Ethereum biweekly vol.50🎉: Ecosystem and projects’ updates, development tools and research articles
4th August — 18th August. Medalla experienced instability, CRV token launched, Aave and Set v2 introduced, The YAM experiment, 1inch launched Mooniswap, EDCON took place, Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs) announced, and much more!
Oh, wow! These two years have come and gone by in a flash! So here is the 50th issue of ‘Ethereum biweekly’ — our traditional report which covers various topics from Ethereum milestones, ecosystem news, protocol and projects’ updates, researches, new podcast episodes, and more! Thank you, Ethereans, for reading us! We sincerely appreciate your interest and support, and will continue to do our best to deliver you a high-quality and intriguing content!
So without further ado, Paradigm has a few areas to cover today.
First and foremost, Medalla experienced instability last week as Prysmatic’s client did not correctly deal with a Cloudflare outage and then local storage got deleted in an emergency hotfix. This instability showed why Ethereum 2.0 needs and incentivizes client diversity. Check out detailed recaps of the Medalla testnet launch and further events and developments from Lighthouse, Nimbus and Prysm below.
As for Layer 2 news, SKALE Labs, the core team behind the SKALE Network, has announced over 40 integration partners and validators, in addition to the Dapps that joined the SKALE Innovator program and are currently building on the platform. Hermez is a new zk-rollup created by Iden3’s Labs, introduced. It uses SNARKs for validity proofs with on-chain data availability and can scale Ethereum to 2000 transactions per second. Golem takes a step forward towards the adoption of Layer 2 scalability solutions on Ethereum, with the UX-first approach by Matter Labs’ zkSync. Nick Johnson from ENS posted a proposal for an optimistic-rollup type system that would substantially reduce gas costs for claiming DNS domains.
What’s more, YAM, an experiment in fair farming, governance and elasticity, launched with unaudited code, got to 600M in value, subsequently a bug froze 750K. It went down and is back to 400M. All of this happened in a few days. Set V2 introduced, a new protocol built to give users and portfolio managers access to all of the exciting opportunities available to them in DeFi. Aave V2 will include new features like repay with collateral, debt tokenization and native credit delegation, fixed rate deposit and much more. 1inch launched Mooniswap, where liquidity providers earn part of the impermanent loss through delayed price updating over 5 minutes. The Aragon team introduced a program to decentralize those opportunities to community members: Aragon Experts. Curve DAO has launched. MetaMask to stop injecting window.web3 in November plus Provider API breaking changes. The REN pool is now live on Bancor V2. Compound Labs has officially launched the Open Price Feed. A new Gnosis Safe App is live. Omen has surpassed 1M in volume. Status adds images, audio messages and emoji reactions. A healthy monthly update from Kyber including updates on the KyberDAO, network stats, token metrics and much more was published. Randomness Summit and EDCON 2020 took place. And much more!
Last week, Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs), a new tool to involve collaborative community input from across the ecosystem, were announced. They are aimed at improving the Devcon experience by formalizing a process to get your ideas heard and integrated into the event. Can’t wait for Devcon next year! Our team is truly desperate to meet you, dear Ethereum family, again IRL! We miss you!
With having a successful two years in production, ‘Ethereum biweekly’ updates will continue to be a one-stop-shop that collates all the most important Ethereum news every two weeks. Thank you for being with Paradigm! More to follow! ⬙
Development
“The technical side of Ethereum’s efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise”
- Vitalik Buterin
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Protocol updates
Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #93 [2020–08–07]
Tim Beiko’s notes.
Geth v1.9.19 Released: Deterministic transaction ordering to discourage front-running spam, faster warmup times, fast-sync fixes and many more.
Turbogeth alpha2 release.
Turbogeth improved stability release.
Turbogeth’s staged sync explainer — how it does a full sync to an archive node in under 700gb and just a few days.
Adding cross-transaction BLS signature aggregation to the EVM.
Regenesis plan proposal.
Eth2.0 Call #45 [2020/8/6]
Medalla experienced instability last week as Prysmatic’s client did not correctly deal with a Cloudflare outage and then local storage got deleted in an emergency hotfix.
Head here to update your Prysm client.
This instability showed why Eth2 needs and incentivizes client diversity. Here’s some guides to running Teku (Somer Esat), Nimbus (CoinCashew), Lighthouse (larrypc), or Lodestar (CoinCashew).
