ECH Roadmap 2023 & Recap 2022
Celebrating the 4th anniversary with the Ethereum community!
Ethereum Cat Herders reached another milestone on Jan 21st, the completion of 4th year of the working group establishment. We are excited to share the experiences gained from the past and a possible roadmap for this year.
- Client Diversity on Ethereum Network
- Network upgrade — Shanghai/Capella Community Call, PEEPanEIP
- Community collaboration — Huddle01, GitPOAP, ETHStaker, Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians
- Meetings — EIP Editing Office Hour, EIPIP, Breakout room meetings
- Learn2Earn with NFT
Roadmap 2023
Client Diversity on Ethereum Network
Client Diversity is important for a truly decentralized blockchain network. At Ethereum, we promote diversity in network sharing. After about 4 months, we aren’t where we’d like to be, especially on the Execution Layer. Numbers are definitely improving, but we hope it can be better.
ECH floated a Client Diversity Survey 2023 to collect feedback from node operators. What do they like/dislike about any client, what do they want to communicate to the client team and what can be done to encourage new users to choose other available client options or maybe run multiple client nodes? If you’re running an Ethereum node, consider responding today!
Support Network Upgrades
Ethereum community has planned for at least two network upgrade this year. Supporting Ethereum protocol development & network upgrade was one of the reasons for the birth of the ECH working group. Since 2019, we have contributed to multiple network upgrades including Beacon chain upgrades, and hope to continue with Shanghai — Capella upgrade expected at the end of Q1 followed by Cancun — Deneb later this year.
Community Calls
ECH’s documenting notes for Shanghai/Capella Community Call started on Jan 20th and hopes to collaborate with EthStakers for a series of community calls planned later this month.
PEEPanEIP
We’ll continue delivering new episodes on PEEPanEIP to help the community learn about the upcoming changes on Ethereum with @EthCatHerders YouTube & Podcast. Follow Shanghai — Capella & Cancun-Deneb playlist for enlightening talks by Ethereum developers.
Learn2Earn with NFT
Learn2Earn was launched in October last year with pilot quizzes providing POAP as a reward for answering all questions correctly. With a great response from the community, we quickly ran out of POAPs for all 4 pilot quizzes. Refilling helped to sustain a few more weeks but considering it not a viable solution in the long run, we came up with Learn2Earn v2 deployed on Polygon to reward NFT to users winning the quizzes. Check out more in the announcement post and take quizzes here to win NFT. Shoutout to George Hervey for his contribution to developing this app.
We hope to add new quizzes to share about the protocol changes with upcoming upgrades.
Huddle01
ECH is committed to supporting decentralized community projects. In an effort to extend support to a Web3 Video Meetings and Infrastructure project, we organized ECH Meeting 100 via Huddle01 instead of Zoom.
GitPOAP for EIP authors
GitPOAP is a popular way to celebrate & incentivize any collaborative effort! Our joint effort aims to award emails, GitHub users, ETH addresses, & ENS Names for contribution to EIPs, Execution & Consensus repositories.
Annual EIP author GitPOAP will be the pilot program to be launched in Q1. With this, we will be able to reward EIP authors whose proposals become an Ethereum standard in 2022. It will be further extended to reward every EIP author with Final EIP in the Ethereum repository.
Onboarding & Community Building
Onboarding new contributors to the Ethereum ecosystem is yet another important goal for us. With bi-weekly ECH meetings, we are encouraging new Discord users to join the call and share their interests and explore different ways to contribute.
EIP Editing Office Hours
In addition to supporting ACDE meetings, ACDC meetings, EIPIP meetings, and EOF Implementers meetings, we will continue facilitating the community’s participation in Ethereum Governance via EIP Editing Office Hour. Starting in August 2022, this is an hour dedicated to answering queries from new and existing EIP authors and helping move proposals to the next status.
It extends support to EIP authors to understand the process and help move the proposal to the next status of EIP standardization. Any EIP author or interested parties may join the call to follow the EIP review with experienced EIP editors. A platform opportunity to ask and resolve questions in this bi-weekly meeting has been greatly appreciated by the community.
Events organizing
Like the past few years, we hope to continue facilitating great speakers from the Ethereum community to represent Ethereum blockchain in different events. As Ethereum Cat Herders, we think it’s important to talk to our community so wherever possible, we will join the events to meet them in person.
Upcoming events
- ETH Denver — EIP Authors meet in association with the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians.
- Interop Summit — Governance session with Danny Ryan, Matt Garnett, and Pooja Ranjan. Anett Rolikova from FEM will be the moderator.
- Consensus — Ethereum Speakers for Protocol Village on the main show floor.
What did we do in 2022?
The first month of the past year also began with celebrating our milestone with the community with a quick recap since 2019.
Communication
The year 2022 will be marked as one of the biggest milestone achievements on the Ethereum blockchain with the long waited to switch to Proof of Stake — The Merge Upgrade.
Information sharing and communication is the key role played by the Cat Herders during a network upgrade. ECH was engaged in communication at multiple levels.
CNBC
Communicating about the benefits of the switch to the Proof of Stake and the process with popular news like CNBC helped share information to mainstream users.
