Author: Sophia Brown

Although the internet has been more quiet than usual, we’ve been super busy hacking away on eth2! Between Devcon5 and keeping our heads down to work, it seems we’ve left the community in the dark on a couple of items. Here’s a quick update to fill in the gaps. Deposit Contract Although the deposit contract has been written, tested, and formally verified, we are working to allow the BLS standardization to stablize prior to launch. One goal of eth2 is to be easily interoperable with other blockchains and systems in general, and to that end, we do not want our…

Welcome to the second installment of eth2 quick update. tldr; Spec release of v0.9.0 — Tonkatsu to ensure Phase 0 development can continue unimpeded.Work continues in ironing out the details of the modified Phase 1 proposal.Quiet client development focused on eth1 -> eth2 infrastructure, general hardening for production, and optimizations. Tonkatsu Release As promised on the latest eth2 call, we pushed things forward to release v0.9.0 release — Tonkatsu. This release is largely simplifying with respect to Phase 0. The goal here is to remove any portions of Phase 0 that are opinionated about Phase 1 to ensure Phase 0…

For the first time ever, the Ethereum Foundation will be sponsoring a range of hacker prizes related to Eth2 at a major hackathon. With Eth2 development proceeding rapidly, there are now many discrete areas of work that a team of motivated hackers can complete over a weekend. The bounties below include useful educational tools for Eth2 development, necessary tooling, and valuable research. Members of Eth2 teams will be available remotely during the hackathon to answer questions from hackers and provide advice related to these prizes. The EF will offer 5 prizes of $1,000 each, for projects that tackle any (or…

Welcome to the third installment of eth2 quick update. tldr; Harden fork choice defences in response to auditsIntroducing challenges.ethereum.orgHerumi grant for a super-fast BLS implementation Fork choice defenses This week, we hardened the defenses of the Phase 0 fork choice rule. Much of our time is spent analyzing eth2 to ensure that the system can remain stable even under adverse conditions (e.g. a large attacker, a major network outage or partition, etc). With any large engineering project, the aim is to find as many potential issues and harden against these scenarios prior to release. This is why we’ve engaged with…

⭐ Introducing Ethereum Studio Today we’re excited to release v 1.0 of Ethereum Studio: a simple web-based IDE, which lives right on ethereum.org One of the most consistent suggestions we’ve received for Ethereum.org is to improve the developer experience. While the site pointed users to extensive third-party resources, it lacked a compelling path that would pull a developer towards immediately trying out Ethereum. Ethereum Studio’s purpose is to let developers get started building on Ethereum within minutes, with as little friction as possible. Studio lets users: Write and test smart contracts in the browserConnect smart contracts to a front-end web…

The Taipei Ethereum Meetup recently hosted Crosslink Taiwan 2019. It was a wonderful event and a perfect opportunity for the Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) to provide a Taiwan-specific wave of grants! The recipients are as follows. 🍍 Group 1: Ethereum-based Technical Projects: USD$5,000 awarded to each project Eauth (License: MIT): An OAuth-compatible service based on Ethereum credentials to authenticate users on a website.Ethereum Wallet SDK (License: LGPL-3.0): An SDK enabling Dapps to connect with different wallets.SOLL (License: Apache-2.0): A new compiler for generating Ewasm code from Solidity code. The ceremony at Crosslink Taiwan. The pineapple is a pun…

Introducing the Ecosystem Support Program In the beginning, most Ethereum-related development and research occurred within the Ethereum Foundation. Today, the Ethereum ecosystem has grown from a small garden to a vast, vibrant rainforest. Along the way, the Ethereum Foundation’s role within the ecosystem has changed almost as much. However, supporting Ethereum to the best of our ability has remained constant as our number one goal. From DEV Grants, to scalability-focused grants), to general purpose support, grants have long been a large part of how we support Ethereum. Increasing the leverage of our grants program has compounding benefits. Accordingly, it’s one…

The Ethereum network will be undergoing a scheduled upgrade at block number 9,069,000, which is predicted to occur on Saturday, December 7, 2019. The exact date is subject to change due to variable block times and timezones. Please upgrade your node before Sunday, December 1, 2019 to account for the variable block times Ethernodes.org has kindly provided Istanbul node statistics and a countdown timer located at https://ethernodes.org/istanbul. etherscan.io has provided a countdown timer located at https://etherscan.io/block/countdown/9069000. You can monitor the network upgrade in real time at http://forkmon.ethdevops.io/. What is Istanbul? Istanbul is the name given to this network upgrade. Previous…

Welcome to the fourth installment of eth2 quick update. There are a lot of moving pieces to talk about this week. Other than the heroic eth2 client development going on, these are the highlights: tldr; Differential fuzzing grant Sigma Prime has been awarded a grant to lead the differential fuzzing effort for eth2 clients. This effort is critical to the success of launching a multi-client network by aiding in catching consensus issues prior to mainnet. The act of “fuzzing” is the act of throwing many random inputs at a piece of software to see how it reacts. When fuzzing a…

Thanks to Danny and Joe for review. As the launch of the beacon chain grows nearer and eth2 becomes ever more final, the time has come to fast-sync the community with the latest on the inner workings of eth2 and on the concrete requirements, incentives and experience of being a validator. This article will provide a high-level overview of eth2 which will form the basis for a series on all aspects of eth2 relevant to validators. eth2 has been in the works for a long time now and has improved dramatically over the years. What were initially separate sharding and…