Formally verifying the Eth2 spec in Dafny.
Danny Ryan’s live demo of Eth1 + Eth2 merge:
Danny Ryan’s latest quick Eth2 update, attacknet bounties now tripled:
- Medalla testnet launches August 4th at 1pm UTC
- New multi-client attacknet is up with new challenges and larger bounties
Eth2 annotated specs from Vitalik Buterin and Ben Edgington.
Eth 2.0 Dev Update #55 — Medalla Testnet: Recap of the Medalla testnet launch, the usual developer updates, an announcement of a new team member joining the PryLabs team, upcoming work and more.
Eth2 Phase 0 Spec Formal Verification Update: An update from ConsenSys R&D on their effort to bring trustworthiness to the Beacon Chain and the core foundations of eth2.
Lighthouse Update #28: Medalla testnet recap, updates on key-management, updates on the work on stability improvements and more in this weeks update.
Nimbus: Medalla Update: A short update from the Nimbus team recapping the Medalla testnet launch.
Stats from crawling Medalla nodes. A serious problem: client diversity.
Some guides to staking: Larrypc, Somer Esat, CoinCashew. Make sure you collect your POAP medals for each different client.
Defining attestation effectiveness: Attestant’s work to create the stat on validator quality that you now see on beaconcha.in
What’s New in Eth2–8 August 2020: An overview of the recent Medalla testnet launch, the attacknets, BLS news and much more from Ben in his weekly Eth2 update.
Layer2:
Hermez zk rollup auction to be block producer with proceeds funding public goods.
Celer’s State Guardian Network testnet launch.
Livepeer’s probabilistic micropayments as pseudo-layer2.
Iden3’s hermez zkrollup, expected to launch with 2000 tps on mainnet this year.
Optimize for minting tokens: a different l2 flavor inspired by Reddit bakeoff.
SKALE Partners with Over 40 Projects: SKALE Labs, the core team behind the SKALE Network, has announced over 40 integration partners and validators, in addition to the Dapps that joined the SKALE Innovator program and are currently building on the platform.
ENS Heads for Layer 2: Nick Johnson from ENS posted a proposal for an optimistic-rollup type system that would substantially reduce gas costs for claiming DNS domains.
The history of optimistic rollups:
Development tools
MetaMask to stop injecting window.web3 in November plus Provider API breaking changes.
Truffle v5.1.39 more Solidity v0.7 support.
How to make Solidity libraries have state variables.
MaticVigil, an API gateway to make it easier to build on Matic.
Gas saver deployer — contract to deploy contracts that use Chi gas token.
How to optimize contract size.
Connecting APIs and contracts with Chainlink.
Deploy your first contract with Chainlink.
Zero knowledge proofs for engineers.
Opyn’s post-mortem on last week’s bug.
A beginners guide to safely interacting with erc20 tokens.
Implementing Eth’s Merkle Patricia Tree to understand it.
How OpenRelay beat back DOS attacks from a Syracuse U lab.
ZoKrates v0.6 — unsigned integer types, zokrates.js works with browser/nodeJS, native SHA256 implementation at 28k constraints.
TypeChain’s stable ethers v5 release.
Opyn got hacked for 370k USDC, and then Sam Sun helped them rescue another 570k. They reimbursed all victims. Peckshield’s explainer.
Gas Saver: wrap methods to use gas tokens.
Clean contracts — Solidity best practices.
Eth-permit: easy token permit signing npm.
OpenZeppelin Contracts special release to support Solidity v0.7.
Trail of Bits token integration checklist.
Governance and new standards proposals
ERC2771: Secure Protocol for Native Meta Transactions.
ERC2848: My Own Messages.
EIP2878: Reduce block reward to 0.5 ETH.
EIP2872: Reduce block reward to 1 ETH.
ERC2876: Deposit contract and address standard.
Follow the EIPs repo.
Ecosystem updates
Development Update #4 — ethereum.org: Fresh illustrations, new page designs, a new framework for the website, ethereum.org now available in 30 languages and more in this development update.
Announcing Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs) [Eng / Esp]: Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs) are a new tool to involve collaborative community input from across the ecosystem. They are aimed at improving the Devcon experience by formalizing a process to get your ideas heard and integrated into the event.
Insane gas prices were last week, almost entirely above 100 gwei to get any transaction confirmed and reaching more than 300 gwei. Transaction fees reached over 20k ETH per day compared to 13k ETH in block rewards.
