tl;dr
Upgrade to London. That’s right.
The hotly anticipated upgrade to the Ethereum mainnet (London) has a fork block scheduled and a mainnet client release released. As previously mentioned, to allow validator deposits, beacon chain validators reach consensus on the state of the proof-of-work chain and process deposits sequentially from there.
To keep this link All mainnet validators You need to upgrade your proof-of-work nodes (often called “eth1 endpoints”).
Please refer to london announcement For details.
🚨🚨🚨 WARNING 🚨🚨🚨
Due to issues discovered on the Ropsten testnet last week (see: retrospective), Gothereum(geth), nethermindand Eragon We’ve been dropping new and important releases since late last week. If you upgraded your proof-of-work node prior to this release: Need to upgrade again Maintain agreement after London.
The London Fork is expected between August 3-5, 2021. There is no time like the present. Upgrade now!
Merge – Checklist and EIP Draft
Mikhail, Tim, and I had a public face. “Mainnet Merge Preparation Checklist”. This document documents the various tasks required to move to Merge here to help coordinate client teams and provide a better view of the community’s progress. This list is pretty good. high level, which is intended to play a supporting role. Much of the more core organization and communication for each branch occurs through calls, disagreement chats, and independent repositories.
Also, if you want to get more technical, Mikhail, Vitalik and I published the Merge specification for the execution layer perspective in the following format: Draft EIP. This doesn’t contain any major surprises, but it’s an important step toward the next wave of Merge development!
Altair Progress
As the first large-scale upgrade of the beacon chain, Altair is making remarkable progress after launching two small devnets consisting primarily of nodes and validators run by client teams. With this first devnet, we moved from alpha to beta release. The feature set has now been vetted by all teams, including any improvements expected in the specification. v1.1.0-beta.2 Machakuai.
Another Devnet launch is expected to follow this week, followed by discussions on choosing a date to fork Pyrmont, the long-standing beacon chain testnet. This will bring in more node operators at a much larger scale and set the stage for final testing and selection of a mainnet target launch date.
For more background on the what, why, and how of Altair, check out the excellent Altair PEEPanEIP set from Ethereum Cat Herders.
- #34: Altair – Accounting Reform with Alex Stokes
- #35: Altair Beacon Chain Upgrade with Vitalik and Danny
- #38: Altair on Teku with Adrian Sutton
Finally, preparing the beacon chain codebase for the first upgrade was a fun yet challenging task. A huge shout out to our client team for all the great work they are doing to get us closer to this important milestone 🚀