Author: Sophia Brown
Ethereum can be simple enough to understand from a bird’s-eye view: Decentralized applications powered by the same sort of crypto-economic guarantees that underpin Bitcoin. But once you’ve zoomed in to, say, a street-level view, things get complicated rapidly. Even assuming one has a strong grasp on proof-of-work, it’s not immediately clear how that translates to a blockchain doing more than keeping track of everyone’s unspent transaction outputs. Bitcoin uses computational work to decentralize money. Ethereum uses computational work to decentralize abstract computation. Wut? That abstraction is called the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and it’s the centerpiece of the Ethereum protocol, because…
Your browser does not support the video tag. Today we’re excited to celebrate a huge milestone – Ethereum.org now supports 30 languages! 🎉🎉🎉 Since we launched the Website Translation Program seven months ago, we’ve seen how decentralized collaboration can result in a significant impact in the ecosystem, benefiting hundreds of thousands of community members around the world. As of today, 467 volunteers from 52 language groups have helped make ethereum.org accessible to non-English speaking communities in their mother tongues. Thanks to these volunteers, 16% of all traffic to ethereum.org is now directed towards non-English versions of the site. Over time,…
Five years ago today, Ethereum’s genesis block marked the official network launch. Today, most members of the community spend their time thinking about all of the work that’s left to be done, but it’s also important to recognize on this fifth anniversary of Ethereum’s launch just how unbelievably far we have all come, what a wild adventure every twist and turn has been, and how much all of us (and the technology) have grown. There were times when some hoped that the protocol would just run as intended, or that builders might try to launch the first applications, that users…
All eyes on Medalla testnet — genesis in less than 24 hours 👀 tl;dr Medalla testnet launches tomorrow 🏅 The minimum validator deposits (16k+ of them) required to kick off the Medalla testnet were met on Friday, which means the genesis of this testnet is set to happen at 1596546008 Unix time, or 8 seconds after August 4th at 1pm UTC. If you’re curious as to how that time is calculated, check out Ben Edgington’s quick genesis explainer. The launch of Medalla is a huge milestone in the development of eth2 — if Medalla proves stable, mainnet launch is next…
Hey Ethereum community! It’s been a few months since our last update so it’s about time we let you know what’s been happening over at ethereum.org. First up, we’re now using Gatsby Under the hood at ethereum.org we’ve switched from Vuepress to Gatsby. Now, this won’t be immediately obvious to anyone visiting the website but it’s going to help us scale ethereum.org. Our team prefers React (a lot of people do) and has experience with MDX – so we should be able to ship better content, faster. If you’re up-to-date on your Eth2 timeline, you could say that Gatsby is…
Today, we (the Devcon organizing team) are excited to make public a new way to get involved in next year’s event, and one that should make Devcon an experience that better represents Ethereum as a whole. Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs) are a new tool to involve collaborative community input from across the ecosystem. They are aimed at improving the Devcon experience by formalizing a process to get your ideas heard and integrated into the event. Why now? In previous posts, we’ve touched on doing more to represent the entire Ethereum ecosystem at Devcon. However, doing so at any one event…
Since transitioning into the Ecosystem Support Program from EF Grants, we’ve talked about defining “support” more comprehensively, thinking beyond simple grant funding. But what does a more comprehensive definition of support actually mean? In practice, it means something different for every project, and it starts with a conversation. ESP was conceived to make a wide range of EF’s resources more accessible to the community, which starts with making our process accessible to anyone who might need support. We take the time to think critically about every inquiry, understand the project and explore ways we might be able to help. Of…
*Disclaimer: None of this is meant as a slight against any client in particular. There is a high likelihood that each client and possibly even the specification has its own oversights and bugs. Eth2 is a complicated protocol, and the people implementing it are only human. The point of this article is to highlight how and why the risks are mitigated.* With the launch of the Medalla testnet, people were encouraged to experiment with different clients. And right from genesis, we saw why: Nimbus and Lodestar nodes were unable to cope with the workload of a full testnet and got…
This week we’re revising the Tech Tree to reflect some new major milestones to Ethereum 1.x R&D that are not quite a complete realization of Stateless Ethereum, but much more reasonably attainable in the mid-term. The most significant addition to the tech tree is Alexey’s reGenesis proposal. This is far from a well-specified upgrade, but the general sentiment from R&D is that reGenesis offers a less dramatic yet much more attainable step towards the ultimate goal of the “fully stateless” vision. In many ways complimentary to reGenesis is a static state network that would help distribute state snapshots and historical…
Farmer minds his crops An optimistic outlook The fields are aflame tl;dr Medalla chugging along smoothlyClient diversity is a musteth1+eth2 (Phase 1.5 aka The Merge) end-to-end demoTesting and audits continue as we approach Phase 0 launch Medalla looking good (after some fun) A quiet testnet is a suspicious testnet. If you’ve followed Medalla at all in the past few weeks, you’ll be very aware of the major 5-day incident that occured on Friday, August 14th. Check out Prysm’s post-mortem for details on the technicals and timeline, and Ben’s recent blog posts ([1][2]) for a high-level analysis. Client teams worked through…