Author: Sophia Brown

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! SSZ.dev: Technical Specs and Resources for SSZ – SimpleSerialize In preparing for the move to Proof of Stake, Ethereum’s core developers have taken the opportunity to revamp some elements of the Ethereum protocol. This was the case with SSZ, or Simple SerialiZe, the canonical serialization format for Ethereum’s PoS…

This issue of Finalized is dedicated to the contextualization of a recently published paper describing three possible attacks on Ethereum’s proof-of-stake algorithm. tl;dr These are serious attacks with a formally-analyzed, technically-simple mitigation. A fix will be rolled out prior to the Merge and will not delay Merge timelines. Forkchoice attacks, mitigations, and timelines There has recently been quite a bit of chatter around a newly published paper co-authored by a team at Stanford and some EF researchers. This paper made public three liveness and reorg attacks on the beacon chain’s consensus mechanism without providing any mitigations or any contextualization of…

Devcon is coming in 2022 (along with something new 🤫), but ahead of our next event updates, we invite you to check out a completely refreshed Devcon archive. Meet the new Devcon Archive Devcon’s impact goes beyond just the physical event, and with that in mind, we’ve completely revamped the Devcon archive. Changes include an improved UX, better discoverability of content, reduced reliance on YouTube, more decentralized content via IPFS, and community involvement in curation. Through all of this, we hope Devcon can continue to be an unparalleled educational resource to learn about the past, present, and future of the…

Community & educationEthereum Cat HerdersCommunity group supporting Ethereum core developers with project management, communication and coordination.Community & educationEthCCEthereum FranceDeveloper and community conference held in Paris, France.Community & educationEthereum HNGrassroots Ethereum community group organizing meetups, workshops and developer events in Honduras.Community & educationEther University Content and Educational ResourcesNathan LeungCommunity-building and educational resources for undergraduate students participating in the ETH Summer learning program.Community & educationETHUni: ETH Spring Community DevelopmentScott Moses SunartoCommunity building and support for the ETH Spring undergraduate learning program, plus formatting and migration of content to the ETH Spring website for public consumption.Community & educationETHUni: ETH SummerTherese Cresalia and Scott…

The Ethereum network will be undergoing a scheduled upgrade at block number 13,773,000, which is predicted to occur on Wednesday, December 8, 2021. The exact date is subject to change due to variable block times and timezones. Please upgrade your node before Sunday, December 5, 2021 to account for the variable block times. What is Arrow Glacier? The Arrow Glacier network upgrade, similarly to Muir Glacier, changes the parameters of the Ice Age/Difficulty Bomb, pushing it back several months. This has also been done in the Byzantium, Constantinople and London network upgrades. No other changes are introduced as part of…

The Ethereum Foundation is allocating 1 million USD in grant funding to organizations that educate governments and policymakers about Ethereum and blockchain technology. We encourage others in the Ethereum community to support their important work. A space to grow, and to do good We understand that transformative technologies raise new questions for regulators and governments. However, regulators must strike a balance between protecting their constituents from bad actors and fraud while also supporting the growth of new industries. The Ethereum community can have a positive role in this process, by providing information and resources to policymakers and governments. The good…

tl;dr Kintsugi🍵 in progress At the start of November, the Kintsugi🍵 month-long Merge sprint began! Kintsugi specs and milestones/plans were released, and now client teams are deep into the sprint with an aim to launch a persistent testnet in the first week of December. Kintsugi specs incorporate all of the learnings and minor adjustments from the Amphora interop. The Kintsugi November sprint, then, is an effort to (1) incorporate the new changeset and (2) refine and productionize Merge implementations. Kintsugi will culminate in the launch of a persistent multi-client testnet to run through the December holidays and serve as the…

Since 2019, we have supported UNICEF’s CryptoFund with recurring contributions, and we are excited about our most recent donation too. Today, I would like to share the story of our journey together, to recognize some of the achievements of our partnership, and to speak a bit more about what’s next. Why and how we started In a previous blog post, I explained how emerging economies represent a huge opportunity for Ethereum, and talked about the importance of asking ourselves “who would most benefit from Ethereum?” People living in emerging economies represent billions of next-generation users and developers of Ethereum. The…

Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake — The Merge — is near: devnets are being stood up, specifications are being finalized and community outreach has begun in earnest. The Merge is designed to have minimal impact on how Ethereum operates for end users, smart contracts and dapps. That said, there are some minor changes worth highlighting. Before we dive into them, here are a few links to provide context about the overall Merge architecture: The rest of this post will assume the reader is familiar with the above. For those wanting to dig even deeper, the full specifications for The…

A Verkle tree is a commitment scheme that works similar to a Merkle tree, but has much smaller witnesses. It works by replacing the hashes in a Merkle tree with a vector commitment, which makes wider branching factors more efficient. Thanks to Kevaundray Wedderburn for feedback on the post. Overview For details on how verkle trees work, see: The aim of this post is to explain the concrete layout of the draft verkle tree EIP. It is aimed at client developers who want to implement verkle trees and are looking for an introduction before delving deeper into the EIP. Verkle…