Author: Olivia Martinez

Hey Ethereum community! It’s been a few months since our last update so it’s about time we let you know what’s been happening over at ethereum.org. First up, we’re now using Gatsby Under the hood at ethereum.org we’ve switched from Vuepress to Gatsby. Now, this won’t be immediately obvious to anyone visiting the website but it’s going to help us scale ethereum.org. Our team prefers React (a lot of people do) and has experience with MDX – so we should be able to ship better content, faster. If you’re up-to-date on your Eth2 timeline, you could say that Gatsby is…

Today, we (the Devcon organizing team) are excited to make public a new way to get involved in next year’s event, and one that should make Devcon an experience that better represents Ethereum as a whole. Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs) are a new tool to involve collaborative community input from across the ecosystem. They are aimed at improving the Devcon experience by formalizing a process to get your ideas heard and integrated into the event. Why now? In previous posts, we’ve touched on doing more to represent the entire Ethereum ecosystem at Devcon. However, doing so at any one event…

Since transitioning into the Ecosystem Support Program from EF Grants, we’ve talked about defining “support” more comprehensively, thinking beyond simple grant funding. But what does a more comprehensive definition of support actually mean? In practice, it means something different for every project, and it starts with a conversation. ESP was conceived to make a wide range of EF’s resources more accessible to the community, which starts with making our process accessible to anyone who might need support. We take the time to think critically about every inquiry, understand the project and explore ways we might be able to help. Of…

*Disclaimer: None of this is meant as a slight against any client in particular. There is a high likelihood that each client and possibly even the specification has its own oversights and bugs. Eth2 is a complicated protocol, and the people implementing it are only human. The point of this article is to highlight how and why the risks are mitigated.* With the launch of the Medalla testnet, people were encouraged to experiment with different clients. And right from genesis, we saw why: Nimbus and Lodestar nodes were unable to cope with the workload of a full testnet and got…

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…