Author: Michael Johnson

Last week, seven of the eight Eth2 clients under active development succeeded in marking the major milestone of moving from single-client to multi-client testnets at the “Interop Lock-in”. With this exciting success in Eth2 development, we wanted to reflect on how this point was reached and on what it means to the Ethereum network and ecosystem. Anyone following Ethereum over the past couple of years has likely become familiar with terms such as “Ethereum 2.0”, “Eth2”, or “Serenity”. Each of these refer to substantial upgrades slated for the Ethereum protocol that have been envisioned in some form since before the…

Devcon season is finally here. Days from now, Devcon participants from across the world will begin to make their way to Osaka, and as we approach the final countdown, we’ve made number BIG online releases at Devcon.org! We invite everyone to meet the incredible class of Devcon presenters! Now online here, we’re welcoming speakers, Workshop and Lightning Talk participants and other presenters to Devcon5. All in all, this year’s event will feature the largest class of Devcon participants ever! Next, the Ethereum Foundation is excited to announce this year’s Devcon Sponsorship and Scholarship supporters. Leaders from across industries have lent…

Welcome to Devcon. We’ve got a lot to cover, and in this post you’ll read about it all! Read closely as we go over transit to the venue from Osaka’s airports, the Devcon Venue, the Agenda & Devcon App, and more! Please bookmark this piece to answer all questions that you may have related to early and on-site registration, experiences around the venue, participating during talks, side/after events and everything else Devcon5. To kick things off, let’s discuss how to get where you’re going. I. Transit Most attendees will be landing soon, and we want to make sure that you’re…

Although the internet has been more quiet than usual, we’ve been super busy hacking away on eth2! Between Devcon5 and keeping our heads down to work, it seems we’ve left the community in the dark on a couple of items. Here’s a quick update to fill in the gaps. Deposit Contract Although the deposit contract has been written, tested, and formally verified, we are working to allow the BLS standardization to stablize prior to launch. One goal of eth2 is to be easily interoperable with other blockchains and systems in general, and to that end, we do not want our…

Welcome to the second installment of eth2 quick update. tldr; Spec release of v0.9.0 — Tonkatsu to ensure Phase 0 development can continue unimpeded.Work continues in ironing out the details of the modified Phase 1 proposal.Quiet client development focused on eth1 -> eth2 infrastructure, general hardening for production, and optimizations. Tonkatsu Release As promised on the latest eth2 call, we pushed things forward to release v0.9.0 release — Tonkatsu. This release is largely simplifying with respect to Phase 0. The goal here is to remove any portions of Phase 0 that are opinionated about Phase 1 to ensure Phase 0…

For the first time ever, the Ethereum Foundation will be sponsoring a range of hacker prizes related to Eth2 at a major hackathon. With Eth2 development proceeding rapidly, there are now many discrete areas of work that a team of motivated hackers can complete over a weekend. The bounties below include useful educational tools for Eth2 development, necessary tooling, and valuable research. Members of Eth2 teams will be available remotely during the hackathon to answer questions from hackers and provide advice related to these prizes. The EF will offer 5 prizes of $1,000 each, for projects that tackle any (or…

Welcome to the third installment of eth2 quick update. tldr; Harden fork choice defences in response to auditsIntroducing challenges.ethereum.orgHerumi grant for a super-fast BLS implementation Fork choice defenses This week, we hardened the defenses of the Phase 0 fork choice rule. Much of our time is spent analyzing eth2 to ensure that the system can remain stable even under adverse conditions (e.g. a large attacker, a major network outage or partition, etc). With any large engineering project, the aim is to find as many potential issues and harden against these scenarios prior to release. This is why we’ve engaged with…

⭐ Introducing Ethereum Studio Today we’re excited to release v 1.0 of Ethereum Studio: a simple web-based IDE, which lives right on ethereum.org One of the most consistent suggestions we’ve received for Ethereum.org is to improve the developer experience. While the site pointed users to extensive third-party resources, it lacked a compelling path that would pull a developer towards immediately trying out Ethereum. Ethereum Studio’s purpose is to let developers get started building on Ethereum within minutes, with as little friction as possible. Studio lets users: Write and test smart contracts in the browserConnect smart contracts to a front-end web…

The Taipei Ethereum Meetup recently hosted Crosslink Taiwan 2019. It was a wonderful event and a perfect opportunity for the Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) to provide a Taiwan-specific wave of grants! The recipients are as follows. 🍍 Group 1: Ethereum-based Technical Projects: USD$5,000 awarded to each project Eauth (License: MIT): An OAuth-compatible service based on Ethereum credentials to authenticate users on a website.Ethereum Wallet SDK (License: LGPL-3.0): An SDK enabling Dapps to connect with different wallets.SOLL (License: Apache-2.0): A new compiler for generating Ewasm code from Solidity code. The ceremony at Crosslink Taiwan. The pineapple is a pun…

Introducing the Ecosystem Support Program In the beginning, most Ethereum-related development and research occurred within the Ethereum Foundation. Today, the Ethereum ecosystem has grown from a small garden to a vast, vibrant rainforest. Along the way, the Ethereum Foundation’s role within the ecosystem has changed almost as much. However, supporting Ethereum to the best of our ability has remained constant as our number one goal. From DEV Grants, to scalability-focused grants), to general purpose support, grants have long been a large part of how we support Ethereum. Increasing the leverage of our grants program has compounding benefits. Accordingly, it’s one…