Author: Sophia Brown

In Sub-Saharan Africa, only 3% of 48 million smallholder farmers are insured. Owning 1 acre of land and earning approximately $1.40 per person per day characterize a smallholder farmer. Smallholder farmers often own a mixture of cash crops and subsistence or non-commercial farming; and, they lack the financial and technological resources of large-scale industrial farms. As extreme weather events become ever more frequent due to climate change, one flood or drought can push such farmers into the spiraling cycle of poverty without protection by means of crop insurance. The following is an update from Ethereum Foundation Fellow Benson Njuguna. Benson…

Note: this post was updated on April 4, 2022 to include a full copy of the Client Incentive Program details. A diverse set of clients is key to the Ethereum network’s health and decentralization. Diversity ensures that innovation continues at the base layer of the protocol, that the network is resilient in the face of potential attacks or bugs, and that a broad set of participants are engaged in debating potential changes to core protocol. While clients provide an essential service to the network (without them, there is no network!), it has historically been difficult for them to capture value.…

It’s been a little while, and we’ve got some news. 👋 It’s happening! 👋 After being cooped up for the last years, it’s exciting to finally say that Devcon 6 will take place in the first half of Q4-2022 in Bogota, Colombia. We know that Devcon has a special spot in everyone’s heart (ours too!), and we can’t wait to share more information very soon (stay tuned!). In the meantime, the Road to Devcon continues with another project that we’ve been working on recently. Meet a little something new Devconnect is a week-long gathering in Amsterdam that will feature independent…

Since returning from the Amphora merge workshop, client teams have been hard at work implementing the latest versions of merge specifications and testing them on devnets. After four ephemeral devnets, Kintsugi 🍵, a longer-lived public testnet, is now live! Although client development and UX continue to be refined, we encourage the community to start using Kintsugi to familiarize themselves with Ethereum in a post-merge context. For application developers, as previously explained, not much will change. Tooling which only interacts with either the consensus or execution layer is also largely unaffected. Infrastructure which depends on both layers is most likely to…

We all have a lot to be thankful for this holiday season, from the first birthday of the beacon chain, to the successful upgrades over the past year and the incredible progress across the entire Ethereum ecosystem. As a highly productive year draws to a close, there are a few final gifts to deliver in the form of updates from many (15+!!) EF-supported teams that are always working to improve the network. And there’s a lot of substantive material here, so take some time to sort through the table of contents, and dig in! As always, this roundup series focuses…

High fees have made life difficult for travelers through these Dark Forests. The Pools of Mem once clouded, now clarified by the filter of 1559, reveal that they are not deep enough to sustain. Legends tell of a society flourishing under the abundance brought about by DankShard, of giant Roll-Ups subsisting on fields of nourishing Data Blobs, each supporting their own fractal nutrient layers. To summon DankShard, our guides point us to a Ceremony. All members of the Lands of Ether and abroad are encouraged to contribute. Each will add their unique contribution to the collective and in doing so,…

Ethereum is a protocol undergoing significant changes. Client teams are upgrading the protocol to scale to meet global demand while improving security and decentralization. Beyond protocol development, a critical shift in Ethereum has been the movement away from ‘Eth1’ and ‘Eth2’ terminology. As of late 2021, core developers stopped using the terminology, preferring ‘execution layer’ and ‘consensus layer’, respectively. Today, as highlighted in our Q1 roadmap, ethereum.org makes the same shift. Eth1 → execution layerEth2 → consensus layerExecution layer + consensus layer = Ethereum Let’s explore why. Tl;dr; The terms Eth1 and Eth2 (Ethereum 2.0) are being phased outExecution layer (Eth1) and consensus layer…

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! GASOL (GAS Optimization TooLkit) The COSTA group works on formal techniques, modeling and implementations related to verification and optimization of programs. Members Elvira Albert, Pablo Gordillo and Albert Rubio are applying that expertise to Ethereum smart contracts with GASOL, a framework for optimizing gas consumption. Every Ethereum smart contract…

tl;dr Merge progress — minor spec updates, engineering full steam ahead 🚂No progress in client diversity. Be selfish, run a minority client! Merge update First of all — fantastic work to all of the engineering teams on the Kintsugi sprint, which culminated in the launch of the Kintsugi Merge testnet. It is incredible to see 3 execution clients and 5 consensus clients for a total of 15 different pairings operating on a unified front. Kintsugi🍵, the first long-standing Merge testnet, was not without excitement. The #TestingTheMerge effort hammered the testnet with transactions, bad blocks, and a number of other chaotic…

In our last post, we outlined Devconnect as a week-long gathering that will feature independent Ethereum events, which aim to bring the Ethereum community together in smaller groups to talk, learn about, or make serious progress on specific subjects. Learn more at Devconnect.org Announcing Devconnect Dates Save the date: Devconnect is scheduled to take place in Amsterdam between April 18-25 2022. While we continue to closely monitor evolving COVID-measures in Amsterdam, things are progressing in the right direction, and we’re organizing quickly. With that, we wanted to share a lot more about what you’ll find in Amsterdam. By (and for)…