Exciting Ethereum - The Daily Gwei #249
There's more to be excited about than just EIP-1559 and the merge!
There are plenty of things happening in the Ethereum ecosystem all of the time with some (like EIP-1559 and the merge) getting lots of attention due to how large of an impact they will have. Though there are many other lesser-known things happening that I wanted to shine a light on in today’s piece.
First up we have EIP-3074 which many of the core developers and researchers are very excited about but the wider community is essentially unaware of. For a full breakdown of EIP-3074 I suggest giving this Twitter thread a read but the tl;dr is that this EIP aims to replace meta-transactions with a much simpler version that reduces contract complexity and adds more features. What this means for end-users is that typical user transactions such as approving a token on Uniswap and then performing a trade can be batched into just 1 transaction. This is a simple example but you can already see how much of a boon this is to the user experience - I can’t wait to see what developers build with this new functionality once it’s live on mainnet.
Next up is the Altair upgrade which is the first major upgrade (hard fork) coming to the eth2 Beacon Chain since it was launched on December 1st. This upgrade would bring with it a host of changes to the Beacon Chain including light client support, incentive accounting reforms and penalty parameter updates. I’m excited to see how well this upgrade goes and how effectively we as a community can coordinate around it as eth1 upgrades are usually quite smooth (though sometimes there are hiccups).
Recently, Trent Van Epps from the Ethereum Foundation announced the ‘Core Dev Apprenticeship Program’ which aims to get more people involved with core Ethereum protocol work. This is exciting because the Ethereum protocol is always in need of more core developers but onboarding has generally been difficult so this program attempts to simplify the process as much as possible. The end result is hopefully onboarding a bunch of very strong developers that can add value across the entire core protocol stack.
Another theme I’m paying close attention to lately is DAO’s launching grants programs (which I’ve written about before here). I think this is something that’s really special and has the potential to do a lot of good for a wide range of people. Not only can these grants programs pay out individual contributors, but they can also be set up in a way to pay out teams to build on a protocol. For example, a grant could be paid out to 5 different teams to build unique front-end interfaces for a specific protocol which acts to further decentralize it - pretty cool, huh?
Lastly we have one of my favorite projects in this space - Aztec Network - working on and deploying critical layer 2 privacy technology to mainnet. For some reason, this has flown under the radar and not nearly enough people are talking about it so if you’d like to learn more you can head here and if you’d like to play around with it you can head here. Privacy features are obviously critical to the long-term success of the Ethereum network (especially for financial applications) so I’m really happy that Aztec is working on this technology - we just need more people to use it!
So as you can see, there’s plenty to be excited about outside of the “mainstream” things that everyone already knows about. Often it takes digging around in research forums, Discord/Telegram chats and Twitter to find these things but I think it’s well worth it if you want to stay ahead of the pack. Of course, you could always subscribe to the Daily Gwei’s YouTube channel and let me cover it all for you - but I won’t shill you on that too much!
Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano
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All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.