JPMorgan Plans to Lead ConsenSys’ $50m Convertible Note Raise: JPMorgan is planning to invest in ConsenSys as the Ethereum infrastructure and software company takes on the bank’s Quorum platform, sources familiar with the deal told The Block.
Sparkpool’s GasNow predictor (with API), using their transaction pool.
Here’s how you can use “decentralized Infura” Pocket Network to replace Infura in Metamask.
Save on paying gas with a weekly plan.
Related to when gas prices are low: DeFi is taking off in China.
Never Get High on Your Own Supply.
What Decentralization Means to Ethereum
Ethereum Social Governance Shouldn’t be Left to the Birds.
Compute the total ETH supply using this script.
Feedvitalik.com transaction visualizer.
A Beginner’s Guide to EPNS Channels.
Bankless Guide #3: Tactics and Tools.
Projects updates
0x:
0x Developer Update — August 2020: New technical developments from 0x Labs & the 0x ecosystem.
- 0x API Improvements
- ZRX Governance & Portal Update
- Augur v2 + 0x Mesh Launch
ZRX Portal and governance H1 update: ZRX Portal metrics and 0x governance updates.
- ZEIP vote results
- RX staking stats
- Portal web metrics
- Gitcoin bounties for improvements
Aave:
Aave V2, The Seamless Finance. The Aave team announced a new version of the Aave Protocol. As expected, Aave V2 will continue to push the limits of what is possible with Decentralized Finance.
Governance on Testnet, Seize the power! As the Aave team continued its path towards more decentralization, they introduced the launch of governance on the Ropsten testnet and invited our community to participate in the first votes on AIPs.
First Credit Delegation on Aave Protocol to DeversiFi is Here. DeversiFi, a decentralized exchange, was the first one to experiment with Credit Delegation by drawing a credit line from a Credit Delegation Vault.
Trading for LEND is now available on OKEX.
Aragon:
The team introduced a program to decentralize those opportunities to community members: Aragon Experts.
The Aragon Network DAO is very close:
Curve DAO has launched:
Furthermore, the team has just added the DeFi projects mStable and dHedge to the #PoweredByAragon website.
Augur:
- Improved gas price estimates again
- Cleaned up Market List display.
- Include version number in UI for easier debugging.
- Consistent usage/capitalization of REPv2.
- Fix error click on orders while not logged in.
- Clearer Reporting-Only UI message banner.
- Bug Fix some bugs in the convert tokens screens.
- Switch to using dweb.link for warp sync loading.
The Augur Master Plan (Part 2):
- Create beautiful easy to use mobile-first interfaces
- Create open-source tools that make it easier for liquidity to form
- Bring the offline social betting experience online through comments and chat
- Now that the team has built a core platform that people can use, focus on growth and user activation
- Build an open-source betting view for Augur, so it’s accessible to bettors in addition to traders
Bancor:
The REN pool is now live on BancorV2.
BNT is now listed on the Crypto.com App.
Interview with Bancor Protocol: Bancor’s head of growth Nate Hindman talks about AMMs, Bancor Protocol backstory, and what is new in Bancor v2.
Brave:
Brave Sync Version 2 Now Available for Desktop and Android Users. Brave desktop users (version 1.12) and Android users (version 1.12) can use our fully redesigned sync functionality to sync data from desktop to desktop, as well as across desktop and Android devices. Support for iOS will follow shortly.
Coinbase:
Band Protocol (BAND) is now available on Coinbase.
Borrow cash using Bitcoin on Coinbase.
Numeraire (NMR) is launching on Coinbase Pro.
Reflections on Bitcoin Transaction Batching.
Welcoming Manish Gupta, Executive Vice President of Engineering.
Compound:
Launching the Open Price Feed, Protocol User Metrics Update, and More:
Compound Labs has officially launched the Open Price Feed.
The Open Price Feed is an open-source project where a set of reporters signs price data which is posted on-chain for use by DeFi protocols. There is no privilege required to post prices, and they encourage the community to build additional posters to keep prices up-to-date. The system is designed to support price data for any token, but initially supports prices for BAT, WBTC, COMP, DAI, ETH, KNC, LINK, REP, SAI, USDC, USDT, and ZRX. The system is also compatible with having many different reporters — notably, Coinbase is the first major reporter.
