Author: Olivia Martinez
📣 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…
Hey Ethereum community! We last spoke August 5 – how you been? We’re here to talk about something fresh we’ve shipped. Maybe you’ve already noticed, but we’ve got a new Developers section. For a long time, this content was a wall of links to products you might find helpful when building a dapp. We provided very little context and left a lot of connecting the dots up to you. We thought we could do better. Technical information about Ethereum is often fragmented, which can be a barrier for new developers who are trying to get their bearings. Getting to grips…
Contract deployment Genesis deposits Bootstrap consensus tl;dr v1.0 specs released 🚀 v1.0 spec release Today, we released v1.0 of the eth2 specs, including the mainnet deposit contract address — 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa. eth2 will have a MIN_GENESIS_TIME of 1606824000 (or for those of you who don’t think in unix time — December 1, 2020, 12pm UTC). To trigger genesis at this time, there must be at least 16384 32-ETH validator deposits 7 days prior to December 1. If not, genesis will be triggered 7 days after this threshold has been met (whenever that may be). For a more detailed discussion of how…
Summary Versions of geth built with Go <1.15.5 or <1.14.12 are most likely affected by a critical DoS-related security vulnerability. The golang team has registered this flaw as ‘CVE-2020-28362’. We recommend all users to rebuild (ideally v1.9.24) with Go 1.15.5 or 1.14.12, to avoid node crashes. Alternatively, if you are running binaries distributed via one of our official channels, we’re going to release v1.9.24 ourselves built with Go 1.15.5. Docker images will most probably be out of date due to a missing base image, but you can check the release notes on how to temporarily build one with Go 1.15.5.…
tl;dr This week the EF announced the Eth2 Staking Community Grants round in an effort to support a more delightful staking experience. This is an open call for proposals for grants that aim to enhance all things staking — tools, documentation, educational resources, etc. Check it out for more details including a non-exhaustive wishlist. Proposals are due by December 22nd! v1.0 eth2 testnets — Toledo and Pyrmont This week, client developers led by protolambda launched the Toledo devnet — a 16k validator testnet with v1.0 mainnet configuration. Although you can sync up your favorite node to this testnet, you cannot…
The EF is excited to announce the results of the Medalla data challenge, a data hackathon focused on the Medalla testnet ✨ The prompt was open-ended: we asked for data tools, visualizations, and analyses of testnet data; in short, anything that would help the community make sense of all the data. Over the course of six weeks we received 23 submissions from a wide variety of teams. We were pleased to see high quality submissions for every category. Prizes are divided into three tiers based on scope, extensibility, and usefulness to the community. 🥇 Gold ($15k prize) Jim McDonald –…
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 projects that are well underway – or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achievements by grantees! Where applicable, the grant recipient is listed first, followed by the project for which the grant was awarded. Fuel Labs for Optimistic Rollup R&D, SparsENS Fuel Labs is best known for their work on a UTXO-based design for scalable, trust-minimized optimistic rollups. This multitasking team is also developing SparsENS, a stateless ENS…
Community & educationBlockchainsForSchoolsSponsorship of BlockchainsForHacks, an ideation challenge for high school and college students to create innovative projects using blockchain technology.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsHubbleContinued funding for work on an optimistic rollup hub allowing creation of any rollup chain simply by writing a solidity function.Cryptography & zero knowledge proofsZkopru (zk-optimistic-rollup)Layer-2 scaling solution for private transactions using zk-SNARKs and optimistic rollup. Github: https://github.com/zkopru-network/zkopruCryptography & zero knowledge proofsDark ForestGame theorietic research completed by a group of Stanford students on using zk-SNARKs to construct “incomplete information” environments where users can keep a private state while publicly submitting verifiably valid actions. Dark Forest was…
While everyone is staring in amazement on December 1st, 12pm UTC anticipating the Eth 2.0 Beaconchain genesis, within the JavaScript team we quietly prepared our own little genesis release in the shadows. Being very much around the good ol’ Eth 1.0 chain we are nevertheless very much excited on this too. 😀 Some background story: the EthereumJS ecosystem around the VM consists of a very modular set of libraries (vm, blockchain, merkle-patricia-tree, tx,…), each encapsulating its own dedicated set of functionality. While this is great for the user, it turned out to be not so great for development since it…