tl; dr
Better for London, yes you!
The highly anticipated upgrade to Ethereum mainnet London has a block hard fork scheduled and mainnet client releases are now live. As mentioned above, to allow validator deposits, the beacon chain validators come to a consensus on the state of the proof-of-work chain and process the deposits sequentially from there.
To maintain this link, all mainnet validators they must update their proof-of-work nodes (often referred to as “eth1 endpoints”).
Please watch the london ad for more details.
🚨🚨🚨 Warning 🚨🚨🚨
Due to an issue discovered last week on the Ropsten testnet (see retrospective), Go-Ethereum (geth), nether mindY erigon have cut new and critical releases late last week. If you updated your proof-of-work node prior to these releases, you must update again remain in the consensus after London.
The London fork is expected between August 3-5, 2021. There is no better time than the present. update now!
The Fusion: Checklist and Draft EIP
Mikhail, Tim and I organized a public meeting “Mainnet Merge Preparation Checklist”. This documents the various tasks required to get us from here to the merge, helping both with client team coordination and providing a better view of progress for the community. Please note that this list is quite high level, and which is intended to serve as an aid. Much of the most essential organization and communication around each point happens in calls, discord chats, independent repositories, etc.
Also, if you want to get more technical, Mikhail, Vitalik, and I have just published a Merge spec for the execution layer perspective in the form of EIP project. This doesn’t contain any big surprises, but it is a critical step towards the next wave of Merge development!
altair progress
Altair, the first major upgrade to Beacon Chain, is making excellent progress after launching two small development networks made up mostly of nodes and validators managed by customer teams. With these early dev networks, we move from alpha to beta releases as all the teams have looked at the feature set with all the refinements expected now in the spec: v1.1.0-beta.2 Mach’acuay.
This week, we expect to see another devnet release followed by discussions to pick a fork date. pirmont, 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 on the what, why, and how of Altair, check out this excellent set of Altair PEEPanEIP from Ethereum Cat Herders:
- #34: Altair – Accounting Reform with Alex Stokes
- #35: Altair Beacon Chain Update with Vitalik and Danny
- #38: Altair in Teku with Adrian Sutton
Finally, preparing the Beacon Chain code bases for its first update has been a fun but challenging task. Here’s a big thank you for all the great work from the customer teams to get us closer to this important milestone 🚀
