Ethereum has announced its progress with the Beacon Chain and Altair upgrade, after the v1.1.0-alpha.6 – Protostellar Evolution was released, as well as some other new developments for Ethereum.
The Protostellar Evolution effectively separates constants, presets, and configuration, which cleans client configuration. Protolambda enables a simpler network configuration.
As Altair code changes stabilize and once the multi-client interop is performed, their client teams will pass consensus test vectors and stand up short-lived testnets. They went on to say in a release that the timeline decision will be made in the next few weeks.
Ethereum also announced that the Rayonism hackathon was completed, which was an industrious event for the team as they built dozens of nodes and thousands of validators, as well as secured a Beacon chain. This Beacon Chain will provide native support for a rich Ethereum application layer with accounts, contracts, and user transactions.
Rayonism is a project that utilizes the research and engineering resources of the ETH1-ETH2 Merge and sharding, which creates testnets around the ETHGlobal Scaling Hackathon. The name of Rayonism comes from the early abstract art movement with sharding and beacon motives. The release further read:
“The Rayonism hackathon allowed teams to rapidly prototype core Merge designs and to better understand how this merged system will work in practice. All teams now have a deep familiarity with the structure of the Merge, and a clear visual on how their software will evolve in this coming year.”
Ethereum’s client teams are now towards two forks – London and Altair – while Merge has the attention of Ethereum’s researchers for spec refinements and testing. Once finished with the midyear upgrades, the teams will Merge.