Ethereum Cat Herders Update #39

Eth1.0 — YOLO v3, Berlin, London timeline & EIPs selection, Eth1-Eth2 merge, removing EVM features, Eth2 — HF1, Verkle tree, 1559 community call, events and more.

Pooja Ranjan
Ethereum Cat Herders

Newsletter

6 min readFeb 23, 2021

--

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

  • Besu, Geth, Nethermind, OpenEthereum syncing with YOLO v3.
  • Estimated Berlin blocks & timeline Ropsten will be forked around March 10th.
  • London timing — Start discussing London EIP soon and get a consensus in the next 2–3 meetings.
  • Eth1-Eth2 merge team shared some roadmap but will produce more documents for Eth1 clients to describe what to be expected with Eth1 chain post-merge.
  • One of the ideal times for merge was the time of difficulty bomb hitting the Eth1 chain. So, Vitalik suggested pushing the bomb for about 6 months & add the Difficulty bomb as a part of every upgrade till the Eth1-Eth2 merge.
  • Backwards-incompatibly changing and/or removing EVM features — Vitalik proposed a bunch of features to be removed from EVM in the upcoming upgrades. Out of which removing ‘refund’ can be targeted to London. It will affect Gas token applications.
  • ACD meeting #106: agenda, video, Tim’s tweet, notes. The next meeting is scheduled for March 05, 2021, at 1400 UTC.

Eth1.0 Clients update

  • GethMarljeh (v1.9.25)
  • OpenEthereum — v3.1.1
  • Besu21.1.0-RC2. Distributions and maven artifacts have been moved off of binary. Support “eth” field in ENR records. Support for the Berlin Network Upgrade, although the block number must be set manually. The next release will include the number in the genesis file so it will support Berlin with no intervention.
  • TurboGeth2021.02.03-alpha
  • Nethermind —v1.10.23. Fix to tx pool filtering for xDAI validators. All ready for the Berlin hard fork planned for April 14th.
  • Ethereum JS @ethereumjs/vm v5.1.0 This release introduces Clique/PoA support. This means that you now can run a VM with blocks or transactions from the main PoA networks Goerli and Rinkeby and generally can use the VM in a Clique/PoA context. Getting ready for Berlin upgrade.

Ethereum 2.0

Eth2.0 mainnet

  • Contribute to the naming of HF1, the upcoming upgrade for Eth2 chain expected in summer 2021.
  • Review HF1 bonus features PR 2192 & feedback on fork choice block slot pair PR.
  • Eth1-Eth2 merge roadmap to be discussed in the next ACD call.
  • Verkle tree to be discussed in the Stateless call.
  • Eth2 implementers meeting #57: agenda, video, Ben’s notes, notes. The next meeting is scheduled for Feb 25, 2021, at 1400 UTC.

Eth2.0 Clients’s update

  • Nimbus-eth2 v1.0.8— This release includes important JSON-RPC stability improvements and compatibility fixes, which make it possible to use Nimbus as a RocketPool operator. New features — RocketPool integration-ready, next attestation time displayed on every Slot end log message (helps you select the best time for restarting the node), libp2p scoring: disconnect from badly performing peers and prioritize peers with better latency and throughput.
  • Lighthouse — Hamurai This release contains a fix to a known issue that can cause excessive memory consumption.
  • Lodestar — Release v0.16.0 — validator client: config API and application to voluntary exit , build docker image in github actions , fix validator aggregating all the time, config api, implement getValidatorStatus and use it in getStateValidator(s), Synch chain cache, calculate state root of BeaconState instead of CachedValidatorsBeaconState, update libp2p to 0.30.x , add voluntary exit to lodestar-cli.
  • Prysm — v1.2.2. This patch release includes several UX and performance improvements. Ability to exit all validators in a single command. Several logging improvements. eth2apis API implementation for GetStateRoot, Improved skip slot cache key, Various small improvements to performance.
  • Teku — v21.1.1

Stateless Ethereum

Vitalik & Dankrad shared a presentation on Verkle tree. Some interesting reads:

EIPIP working group

Community events

ETHDenver

The Future of Ethereum 1.0 in 2021

ETHDenver 2021 Presentations and Awards

EthGlobal

  • NFTHack — Bringing together a virtual collective of passionate creatives and engineers for a weekend NFT hackathon and summit powered by ETHGlobal. March 19 — March 21.

Gitcoin Virtual Hackathon

  • OPEN WEB FOUNDRY BY ARWEAVE. Mar 1, 2021 — Apr 9, 2021

Ethereum Cat Herders

1559 Community call

The Ethereum Cat Herders are hosting a community call on EIP-1559: Fee market change for Eth1.0 chain featuring proposers, developers & miners from the Ethereum community. This community call is mainly to address miners’ concerns and build consensus for the Ethereum network upgrade followed by the Berlin upgrade. Join us on Feb 26th at 1400 UTC.

Peep an EIP

Released video

Upcoming

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 a more user-friendly way. If you have got an improvement suggestion, something you’d want us to add, share with us. You may follow the progress here.

  • The Ethereum Cat Herders meeting #52: agenda, video, notes. The next meeting is scheduled for March 02, 2021, at 1500 UTC.

Support the Ethereum Cat Herders

https://gitcoin.co/grants/782/ethereum-cat-herders-community-fund

Share your question, comments, and suggestions with me on Twitter. Thank you for reading 🙏.

— The Ethereum Cat Herders

--

--

Pooja Ranjan
Ethereum Cat Herders

Herder-in-chief @EthCatHerders, Founder @ether_world, EIPsInsight.com. I share news and views about blockchain technology. Ethereum.