Over the past six weeks, the Ethereum primary development and research squads have been enhancing the advancements achieved in the previous year. With the shadow of last year’s security challenges now firmly in the past, efforts have commenced vigorously on the execution of the Metropolis hard fork.
To commence, we have seen continuous advancement in collaboration with the Zcash team concerning the integration of zk-SNARKs:
In terms of proof of stake, Vlad, myself, and others have persistently worked to refine the Casper specification and unify on a strategic plan. A major aspect of our efforts has been the concept of “protocol armor,” which is capable of transforming numerous types of traditional Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus algorithms into “attributable-fault consensus algorithms.” In the event of a protocol malfunction, not only can you identify that numerous validators were at fault, but you can also ascertain who is accountable. The development is not yet fully documented, but it will be explicitly defined and shared soon, and anyone interested can follow along at https://gitter.im/ethereum/casper-scaling-and-protocol-economics.
An article on parameterizing Casper can be found here: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/parametrizing-casper-the-decentralization-finality-time-overhead-tradeoff-3f2011672735
We conducted two core dev meetings and have sanctioned the subsequent EIPs for probable incorporation into Metropolis:
Moreover, there were several modifications made to the EIP procedure itself: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5rp8mr/update_to_eip_ethereum_improvement_proposal_system/
Progress on Mist, Swarm, ENS, and related infrastructure is rapidly advancing; Swarm has reached a point where it can facilitate the wallet application, although the incentivization logic is not yet established.
Advancements in programming languages are also proceeding:
Implementation efforts are underway:
We wish everyone a joyful Valentine’s Day!
