The Future of Ethereum 1.0 in 2021

okay with that we're going to just jump into our first conversation uh we have a panel being moderated by the great hudson jameson one of my dear friends and uh it is uh the future of ethereum 1.0 in 2021 so joining him is tim from consensus quorum puja from ethereum cat herders and james from the ethereum foundation good morning everybody or good afternoon wherever you happen to be in the world hey john good to see you hey great to see you likewise everybody ready yeah i think we're good to go all right take it away all right thanks so much john hey everybody uh this is hudson i'm here to uh with my other panelists present on the future of ethereum 1.0 and 2021. let's click this away all right so here's the overview of the panel i'm going to be talking about the history of the all core devs meetings pooja is going to be talking about how the ethereum cat herders uh assist in all things network upgrade in core devs james is going to be talking about network upgrade coordination and finally tim will be talking about the future of the all-core devs if we have some time at the end we might take a question or two and thank you all for showing up all right so just a little about me i've been the facilitator for the all core dev meetings since 2016. i'll be passing that off to tim uh starting in march roughly i also co-founded the ethereum cat herders do stuff at the ethereum foundation uh do community stuff across ethereum and zcash i'm also an advisor to status and chain link and i have three cats who i love dearly okay so for those of you who don't know the ethereum core developer calls we call the all core devs calls because that's what the chat room channel that was originally made for this uh that you'll see in a little bit is called uh it happens every other friday at 1400 utc so that's roughly 9 a.

m eastern time and then it's like afternoon in europe and evening in asia so we try to make it like even for everybody to participate so the all-core devs getter was established in 2015 by gavin wood uh at the time there wasn't really like a bunch of different organizations like there are now it was mostly the ethereum foundation so there was meetings of about 8 to 10 to 12 people who would talk about core developer issues what to do with the clients how to do hard forks etc we transitioned to from getter to discord in late 2020 and that's been great so far it also helps us coordinate with the eth 2.0 people for stuff like the merge coming up and just generally can convey stuff about eips have some good chat sessions there the ethereum pm repo was established in september 2016 by me and there if you go to github.com ethereum pm you can see all the meeting notes for core developer meetings spanning back all the way to end of 2016 um all the way to today um we have like a chart we kind of have what the meetings are about it's it's a it's a place that we also have the agendas and the issues section so if you're ever interested in seeing what's going to come up with a lot of the ethereum 1.0 space you can check out the agenda and start seeing um how you can contribute what the other client devs are doing stuff like that the video recordings were established in january 2017. before then it was just audio or just in person not recorded this is an old one this was actually the first one that was video recorded um all core devs number 11.

we see peter's lovely face on there um so yeah we just have video recordings i think that's nice because people can kind of feel more involved and get a sense for how people are acting we've also started having video on so that we can get like facial reactions and stuff like that from people also i have an obligatory number go up slide as you can see we are going up in number on the core dev meetings so the numbies are looking really good everyone that was my fast spiel if you go to hudsonjamison.com i have blogs up about ethereum network upgrade history and about what it means to be a core developer if you're interested um other than that i think that's good you can find me on twitter at hudsonjamison and i'm gonna pass it off to puja hey everyone excited to be part of denver this is my first time so thanks for providing me the opportunity to talk about ech a working group to support ethereum community at large i'm puja ranjan the herder in chief at ethereum cat hurdles currently supporting ethereum network upgrade as community liaison so who are cat herders founded in 2019 by hudson jensen and lane retic from the ethereum community to support the ethereum development work with communication and coordination activities network upgrade and all code meeting notes were the primary that people could think of at that time but with time more people joined and now we are a decentralized project management group that aims to support ethereum as ethereum support desk for the new community members this group has project managers developers and individual community contributors how do we support it communication and coordination are the primary tasks that we are undertaking we reach out to client development team and try to spread information about the progress and the network upgrade also in coordination with community we we collect some feedback from them as per requirement of the client developers and with analysis of the data we share the feedback with everybody in the ethereum allcorner meeting we also facilitate the breakout room meeting uh that is sometimes needed to support the decision making process making it faster which cannot be you know uh all coder meetings saving all code meetings time process improvement is important for any project eib ip is a group who is currently looking into the develop and process improvement part of it the categories are core contributors and we are trying to document the new changes also document notes which are coming from core meetings community building is important as we see it ethereum