Merge data challenge
Calling all Ethereans, data scientists, data engineers, data visualizers, developers, and anyone interested in digging into Ethereum data!
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The Merge data challenge
Up until October 31st, 2022, the Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring a Merge data analysis and data visualization blog post challenge. Here are all the details you need.
Calling all Ethereans, data scientists, data engineers, data visualizers, developers, and anyone interested in digging into Ethereum data!
The Merge is coming, providing a more secure and sustainable home for Ethereum—as well as more data, lots and lots of data. And the Ethereum community needs your help to make sense of it all.
What new visualizations help provide insight into proof-of-stake Ethereum?
How do the consensus layer and execution layer interact? Are there differences across client pairs in communication patterns, efficiency, etc? Are there good places to optimize?
What, if anything, changed on the network at the point of The Merge—block propagation times, p2p connections, transaction mempool performance, etc?
Did The Merge affect core Beacon Chain activity—attestation performance, blocks missed, sync committees?
Did user activity noticeably change after the Merge? What about MEV?
What new tools can you build to collect and analyze data in the post-Merge network?
The challenge
Document your best Merge data insights in the most readable blog post possible—for prizes!
The Ethereum Foundation is running this challenge because there’s a lot to learn and discover from the Merge mainnet activity. Your findings will give the Ethereum community – from beginners to researchers and client developers – important insight into the Merge.
Get started now if you want to gather date from both before and after the big event!
How to submit
Anyone is free to submit, here’s how:
- Collect and analyze Merge data
- Either with existing tools
- Or for the extra ambitious, build your own tool and tell us about it!
- Detail out your work in a blog post
- Submit!
You may submit more than one blog post! So long as each posts focuses on a different visualization or piece of analysis
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 October 31st, 2022.
Prizes 💸
Up to USD $30,000
Entries must be considered sufficiently impactful/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 Merge network data
- Tools and scripts used (and created) must be free and 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 the Merge, clients, and Ethereum in general
- Insights that lead to substantive changes/improvements in client implementations or specifications
- Analyses or visualizations that help a non-technical audience gain insight into the network
- Quality of contribution to the Ethereum tooling ecosystem (if applicable)
How to get started
- Run / sync a Mainnet client pair (or multiple clients)
- Dig around a block explorer:
- Experiment with client APIs for single node statistic (i.e. beacon-APIs and execution-APIs)
- Experiment with ethdo, rumor, zcli, chaind, Ethereum ETL, Ethereum 2 ETL, and other existing data gathering and analysis tools
- Write new tools to gather data
- 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 datachallenge@ethereum.org.
