TL;DR: To use the new Proof of Stake network, you'll need 2 pieces of software in parallel. It seems only one of those is developed by the Ethereum foundation - implementations of the other one are only developed by various seemingly commercial entities - despite the foundation holding $ 1 billion in assets (see comments).Now that the PoS-merge is close, I tried to find out how to actually use it.
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/ says:
> After The Merge, both execution and consensus clients must be run together in order for a user to gain access to the Ethereum network.
Here are the lists of implementations of those two clients:
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/#execution-clients
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/#consensus-clients
So they do develop an execution client, commonly known as "geth".
It's on their own GitHub: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
But the 5 consensus clients not only have websites which aren't ethereum.org - they are in fact also hosted on different GitHub accounts:
https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse
https://github.com/ChainSafe/lodestar
https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth1 (yes, this is also for eth2, see "About" at top right)
https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm
https://github.com/Consensys/teku
Further, all of these 5 institutions seem to be companies from the looks of their website, not non-profit foundations. (Please correct me and pardon me if that is not true, I don't have the time to navigate through all these websites to figure out their precise legal status.)
So is it true that there is no official reference implementation to run the post-Merge, Proof of Stake Ethereum?
Only 3rd party software which is somehow endorsed but which you have to choose on your own still?
Sure, more choice can be nice, but it would seem advantageous to have at least one trustworthy reference client instead of the users having to decide which of 5 commercial entities they trust?
Now that the PoS-merge is close, I tried to find out how to actually use it.
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/ says:
> After The Merge, both execution and consensus clients must be run together in order for a user to gain access to the Ethereum network.
Here are the lists of implementations of those two clients:
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/#execution-clients
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/#consensus-clients
So they do develop an execution client, commonly known as "geth". It's on their own GitHub: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
But the 5 consensus clients not only have websites which aren't ethereum.org - they are in fact also hosted on different GitHub accounts:
https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse
https://github.com/ChainSafe/lodestar
https://github.com/status-im/nimbus-eth1 (yes, this is also for eth2, see "About" at top right)
https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm
https://github.com/Consensys/teku
Further, all of these 5 institutions seem to be companies from the looks of their website, not non-profit foundations. (Please correct me and pardon me if that is not true, I don't have the time to navigate through all these websites to figure out their precise legal status.)
So is it true that there is no official reference implementation to run the post-Merge, Proof of Stake Ethereum?
Only 3rd party software which is somehow endorsed but which you have to choose on your own still?
Sure, more choice can be nice, but it would seem advantageous to have at least one trustworthy reference client instead of the users having to decide which of 5 commercial entities they trust?