is a decentralized project and we would want everybody to join so we organize different events and we try to participate in different blockchain conference to talk more about ethereum educational resources at present on the cad orders website we have educational resources of the information that are with us but uh we are also working with ethereum.org people to make this information readily available for people recently we started p penny which is dedicated to improvement proposal i'm gonna talk about it in the later slide so why people need eaps are building block of ethereum chain uh in uh august 2020 we started the p panic series with how to write an eip the purpose next the purpose was to provide more information about the proposals which are under discussion and we wanted to make sure that people should aware of it and if they have any questions we could bring the authors on the platform where they can ask the questions from authors directly in this process we also try to standardize the proposal push it forward as as fast as possible and this also helps us making a useful resource for every proposal which has been considered for ethereum so far we have recorded over 22 episodes and these can be found at ethereum cathedral's youtube channel under a playlist p penny next as they say anything is possible if you have the right people to support you we are so lucky to have found so many different working group in the ethereum ecosystem and we are working closely with ethereum all for them developers erp editors and authors with the fellowship of ethereum magician people and with their support we are trying to build a stronger community next this is the list of all our social media where you can find ethereum cat hurdles discord is the best place to hang out for the latest information you can subscribe to the ethereum catalyst newsletter by following us at medium east website is currently under renovation meanwhile you can follow us at get a meeting for notes and if you go to uh hudson jameson on twitter my one of my latest tweets has a link to these slides as a sub comment on the uh topic of this meeting and like a link to or this presentation and a link to the presentation on twitch that's on thank you all right next up we have james hello i'm james hancock i started volunteering with the core devs about two years ago and then uh was picked up about a year ago by the ef to help spend more time on that i do the hard four coordination so you um you can find me at jay hancock on twitter and dms are open um at at some level ethereum is the software that we're all running on our nodes and for so my role as hardcore coordinator is to help schedule and coordinate between the decision makers how all of these things fit together so that node operators community can all install uh together and stay in sync with the network and and there's four major clients today gath basu nethermine and open ethereum and each of them have their own developer teams and their own um work work work habits and their own places where they communicate and we all get together in the alcor devs and i um help basically to schedule the decisions that they make there and the we've moved a lot of it used to be in the eipip the eip repo but now this kind of work is done in the specs repo um currently we're in the scheduling process for berlin where we're where we're choosing the fork blocks for the test nets and then upcoming we'll be choosing maintenance and a more in-depth summary of or more in depth on eip statuses into hard forks and how those work was written by the cappers and there's a link at the bottom of the proposal which i think you'll be able to either click on later or find on hudson's twitter thread cool thanks james um hey everybody i'm tim uh so as hudson mentioned earlier i'll be taking over the awkward devs call starting in march so i've been uh working closely as part of them over the past two and a half years as a product manager on one of the eth1 clients hyperledger basu and the other thing that's been keeping me busy is uh championing eip 1559 over the past year or so um next time please so i think you know one way to think about all core devs is really a balancing act between the different parts of the community so uh you know on one hand we have the client developers which james mentioned who are really kind of the core of the call um which you know put together the software that the nodes use on the network and and you know uh look through the different proposals and determine what what should go uh in in the upgrades um but then in order to actually get proposals you know we have people coming into the calls who champion certain eips and those are ideas about how we can improve the protocol i mentioned eip1559 that's one of them we see people coming in all the time with say different cryptographic curves that they want added to support stuff like zk snarks or even new up codes that'll just help their application run better on ethereum so people coming in and kind of proposing these things are obviously a very important part of the call um and then you know another big part uh of of uh all core devs is trying to think through what the rest of the community wants right so everyone who's involved in ethereum but who isn't involved in the core devs calls um themselves um and you know i think what we try to do in awkwardness is balance between all of those and and get to a spot where everyone is is happy um but you know at the end of the day the client developers are really kind of the core stakeholders of that call because they're the ones who show up to every call um that actually you know do the work when we have to implement something and that are ultimately responsible if anything goes wrong with a network upgrade um so one thing i've been trying to do as i i'm ramping up on uh taking over the calls is talking with the different kind developers and understanding you know how do we make