Alts Forever

2021 Pt. 3 - We all have a lot to be thankful for this holiday season, from the first birthday of the beacon chain, to the successful upgrades over the past year and the incredible progress across the entire Ethereum ecosystem. As a highly productive year draws to a close, ther...

Since returning from the Amphora merge workshop, client teams have been hard at work implementing the latest versions of merge specifications and testing them on devnets. After four ephemeral devnets, Kintsugi 🍵, a longer-lived public testnet, is now live! Although clie...

Big things are happening in 2022 - It’s been a little while, and we’ve got some news. 👋 It’s happening! 👋 After being cooped up for the last years, it’s exciting to finally say that Devcon 6 will take place in the first half of Q4-2022 in...

A diverse set of clients is key to the Ethereum network’s health and decentralization. Diversity ensures that innovation continues at the base layer of the protocol, that the network is resilient in the face of potential attacks or bugs, and that a broad set of participan...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, only 3% of 48 million smallholder farmers are insured. Owning 1 acre of land and earning approximately $1.40 per person per day characterize a smallholder farmer. Smallholder farmers often own a mixture of cash crops and subsistence or non-commercial farm...

A Verkle tree is a commitment scheme that works similar to a Merkle tree, but has much smaller witnesses. It works by replacing the hashes in a Merkle tree with a vector commitment, which makes wider branching factors more efficient. Thanks to Kevaundray Wedderburn for feedback...

Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake – The Merge – is near: devnets are being stood up, specifications are being finalized and community outreach has begun in earnest. The Merge is designed to have minimal impact on how Ethereum operates for end users, smar...

How it started, how far we’ve come, what’s next - Since 2019, we have supported UNICEF’s CryptoFund with recurring contributions, and we are excited about our most recent donation too. Today, I would like to share the story of our journey together, to recogniz...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - tl;dr Kintsugi🍵 in progress – testnet to come Stakers must upgrade for Arrow Glacier Kintsugi🍵 in progress At the start of November, the Kintsugi🍵 month-long Merge sprint began! Kintsugi specs and milestones/plans wer...

The Ethereum Foundation is allocating 1 million USD in grant funding to organizations that educate governments and policymakers about Ethereum and blockchain technology. We encourage others in the Ethereum community to support their important work. A space to grow, and to do go...

The Ethereum network will be undergoing a scheduled upgrade at block number 13,773,000, which is predicted to occur on Wednesday, December 8, 2021. The exact date is subject to change due to variable block times and timezones. Please upgrade your node before Wednesday, December...

It’s that time again - our Q2 grantee lineup is coming right up. But before we get to that: ESP is hiring a Team Lead! We’re looking for someone organized, innovative, and passionate about Ethereum. If you think you might be the right person to lead a small but hard...

Community focused and decentralizing - Devcon is coming in 2022 (along with something new 🤫), but ahead of our next event updates, we invite you to check out a completely refreshed Devcon archive. Meet the new Devcon Archive Devcon’s impact goes beyond just the ph...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - This issue of Finalized is dedicated to the contextualization of a recently published paper describing three possible attacks on Ethereum’s proof-of-stake algorithm. tl;dr These are serious attacks with a formally-analyzed, technically-simpl...

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway - or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones a...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - tl;dr Altair is fast approaching. Upgrade your nodes! Now! 🚨Upgrade to Altair before Oct 27🚨 As mentioned in the previous Finalized post, Altair is scheduled to go live at epoch 74240 – Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC. See the A...

Earlier this year, the Rayonism hackathon kicked off to protoype the architecture for Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake. The transition, often refered to as The Merge, will keep the existing beacon chain (eth2) and execution layer (eth1) clients, and “merge&rd...

The Altair beacon chain upgrade is ready to be activated on the Ethereum mainnet. The upgrade will go live at epoch 74240 (Oct 27, 2021, 10:56:23am UTC). Client Versions In order to be compatible with the Altair upgrade, beacon node operators must update the client version that...

