Introducing Teku

Teku is the Eth2 Beacon Chain Client for Institutional Stakers

by ConsenSysOctober 16, 2020

The Eth2 Beacon Chain Client for Institutional Stakers

The ecosystem has anticipated the arrival of Ethereum 2.0 for a long while. ConsenSys’ Protocol Engineering team (formerly known as PegaSys) has been involved right from the start.

We joined others at the Ethereum Sharding Workshop in Taipei in early 2018.
We’ve made significant contributions to Eth2 R&D via our Applied Research, TX/RX, and Automated Verification teams, each focusing on different key research questions for the development of the Eth2 paradigm.
We’ve been contributing to core Ethereum since 2016, building Hyperledger Besu, the premier Ethereum client for enterprises. In addition, we’ve been informing, leading, and implementing EIPs and key Eth1.x research projects.
We recently formed a strategic partnership with JPMorgan to acquire their protocol project and support their Ethereum applications. JPMorgan joins a growing list of companies serviced by our enterprise-grade support team.

These initiatives are a testament to our high-quality engineering practices, our hardened enterprise support experience, and the sustainability of our long-term commitment to advancing the Ethereum protocol.

ConsenSys’ Protocol Engineering team is one of the largest protocol teams in the entire blockchain sphere. With over 70 members, our team spans a broad spectrum of expertise, from enterprise Java wizards to distributed systems academics, from tech, banking, academia and further afield. We are huge believers in Ethereum 2.0 and are investing considerable resources towards getting it delivered.

At the heart of our Eth2 efforts is Teku, a full Ethereum 2.0 client built to meet institutional needs and security requirements. Teku is also the only client that has received zero funding from the Ethereum Foundation and is fully backed by ConsenSys. Teku has been a full participant in all the multiclient testnets to date (including the famous Ontario retreat, which we put together to support the Eth2 ecosystem).

Client diversity is critical in the new Eth2 network architecture, and in order for Eth2 to be resilient, no single client implementation can dominate. For that reason, each of the five existing clients has a target user base in mind; Teku is the client of choice for institutional stakers. We’ve developed it under the enterprise-friendly Apache 2.0 license, and in battle-tested Java, to tap into its rich ecosystem of over 7 million developers and robust tooling for high-performance applications. We’ve just had an audit by Quantstamp, to be published soon, which supports our goal of writing clean, quality code and offers additional certainty to our users as we advance towards the genesis of the beacon chain.

ConsenSys’ Eth2 products are built on Teku.

Infura has been running Teku in a production-grade environment to underpin its Eth2 Beacon Chain API service.
Codefi Staking, which is launching soon, will be relying primarily on Teku for their white-label platform for managed Eth2 staking infrastructure.

For institutional staking, Teku goes hand-in-hand with our other open-source project, Web3Signer, to offer a remote key signing and slashing protection service for maximum security and peace of mind for validators.

We’re already working with several other major projects in the ecosystem to support their use of Teku in their own staking operations. One of our ecosystem partners, Attestant, shared their experience using Teku so far:

“Attestant provides a non-custodial, institutional-grade staking service for Ethereum 2.0. To do so, we need to underpin our offering with products and services that deliver mission-critical security, stability, reliability, and performance. It is apparent that through continual research, development, and testing, the Teku client has now matured to the point where it meets all of our stringent criteria. We are delighted to be working so closely with such a professional team, and look forward to deploying the Teku client as a component of our suite on Mainnet later this year.”

We’ve been working to build Teku into the premier enterprise Eth2 client for over two years, and we’re excited to welcome more professional stakers into our community. Please join us over on the ConsenSys Discord at #teku or email us at [email protected] to get in touch. We want to work with you!