tl;dr
Altair pre-release released
Over the past week, preliminary specifications for the Altair Beacon Chain: Stargazer v1.1.0-alpha.1 And Half of them look like dots v1.1.0-alpha.2 – were released. These represent the first full feature releases of Altair’s upcoming Beacon Chain upgrade and give engineering teams something concrete to work on.
Altair is a beacon chain upgrade that brings thin client support, minor fixes to incentives, per-validator inactivity leak accounting, increased outage severity, and validator reward cleanups for a simplified state management.
In addition to these various features, Altair also represents a “warm-up upgrade” for Beacon Chain and Beacon Chain customers. Ethereum’s proof-of-stake system has worked quite well since its genesis, but before performing the high-stakes merge, client teams want to go through the live upgrade process to further test and prepare their codebases and live system.
Customer teams are currently integrating the draft changes and providing feedback along the way. After this process, we will release a full version and start the testnet phase.
Open call: security tender
Last week, the FE published a beacon chain security + RFP testing. This is an open call for proposals to improve beacon chain security, analytics, and testing. Beyond customer engineering, there is much to do to continue to verify, refine, and strengthen the beacon chain system before the merge, and we want to involve more teams with a wide variety of expertise.
Consult the calls for tenders potential areas of interest for some ideas, but if you’re having trouble refining these different areas into a more refined proposal, feel free to email rfp@ethereum.org for some advice. Provide general information about your or your team’s skills and experience, as well as basic guidance, and we can work together to refine a proposal.
If you know of a team or person who might be suitable for this call for tenders, please send it to us!
Merge Progress
Merger progress accelerates 🔥
What is the merger you ask? This is the unification of Ethereum’s application layer (currently supported by proof of work) with Ethereum’s proof of stake consensus layer, the beacon chain. Although the Beacon Chain is already active, it currently only reaches consensus on itself, but after the merge, the Beacon Chain will be the powerhouse of all the dapps, smart contracts, and accounts you use today .
Over the past few weeks, fusion designs have continued to be refined. Discover Mikhail’s latest PR specification for the final synthesis of plans and fusion structure. We expect these basic designs to be integrated into the specifications soon and engineering teams to begin work on the next wave of demos and testnets.
In addition to our asynchronous research, design, and engineering, we launched a bi-weekly call to increase collaboration across the many teams. You can monitor progress and actively participate in Discord R&D Eth #merge channel 🚀