The ethereum.org Translation Program has been live for over two years, and we are excited to share a couple of milestones we have hit since its inception, as well as some of our plans for the future. Since we launched the initiative in 2019, over 2,000 community members have co...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - Altair is here; the Merge is coming. tl;dr Altair upgrade epoch set, mainnet client releases in progress 👀 Merge interop spec released. Devnets to follow 🏺 Altair upgrade, Oct 27 Altair, the first mainnet upgrade to the Beacon Chai...

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway - or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones a...

Protecting the Ethereum consensus-layer - Earlier this year, we launched a bug bounty program focused on finding issues in the beacon chain specification, and/or in client implementations (Lighthouse, Nimbus, Teku, Prysm etc…). The results (and vulnerability reports) hav...

Does development of the core protocols that power the Ethereum blockchain excite you? Are you interested in getting involved at the most fundemental and technical levels of the Ethereum protocol? I am excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for the second coh...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - The Road to Altair edition 🛣⭐️ tl;dr Pyrmont upgrade successful, scenario testing underway Prater upgrade scheduled for September 2, 12pm UTC Mainnet to follow Road to Altair Pyrmont forks, testing in progress After a series ...

Ethereum’s diverse client ecosystem is at the foundation of all that we’re building together. This includes both execution-layer and consensus-layer clients, both of which are essential parts of Ethereum’s post-merge future. Supporting execution-layer (formerl...

2021 Pt. 2 - Welcome to London! This is an exciting time for the Ethereum ecosystem, and the pace will only pick up further as we approach Altair [1] [2] and the Merge in the months ahead. The Beacon Chain now has 6.5+ million Ether staked, and 200K+ active validators online ac...

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway - or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones a...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - tl;dr It’s time to upgrade for London Merge checklist and draft EIP released Altair devnets launch; clients position themselves for mainnet Upgrade for London, yes you! The hotly anticipated upgrade to Ethereum mainnet – London –...

After a successful testnet deployement, the London upgrade is now ready to be activated on the Ethereum mainnet. It will go live on block 12 965 000, which is expected between August 3-5, 2021. Client Versions In order to be compatible with the London upgrade, node operators wi...

Community organizers are the glue that holds the Ethereum ecosystem together, and whether they’re leading large-scale events, local meetups, hackathons or seminars, we might all be wandering in the dark forest of the analog world without them. But where’s the fun in...

Happy July! Read on for the list of projects funded in Q1 of this year. But first: office hours are in session! Signups are open now through this Sunday (July 4) for teams or individuals to request a one-on-one call with the ESP team during the week of July 5-9.... ...

The long-anticipated London upgrade is now ready for deployement on the Ethereum testnets! The upgrade will first go live on Ropsten, at block 10499401, which is expected to happen around June 24, 2021. This upgrade follows Berlin, which was activated only a few months ago on t...

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway - or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones a...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - Steady progress tl;dr Altair progress Rayonism wrapped up; The Merge progresses Altair progress Altair, the first planned upgrade of the Beacon Chain, continues to make steady progress. Last week, we released Beacon Chain spec v1.1.0-alpha.6 &ndas...

Friends, As the Ethereum ecosystem continues to grow and mature at break-neck speeds, we continue to work hard on delivering an amazing Devcon 6. Though the timing is still unclear as to when we’ll all be able to reunite in Bogota, we want to keep our community involved a...

TL;DR: Ethereum will use at least ~99.95% less energy post merge. Ethereum will be completing the transition to Proof-of-Stake in the upcoming months, which brings a myriad of improvements that have been theorized for years. But now that the Beacon chain has been running for a ...

With this blog post, the intention is to officially disclose a severe threat against the Ethereum platform, which was a clear and present danger up until the Berlin hardfork. State Let’s begin with some background on Ethereum and State. The Ethereum state consists of a pa...

Get involved in developing at the protocol level! - Have you have ever been interested in getting involved in the development of the core Ethereum protocols? If so, there is a new program to discuss that’s targeted at you. As part of an EF procotol-support initiative, I&r...

The progress being made in the Ethereum ecosystem lately is really inspiring. Whether you’re excited by the adoption of proof of stake (and a faster, more secure, greener Ethereum), the coming Merge and other big upgrades, or by some of the many applications and solutions...

