Author: Olivia Martinez

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…

Cboe has submitted a 19b-4 filing to be allowed to list and trade options on spot Ethereum ETFs. The proposal follows high demand for Ethereum ETFs. NYSE American has made a similar proposal though it is yet to receive SEC approval. The Cboe BZX Exchange has officially submitted a 19b-4 filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), seeking approval to list and trade options on spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This move signifies a pivotal step for Cboe towards expanding investor access to Ethereum, mirroring the growing demand within the cryptocurrency market. Cboe seeks to expand its investment…

Community & educationAleph de VeranoCrecimiento2-week event in Buenos Aires, Argentina featuring a ZK and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) bootcamp, hackathon, demo day, and talks on DeFi, infrastructure, governance, and regulation.Community & educationAleph ZK Week3-day conference hosted during the Aleph pop-up city in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that provided a deep dive into programmable cryptography, multi-party computation (MPC), FHE, and decentralized identity systems.Community & educationAlgebraic Aspects in the Design and Cryptanalysis of Modern Symmetric Cryptography (ALPSY) 2025Research workshop that unites experts in arithmetic oriented symmetric-key primitives and their cryptanalysis to foster collaborations on significant research problems, including special sessions on Poseidon.Community &…

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.…