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Research & Development

Announcements related to research and development of the Ethereum protocol.

February 27, 2024

R&D

Dencun Mainnet Announcement
Dencun Mainnet Announcement

by Protocol Support Team

March 12, 2024 update: Since the initial publication of this post, several client teams have made Dencun-compatible releases containing significant performance and stability improvements. While previously announced versions are still considered sufficient for the upgrade, a column has been added to the Client Releases tables highlighting the latest recommended versions for all clients. Mainnet blobs are coming .oO: Two years after its ETHDenver inception, dozens of testing calls and devnets later, protodanksharding is finally going live on mainnet! Dencun will activate on the Ethereum mainnet at epoch 269568, occurring on March 13, 2024 at 13:55 UTC. Node operators & stakers must upgrade their software to releases listed in this announcement. To receive email alerts for future network upgrade announcements, subscribe here.

February 21, 2024

R&D

ZK Grants Round

by Rodrigo Vasquez

The Ethereum Foundation is thrilled to announce a collaborative grant round with Aztec, Polygon, Scroll, Taiko, and zkSync to develop Zero Knowledge public goods projects. Each co-funder of the grant round has contributed 150K USD in funds, bringing the total grant pool to 900K USD. The breadth and complexity of the Layer 2 ecosystem has reached a point where identifying shared needs and dependencies requires the participation of domain experts from a range of stakeholders. The co-funders will, therefore, not only provide funding but also participate in the allocation decisions. Beyond more and better-informed funding, we hope this approach will facilitate increasing modularity and use of shared standards in the ZK L2 ecosystem. For this round the research teams have collaborated on a collective wishlist to

February 7, 2024

R&D

Introducing the EPF Study Group

by Josh Davis & Mario Havel

The Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF) is a program designed to reduce the barrier to entry for developers interested in working on the core protocol. As core developer (and EPF creator) Piper Merriam likes to say, the door is comically wide open. EPF helps you walk through it. Over the past two cohorts, one of the most frequent request we've received from applicants & participants was for better onboarding materials. Josh and Mario, the coordinators of the EPF, are excited to announce the launch of the EPF study group (EPFsg): a 10 week education series intended as a precursor to the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (the fifth cohort is coming 🔜). EPFsg has been designed to guide and grow the next generation of Ethereum core developers

January 24, 2024

R&D

Sepolia & Holesky Dencun Announcement

by Protocol Support Team

Important update: since the initial publication of this post, Lodestar has published a new release, v1.15.0, which Holesky users must upgrade to prior to Dencun's activation on February 7th. Additionally, Prysm and Nimbus have both published highly recommended releases for Holesky. Prysm users are encouraged to use v4.2.1, and Nimbus users v24.2.0. Goerli blobs are here: Dencun went live on Goerli at 6:32 UTC on January 17, 2024. You can now use blobs there! Sepolia and Holesky will upgrade over the next two weeks. Dencun will activate on Sepolia at epoch 132608 (January 30th, 22:51 UTC), and on Holesky at epoch 29696 (February 7th, 11:35 UTC). Client releases in this announcement are suitable for both testnet upgrades. Assuming the Sepolia and Holesky

January 23, 2024

R&D

Wrapping up the KZG Ceremony

by EF Protocol Support Team

The KZG Ceremony was the largest multi-party computation of its kind (by number of participants). Through an open, accessible process, it produced a secure cryptographic foundation for EIP-4844. Learn more about how the Ceremony worked in Carl Beekhuizen's Devcon talk: "Summoning the spirit of the Dankshard" As the Dencun upgrade approaches, this post will serve as a comprehensive record of outcomes and people that brought the Ceremony to life in 2023.

January 10, 2024

R&D

Goerli Dencun Announcement

by Protocol Support Team

The blobs are coming: Dencun will go live on Goerli at 6:32 UTC on January 17, 2024. Dencun will be Goerli's last upgrade before core teams stop supporting it. More on this in a previous post. Assuming the Goerli upgrade goes well, the Sepolia and Holesky testnets will activate Dencun over the next few weeks. To receive an email alert for network upgrade announcements, subscribe here. The Dencun network upgrade is scheduled to activate on the Goerli testnet at 6:32 UTC on January 17, 2024. The upgrade includes several changes, most notably the introduction of ephemeral data blobs with EIP-4844, also known as "protodanksharding", which will help reduce L2 transaction fees. Dencun follows last year's Shapella upgrade. It will first

November 2, 2023

R&D

Secured #6 - Writing Robust C - Best Practices for Finding and Preventing Vulnerabilities

by Justin Traglia

For EIP-4844, Ethereum clients need the ability to compute and verify KZG commitments. Rather than each client rolling their own crypto, researchers and developers came together to write c-kzg-4844, a relatively small C library with bindings for higher-level languages. The idea was to create a robust and efficient cryptographic library that all clients could use. The Protocol Security Research team at the Ethereum Foundation had the opportunity to review and improve this library. This blog post will discuss some things we do to make C projects more secure. <!--

September 12, 2023

R&D

Geth v1.13.0

by Péter Szilágyi

Geth v1.13 comes fairly close on the heels of the 1.12 release family, which is funky, considering it's main feature has been in development for a cool 6 years now. 🤯 This post will go into a number of technical and historical details, but if you just want the gist of it, Geth v1.13.0 ships a new database model for storing the Ethereum state, which is both faster than the previous scheme, and also has proper pruning implemented. No more junk accumulating on disk and no more guerilla (offline) pruning! !Geth v1.13.0 Sync Benchmark ¹Excluding ~589GB ancient data, the same across all configurations. ²Hash scheme full sync exceeded our 1.8TB SSD at block ~15.43M. ³Size difference vs snap sync attributed to compaction overhead. Before going ahead though, a

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