Ethereum Cat Herders Update #37
YOLO v3, Berlin & difficulty bomb update, network upgrade survey in Eth1.0, first eth2 update, client status, 1559 implementers meeting & new resources, EVM 384 & BLS curves discussion, EIPIP meeting, ECH, EEA Education series, and community updates.
The Ethereum Cat Herders completed two years in January. We’ve published a blog “Review 2020: The Ethereum Cat Herder” sharing our journey with the Ethereum ecosystem in the past two years.
Welcome to another edition of the Ethereum Cat Herders community update to bring you up to speed since the last update.
Ethereum 1.0
Ethereum All Core Developers’ meeting
YOLOv3 & Berlin client updates
- Berlin Network Upgrade Specification
- Geth & Besu team working together on setting up proper testing for proposals of YOLOv3.
- Yolo v3 (most likely) will be running in this week.
- Fork block estimation is difficult in absence of an estimated time for when the work will be completed. The discussion will take place async.
Ethereum Difficulty bomb
- According to an earlier estimate, the ice age is expected in July 2021.
- The general consensus is to handle it separately and not include it in Berlin. James will be writing an EIP to push the Ice Age.
- On the question of why need to have a difficulty bomb in place, Peter S.from the Geth team said that the Ice Age can be useful in resolving conflicts for contentious EIPs, so we should probably keep it around.
- Investigating Ethereum Difficulty Data by Tokenomics.
EIP-2937: SET_INDESTRUCTIBLE opcode
- There is an open PR with a spec update. A few open questions at EthMagicians thread.
All Core Developers’ meeting moderator transition
- Tim Beiko has talked with most client teams and more people who have been involved in the process and want to share their thoughts to improve the current process.
- ACD meeting#104: Agenda, video, Tim’s tweet.
The next meeting is scheduled for 5th February 2021, at 1400 UTC. Agenda.
Network Upgrade
The Ethereum1.0 chain is progressing towards Berlin, the next network upgrade. With this survey, we’re collecting feedback on experiences and challenges of earlier upgrades, preference in terms of frequency & interval between upcoming upgrades, and invite thoughts on how we can make upgrades smoother for all node operators.
Consider taking the time to answer this survey!
Eth1.0 Clients update
- Geth — Marljeh (v1.9.25)
- OpenEthereum — v3.1.1 — Along with other bug fixes & updates, this release includes EIP2929 with journaling + Yolov3, EIP-2565 implementation, TypedTransaction (EIP-2718), and Optional access list (EIP-2930)
- Besu — 20.10.4 — Implemented EIP-778: Ethereum Node Records (ENR), Implemented EIP-868: Node Discovery v4 ENR Extension, other addition and improvements.
- TurboGeth — v2021.01.02-alpha — improvements for the RPC daemon efficiency (lazy cursors, more concurrent streams).
- Nethermind — v1.10.7-beta
- Ethereum JS — @ethereumjs/tx v3.0.1
Breakout room (EVM 384 & BLS curves)
- Breakout room meeting#7: Agenda, video, summary.
- A new Discord channel created to continue the discussion (#cryptography)
- An EIP for EVM384 will be published soon.
Resources
- EVM384 Update 5: First Gas Cost Estimates
- A tweet thread by MariusVanDerWijden on BLS384 vs EIP2537.
- Introducing blst: The first public release of ‘blst’. blst is a fast signature library based on the IETF BLS signature specification and uses the BLS12–381 curve. The library aims to support a wide variety of programming languages (Go, Rust, C++, etc.), operating systems (Linux, Mac, Windows), and hardware platforms (x86, ARM).
- Curated resources for EVM384, EIP-2537 by Ethereum Cat Herders.
EIP-1559 fees market change
Implementers’ meeting
- EIP-1559 Transaction Sorting: Part 2 by Ansgar Deitrichs
- Why I think EIP 1559 block variance is nothing to worry about by Vitalik Buterin
- Nethermind — EIP-1559 merged to master on Nethermind nodes.
- EIP-1559 Implementers’ Call 9: Agenda, video, notes, Tim’s tweet thread.