Proposal 19: Open Price Feed passed.
Proposal 20 Set interest rate model for cUSDT in the active voting phase in Compound’s governance system.
Recently, Dharma led the community to release a new upgradable interest rate model contract for cDAI based on the new JumpRateModelV2. This proposal updates the cUSDT interest rate model to a recently deployed JumpRateModelV2 with the same parameters as the current cDAI interest rate model:
- 0% base rate (current 2%)
- 4% borrow rate at kink (current 22%)
- Kink at 80% utilization (current 90%)
- 25% borrow rate at 100% utilization (current 49%)
Links & Discussions:
- In an essay for Bankless, Compound Labs’ Calvin Liu explains the hurdles for institutions looking to integrate Compound’s interest rate markets.
- The Block reports on the development of Compound Lab’s Open Price Feed.
Decentraland:
MakersPlace joins the Decentraland Marketplace: Browse, buy and trade from the entire MakersPlace inventory using MANA.
Game Jam is back! The first in a new series of creative competitions, it runs September 1–8, with a total prize pool of $15k USD.
Gitcoin:
Chainlink’s Security Bug Bounty Program is now live:
Gnosis:
Omen has surpassed $1M in volume:
Gnosis yield farming incentive program on Gnosis Protocol now includes DIA (Decentralised Information Asset). Learn more about how to setup the custom market maker and enter the ring here.
A new Gnosis Safe App is live:
Golem:
Sliding (rolling!) into Layer 2 with zkSync🌀: scalability on Golem + Ethereum: Golem takes a step forward towards the adoption of Layer 2 scalability solutions on Ethereum, with the UX-first approach by Matter Labs’ zkSync.
Community Update — CIP winners(!), EDCON, zkSync, CHEM@Golem + more: Community Incentives Program round 1 winners and recent community updates & coverage.
Announcing CHEM@Golem: The team presents CHEM@Golem, the first scientific Golem use-case on the Golem mainnet. CHEM@Golem is the result of a collaboration between our R&D team, and subject experts in organic chemistry.
Kyber Network:
- 2580 voters in Epoch 1, 57M+ KNC ($90M+) staked Kyber DAO
- $400K+ in voting rewards distributed
- Highest trading volume in a month($275M)
- Coinbase launched KNC Earn Campaign
- New tokens listed: $COMP $BZRX $renBTC $VIDT
REPV2 is now available on Kyber Network.
STMX now available on Kyber Network.
Loom Network:
Maker DAO:
Executive Vote: Modify Multiple System Parameters: The Governance Facilitators and the Maker Foundation Smart Contracts Team have placed an Executive Vote into the voting system which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.
- The Base Rate meta-parameter will be reduced from -4% to -6%.
- The USDC-B Stability Fee parameter will be reduced from 46% to 44%.
- The MANA-A Stability Fee parameter will be reduced from 8% to 6%.
- The dust parameter for each vault type will be increased from 20 DAI to 100 DAI.
- The BAT-A Risk Premium will be increased from 0% to 4%.
- The Surplus Auction Buffer will be increased from 500K DAI to 2M DAI.
Who Uses the Maker Protocol and Dai, and Why?: The Maker Protocol provides a powerful set of financial tools that Dai unlocks. Together, the Protocol and Dai fuel a beneficial ecosystem of DeFi projects.
Governance Poll: Liquidations 1.2 Upgrade, Base Rate adjustment, and more: The Maker Foundation Interim Risk Team has placed a series of Governance Polls into the voting system which presents polls to implement.
Executive Vote: Urgent configuration change to the ETH lump size, Increase the WBTC-A debt ceiling: The Governance Facilitators and the Maker Foundation Smart Contracts Team have placed an Executive Vote into the voting system which will enable the community to approve the following alterations to the protocol.
- The WBTC-A Debt Ceiling will increase from 40 million to 80 million.
- The ETH lump parameter will decrease from 500 ETH to 100 ETH.
Maker Governance Review: July 2020: The Maker Governance Review is a monthly recap of all Governance activity.
The Top 10 Crypto and DeFi Influencers on Twitter: The top 10 crypto and DeFi influencers on Twitter chosen for this list provide insightful content and inspire valuable discussions about the DeFi movement.
