Gas utilization per day has not yet reached the record high of June 18, when the blockchain experienced significant spam as part of the DAO attack and various counteractions, but is approaching it with an 11-month peak<\/a> of 10.7 billion per day. That translates to 1991878 gas per block, or about 45% full blocks for the day (note: gas limits are dynamically adjusting<\/a>, hence congestion with sharply rising fees is unlikely) . Uncle rate<\/a> on that day was merely around 7.4%.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/p>\n
Concerning various side projects:<\/p>\n
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\n- ENS has been launched, and auctions are in progress<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- Whisper is being equipped with a proper API, aligned with our general RPC, and the API is expected to be ready shortly, with a functional version of whisper scheduled for release.
\n<\/p>\n\n- Swarm has undergone several significant enhancements, including (i) enabling directory upload and download via the HTTP interface, (ii) full FUSE support, (iii) a new protocol called pss for node-to-node messaging, (iv) substituting the chunk hash with a Merkle tree hash to facilitate more efficient data inclusion proofs. Progress towards POC3 is advancing robustly.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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Pyethereum development has gained momentum rapidly:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n- Jan Xie and his team have successfully synchronized a pyethapp node with the latest block on the mainnet.<\/li>\n
- Multiple bugs in the implementation have been addressed, and the client is currently passing all state tests and most pre-Metropolis blockchain tests. Efforts to identify the remaining issues are ongoing.<\/li>\n
- The majority of Metropolis EIPs have been incorporated, including the four new precompiles<\/a>.<\/li>\n
- The tester module has been redesigned to be fully based on the Chain module, with a new and more user-friendly interface introduced, incorporating functionalities like creating state tests.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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Casper research is currently engaged in fine-tuning the incentives for liveness, while embedding the logic within pyethereum. This involves:<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
Additional research items:<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
Geth development:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n- Eliminated the artificial 20 shannon minimum gas limit from the transaction pool<\/a>, allowing Geth nodes to accept and relay transactions with arbitrary pricing. This should facilitate the emergence of a genuine gas market.<\/li>\n
- Detected a sync regression affecting HDD users, resulting in a substantial rewrite of fast sync code<\/a>, enhancing its robustness and stability.<\/li>\n
- Identified and resolved a few EVM bottlenecks<\/a>, enabling complex contracts to execute up to 60% faster while performing up to 95% fewer memory allocations.<\/li>\n
- Refining the light client and its mobile bindings<\/a> in cooperation with Status<\/a>, Walleth<\/a> and others. Preliminary proof-of-concept for light client event retrievals completed.<\/li>\n
- Developing a new filtering system<\/a>, yielding very encouraging outcomes, trimming the duration needed to sift through the entire blockchain for contract events from minutes to mere seconds.<\/li>\n
- Exploring a novel mining technique, which is aimed at executing transaction processing for miners completely in parallel with mining, thereby reducing the overhead associated with transaction inclusion to zero. This should enable miners to decrease fees without transactions affecting the chances of discovering blocks and\/or having them included.<\/li>\n
- Gradually implementing minor enhancements to Puppeth, Clique, and Rinkeby, such as a tiered faucet<\/a> for Ether withdrawals, configurable gas dynamics<\/a> for miners in private networks, and automatic ENS integration.<\/li>\n
- An independent security audit has been conducted by Truesec AB, with no significant issues identified.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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C++ development:<\/p>\n
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