these calls as valuable as we can for you all and once that's done we'll obviously be reaching out to the rest of the community to get uh the similar feedback so so far um i've you know i've talked to all of the different client teams as well as a few folks who are involved pretty regularly in the call um there's a link that on the slide that links through the kind of extensive feedback that i've gathered um but at a high level there were really three bits of feedback that came up pretty frequently the first is that the calls can kind of feel slow and inefficient but at the end of the day they work ethereum keeps running we have network upgrades um so even though the process can be some sometimes frustrating when you're part of it if you zoom out a little bit it actually is not all that bad um and that's i think something that can kind of be lost when you know you're sitting in the call after call and it feels like you're not making a ton of progress um yeah if you zoom out on kind of a month or a year's time time span it's pretty incredible how much the protocol has evolved um oh sorry still on this slide thanks um i guess the other thing that came up a lot is there's kind of a tension in the call between trying to use it to make important decisions about the protocol and trying to have kind of more in-depth discussions about certain aspects of the protocol and both those things are important but sometimes people get frustrated when they're you know coming into the call expecting to have a technical discussion about something and we spend half the call trying to come to a decision or vice versa they come into the call trying to get a decision made about the topic and then we kind of get bogged down into some technical discussion for half the call so there's really these two kind of i don't know tasks that people want to do in the call that are both important to do there uh but that sometimes you know uh it's hard to balance between them um and finally the last bit of feedback that came is um kind of the lack of a long-term roadmap so the way we operate on eth1 is we tend to look at the next network upgrade and plan for that and then when that's when it's done we plan for the one after um and while that kind of worked well i think to get us so far um with things coming up like the merge of each one to e2 and you know these kind of big events uh that will have to happen in the protocol uh there's there was a desire that most people know that to try to you know draft the way of how we get there even though we don't decide every single thing in advance what is kind of the what are the big things we need to get done if we want to get the merge done over the next few years um so based on that uh there's a couple you know couple first steps that we're going to be taking to improve the calls that's the next slide um the first one is obviously discuss the roadmap so uh as hudson and james mentioned we're in the process of finishing up the next network upgrade called berlin right now and as dial is dying down we're going to take some time on the next couple calls to to discuss a lot of potential things for the world map over the next year or so so stuff like the merge to e2 stuff like potentially removing features from the protocol before we merge with e2 um so we get a feel for you know what are the really important things that everyone agrees we should do and once we have those lined up we'll kind of know how much other stuff we can do um the second thing that was kind of probably the easiest fix is i mentioned earlier this kind of tension between like taking having technical discussions and making decisions on the call so one way to to help with that is to just have agendas planned over a longer period of time so historically we've only like had the agenda for the next call available and it's really hard to say i want to talk about this thing it's really important but it's not super urgent in the next two weeks and those things tend to tend to tend to get you know pushed pushed out or similarly to say look we need to take a decision on this we're not ready to do it now but we can say that like in a month we'll be ready so at least having like a longer term agenda we can flag you know either technical topics we want to discuss well in advance and then people have time to prepare for them or a decision we want to make and then everybody can know in advance and make sure that they're available for this call if they want to be part of the decision making process and the last part this is the hard one so we haven't gotten into it yet um but uh i think the core developers are sometimes uneasy with the role that they play in the community where people put a lot of pressure on them to um to shape the the protocol and while you know the developers do decide what goes in the upgrades it's really the entire ethereum community that decides if those upgrades get adopted and i think putting together a sort of mission statement or scope for what the client developers want to be accountable for and making that explicit to the community is a good way to communicate you know this is what we own and this is what we want to see the community kind of voice their opinion on and that's all i had and i think we're right at time um yeah we got uh this ethereum 1559 community call coming up organized by the ethereum cat herders check out the ethereum cat herders on twitter where we have a post to our medium article that explains this and who's involved uh please uh join us for this this is february 26th um other than that i think we are at time thanks everybody on the panel thanks heath denver for having us and back to you john john you're muted we can't hear your beautiful voice i was singing while i was talking well thank you uh wonderful update thank you for all of your contributions puja we expect to see you in person next year seeing that this is your first sure i'll be happy too all right thanks bye bye now