and they've been kind enough to open up a dedicated support channel #medalla-data-challenge for The Eth2 Medalla Data Challenge!