Ethereum R&D Summary: Valentine’s Day Edition

Over the past month and a half, the Ethereum core development and research team has been building on the progress made over the past year, and with the specter of last year’s security issues now far behind, the Ethereum core development and research team has been looking forward to the Metropolis hard fork.

First, here’s our collaboration with the Zcash team and our continued progress on zk-SNARK implementation:

On the proof-of-stake side, myself, Vlad, and others have continued to solidify the Casper spec and converge on the roadmap. The main focus of our work has been on the concept of “protocol armor”, which can turn many classes of traditional Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithms into “attributable fault-tolerant consensus algorithms”. We know that many validators are flawed, but we also know who to blame. This work is not yet fully written, but will be further formalized and published soon, and anyone interested is free to follow along. https://gitter.im/ethereum/casper-scaling-and-protocol-economics.

Here’s a post about Casper parameterization: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/parametrizing-casper-the-decentralization-finality-time-overhead-tradeoff-3f2011672735

we are two core developer meetingApproved the following EIPs for potential inclusion in Metropolis:

There have also been several changes to the EIP process itself. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5rp8mr/update_to_eip_ethereum_improvement_proposal_system/

Work on Mist, Swarm, ENS, and related infrastructure continues at a rapid pace. Swarm is now at a stage where it can offer a wallet app, but the incentive logic isn’t in place yet.

Work is also underway on programming languages.

Implementation work is in progress.

I hope everyone has a happy Valentine’s Day!