Author: Sophia Brown
Ethereum’s diverse client ecosystem is at the foundation of all that we’re building together. This includes both execution-layer and consensus-layer clients, both of which are essential parts of Ethereum’s post-merge future. Supporting execution-layer (formerly “Eth1”) clients remains one of the Ethereum Foundation’s highest priorities. These client teams have supported Ethereum’s growth over the past several years, and they will continue to provide critical infrastructure for the network post-merge, as Ethereum transitions to a Proof of Stake consensus system. Since January 2020, the EF has spent more than $10M on execution-layer client R&D. Our steadfast support will continue as these teams…
The Road to Altair edition 🛣⭐️ tl;dr Pyrmont forks, testing in progress After a series of small but very valuable Altair devnets, Pyrmont — a large public testnet — upgraded last week. The transition to Altair went off without a hitch, setting the stage for the next wave of testing and upgrades. This week, Pyrmont is being put through the ringer as we run a number of test scenarios on the soon-to-be-deprecated testnet. Don’t panic! At the time of writing, Pyrmont is already 482 epochs without finality with a large share of validators taken offline for a few days. Such…
Does development of the core protocols that power the Ethereum blockchain excite you? Are you interested in getting involved at the most fundemental and technical levels of the Ethereum protocol? I am excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for the second cohort of the Core Developer Apprenticeship Program (CDAP)! What is CDAP My name is Piper Merriam and I’m a core developer. That means that development and maintenance of the Ethereum protocol is part of my job. Lately, protocol development has been accelerating. The “merge” is getting closer every day, the road to achieving “Stateless Ethereum” continues…
Earlier this year, we launched a bug bounty program focused on finding issues in the beacon chain specification, and/or in client implementations (Lighthouse, Nimbus, Teku, Prysm etc…). The results (and vulnerability reports) have been enlightening as have the lessons learned while patching potential issues. In this new series, we aim to explore and share some of the insight we’ve gained from security work to date and as we move forward. This first post will analyze some of the submissions specifically targeting BLS primitives. Disclaimer: All bugs mentioned in this post have been already fixed. BLS is everywhere A few years…
It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees! Imapp for EVM Gas Cost Estimator Gas costs in Ethereum are a constant topic of debate and improvement. The average user only sees what they pay to send a transaction – whether the gas limit is very high, very low or just volatile. But where do those suggested gas…
Altair is here; the Merge is coming. tl;dr Altair upgrade, Oct 27 Altair, the first mainnet upgrade to the Beacon Chain, has been scheduled for epoch 74240 (Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC). A subtle but great advantage of proof-of-stake is that we can precisely time upgrades (Sorry Tim! We’ll be done with proof-of-work soon 😉) This upgrade brings light-client support to the core consensus, cleans up beacon state incentive accounting, fixes some issues with validator incentives, and steps up the punitive params as per EIP-2982. Huge shout-out to client teams for their work on this throughout the year 🙌 Keep…
The ethereum.org Translation Program has been live for over two years, and we are excited to share a couple of milestones we have hit since its inception, as well as some of our plans for the future. Since we launched the initiative in 2019, over 2,000 community members have contributed, translating a total of 2.8 million words so far! Thanks to all this activity, ethereum.org is now available in 37 different languages. While English continues to be the primary language viewed on the site (88% of total page views), traffic to translated pages is growing as well and has more…
The Altair beacon chain upgrade is ready to be activated on the Ethereum mainnet. The upgrade will go live at epoch 74240 (Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC). Client Versions In order to be compatible with the Altair upgrade, beacon node operators must update the client version that they run. If you run a validator, you must upgrade to continue to follow the mainnet beacon chain. Failure to do so will result in downtime penalties. The versions listed below are support the mainnet Altair upgrade. EDIT: The following table has been edited to reference the latest Altair client releases prior to…
Earlier this year, the Rayonism hackathon kicked off to protoype the architecture for Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake. The transition, often refered to as The Merge, will keep the existing beacon chain (eth2) and execution layer (eth1) clients, and “merge” both chains by making the beacon chain drive the execution layer’s consensus. This approach is the most recent in a series of iterations to the Ethereum roadmap (more on that here). While Rayonism proved that this was a sound architecture, there were still several things left to design, implement and test, including the actual proof of work (PoW) to…
tl;dr Altair is fast approaching. Upgrade your nodes! Now! 🚨Upgrade to Altair before Oct 27🚨 As mentioned in the previous Finalized post, Altair is scheduled to go live at epoch 74240 — Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC. See the Altair Mainnet Announcement for details on who, how, and why. Suffice it to say here that the upgrade is in approximately one week, so the time to upgrade your node is now. If you run a validator on the beacon chain, you must upgrade before the Altair upgrade epoch or else you will experience downtime penalties. Note: 4 of the 5…