Altair Upgrade Announced: Ethereum’s Merge Approaches

The arrival of Altair is upon us; the Merge is on the horizon.

Summary:

Altair upgrade, October 27

Altair, the inaugural mainnet upgrade to the Beacon Chain, has been set for epoch 74240 (October 27, 2021, 10:56:23 AM UTC).

One of the key benefits of proof-of-stake is the precision in timing upgrades (Apologies, Tim! Our proof-of-work days are numbered )

This update introduces light-client support into the core consensus, cleans up incentive accounting for the beacon state, resolves some validator incentive issues, and enhances the punitive parameters in accordance with EIP-2982.

A huge thank you to the client teams for their hard work throughout the year

Stay tuned for another blog post on Monday, October 4th, featuring all mainnet Altair releases.

After that, you’ll be able to upgrade your nodes!

Merge interoperability specs and upcoming development networks

The Merge Interop specification was unveiled on Friday. This “meta-spec” offers stable objectives for engineers during the initial testing phase and development networks.

Following a surge in specification development over the previous months, Merge specifications are approaching feature completeness, and the core logic has stabilized. Moving into this next stage, engineers will implement the Merge logic and collaborate with other teams on temporary development networks to test their software. They will evaluate the current specifications and provide ongoing feedback to refine and address any emerging issues.

A top priority is to validate and enhance the Merge engine API and to prototype and define various synchronization models under the new Merge framework.

The transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake has been years in the making, and we share your enthusiasm to witness it in action. Exciting times are ahead this October