Information sharing is a process and thus ECH were engaged throughout the year with
- Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA)
- Mainnet NYC: Exploring Ethereum with Ethereum cat Herders
- Chainlink: Women in blockchain (Panel discussion)
- ETH Builders NYC & Blockchain NYC
- ETHWMN: Opportunities in Web3
- NFT Web3 Community Service Hour
- ConsenSys: Educational series
- Bankless DAO: Project Management Educational Series
- Meta Gamma Delta: Information sharing session
- Public & Twitter spaces
Community calls and events
ECH New Joiners Meeting
With the addition of the ECH Ops team, we started ECH New Joiners Meeting (monthly) to familiarize new joiners with opportunities available in the Ethereum ecosystem.
🗼EL Upgrade (Client Release) Naming Community Call
The Merge was the first upgrade to be executed on both EL & CL clients simultaneously. Nominations for EL client's specs for Merge were received on the FEM Discussion thread. To have a consensus based on the responses received on the FEM + Twitter Poll and general discussion, ECH organized a breakout room meeting and we got Paris upgrade. 🗼
The Future of Inclusion 3.0
In association with different groups we facilitated, organized & contributed to multiple events, and fellowship programs throughout the year.
The Future of Inclusion 3.0 was our first Women’s day celebration inviting women from niche backgrounds to work in the blockchain ecosystem.
ECH Podcast
William Schwab, a long-time ECH contributor, introduced ECH Podcast with the pilot episode on Innovative Smart Contracts with Andre Cronje. With over 1000 plays in the first month, it was a mega-hit. He subsequently recorded and published (with zkDoof), different talks with Samczsun, Alchemy, Tomasz Stanzcak, Lefteris Karapetas, Tylor Monahan, Tornado Cash, Kristy Leigh, and Chase Chapman. If you missed listening to any, hear them out on your favorite podcast channel at Ethereum Cat Herders Podcast.
On popular demand, in Q2, we started adding a podcast version of the popular video series PEEPanEIP.
EIPs related
PEEPanEIP
We delivered 36 new episodes of our educational video series. For people who aren’t aware, PEEPanEIP is an hour-deep dive into Ethereum Improvement Proposals.
We’re able to touch on popular EIPs such as EIP-721:NFT Standard with William Entriken, EIP- 3668: CCIP Read with Nick Johnson, EIP-1967: Standard Proxy Storage Slot, EIP-4361: Sign-In With Ethereum, EIP-4444: Bound Historical data, EIP-4337: Account Abstraction via Entry Point Contract and many other talks on Ethereum Network Upgrade — The Merge, Shanghai-Cancun.
The Know Your Client series was much appreciated. Also, check out ERC Proposals including NFT standards.
EIPs Insight
Shares a monthly summary of the standardization efforts for the Ethereum blockchain. It helped me understand the real picture of the number of proposal submissions per month and the effort made by EIP editors to move them along the process.
We may discontinue the publishing of the hackmd version once the tooling website EIPsInsight.com is ready for the community.
EIP Editors Apprenticeship
In late 2021, the lack of EIP editors was an issue that led to huge numbers of unattended Pull Requests in the Ethereum EIP GitHub repo. To encourage more community contributors, and to assist with EIP editing, Pooja Ranjan documented the EIP editor “apprentice” handbook.
ECH announced an EIP/ERC Editor Mentorship program in association with the EIP Editor Matt Garnett. The first cohort successfully onboarded two new EIP Editors.
URL/URI Working Group & All Wallet Dev Meeting
The EIP GitHub repository has received multiple proposals related to URL/URI standards. Some of them are Stagnant or in any other status, and very few reached the `Final`. A few proposals are overlapping, too.
On the recommendation of Matt Garnett in EIPIP meeting 56, ECH organized a working group to bring authors together in a room.
The goal of the working group was to bring all authors together to work towards pushing a common proposal for URL/URI Ethereum Standard toward Final status for application developers to simply adopt it.
It was observed that similar efforts are being put in by volunteers of Wallet Dev. Sam Wilson was organizing once a monthly All Wallet Dev Meeting. So, instead of organizing two different meetings, ECH started supporting the All Wallet Dev meetings. zkDoof from the ECH team is currently engaged in meeting the recording and Pooja Ranjan publishes it on ECH YouTube.
EIPIP meetings
ECH continues hosting EIPIP meetings. We made good progress in decisions making on changes around EIPs governance. Here are some of the achievements
- An agreement to the External link policy with EIP-5757:Process for Approving External Resources
- Update EIP-1: add devp2p repo as accepted external resource Ref: PR
- Update EIP-1: Add first two external origins Ref: PR
- Update EIP-1: Clarify when to use requires Ref: PR
- Update EIP-1: Suggest that EIPs use RFC 8174 (updates RFC 2119) Ref: PR
Continued community coordination
We continued onboarding new users to the Ethereum ecosystem — New joiners meetings & 1:1 conversations with potential contributors.
ECH website provides the latest information & curated resources on Shanghai & other Ethereum network upgrades via the ECH website.
Meeting notes — ACD, Consensus Layer, Merge, EIPIP, ECH
- Share your ❤️ with the Cat Herders at Gitcoin and EthCatHerders.eth.
- Join the decentralized project management team by submitting the ECH onboarding form and at ECH Discord.
- Follow the Ethereum Cat Herders on Website, GitHub, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube.
