tl;dr
Altair pre-release has ended
Last week’s Beacon Chain Altair pre-release specifications — stargazer v1.1.0-alpha.1 and Half of them just look like dots v1.1.0-alpha.2 — He was released. This represents the first full feature release of Altair’s upcoming beacon chain upgrade and provides concrete details to the engineering team.
Altair is an upgrade to the Beacon Chain that provides simple client support, minor patches to incentives, per-validator inactive leak accounts, reduced severity, and cleanup of validator rewards for simplified state management.
In addition to these various features, Altair represents a “warm-up upgrade” for Beacon Chains and Beacon Chain Clients. Ethereum’s proof-of-stake system has run very smoothly from the beginning, but before performing any high-risk merges, the client team wants to go through a live upgrade process to further test and prepare the code base and live systems.
The client team is currently integrating changes from the pre-release and providing feedback along the way. Once this process is complete, we will stop the full release and begin the testnet phase.
Public Currency: Secure RfP
Last week, EF published the following report: Beacon Chain Security + Test RfP. This is an open call for proposals aimed at improving the security, analytics and testing of beacon chains. In addition to client engineering, there is a lot of work to be done to continue to investigate, improve, and harden the beacon chain system before the merge, and we would like to involve more teams with diverse expertise.
Check out the RfP. Potential Areas of Focus If you need some ideas but are having trouble narrowing down these different domains to a more refined suggestion, please feel free to email me. rfp@ethereum.org For guidance. Please provide some basic direction, as well as some background on your or your team’s skills and experience, so we can work together to improve your proposal.
If you know a team or individual who would be a good fit for this RfP, please forward it to them!
Merge progress
Merge progress is heating up 🔥
What is a merge you ask? It integrates Ethereum’s application layer (currently supported by proof-of-work) with Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus layer, the Beacon Chain. The Beacon Chain is already active, but currently only makes consensus on its own, but after the merge, the Beacon Chain will be the driving force for all dapps, smart contracts, and accounts you currently use.
Over the past few weeks, the merge design has continued to improve. Check out Mikhail’s latest news. Specification Promotion It is intended for an up-to-date synthesis of merger plans and structures. We expect these basic designs to be incorporated into the specification soon and the engineering team to begin working on the next phase of demo and testnet.
In addition to asynchronous research, design, and engineering, we started meeting biweekly to foster collaboration across teams. You can follow progress and actively participate. Eth R&D Discord #Channel Merge 🚀