steady progress
tl; dr
altair progress
Altair, the first planned update to the Beacon Chain, continues to progress steadily. Last week, we released the Beacon Chain specifications v1.1.0-alpha.6 — Protostellar Evolution. While this is an alpha release, unless there is a practical engineering or security issue, it is unlikely that the specification will change from now on.
Client teams are busy passing consensus test vectors and setting up short-lived testnets. The teams will make timeline decisions in the coming weeks as Altair code changes stabilize and initial multi-client interoperability takes place.
For more information on updates coming to the Beacon Chain on Altair, check out Vitalik’s recent release from Altair annotated specifications.
Rayonism Summary and Fusion Progress
He rayonism hackathon concluded last week with the Nocturne testnet, a multi-client Merge 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 user accounts, contracts, and transactions.
🎉 A big shout out to all the participating customer teams and to protolambda and Mikhail for driving the effort forward 🎉
The Rayonism hackathon allowed teams to quickly prototype basic Merge designs and better understand how this combined system will work in practice. All teams now have a deep familiarity with the Merge structure and a clear vision of how their software will evolve in the coming year.
Customer teams are now focused on the two forks this summer: London Y altaïr — while the researchers return to Join refinements and specification tests. After the summer updates, the teams will shift their focus to Merge and start tackling production engineering for public testnets 🚀