Melon:
Amadeo Brands ON-DeFi talks with Mona El Isa:
MetaMask:
Breaking Changes to the MetaMask Provider: It’s Happening: On November 16, 2020, MetaMask will stop injecting window.web3, and make some breaking changes to our window.ethereum API.
OMG Network:
The difference between MoreViable Plasma and MinimumViable Plasma.
Raiden Network:
Fresh Raiden Weekly is out. Issue 131 covers:
- RaidenMap explorer release
- Planning of future work for the Raiden Client
- Maintenance and refactoring in the wake of the Reddit challenge
Set Protocol:
Set V2 introduced, a new protocol built to give users and portfolio managers access to all of the exciting opportunities available to them in DeFi.
Set V2 is a new, reimagined protocol that natively supports:
- 3+ assets in a portfolio
- Expanded asset selection
- Yield generation
- Gas efficiency
- Airdrop captures
The building block features of Set V2 are:
- Yield Farming — Generate yield by depositing assets into yield generating positions.
- Multi Asset Support — Hold 2+ assets in your Set, allowing for broader crypto exposure and enabling index products.
- Flexible Trade Execution — Portfolios can easily trade tokens using DEXs and dutch auctions. Tokens in the portfolio can also be completely removed or added in unlike V1 Sets where the trading pair is immutable.
How The Crypto Gateway’s Luca Built The Largest Italian Crypto Community.
Status:
Status Community Engineering: Audio Messages from a Status Ambassador: Status Ambassador tbenr built out audio messages as a community contribution to Status. Audio messages are a new feature in Status v1.5 that demonstrate the amazing community members that support Status and help us move toward a decentralized vision.
V1.5 Release — Images, Audio Messages, Emoji Reactions & More! Status version 1.5 introduces a number of new features to make the private messenger more fun and engaging — images, emoji reactions, audio messages & more.
Storj:
Storj Labs and Blockchain Education Network — Driving Student Adoption of the Decentralized Cloud.
Choosing Cockroach DB for Horizontal Scalability.
STORJ Token Balances and Flows Report: Q2 2020.
Zilliqa:
Reflections from ZIL-3: Imagining a New Future for Zilliqa.
Buletin Bulanan Zilliqa: Juli 2020 ‘Edisi Khusus ‘yang menampilkan Sorotan ZIL-3.
Zilliqa Monthly Newsletter: July 2020 ‘Special Edition’ featuring ZIL-3 Highlights.
Other project’s updates:
6 billion in DeFi. 1 billion reached by Aave and Curve. 420m+ DAI, 100k eth in Nexus Mutual.
YAM, an experiment in fair farming, governance and elasticity, launched with unaudited code, got to 600m in value, subsequently a bug froze 750k; it went down and is back to 400m per the Zippo dashboard. The YAM token went to $160, and is now under a dollar. Migration to v2.
Timeline of events:
- YAM launched
- Bug found, YAM needs saving
- YAM couldn’t be saved, post-rescue attempt update posted
- YAM migration plan announced
- YAM sets up a Gitcoin Grant and raises over 100,000 Dai
CRV Token Launched: Curve officially launched its governance token last week in a rather weird way (they didn’t actually launch it themselves). Check out this post for a full recap.
Mooniswap Launched: Mooniswap is a new AMM launched by DEX aggregator 1inch. With Mooniswap, 1inch plans to lower impermanent losses for liquidity providers by lowering the profit-margins of arbitrageurs with the introduction of a 5-min time-delay.
yEarn yDAO Summoned: yDAO is a new DAO for the yEarn platform created by DAOhaus. It will be used to fund value-added contributions to the yEarn ecosystem, is open for anyone to request funding for yEarn related tasks, is focused solely on funding projects, not on protocol-level governance and more.
yBorrow Launched: yBorrow allows LPs to create vaults and assign credit via Aave from which borrowers can draw their credit line. Credit delegation supports smart contract to smart contract. You can delegate to a yVault and farm yield with the borrowing asset you prefer.
GridPlus Update: August 7th 2020: This past month the Grid+ team shipped Lattice1s to Ethereum developers and testers, external devs have had Prysmatic Labs’ eth2 validator client running on the device, the pace of GRID redemption by energy customers accelerated, ENS support has been integrated into their web wallet, and their CTO Alex Miller’s MetaMask fork including Lattice1 support has been tested and is functioning smoothly.
dYdX Launches ETH-USD Perpetual Contract: The ETH-USD Perpetual Contract is live for trading on dYdX. Traders can get up to 10× leverage on their ETH without converting to any other token.
