In The last month and a half, Ethereum’s core research and development teams have continued to build on the successes of the preceding year. Last year’s security issues are now behind us, and we are off to a good start with the Metropolis Hard Fork implementation.
Among Other developments, collaboration with the Zcash team has led to the implementation of zk-SNARKs.
On The proof-of-stake front, Vlad and others have been actively refining the Casper protocol and finalizing the roadmap. The concept of “protocol armor” can be used to convert a range of fault-tolerant Byzantine consensus algorithms into “failure-attributable consensus algorithms”. If a protocol fails, the process is terminated, and it is not only clear that certain validators have failed, but who is responsible for the problem. Although this work is not yet complete, it will be formalized and made available soon. Those interested can continue their work in the Gitter channel.
Parameters For Casper have been discussed in a post; see here: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/parametrizing-casper-the-decentralization-finality-time-overhead-tradeoff-3f2011672735
At The two core development meetings this month, the following EIPs have been examined, approved, and set for inclusion in the future Metropolis release:
Modifications Were also made to the EIP itself; view here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5rp8mr/update_to_eip_ethereum_improvement_proposal_system/
Progress On Mist, SwarmENS, ENS, as well as the overall infrastructure, is continuing at a rapid rate. The wallet application is now ready to be released, although the reward logic is still not in place.
Work On programming languages is also moving ahead, and progress is being made in the implementation stage.
Wishing Everyone a Happy Valentine’s Day!
