Constant progress
tl;dr
Altair’s Progress
Altair, the first planned upgrade to the Beacon Chain, continues to make steady progress. Last week we released the Beacon Chain specs v1.1.0-alpha.6 — Protostellar evolution. Although this is an alpha release, barring any security or practical engineering issues, the specifications are unlikely to change from now on.
Customer teams are busy passing consensus test vectors and setting up short-lived test networks. Teams will make timing decisions in the coming weeks as Altair code changes stabilize and initial multi-client interoperability is achieved.
If you want to learn more about the upcoming improvements for the Beacon channel in Altair, check out the recent Vitalik release: Altair specifications annotated.
Summary of Rayonism and Fusion Progress
THE Rayonism Hackathon ended last week with the Nocturne testnet – a multi-client fusion testnet consisting of 4 consensus engines and 3 execution engines for a total of 12 unique client pairs.
Dozens of nodes and thousands of validators built and secured a beacon chain that provided native support for a rich Ethereum application layer with accounts, contracts, and user transactions.
🎉 Many thanks to all participating customer teams and to protolambda and Mikhail for leading this effort 🎉
The Rayonism hackathon allowed teams to quickly prototype basic Merge designs and better understand how this fused system will work in practice. All teams now have a deep familiarity with the structure of the merger and a clear vision of how their software will evolve over the coming year.
The customer teams are now focusing on the two forks this summer: London And Altaïr — while the researchers are back Merge specification improvements and testing. After summer upgrades, teams will focus on merging and start tackling production engineering with an eye on public testnets 🚀
