Altair progress
Altair, the main arranged update of the Beacon Chain, keeps on gaining consistent headway. A week ago, Beacon Chain spec v1.1.0-alpha.6 – Protostellar Evolution was delivered. While this is an alpha delivery, excepting a security or commonsense designing concern, the spec is probably not going to change from here on in.
Clients teams are occupied as they finish consensus test vectors and stand up fleeting testnets. Teams will settle on timetable choices in the following not many weeks as Altair code changes stablize and introductory multi-client interop is performed.
In the event that you need to study the updates going to the Beacon Chain in Altair, look at Vitalik's new release of annotated Altair specs.
Rayonism wrap-up and Merge progress
The Rayonism hackathon wrapped up a week ago with the Nocturne testnet – a multi-client Merge testnet comprising of 4 consensus engines and 3 execution-engines for a sum of 12 unique client pairs.
Many nodes and a large number of validators assembled and secured a beacon chain that provided native support for a rich Ethereum application-layer with accounts, contracts, and user transactions
The Rayonism hackathon permitted teams to quickly prototype core Merge designs and to more readily see how this merged system will function practically speaking. All teams presently have a profound experience with the construction of the Merge, and a reasonable visual on how their software will advance in this coming year.
Clients teams are currently centered around this present mid-year's two forks – London and Altair — while analysts/researchers are back to Merge spec refinements and testing. After the mid year updates, groups will move their concentration to the Merge, and start handling the production engineering with an eye toward public testnets.