Author: Michael Johnson
The idea behind the Vyper Project was to develop something that was designed at the language level to naturally exhibit a high degree of safety. The project was originally authored by Vitalik as a proof-of-concept replacement for Serpent, its predecessor, but shortly after its creation Vyper found itself without a dedicated maintainer. Luckily, there were enthusiastic community members that took up the torch and continued development of the project, and we (the EF Python Team) became re-involved in the project for some time earlier this year. This fall, a preliminary security audit was performed by the Consensys Diligence team on…
Thanks to Joseph Schweitzer and Danny Ryan for review. Welcome back! Having discussed eth2’s design philosophy last time, today’s focus is on eth2’s incentives through the lens of that philosophy. More specifically, we look at the incentives effecting eth2 and how they are realised in the form of rewards, penalties, and slashings. We then walk through how and why validators are incentivised to remain online, why you won’t be slashed for going offline, and more. Let’s dig in. If not for being offline, when do slashings occur? ⚔️ Slashing has two purposes: (1) to make it prohibitively expensive to attack…
Welcome to the first eth2 quick update of 2020! This is going to be an exciting year. tldr; Release of v0.10.0 spec as stable target for multi-client testnets and security reviews@paulhauner and @sigp_io team hard at work building LighthouseRelaunch of Prysm testnet, now with aggregators and mainnet configurationA new proposal for an expedited merging of eth1+eth2 (aka Phase 1.5) Release of v0.10.0 for security reviews and multi-client testnets v0.10.0 — 404 Not Found was released last week. Read the release notes for the technical details (integration of IETF BLS, simpler eth1 caching, etc), but what does it actually mean for…
January 14th tl;dc (too long, didn’t call) Disclaimer: This is a digest of the topics discussed in the recurring Eth1.x research call, and doesn’t represent finalized plans or commitments to network upgrades. The main topics of this call were Rough data quantifying advantages of switching to a binary trie structureTransition strategies and potential challenges for a switch to binary tries”Merklizing” contract code for witnesses, and implications for gas scheduling/meteringChain pruning and historical chain/state data — network implications and approaches to distribution. Logistics The weekend following EthCC (March 7-8), there will be a small 1.x research summit, with the intent of…
I started to write a post that detailed a “roadmap” for Ethereum 1.x research and the path to stateless Ethereum, and realized that it’s not actually a roadmap at all —— at least not in the sense we’re used to seeing from something like a product or company. The 1.x team, although working toward a common goal, is an eclectic collection of developers and researchers independently tackling intricately related topics. Consequently, there is no “official” roadmap to speak of. It’s not complete chaos though! There is an understood “order of operations”; some things must happen before others, certain solutions are…
The try/catch syntax introduced in 0.6.0 is arguably the biggest leap in error handling capabilities in Solidity, since reason strings for revert and require were released in v0.4.22. Both try and catch have been reserved keywords since v0.5.9 and now we can use them to handle failures in external function calls without rolling back the complete transaction (state changes in the called function are still rolled back, but the ones in the calling function are not). We are moving one step away from the purist “all-or-nothing” approach in a transaction lifecycle, which falls short of practical behaviour we often want.…
Keep it coming tldr; Runtime Verification audit and verification of deposit contract Runtime Verification recently completed their audit and formal verification of the eth2 deposit contract bytecode. This is a significant milestone bringing us closer to the eth2 Phase 0 mainnet. Now that this work is complete, I ask for review and comment by the community. If there are gaps or errors in the formal specification, please post an issue on the eth2 specs repo. The formal semantics specified in the K Framework define the precise behaviors the EVM bytecode should exibit and proves that these behaviors hold. These include…
Are you part of a university blockchain club eager to dive deeper into the world of Ethereum? We want to connect with you! The Ethereum Foundation is sponsoring a global University Tour in partnership with BuidlGuidl, designed to activate student communities and grow the next generation of Ethereum builders. This tour includes: 🧑💻 Virtual sessions with Ethereum educators and builders🏫 In-person workshops on campuses across the globe🏆 A cross-university club competition, culminating in a live finals at Devconnect 2025 Whether your club is just getting started or already deeply embedded in the Ethereum ecosystem, this is your chance to: Plug…
Every year, the Ethereum ecosystem welcomes thousands of builders through community events, hackathons, courses, bootcamps, and campus clubs. However, many newcomers struggle to remain engaged, as they face challenges securing structured early-career opportunities. The Ethereum Season of Internships directly addresses this retention gap by creating a coordinated collection of internship opportunities across the ecosystem. What is the Ethereum Season of Internships? The Ethereum Season of Internships offers a coordinated collection of paid, fully remote summer internships across the Ethereum ecosystem. This initiative creates pathways for the next generation of contributors to connect with Ethereum projects and apply their diverse skills…
Thanks to Marius Van Der Wijden for creating the test case and statetest, and for helping the Besu team confirm the issue. Also, kudos to the Besu team, the EF security team, and Kevaundray Wedderburn. Additionally, thanks to Yuxiang Qiu, Justin Traglia, Marius Van Der Wijden, Benedikt Wagner, and Kevaundray Wedderburn for proofreading. If you have any other questions/comments, find me on twitter at @asanso tl;dr: Besu Ethereum execution client version 25.2.2 suffered from a consensus issue related to the EIP-196/EIP-197 precompiled contract handling for the elliptic curve alt_bn128 (a.k.a. bn254). The issue was fixed in release 25.3.0. Here is…