December marks a month of continued progress in the Ethereum ecosystem. Research on proof of stake and sharding continues after the research team’s workshop in Singapore in November, the light client slowly keeps getting better, Whisper and Swarm keep moving forward, and discussions on protocol economics and community governance continue to mature.
First, privacy technologies on Ethereum, and particularly zk-SNARKs (or “zero knowledge proofs”), have been rapidly moving forward.
Vlad Zamfir has taken it upon himself to explain the history behind Casper, from his point of view:
On proof of stake from myself:
Vlad has also taken it upon himself to rail against the evils of “economic abstraction” (ie. the goal of trying to create token-agnostic public economic consensus protocols):
Various discussions were had on monetary policy:
Speaking of EIPs…
- Greg Colvin’s suggested modifications for adding further static analysis capability (184) as part of the move toward “EVM 1.5”
- The Ethereum Name System (launched on the Ropsten testnet in late November), saw an EIP opened (181) to support reverse resolution of Ethereum addresses
The data storage-focused “sister protocol” Swarm continues to move forward:
And from the core client development standpoint:
We wish the community a happy new year and look forward to more progress in January!