In this article the term "skip-block" has been mentioned so briefly that it is not clear to me what its exact definition is. Is it a kind of block in Ethereum 2.0 ?
I also could not find this term in https://ethereum.org
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1 Answer
"Skip-block" isn't mentioned in any Ethereum specifications or documentation.
Basically the only reference to it is the sole article mentioned in the question. What the article means by a "skip-block" is an empty/skipped slot.
Each slot has a committee of validators assigned to attest to that slot. At each slot, an optimal validator (in the committee) will always make an attestation. If it sees a block for the slot, it will attest to that block. If the validator does not see or receive the block in time, it should make an attestation that the slot is empty/skipped: it does this by attesting to the block it thinks is the head of the chain.
A slot can be skipped for various reasons. For example, the block proposer for the slot may be offline. Or the block proposer waited too long before broadcasting the block to the network. Or the block that was proposed took too long to reach a majority of the committee validators that attested for that slot.