steady progress
tl;dr
Altair Progress
Altair, the first upgrade plan of the beacon chain, continues to develop steadily. Last week we released the Beacon Chain specification. v1.1.0-alpha.6 — Primitive Evolution. This is an alpha release, but the spec will not change from now on, barring any security or practical engineering issues.
The client team is busy passing consensus test vectors and preparing a short-term testnet. The team will make a timeline decision in the coming weeks as Altair code changes stabilize and initial multi-client interoperability is performed.
To learn more about Altair’s Beacon Chain upgrade, check out Vitalik’s latest release. Annotated Altair Specifications.
Rayonism is completed and merge is in progress.
that much Rayonism Hackathon Last week, the Nocturne testnet concluded with the Nocturne testnet, a multi-client merge testnet consisting of four consensus engines and three execution engines for a total of 12 unique client pairs.
Dozens of nodes and thousands of validators have built and secured a beacon chain that provides native support for the rich Ethereum application layer with accounts, contracts, and user transactions.
🎉 A big shout out to all participating client teams and to protolambda and Mikhail for leading the effort 🎉
The Rayonism hackathon allowed the team to quickly prototype the core merge design and better understand how this merge system works in practice. All teams are now familiar with Merge’s structure and have a clear view of how the software will evolve over the next year.
The client team is now focusing on two forks this summer: London and Altair — While the researchers returned absorption Specification improvements and testing. After the summer upgrade, the team will shift focus to Merge and begin addressing production engineering with an eye on the public testnet 🚀