Ethereum Cat Herders Update #16

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Ethereum Cat Herders

4 min readDec 9, 2019

Welcome to Ethereum Cat Herders Update #16!

The Cat Herders had another productive call last week as we discussed some critical areas that require immediate attention, new collaborations, EIP improvement initiatives, Sai to Dai Migration and much more.

1. Hard Forks! Istanbul, Muir, and Berlin

Istanbul Upgrade

The Istanbul Hard Fork went successfully just two days ago. The Cat Herders held a live stream community call where we counted down the blocks to the #Istanbul network upgrade. The live stream video can be found here.

Upgrade Information

Ethereum Foundation Istanbul Blog Post
Update Geth nodes to run v1.9.7+
Update Parity Ethereum nodes v2.5.10+ and v.2.6.5+
Update Besu nodes v1.3.4+
Ethereum Istanbul Upgrade Countdown can be tracked here.
Istanbul Meta: EIP 1679.
Client’s implementation tracker.
As of today, 97% of nodes have upgraded to Istanbul! Source.

Muir Glacier Upgrade

Planned for January 6th, 2020.
Block activation #9, 200, 000.
Includes only one EIP: EIP-2384 — Muir Glacier Difficulty Bomb Delay.
An ECH blog post will be released in the near future for Muir Glacier as soon as there are releases for clients.

Berlin Upgrade

The Berlin Upgrade will follow the new EIP centric model — thus it does not have a scheduled date. Instead, there will be a list of EIPs curated that have met the qualification for being included in an Upgrade.

EIPs Marked as EFI (Ellible for Inclusion)

EIP-663 — Unlimited SWAP and DUP instructions.
EIP-1380 — Reduced gas cost for call to self.
EIP-1559 — Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain.
EIP-1702 — Generalized Account Versioning Scheme.
EIP-1962 — EC Arithmetic and pairings with runtime definitions.x
EIP-1985 — Sane limits for certain EVM parameters.
EIP-2046 — Reduced gas cost for static calls made to precompiles.

Important Note: The process to move an EIP into EFI is to have a champion bring it up on an AllCoreDevs call during the Eligibility for Inclusion (EFI) EIP Review section of the Agenda. For example, call #74.

2. Ethereum Cat Herders and Ethereum Magicians Collaboration

This new initiative came out of DevCon, Osaka. The Ethereum Cat Herders have started to collaborate with the Ethereum Magicians for Eth1.0 and where possible for Ethereum 2.0.

As part of this new initiative, we co-hosted a Q&A community call for the Istanbul fork with the Ethereum Magicians team this past Wednesday.

Announcement: https://medium.com/r/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fethereum-magicians.org%2Ft%2Fistanbul-hard-fork-community-call%2F3816

Video Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv5E9bq34j4&feature=emb_title

3. EIP Improvement Process

A few members from the Ethereum Foundation, Ethereum Magicians and Ethereum Cat Herders have reached out to Hudson to look at improving the current EIP process.

A call will be proposed to start working on this. During our last meeting, there was a general discussion around how to engage with the EIP creators and managed old drafts as well as look at the option of archiving EIPs that have not been active for 9 months or more.

4. Migration of SAI to DAI and the DSR

We proposed the idea of migrating our SAI to DAI and placing a portion of the ECH funds in Oasis Save aka activating the Dai Savings Rate (DSR). We will write up a proposal detailing the process of moving SAI to DAI as well as provide options for earning savings so that the ECH team can make a more informed decision.

5. Ethereum Updates

Blog Posts

Ecosystem Support Program — A call for applicants
Validated Staking on Eth2.0
EF Supported Teams, Research and Development Update 2019 (Part II)
Ethereum.org Translation Efforts: https://ethereum.org/languages/
Introducing Ethereum Studio

Ethereum 2.0 Updates

Eth2 quick update no. 5
Eth2 quick update no. 4
The release of the Beacon Chain Eth 2.0 Testnet explorer: https://beacon.etherscan.io which is running the @prylabs Prysm client.

Meetings