Author: Olivia Martinez

Strange times. I hope you are all well and continue to take care of yourselves, your families, and your communities. We’re a bit overdue on a quick update. My apologies. I’ll keep them coming at a regular clip after this one. Eth2 is looking good — Phase 0 is stable, client teams are crushing it, and some promising research was published for our stateless future. tl;dr v0.11.0 post-audit release Spec version v0.11.0 — Lan party — was released last week. This release represents a “post-audit” Phase 0 spec, ready for long-standing multi-client testnets. It contains limited changes to the core…

SEC staff said certain liquid staking activities do not constitute the sale of securities in a new clarification. The statement clarifies that “Staking Receipt Tokens” do not need to be registered under securities laws. SEC Chair Paul Atkins called the move a “significant step forward in clarifying the staff’s view” on crypto activities. In a significant and widely welcomed move, the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Division of Corporation Finance has issued a statement clarifying its view that certain liquid staking activities associated with protocol staking do not constitute the sale of securities. This clarification, released on August 5,…

Hey Ethereum! Here’s the latest update from the ethereum.org team: Style guide & Design upgrade Ethereum.org is getting an upgrade! In January we released a style guide (figma doc) for public comment and feedback, and we’re currently in the process of rolling it out live on the site. We also published a set of design principles that help guide decisions about the site. The rollout of the new site design will also include new layouts to existing pages – go check out the changes that are already live, share your feedback, and stay tuned for more updates over the next…

Special thanks to Sacha Yves Saint-Leger & Joseph Schweitzer for review. Sharding is one of the many improvements that eth2 has over eth1. The term was borrowed from database research where a shard means a piece of a larger whole. In the context of databases and eth2, sharding means breaking up the storage and computation of the whole system into shards, processing the shards separately, and combining the results as needed. Specifically, eth2 implements many shard chains, where each shard has similar capabilities to the eth1 chain. This results in massive scaling improvements. However, there’s a less-well-known type of sharding…

Friends, Out of respect for those within our own community and around us currently facing the ongoing global health crisis, our team has decided to temporarily hold scheduled Devcon announcements, first teased in our last post. In the meantime we wanted to share something else that we’ve been working on, which was intended for release alongside this year’s other material. Meet the Devcon Archive Beginning today, everyone can dive into presentations from all past Devcon events through the Devcon Archive, which will live as a permanent element of Devcon.org. With the Archive, we’ve started by gathering videos of keynotes, workshops,…

Have some fun announcements for y’all this week 🙂 Other than the items below, client teams continue to move toward production. More on that next week! tl;dr Least Authority Phase 0 audit complete As discussed many months ago, we engaged with Least Authority to conduct a full audit of the Phase 0 specifications. The audit was comprehensive with a deep look at potential DoS attacks, misuse of resources, unintended forks/chains, and attacks impacting funds. The audit is now complete and available for public review 🎉. The Least Authority audit helped us patch a few DoS vectors in gossip messages with…

As we embark on a new decade(!), the Ecosystem Support Program team wanted to speak to some of the recent growth, transition and learning around the program, and share details of our 2019 financial allocations. What is ESP? The Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) is the arm of the Ethereum Foundation focused on providing support to teams throughout the Ethereum ecosystem. This includes financial and non-financial support. ESP is an expansion of the Grants program, which previously focused primarily on monetary support. Improving Our Processes The 2019 Ethereum Foundation Spring Update first previewed some of our plans for evolving from Grants…

In June, we introduced Protocol, reorganizing the Ethereum Foundation’s research & development teams to better align on our current strategic goals, Scale L1, Scale Blobs, and Improve UX without compromising on our commitment to Ethereum’s security and hardness. Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish updates on each work stream, covering their ongoing progress, new initiatives, open questions and opportunities for collaboration. We start today with Scale L1 — expect follow-ups about Scale Blobs and Improve UX soon! TL;DR Marius van der Wijden joined Ansgar Dietrichs and Tim Beiko to co-lead Scale L1Mainnet’s gas limit increased to 45M post-Berlinterop, a first…

The Updated Stateless Ethereum Tech Tree Apologies for the delay in releasing this post; there have been some unavoidable distractions in my life recently, as I’m sure there have been in yours. I hope that you are making the best of your circumstances, whatever they may be, and implore you to turn your empathy up to eleven for the next few months, and to help your community’s at-risk people in whatever capacity you can :pray:. With that said, let’s talk about Stateless Ethereum, and the changes to the Tech Tree! Graphically, the tree has been completely re-worked, but if you…

Since a lot of us have a bit more time on our hands, I thought now might be a good opportunity to proceed with something perhaps a little bit boring and tedious, but nevertheless quite fundamental to the Stateless Ethereum effort: understanding the formal Witness Specification. Like the captain of the Battleship in StarCraft, we’re going to take it slow. The witness spec is not a particularly complicated concept, but it is very deep. That depth is a little daunting, but is well worth exploring, because it’ll provide insights that, perhaps to your nerdy delight, extend well beyond the world…