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on a couple of projects that are well underway - or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones a...

2021 Pt. 1 - Friends, The year ahead will be filled with upgrades and big ideas from across the Ethereum ecosystem. Since our last Supported Teams post (which followed the launch of the beacon chain), the network has seen 3.8+ million Ether staked, and 120K+ active validators o...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - tl;dr Rayonism☀️, hacking the Merge together blst security advisory Reminder! Beacon Chain security+testing RfP Rayonism☀️, hacking the Merge together This week, protolambda and others released plans for Rayonism, an ambi...

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on projects that are well underway - or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achieveme...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - tl;dr Altair prereleases: Stargazer and Half of ‘em just look like dots Security RfP Merge progress Altair pre-release is out Over the past week, beacon chain Altair pre-release specs – Stargazer v1.1.0-alpha.1 and Half of ‘em ju...

Application & consensus layer funding updates - With the arrival of the beacon chain in 2020, Ethereum today supports two types of clients: those focusing on the application-layer (often referred to as eth1) and those powering the proof-of-stake consensus layer (aka eth2). As t...

2021 is just getting started, but it’s already been quite an eventful year! We’ve got the list of Q4 funded projects below, but we also want to share some updates from the ESP team. We’re always looking for more ways to support the ecosystem as it grows and ev...

the Ethereum consensus-layer - tl;dr Finalized: rebranding the blog Upgrade your nodes! Finalized, rebranding the blog If you’ve read my recent writings or listened to me speak about Ethereum and this grand upgrade that’s in the works, you’ve perhaps noticed t...

TL;DR Berlin is ready to be deployed! We’re moving fast: the first testnet to upgrade, Ropsten, is scheduled to upgrade on March 10th. Mainnet is scheduled for April 14th. If you are running an Ethereum node, you should upgrade it to a Berlin-compatible version ASAP for t...

Ethereum is very much a global community, but within that larger ecosystem lives a vast and vibrant web of local, grassroots communities. These local community nodes are a Schelling point for thousands of Ethereans, often organized around a shared geography, language, or on-the...

Oh wow, it’s been a while… over 1.5 years since we’ve released Geth v1.9.0. We did do 26 point releases in that time frame (about one per three weeks), but pushing out a major release is always a bit more special. The adrenaline rush of shipping new features,...

This month, we’ve got the latest on from two groups doing great work to grow the Ethereum ecosystem! Couger for education and community building in Japan Specializing in AI, Couger might seem like an unlikely champion of Ethereum education! However, Couger has not only ex...

tl;dr Successful R&D workshop on future beacon chain upgrades Staking community grants announced Quick plug for my State of Eth2, Jan 2021 post Eth2 Workshop: Eth1+Eth2 Merge and Sharding Last week, the EF eth2 research team hosted an online workshop focused on the two majo...

We’re excited to announce the grantees selected for the recent staking community grants round. This grants round invited proposals that make the Ethereum staking experience easier, safer, and more secure. We were thrilled to see all of the great work proposed by these tea...

Our intrepid grantees have been keeping busy as always - read on for some recent accomplishments :trophy: ENS ENS (Ethereum Name Service) runs on the Ethereum blockchain, but it’s not just for ETH addresses! ENS maps human-readable domain names to locations all across the...

Friends, In the time since the last Devcon announcement, the state of the Ethereum ecosystem has been electric. We’ve realized critical milestones on the Eth2 roadmap, as well as countless breakthroughs and major progress by teams across the ecosystem. We are incredibly e...

Thanks to ETHPlanet for their work on the translations included in today’s post! At the start of December, the Ethereum community bootstrapped the new beacon chain proof-of-stake consensus mechanism – the foundation of Ethereum’s long-term and sustainable home...

We’re here with our last hurrah before we head into 2021 - read on for the latest news on a few grantees! Gitcoin for CLR matching Gitcoin’s CLR grants were one of the first real-world uses of quadratic funding, with the number of unique contributors to a grant carr...

