blockdreamer

Blockdreamer is a microservice for triggering block production on Ethereum consensus clients.

Each slot it hits the /eth/v2/validator/blocks/slot endpoint for each node in its config.toml.

This is useful for several tasks:

• Benchmarking/stress testing
• Generating training data for blockprint
• Computing similarity scores for blocks (an alternative to blockprint, see src/distance.rs)

Installation

A Docker image is available on the GitHub container registry:

docker pull ghcr.io/blockprint-collective/blockdreamer

Or you can build from source:

cargo build --release

Configuration

Blockdreamer is configured by a config.toml provided to the --config flag.

Ethereum block hallucinator.

Usage: blockdreamer --config <PATH>

Options:
      --config <PATH>  Path to a TOML configuration file. See docs for examples
  -h, --help           Print help
  -V, --version        Print version

An example configuration file can be found at example.toml.

A full list of configuration options can be found in the source: src/config.rs.

Consensus Node Configuration

Ensure that all the consensus nodes configured with blockdreamer have a fee recipient set. Block proposals may fail if the fee recipient is not set. A dummy value is usually sufficient, e.g. for Lighthouse:

lighthouse bn \
  --suggested-fee-recipient 0xffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

Execution Node Configuration

Blockdreamer is often used in conjunction with Eleel, which both simplifies the maintenance of the consensus node swarm and streamlines block building. Unlike execution nodes which may take significant time to build an execution payload, Eleel can build a dummy payload in milliseconds, and isn't fussy about how the consensus node asks for that payload.