Ethereum Cat Herders Update #40
Berlin upgrade is announced, Ropsten testnet forked, Goerli will be forked March 17th. EIP-1559 & EIP-3238 approved for the London upgrade, Eth2 — Altair upgrade, Prater testnet, 1559 community call, events, and more.
Welcome to another edition of the Ethereum Cat Herders community update to bring you up to speed since the last update.
Ethereum 1.0
Berlin upgrade announcement
- The Berlin Upgrade Overview — Ethereum Improvement Proposals for Berlin upgrade
- EF’s Ethereum Berlin Upgrade Announcement
- Ropsten forked on March 10th, Goerli will be forked on March 17th.
- Mainnet expected on Apr 14th.
Ethereum All Core Developers’ meeting
This was the last All core devs meeting for Hudson Jameson as a facilitator, however, he will be around to provide support as and when needed. Tim Beiko will be replacing him from the next meeting onwards.
YOLO/Berlin updates
- One major change from the almost testnet ready Berlin upgrade is that EIP-2315 will not be a part of the Berlin upgrade.
- Last week some concerns on the need & adoption of the EIP-2315 were highlighted by the Solidity team. After some discussion, it was finally decided by all the client developers to take this proposal out from the spec for the Ropsten testnet.
- Ropsten fork will NOT be pushed and clients will have another release soon.
London EIPs
- EIP-1559: Fee market change for ETH 1.0 chain & EIP-3238: Difficulty Bomb Delay to Summer 2022 are CFI accepted by the client developers to be proposals for London.
- There wasn’t enough time to discuss other CFI proposals, which will be discussed in the next meeting.
- Besu, Geth, Nethermind, OpenEthereum, Ethereum JS syncing with YOLO v3.
- ACD meeting #107: agenda, video, Tim’s tweet, notes. The next meeting is scheduled for March 19, 2021, at 1400 UTC.
Eth1.0 Clients update
- Geth — Gemini Sigma (v1.10.1) is a minor release with the sole purpose of enabling the Berlin hard-fork! This hard-fork takes a step towards making opcodes fairer and lays the groundwork to new types of transactions, with lots of interesting features to be built on top.
- OpenEthereum — v3.2.0. Berlin hardfork blocks: mainnet (12,244,000), goerli (4,460,644), rinkeby (8,290,928) and ropsten (9,812,189)
- Besu — 21.1.2. If you are using Besu on public Ethereum networks, you must upgrade to 21.1.2. This release contains the activation blocks for Berlin across all supported testnets and the Ethereum mainnet.
- TurboGeth — 2021.02.04-alpha. improving intermediate hashes storage ~3 hours.
- Nethermind — v1.10.44. Fixes issue when StateSync could kick in during normal block processing.
- Ethereum JS — @ethereumjs/vm v5.1.0
Other interesting reads on EIPs
- Using flashbots as a backdoor path to account abstraction by Vitalik Buterin.
- Some technical proposals that were considered for the ethereum protocol but never made it in: a history by Vitalik Buterin
Ethereum 2.0
Eth2 HF1 (Altair)
- The naming of the upgrade will be on Stars name in alphabet order. The first beacon chain upgrade — Altair is expected in mid-year 2021.
- Relevant PRs with proposed features for upcoming upgrade
—Penalties+activs+exits only at 64-epoch boundary,
— independent leak score feature,
- Altair networking — remove faulty de-duplication condition for seen aggregates
- Fork choice tests — fork-choice test vectors: starting with `get_head` tests
Eth2 Testnet update
- From the last meeting, it is expected that the mainnet will exceed the load of Pyrmont soon. Most of the people on the call agreed to start a new testnet with 200–250k validator.
- Prater Testnet: Afri S. has been coordinating this testnet. The goal is to deploy a testnet with over 200k validators so it can stress-test clients before getting there on the mainnet.
- Prater is going to be more of a “devnet” and not necessarily user-facing. The testnet genesis could be in two weeks (March 23).
Eth1-Eth2 merge
- Earlier, Mikhail shared an updated beacon chain spec including the Merge proposal. He encouraged people to start referring to Eth1 as the Application layer & Eth2 as the Consensus layer.
- The initial merge specs have been added to the eth2 specs repo.
- Verkle tree — According to Dankrad, it will take at least 6 months to get to stable specs. It is proposed not to be implemented at the time of merge but separately.
- Vitalik’s proposal on ethresear.ch around state-expiry.
- There is a PR that changes empty epoch transition processing to only every 64 epochs. Feedback appreciated.
- Eth2 implementers meeting #59: agenda, video, Ben’s notes.
Additional resources
- Quick merge via fork choice change a proposal by Vitalik.
- Why the Merge Should Be Prioritized Over Data Sharding — Twitter thread.
Eth2.0 Clients’s update
- Nimbus-eth2 — v1.0.10. This release contains important security and performance improvements.
- Lighthouse — Tony. This release marks the first minor version increase since the v1.1.x series. It contains several improvements to Lighthouse’s stability and performance, particularly for users running multiple validators.
- Lodestar — Release v0.17.0
- Prysm — v1.3.3. More eth2apis implementation complete. Improvements to database backup. Add prysm version to prometheus metrics. Fix validator key reloading at runtime when adding keys to a keystore with only inactive keys.
- Teku — v21.2.0. Docker images are now being published to
consensys/teku. Thepegasys/tekuimages are no longer updated.
Statelessness & State Expiry Call
- A few paths to statelessness and state expiry
- Increasing address size from 20 to 32 bytes
- Some initial brainstorming on how we could increase address sizes
- Agenda, Recording
EIP-1559
- Vitalik Buterin first proposed EIP-1559 for zcash
- Ethereum 1559 community meeting recording
EIPIP working group
- EIPIP meeting #28: agenda, video, notes.
- The next EIPIP meeting is scheduled for March 24th at 1500 UTC. Agenda.
Community events
- Gitcoin Grants Round 9 is Live
- 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: Mar 1, 2021 — Apr 9, 2021
Ethereum Cat Herders
Peep an EIP
Released video
- EIP-3074: Native Sponsored Transactions with Sam Wilson now renamed as “AUTH and AUTHCALL opcodes”
Upcoming
- EIP-1474: Remote procedure call specification
- ENS EIP-137: Specs. & 2544:ENS Wildcard Resolution
- 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 first draft of the website design was shared in the ECH meeting. With a new theme, it seems to be coming out well. If you have got an improvement suggestion, share it with us.
- The Ethereum Cat Herders meeting #54: agenda, video. The next meeting is scheduled for March 30, 2021, at 1500 UTC. Agenda.
Support the Ethereum Cat Herders
https://gitcoin.co/grants/782/ethereum-cat-herders-community-fund
- Gitcoin CLR matching round 9 is ongoing. THANK YOU to all who have contributed to the Ethereum Cat Herders so far. If you haven’t, you can contribute now. Share yours ❤️ with the Cat Herders at Gitcoin & Clr.fund. We accept all tokens!
- Join the decentralized project management team by submitting the ECH onboarding form and at ECH Discord.
- Follow the Ethereum Cat Herders at Website, GitHub, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube.
Share your question, comments, and suggestions with me on Twitter. Thank you for reading 🙏.
— The Ethereum Cat Herders
