Author: Sophia Brown
With this blog post, the intention is to officially disclose a severe threat against the Ethereum platform, which was a clear and present danger up until the Berlin hardfork. State Let’s begin with some background on Ethereum and State. The Ethereum state consists of a patricia-merkle trie, a prefix-tree. This post won’t go into it in too much detail, suffice to say that as the state grows, the branches in this tree become more dense. Each added account is another leaf. Between the root of the tree, and the leaf itself, there are a number of “intermediate” nodes. In order…
TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy post merge. Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which brings a myriad of improvements that have been theorized for years. But now that the Beacon chain has been running for a few months, we can actually dig into the numbers. One area that we’re excited to explore involves new energy-use estimates, as we end the process of expending a country’s worth of energy on consensus. There aren’t any concrete statistics on energy consumption (or even what hardware is used) as of yet, so what follows…
Friends, As the Ethereum ecosystem continues to grow and mature at break-neck speeds, we continue to work hard on delivering an amazing Devcon 6. Though the timing is still unclear as to when we’ll all be able to reunite in Bogota, we want to keep our community involved along the Road to Devcon! In an effort to do this, we’re announcing Road to Devcon Quests! What are Quests? Road to Devcon Quests are periodic engagements for our community to continually collaborate, contribute, and learn. For each Quest, you’ll have the opportunity to earn a POAP badge representing your participation —…
Steady progress tl;dr Altair progress Altair, the first planned upgrade of the Beacon Chain, continues to make steady progress. Last week, we released Beacon Chain spec v1.1.0-alpha.6 — Protostellar Evolution. While this is an alpha release, barring a security or practical engineering concern, the spec is unlikely to change from here on in. Client teams are busy as they pass consensus test vectors and stand up short-lived testnets. Teams will make timeline decisions in the next few weeks as Altair code changes stablize and initial multi-client interop is performed. If you want to learn more about the upgrades coming to…
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! GSN GSN (Gas Station Network) provides a decentralized infrastructure for dapp builders to decrease friction in their UX by abstracting away transaction costs. A network of relayers make “collect calls” to paymaster contracts which can implement any logic for gas payment conditions. A dapp developer could choose to cover…
The long-anticipated London upgrade is now ready for deployement on the Ethereum testnets! The upgrade will first go live on Ropsten, at block 10499401, which is expected to happen around June 24, 2021. This upgrade follows Berlin, which was activated only a few months ago on the Ethereum mainnet. By starting the work on London while Berlin was being rolled out, client teams were able to release this network upgrade at record speed! The upgrade includes the following EIPs: The Ethereum Cat Herders have put out a blog post going over the details of these EIPs. It is worth noting…
Community & educationChina ecosystem developmentETHPlanetSupport for ETHPlanet’s ecosystem building initiatives in China, including working with students and universities, events, community organization, and educational resources.Community & educationDE-FERENCEDecipherResearch and discussion-focused blockchain conference run by Decipher, a blockchain society at Seoul National University.Community & educationDevspace Virtual HackathonComputer Society of IndiaStudent-run hackathon organized by the Computer Society of India, targeting developers, researchers and students.Community & educationETHGlobalVirtual and in-person hackathons focused on building the Ethereum developer community through learning opportunities and hands-on support for hackers.Community & educationInformational websitesDeployment of a series of easily digestible, informational and educational websites about the Ethereum ecosystemCommunity & educationRussian-speaking ecosystem…
Community organizers are the glue that holds the Ethereum ecosystem together, and whether they’re leading large-scale events, local meetups, hackathons or seminars, we might all be wandering in the dark forest of the analog world without them. But where’s the fun in relying on chance encounters with kindred spirits identified by a telltale laptop sticker, or that indefinable air of cryptocool? Although major events tend to generate more buzz, not everyone can travel halfway across the world for a conference. Smaller events play a crucial role in making Ethereum inclusive, accessible and cohesive: anyone with an internet connection and a…
Important Update On July 21, 2021, a consensus issue was identified on the Ropsten network, where the go-ethereum, Erigon and Nethermind implementations had different transaction validation logic than Besu and OpenEthereum. New versions of the affected clients have been released and are linked in the “Client Versions” table below. The block number for London is unchanged, and still is 12 965 000. Node operators using an affected client MUST upgrade to the latest version. An overview of the issue is provided in the “Ropsten Consensus Issue” section. London After a successful testnet deployement, the London upgrade is now ready to…
tl;dr Upgrade for London, yes you! The hotly anticipated upgrade to Ethereum mainnet — London — has a fork block scheduled, and mainnet client releases are out. As mentioned before, to allow for validator deposits, the beacon chain validators come to consensus on the state of the proof-of-work chain and process deposits sequentially from there. To maintain this link, all mainnet validators must upgrade their proof-of-work nodes (often called the “eth1 endpoint”). Please see the London announcement for more details. 🚨🚨🚨 Warning 🚨🚨🚨 Due to an issue uncovered last week on the Ropsten testnet (see restrospective), Go-Ethereum (geth), Nethermind, and…