Development

The technical side of Ethereum’s efficacy is 100% an engineering exercise Vitalik Buterin

GitHub metrics:

Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):

Protocol updates

7. Client Updates: a) Geth, b) Parity Ethereum, c) Aleth/eth, d) Trinity/PyEVM, e) EthereumJS

f) EthereumJ/Harmony, g) Pantheon, h) Turbo Geth, i) Nimbus, j) web3j, k) Mana/Exthereum, l) Mantis, m) Nethermind

8. EWASM & Research Updates

Live tweeted notes:

October 2 testnet fork, mainnet in November. Lots of blake2b discussion. Next hard fork after this one named “Berlin.”

Check out:

Eth1.x Finality Gadget Working Group — Call #0:

First call for the finality gadget working group that will use the eth2 chain to finalize the eth1 chain and then drastically reduce mining rewards.

Geth v1.9.3 — maintenance release with Istanbul upgrade finalized.

Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.28 — get synced in an hour with BeamSync.

EthereumJS VM v4.1 with full-featured Istanbul Support: EthereumJS VM v4.1, ready for the Istanbul upgrade.

ProgPoW Audits Released by Hudson Jameson: ProgPoW hardware audit by Bob Rao after the Least Authority software audit released the previous week.

Lighthouse Update #15: Over the last few weeks the team has been quietly making strides in client compatibility and optimisations. A Lighthouse node can now successfully run on 50ms slot times (with 8 validators). This demonstrates the ability for the Lighthouse beacon node and validator client to perform signing, attesting and block processing at very high speeds. To give context to this, the expected slot time for the mainnet is 6 seconds.

Below is a summarised list of their specific achievements since the last update:

Successfully connected and gossiped information with Nimbus nodes!

Updated the client’s networking stack to the latest libp2p networking specification.

Introduced new CLI sub-commands to allow for greater ease in spinning up testnets.

Debugged and corrected discrepancies between our rust-libp2p library and the go implementation.

Performed successful compatibility tests of lower layer libp2p protocols and gossipsub between the networking stack and the go-daemon.

Updated and optimised the syncing strategy for the new networking specification.

Optimised the database storage layout. Lighthouse now includes hot/cold db storage for faster read/write access.

Added compatibility to starting a beacon node from a pre-loaded genesis state.

Created a new tool to generate beacon states to bootstrap testnets.

Ethereum 2.0 Development Update #34 — Prysmatic Labs: biweekly updates written by the entire Prysmatic Labs team on the Ethereum 2.0 roadmap. Like Lighthouse, prepping for Eth2 networking lockin.

Nimbus Status Update — Pre-interop!: Nimbus has a mostly pre-interop client update: exit mechanics, better monitoring, and Nimplay — a nim DSL for Ethereum.

Interop week is over, but the results are spectacular: seven Eth2 clients talking to each other. This was the last major hurdle before clients focus on optimizations, auditing, and UX in preparation for launch.