IDEX Raises $2.5mil Seed Round: The round was led by G1 Ventures and Borderless Capital, with participation from Collider Ventures and Ethereum prediction market project Gnosis.
Reflexer Labs Raises $1.7M: The seed round was led by Paradigm, with participation from Standard Crypto, Compound founder Robert Leshner and Variant Fund, from a16z alum Jesse Walden.
Chicago DeFi Alliance Launches Accelerator Program: This new accelerator program will be devoted entirely to decentralized finance (DeFi) startups. The program will invest $120,000 in each participating team for future token purchases.
Power Pool Announced: Power Pool is an experimental protocol that is designed to help people accumulate governance tokens.
Dark Forest Announced: Dark Forest is an MMO space-conquest game where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographically-specified universe.
Strike Protocol Monthly Update: A healthy update for the month of July from the Strike Protocol team covering their revamped UI, some stats/metrics and more.
Idle Finance Yield Farming Update: Idle Finance announced that they will be incorporating multi-protocol yield farming into the protocol.
Yinsure.finance Detailed: Yinsure.finance is a protocol for a new kind of tokenized insurance product that will be part of the Yearn protocol.
DODO Launched: DODO is a next-generation algorithmic market maker capable of responding to changing markets and liquidity constraints in real-time.
Prysm Announced: Prysm is a collaborative trading community accessing our global liquidity aggregator that distributes kickbacks to our top contributors.
Alchemy Goes Public: Alchemy, a platform that supports the growth and development of blockchain applications.
Rotki v1.6.2 Released: The main highlights of this release are per-DeFi protocol address setup, robust token detection and more. A ton of bugs are also fixed.
Announcing bloXroute for ETH DeFi: Traders can now take advantage of bloXroute’s high speed BDN to trade faster and trade smarter.
New Withdrawal Improvements on DeversiFi: DeversiFi detail what they’ve done to vastly improve withdrawals on their Layer 2 decentralized exchange.
The League of Entropy Launches Drand v1.0: Drand is the Internet’s first production-grade, publicly verifiable randomness beacon.
APY.Finance Announced: APY.finance automates yield farming to get users the best, risk-adjusted returns in DeFi.
Introducing the Personal Token Agency: The Personal Token Agency is a project spun up by Cooper Turley that aims to be the first talent agency for personal token creators. The agency is being set up to establish best practices around personal tokens.
MolochDAO v2.x — gas efficiency, wrapped token for voting, accepts ETH.
Podcasts
The Graph: Making Ethereum Data More Accessible on Into the Ether.
Exploring the Frontier | Erik Voorhees on Bankless.
YFI: Farming the Farmers | Andre Cronje on Bankless.
Andre Cronje on Yearn on The Defiant.
SKALE Labs — An Ethereum Scaling Solution Using App Specific Blockchains on Epicenter.
Andreas Antonopoulos on Why the ETH Supply Debate Is ‘Silly’ on Unconfirmed.
Ben Jones CEO of Bitwala on the future of banks in a crypto-first world on CryptoTesters.
Videos
Andreas Antonopoulos video answering basic Ethereum questions:
The Opyn Contract hack explained:
Ethereum continues to gain more traction every day:
Videos from the Randomness Summit and Edcon2020.
Finance
Information from Etherscan.io:
Etherscan Homepage Updated: Everyone’s favorite block explorer got a face-lift this week.
Roadmap
“When I came up with Ethereum, my first thought was, ‘Okay, this thing is too good to be true.’ As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good — fundamentally, completely sound.”
- Vitalik Buterin
Vitaliks eth2 and beyond flow chart:
An annotated version of Vitalik’s Eth2020 roadmap.
To date, the Ethereum network has undergone eight hard forks, including Byzantium and Constantinople — sub-sections of the massive Metropolis upgrade.
Check out the original timeline for the Ethereum development stages and the intermediate hard forks here.
Eth2 — Serenity
Serenity is the last stage of Ethereum development. It will introduce Eth2, the new Ethereum blockchain that will finally have Casper, a new Ethereum Virtual Machine, and much more. The goal of Serenity is to improve the scalability, security, and programmability of Ethereum. Instead of 15 TPS on a single chain, Eth2 will process thousands to tens of thousands of transactions per second without compromising on decentralization.
