Author: Sophia Brown
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…
Community and EducationAkomba Education InitiativeOn-chain certification framework, and development of modular learning resources and accredited courses using this framework.akomba.com/Community and EducationCougerEducational initiative creating working groups and corporate meetups/workshops to discuss and develop open standards and proofs of concept.Community and EducationFOSS RespondersEvent organized by Open Software Foundation to help connect open source projects and teams affected by COVID-19 with funding opportunities in various open source ecosystems.fossresponders.comCryptography and ZKPSTARK-related explorationsResearch and development on Distaff, a zero-knowledge virtual machine written in Rust which automatically generates a STARK-based proofs of execution, including progress toward Turing-completeness.github.com/GuildOfWeavers/distaffCryptography and ZKPzk-SUMMERProgram for students to learn about and build…
Can’t travel these days Miss the people, not the planes Spadina, not Spain tl;dr Spadina “dress rehearsal” just around the corner We realize that both the engineers and the community could use one more public testnet launch before mainnet to run through the motions. At the same time, we want to avoid disrupting Medalla’s momentum. We’ve therefore opted for a shortlived dress rehearsal that will run in parallel to Medalla later this month. Welcome Spadina! Spadina will be a (primarily) mainnet configuration testnet with a 3 day end-of-life (EOL). The main objective is to give us all another chance to…
📣 Last chance to practice genesis before mainnet 📣 tl;dr Announcing Spadina Launchpad As of today, the Spadina Launchpad is live 🎉 If you are unfamiliar — Spadina is a rapid-fire dress-rehearsal eth2 testnet to be launched on September 29th with a 3 day end-of-life. If you’re interested in testing out your deposit and genesis chops one last time before mainnet launch, then Spadina is for you — submit deposits today! Check out the quick update from last week for more discussion on the what and why of Spadina. If this is your first eth2 testnet, be sure to check…
Oh you, Spadina, Finally, finality Hello and farewell tl;dr A quick Spadina postmortemNew testnet: Zinken. Launchpad is live; Genesis deposits due in one week! Spadina Postmortem The Spadina testnet dress rehearsal launched this past Tuesday. Although Spadina is now healthy and finalizing, the launch was not as smooth sailing as it could have been. Validator participation started very low, and it took ~70 epochs (almost 8 hours) to get up to the 2/3 participation threshold needed for the chain to finalize. Since then however, the chain has actually been remarkably stable. At first, we thought this lack of early finality…
Hey Ethereum community! We last spoke August 5 – how you been? We’re here to talk about something fresh we’ve shipped. Maybe you’ve already noticed, but we’ve got a new Developers section. For a long time, this content was a wall of links to products you might find helpful when building a dapp. We provided very little context and left a lot of connecting the dots up to you. We thought we could do better. Technical information about Ethereum is often fragmented, which can be a barrier for new developers who are trying to get their bearings. Getting to grips…
Contract deployment Genesis deposits Bootstrap consensus tl;dr v1.0 specs released 🚀 v1.0 spec release Today, we released v1.0 of the eth2 specs, including the mainnet deposit contract address — 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa. eth2 will have a MIN_GENESIS_TIME of 1606824000 (or for those of you who don’t think in unix time — December 1, 2020, 12pm UTC). To trigger genesis at this time, there must be at least 16384 32-ETH validator deposits 7 days prior to December 1. If not, genesis will be triggered 7 days after this threshold has been met (whenever that may be). For a more detailed discussion of how…
Summary Versions of geth built with Go <1.15.5 or <1.14.12 are most likely affected by a critical DoS-related security vulnerability. The golang team has registered this flaw as ‘CVE-2020-28362’. We recommend all users to rebuild (ideally v1.9.24) with Go 1.15.5 or 1.14.12, to avoid node crashes. Alternatively, if you are running binaries distributed via one of our official channels, we’re going to release v1.9.24 ourselves built with Go 1.15.5. Docker images will most probably be out of date due to a missing base image, but you can check the release notes on how to temporarily build one with Go 1.15.5.…
tl;dr This week the EF announced the Eth2 Staking Community Grants round in an effort to support a more delightful staking experience. This is an open call for proposals for grants that aim to enhance all things staking — tools, documentation, educational resources, etc. Check it out for more details including a non-exhaustive wishlist. Proposals are due by December 22nd! v1.0 eth2 testnets — Toledo and Pyrmont This week, client developers led by protolambda launched the Toledo devnet — a 16k validator testnet with v1.0 mainnet configuration. Although you can sync up your favorite node to this testnet, you cannot…