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Ethereum 2.0 Deposit Contract Release Kicked Back Until November

The Ethereum 2.0 deposit contract is a few weeks away at least, according to Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan.

Speaking Thursday on the Bankless podcast, Ryan said the deposit contract won’t go live until it receives a thumbs up on an audit of a critical crypto library, BLST, performed by cryptography audit firm NCC Group.

“This library is critical to creating keys, signing messages. Critical, in early phases, [means] that if you use this library, they need to be secure; if you use it to generate your wallets, it needs to have good randomness; and if you are signing your deposits which have a signature associated, it needs to be correct,” Ryan said. “Given that how critical this library is, and given that, if there is a fundamental error in this library we could f*ck some sh*t up in terms of genesis deposits, that is the blocker,” he said.
Ethereum 2.0 core researchers are now expecting the deposit contract – a one-way Ethereum smart contract that holds staked ether (ETH) necessary for securing the new Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network – to be released in early to mid-November pending the audit’s findings, Ryan said.
Ryan said researchers are still eyeing 2020 for the genesis block of the Beacon chain.