The majority of developers foresee these main phases of Eth1’s evolution to Eth2:
- Phase 0: Beacon Chain (Q1 2020)
- Phase 1: Shard Chains (2021)
- Phase 2: eWASM (New Ethereum Virtual Machine) (2021/early 2022)
- Continued Improvement (2022)
Phase 0 — Beacon Chain Shipping in late Q2/early Q3 of 2020
On the beacon chain, we will finally see Casper. The Beacon Chain will be a separate blockchain from the main Ethereum blockchain. This new chain will have a PoS consensus algorithm, and it will run in parallel to the main PoW Ethereum blockchain. Initially, the blockchain will be created for simplicity and will not support smart contracts or accounts.
Phase 1 — Sharding Shipping in 2021
Sharding will be introduced on the Beacon chain, and it will have initially 100 shards. Validators will validate transactions from their own shard, and in the first phase, they won’t approve any smart contract, account or asset.
While sharding will bring more scalability, there are a few setbacks to take into account. Validators have a small pool of transactions to validate, which makes it easier for a 51% attack, as they only need 51% computing power (or stake) of the shard they are in, instead of the whole network. This technique can also lead to higher centralization, as each shard can be validated with a small group of validators.
It will be fascinating to see how this stage is implemented, as it still needs thorough testing to ensure all validators are randomly selected to avoid centralization and any risk attack.
Phase 2 — State Execution Shipping in late 2021/early 2022
During Phase 2, the foundational aspects of the previous Eth2 releases will come together and provide functionality for the updated network. A new operational mechanism called Ethereum WebAssembly (eWASM) will be launched instead of Ethereum’s Virtual Machine. eWASM will work much faster.
One of the main issues with the current EVM is that it processes transactions sequentially. With the PoS and Sharding changes, there’s a need to process transactions in parallel, and the current EVM won’t be suitable for this.
The new EVM called stands for Ethereum WebAssembly, an open standard defining a portable binary code format for executable programs. This new architecture for the EVM will allow for much better performance and will make it possible to support smart contracts, accounts, states and much more on the new blockchain. The current status of the eWASM development is at the very early stages, as it is planned to be released in 2021. There’s still a lot of research to do around this phase.
Continued Improvement
Continued Improvement is the code name to encompass all the future changes, fixes and improvements of the previous stages, and whatever comes along. The following technologies to be implemented:
- Cross-shard transactions
- Lightweight clients
- Super-square charting
- Closer ties
See the Eth2 Phase 2 Wiki for current progress, discussions, and definitions regarding this work. The Eth2 Project Management repo holds ongoing notes and meetings.
Other
Upcoming events
- Aug 28–29 — Chainlink’s Smart Contract Virtual Summit
- Oct 2–30 — EthOnline hackathon
- Nov 6–7 — virtual Trufflecon
- Nov 16 — MetaMask Provider breaking changes
Check out Ethereum virtual events list.
Social media metrics
There is strong stable growth in the Ethereum community over time. The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Ethereum Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
Twitter (Ethereum) — Official announcement channel.
Twitter (Ethereum Network) — News from dApps.
Facebook — Official announcement channel. Recent publications — about Ethereum Core Devs Meetings, conferences.
r/ethereum — plain Ethereum development discussion. News about projects, links to interviews, podcasts, upcoming events.
Keep price discussion and market talk to subreddits such as r/ethfinance or r/ethtrader.
Keep mining discussion to subreddits such as /r/ethermining.
Do you have any question that feels really dumb? Try r/ethereumnoobies
Don’t forget to check out /r/ethdev for the Ethereum developer community.
Check out /r/ethdapps.
Surfwith r/ethstaker. The future is at stake!
YouTube (Ethereum) — Last video on July 27th, 2017 (5000–20 000 views per video).
YouTube (Ethereum Foundation) — Videos from conferences, meetups, Ethereum Core Devs Meetings.
Check out Ethereum Community and Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forums.
This is not financial advice.
Subscribe to detailed companies’ updates by Paradigm!
Medium. Twitter. Telegram. Reddit.
Main sources
Ethereum official media channels
Core Devs Meetings
Eth2.0 Implementers Calls
Week in Ethereum by Evan Van Ness
What’s New in Eth2 by Ben Edgington
Projects build on Ethereum official blogs
Ethereum in news
