tl;dr
Upgrade to London, yes you!
The highly anticipated upgrade to the Ethereum mainnet – London – has a block fork planned and mainnet client builds are available. As mentioned previously, to enable validator deposits, validators in the beacon chain reach consensus on the state of the proof-of-work chain and process deposits sequentially from there.
To maintain this link, all mainnet validators need to upgrade their proof-of-work nodes (often called an “eth1 endpoint”).
Please see the London announcement for more details.
🚨🚨🚨Attention🚨🚨🚨
Due to an issue discovered last week on the Ropsten testnet (see retrospective), Go Ethereum (geth), Void SpiritAnd Erigon removed critical new builds late last week. If you upgraded your proof-of-work node before these releases, you need to update again remain in the consensus after London.
The London fork is expected between August 3 and 5, 2021. There’s no time like the present — upgrade now!
The merger – checklist and draft EIP
Mikhail, Tim and I put together a public presentation “Mainnet Merge Readiness Checklist”. This documents the various tasks needed to get us from here to the merge, making it easier to both coordinate the client team and provide a better view of the community’s progress. Note that this list is pretty high leveland that it is intended to serve as an aid. Much of the most important organization and communication around each point happens during calls, Discord chats, freelance repos, etc.
Also, if you want more technical details, Mikhail, Vitalik and I just published a Merge specification for the execution layer perspective in the form of a IEP project. This contains no major surprises but is a crucial step towards the next wave of Merge development!
Altaïr’s progression
Altair, Beacon Chain’s first major update, is making excellent progress following the launch of two small devnets primarily comprised of nodes and validators managed by customer teams. With these first devnets, we moved from alpha to beta versions because all the features have been verified by all teams with all the improvements now expected in the specifications — v1.1.0-beta.2 Mach’acuay.
This week we expect to see another Devnet launch followed by discussions to choose a date to create Pyrmont, a long-standing beacon chain testnet. This will attract many more node operators on a much larger scale and set the stage for a final wave of testing and selection of a target mainnet launch date.
For more information on the what, why and how of Altair, check out this excellent set of PEEPanEIP Altair by Ethereum Cat Herders:
- #34: Altair – Accounting Reform with Alex Stokes
- #35: Altair Beacon Chain Upgrade with Vitalik and Danny
- #38: Altaïr as Teku with Adrian Sutton
Finally, preparing the Beacon Chain codebases for their first upgrade was a fun but challenging task. A big congratulations for all the excellent work of the customer teams to bring us closer to this major milestone 🚀
