The Ethereum 2.0 Altair Beacon Chain update is off to a successful start, with its node upgrade currently at 98.7%. This is going by a Twitter statement released on October 28th by Eth2 developer Preston Vanloon. The Altair upgrade is the first Beacon upgrade since it went live in December last year. Furthermore, it also seems to be the final one before a host of protocol changes take place. These include merging with the Ethereum mainnet and transitioning to proof-of-stake (PoS).
Altair introduces some notable features such as light-client support to the core consensus and addresses some issues with the validator incentives. Furthermore, it also cleans up beacon state incentive accounting and enhances the punitive parameters – which is the penalty for offline validators. It is worth noting that the Altair upgrade was a hard fork. This means that the validators (up to 250,000 in number) who did not upgrade are currently offline. In addition, their Ether stake will slowly deplete at an annual rate of 10%.
Beacon node operators needed to upgrade their client version so as to be compatible with the Altair upgrade. The process was relatively straightforward and lasted no more than 10 minutes.
The successful upgrade means that Ethereum can now look ahead to the merge slated to take place in February 2022.
Image Credits: Pixabay
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