Other resources
- EIP-1559 Resources
- The State of 1559 — Update 005
- Why 1559? by Tim Beiko
- Miners favor 1559 by Alex Stokes
- Oiler Research — EIP-1559 BASEFEE manipulations by Antonio Sabado
- Miner FAQ by Micah Zoltu.
- Can ETH Become DEFLATIONARY? EIP 1559 Explained
- ETH miner revenue with and without EIP-1559
- Reddit — Miners and transition to EIP-1559. Some questions.
1559 bounty — Tim Beiko announced a bounty to build a decent model for calculating how much ETH 1559 would burn.
Ethereum 2.0
Eth2.0 mainnet
- Eth2 upgrade 1.
— add nice to have features
— cleanups to help with maintenance, and edge cases.
— upgrade expected in summer 2021.
- Consensus for upgrade 1 is required by next week for
— Sync committee
— Accounting reform (end of lighter version)
— Fork choice to resolve issues - The goal is by the end of Q1 have good specs on both, and make a decision on what to pursue for production.
- Q&A educational resources to be shared by the end of Jan — reach out to the team to arrange any 3–4 hrs. session.
- After the mid-year upgrade, emphasis will be placed on one of these two major upgrades:
- Eth1-Eth2 Merge
- scalability/data availability
- Scheduled to review Pyrmont testnet towards the end of January.
Eth2.0 Clients’s update
- Nimbus-eth2 —v1.0.6 — A release that brings reproducible precompiled binaries for ARM devices and significant performance improvements. Improved attestation subnet walking logic: this brings significant reductions in bandwidth usage and CPU load. A larger window for the candidate attestations included in blocks: this can lead to higher block rewards.
— The Nimbus dashboard challenge. The deadline for submissions is February 5th (any time).
- Lighthouse — Dr. Wong — This minor release contains some important protection from excessive resource consumption in some uncommon cases. The most notable feature is the new “validator monitor” that allows a BN to provide additional logging and metrics for specific validators. This provides the long-awaited “validator balance” metric and many, many others.
- Lodestar — Release v0.14.0
- Prysm — v1.1.0 — This release is the first minor release since v1 and it includes several significant changes — Validator Slashing Protection DB New Schema. Notable changes include several API endpoints implemented to support eth2.0-APIs, several logging improvements, peer management improvements, Prysm Web UI updated. Many code health improvements.
- Teku — v21.1.0 — Added support for loading graffiti from a file to allow it to be changed without restarting. Supported retrieving states as SSZ on the standard REST API. Improved performance when verifying aggregate signatures. Added verification of block signatures when downloading historic blocks after snapshot sync.
Other resources
- The State of Eth2, Jan 2021 by Danny Ryan
EIPIP working group
- EIPIP meeting #24: agenda, video, notes.
- The next EIPIP meeting is scheduled for Jan 27, 2021, at 15:00 UTC. Agenda.
EEA Education series
matt garnett & I participated in the EEA Education Series (Jan) and talked about “Improving Ethereum with EIPs” and “EIPs to watch in 2021”.
Community updates & Open positions
- Gnosis is hiring Ethereum Core Developer — EIP-1559 focus
- The year in Ethereum 2020 by Josh Stark & Evan Van Ness
Ethereum Cat Herders
Peep an EIP
Released video
- EIP-3102 Binary trie structure & EIP-2584: Trie format transition with Guillaume B
- Potential directions for new EIPs with Nick Johnson
Upcoming
- EIP-1822: Universal Upgradeable Proxy Standard with Gabriel Barros & Patrick Gallagher on Jan 26, 2021, at 1830 UTC (1:30 pm ET)
- EIP-3076: Validator client interchange format (slashing protection) with Michael Sproul, Sacha Saint-Leger on Feb 03, 2021, at 1830 UTC (1:30 pm ET )
- Follow EIP scheduled at ECH GitHub. If you have any questions related to a proposal, or you want to join a talk with the author, reach me on ECH Discord.
Upgrading the Ethereum Cat Herders website
The Ethereum Cat Herders are in process of upgrading the website to be able to provide you the information in more user-friendly. We’ve received a few proposals to do the development. If you have got an improvement suggestion, something you’d want us to add, share with us. You may follow the progress here.
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— The Ethereum Cat Herders