We hope that you are all excited for the upcoming year-end holidays. Today, we’ve got some exciting new changes to announce for Ethereum.org’s Translation Program and some milestones to celebrate. To start, we can’t thank you enough for all of your support thi...

T'was the day before genesis, when all was prepared, geth was in sync, my beacon node paired. Firewalls configured, VLANs galore, hours of preparation meant nothing ignored. Then all at once everything went awry, the SSD in my system decided to die. My configs were gone, chain ...

2020 Pt. 2 - Friends, Leaves have fallen for those in the global north, Summer is on the way in the south, and ETH is staked across the globe. The jolliest of holidays has arrived, the birth of the beacon chain. Moreover, incredible progress has been made in recent months by al...

Within the next few weeks, we’ll be winding down Ethereum Studio. Please use this time to download any projects you have saved. To download your project, use the download icon in the file explorer. If you’re looking for another web environment for your Solidity deve...

Within the next few weeks, we’ll be winding down Ethereum Studio. Please use this time to download any projects you have saved. To download your project, use the download icon in the file explorer. If you’re looking for another web environment for your Solidity deve...

A note about the Stateless Ethereum initiative: Research activity has (understandably) slowed in the second half of 2020 as all contributors have adjusted to life on the weird timeline. But as the ecosystem moves incrementally closer to Serenity and the Eth1/Eth2 merge, Statele...

Minimum ETH threshold hit 🎉; genesis on December 1st, 12pm UTC Get your nodes running! and monitor updates through genesis 👀 Eth2 genesis, December 1st. Get ready! This week, the deposit contract hit the minimum threshold of 16384 32-ETH validator deposits, kick...

While everyone is staring in amazement on December 1st, 12pm UTC anticipating the Eth 2.0 Beaconchain genesis, within the JavaScript team we quietly prepared our own little genesis release in the shadows. Being very much around the good ol’ Eth 1.0 chain we are neverthele...

It’s quarterly update time again! The big news is is the Q3 grantees, of course, but we always like to share what else the ESP team has been up to. A few things we’ve knocked out lately: Added a Guide to ESP on our website. Here you’ll find details on... ...

It’s always fun to hear about new grants as they’re awarded, but what happens after the announcement? In this series, we’ll check in on projects that are well underway - or already at the finish line. Read on to learn about some recent milestones and achieveme...

The EF is excited to announce the results of the Medalla data challenge, a data hackathon focused on the Medalla testnet ✨ The prompt was open-ended: we asked for data tools, visualizations, and analyses of testnet data; in short, anything that would help the community m...

tl;dr Staking community grants v1.0 eth2 testnets – Toledo and Pyrmont Mainnet deposits to 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa Staking community grants This week the EF announced the Eth2 Staking Community Grants round in an effort to support a more delightful stak...

Critical patch for CVE-2020-28362 - Summary Versions of geth built with Go <1.15.5 or <1.14.12 are most likely affected by a critical DoS-related security vulnerability. The golang team has registered this flaw as ‘CVE-2020-28362’. We recommend all users to re...

Contract deployment Genesis deposits Bootstrap consensus tl;dr v1.0 specs released 🚀 v1.0 spec release Today, we released v1.0 of the eth2 specs, including the mainnet deposit contract address – 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa. eth2 will have a MIN_GENE...

Hey Ethereum community! We last spoke August 5 – how you been? We’re here to talk about something fresh we’ve shipped. Maybe you’ve already noticed, but we’ve got a new Developers section. For a long time, this content was a wall of links to produc...

Oh you, Spadina, Finally, finality Hello and farewell tl;dr A quick Spadina postmortem New testnet: Zinken. Launchpad is live; Genesis deposits due in one week! Spadina Postmortem The Spadina testnet dress rehearsal launched this past Tuesday. Although Spadina is now healthy an...

📣 Last chance to practice genesis before mainnet 📣 tl;dr Spadina Launchpad is live. Spadina genesis in 7 days! Deposit CLI audit completed by Trail of Bits EIP 2982: Serenity Phase 0 released 🚀 Announcing Spadina Launchpad As of today, the Spadina Launch...