Happy 2020 from all the Cat Herders!! We hope everyone had a lovely break and to kick of 2020 here is our first update of the year, and a summary of what’s been happening since our last update.

May the fork be with us…

Muir Glacier happened and it was a success! It activated when it hit block 9,200,000 for mainnet on January 2nd with one EIP 2384 pushed through. The Ropsten testnet is scheduled for block number 7117117(see live update here), no PoA (Proof-of-Authority) testnets need to upgrade. This upgrade was needed in order to delay the difficulty bomb, which had been affecting block times on the network; for a more in depth explanation at what this is please refer to our previous post. We had a slight hiccup with the nethermind nodes (3/4 clients had no issue), but it has been dealt with and all is now running smoothly, you can see the ethernodes page for updates on this. The good news is, block times have been reduced by 25%!

The Ethereum Cat Herders at ETHCC!

We are excited to confirm that ECH will be represented at this year’s edition of ETHCC (6–8 March) in Paris! Tim, William and I will be running a workshop entitled “Growing the herd: what the Cat Herders can do for Ethereum.” Please feel free to join us for the session or reach out to meet us there, we’ll start the session with a brief overview of what we are up to at the moment, and then we want it to be interactive with as much contribution as possible from the community. Your opinions on how we can help the ecosystem are super important to us :)

See you in Paris very soon!

If you can’t make it to the conference, please fill out this feedback form for us, it will only take a couple of minutes and we would very much appreciate it! ❤

ECH/ETHMagicians collaboration

As some of you may or may not be aware, we have been working very closely with the ETH Magicians recently, to see how we can work together to enhance community initiatives. ETH Magicians asked for ideas in the forum and they got some ideas for ideas for ETHCC to host something educational. Some ideas included hosting a workshop on how to set up ETH 1.0 nodes and how to run ETH 2.0 testnets.

ECH 2019 Review

2019 was full of surprises and interesting moments; the postponement of a fork last minute, new collaborations at Devcon in Osaka, more forks, the Ice Age looming, then another fork to fix it. Pooja Ranjan penned a great retrospect on the year that passed for the Cat Herders, we’ve certainly evolved a lot since then. To find out all about the journey so far, read it here.

ECH 2020 Roadmap

New year, new us. After the adventures of 2019, we are currently working on our roadmap for the coming year, as we grow and get more involved in the community we need to have something to guide the strategy of where the group is going. Stay tuned for more from us about this in the next update.

EIP Improvement process meeting

The idea is to start ideating next week on how to move forward with this, after the ACD meeting this Friday. contribute to strategies and proposals. Message Hudson if you want to be added to the telegram group for that!