Author: Michael Johnson

Altair is here; the Merge is coming. tl;dr Altair upgrade, Oct 27 Altair, the first mainnet upgrade to the Beacon Chain, has been scheduled for epoch 74240 (Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC). A subtle but great advantage of proof-of-stake is that we can precisely time upgrades (Sorry Tim! We’ll be done with proof-of-work soon 😉) This upgrade brings light-client support to the core consensus, cleans up beacon state incentive accounting, fixes some issues with validator incentives, and steps up the punitive params as per EIP-2982. Huge shout-out to client teams for their work on this throughout the year 🙌 Keep…

The ethereum.org Translation Program has been live for over two years, and we are excited to share a couple of milestones we have hit since its inception, as well as some of our plans for the future. Since we launched the initiative in 2019, over 2,000 community members have contributed, translating a total of 2.8 million words so far! Thanks to all this activity, ethereum.org is now available in 37 different languages. While English continues to be the primary language viewed on the site (88% of total page views), traffic to translated pages is growing as well and has more…

The Altair beacon chain upgrade is ready to be activated on the Ethereum mainnet. The upgrade will go live at epoch 74240 (Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC). Client Versions In order to be compatible with the Altair upgrade, beacon node operators must update the client version that they run. If you run a validator, you must upgrade to continue to follow the mainnet beacon chain. Failure to do so will result in downtime penalties. The versions listed below are support the mainnet Altair upgrade. EDIT: The following table has been edited to reference the latest Altair client releases prior to…

Earlier this year, the Rayonism hackathon kicked off to protoype the architecture for Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake. The transition, often refered to as The Merge, will keep the existing beacon chain (eth2) and execution layer (eth1) clients, and “merge” both chains by making the beacon chain drive the execution layer’s consensus. This approach is the most recent in a series of iterations to the Ethereum roadmap (more on that here). While Rayonism proved that this was a sound architecture, there were still several things left to design, implement and test, including the actual proof of work (PoW) to…

tl;dr Altair is fast approaching. Upgrade your nodes! Now! 🚨Upgrade to Altair before Oct 27🚨 As mentioned in the previous Finalized post, Altair is scheduled to go live at epoch 74240 — Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC. See the Altair Mainnet Announcement for details on who, how, and why. Suffice it to say here that the upgrade is in approximately one week, so the time to upgrade your node is now. If you run a validator on the beacon chain, you must upgrade before the Altair upgrade epoch or else you will experience downtime penalties. Note: 4 of the 5…

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! SSZ.dev: Technical Specs and Resources for SSZ – SimpleSerialize In preparing for the move to Proof of Stake, Ethereum’s core developers have taken the opportunity to revamp some elements of the Ethereum protocol. This was the case with SSZ, or Simple SerialiZe, the canonical serialization format for Ethereum’s PoS…

This issue of Finalized is dedicated to the contextualization of a recently published paper describing three possible attacks on Ethereum’s proof-of-stake algorithm. tl;dr These are serious attacks with a formally-analyzed, technically-simple mitigation. A fix will be rolled out prior to the Merge and will not delay Merge timelines. Forkchoice attacks, mitigations, and timelines There has recently been quite a bit of chatter around a newly published paper co-authored by a team at Stanford and some EF researchers. This paper made public three liveness and reorg attacks on the beacon chain’s consensus mechanism without providing any mitigations or any contextualization of…

Devcon is coming in 2022 (along with something new 🤫), but ahead of our next event updates, we invite you to check out a completely refreshed Devcon archive. Meet the new Devcon Archive Devcon’s impact goes beyond just the physical event, and with that in mind, we’ve completely revamped the Devcon archive. Changes include an improved UX, better discoverability of content, reduced reliance on YouTube, more decentralized content via IPFS, and community involvement in curation. Through all of this, we hope Devcon can continue to be an unparalleled educational resource to learn about the past, present, and future of the…

Community & educationEthereum Cat HerdersCommunity group supporting Ethereum core developers with project management, communication and coordination.Community & educationEthCCEthereum FranceDeveloper and community conference held in Paris, France.Community & educationEthereum HNGrassroots Ethereum community group organizing meetups, workshops and developer events in Honduras.Community & educationEther University Content and Educational ResourcesNathan LeungCommunity-building and educational resources for undergraduate students participating in the ETH Summer learning program.Community & educationETHUni: ETH Spring Community DevelopmentScott Moses SunartoCommunity building and support for the ETH Spring undergraduate learning program, plus formatting and migration of content to the ETH Spring website for public consumption.Community & educationETHUni: ETH SummerTherese Cresalia and Scott…

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…