tl; dr: support EIP-2537! — a new frontier With the mainnet launch of the first phase of eth2.0 (called the “beacon chain”) expected later this year, it is time to ask if there is anything the existing network can do to facilitate a smooth genesis of the new system. We can imagine a number of exciting use cases…

Putting eth2.0 to work… — As we get closer to the launch of Ethereum 2.0, you may be wondering about the fate of the existing Ethereum blockchain. A number of ideas aimed at increasing scalability of the existing network in the short-term have been proposed…

Or, what is Casper finality? — Normal operation of the Casper proof-of-stake consensus protocol leads to the output of a property called finality on the data that participants in the process are coming to consensus on. We call this data finalized because once achieved, the data cannot be changed without provably burning more than 1/3 of…

I was talking with a friend recently and in the course of our conversation came to the question: “just what is a protocol?” It is a word we hear all the time in crypto so figured I would share some definitions as I see it. A good definition strikes the…

An introduction to the basics to make sense of the latest and greatest Casper research — If you are following the Casper research from the Ethereum Foundation, you will hear a lot of terms like “accountable safety” and “fault tolerance thresholds in an asynchronous timing model.” I want to sketch the important concepts in the underlying Byzantine Fault Tolerance theory so you have more context to…

An overview of what blockchain forks are and what they mean to the ecosystem — If you are following the crypto news at all, there has been a lot of activity around Bitcoin and various factions of its users who are “forking” the protocol resulting in many different “Bitcoins”: Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, (and Bitcoin Silver?) and the upcoming duel for market share between Bitcoin…