The new Ethereum update is ready

The Altair fork will introduce considerable improvements to the network to bring the merger between Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0 even closer.

Altair, the first hard fork of the Ethereum Beacon Chain is now ready and will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, October 27. The fork will introduce considerable improvements to the network to bring the merger between Ethereum and Ethereum 2.0 even closer.

The engineer in charge of the development of the first update on the new Beacon Chaim mainnet, Wei Wang, reported on her Twitter account:

Keep calm and update your client to the Altair HF beacon chain compatible version ASAP!
Make sure your beacon node and validator client version is higher than https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/10/05/altair-announcement/. Altair will be available at Epoch 74240 (27 de October 2021, 10:56:23 am UTC)!

This first update to the Ethereum Beacon Chain mainnet is considered a “low risk warm-up” for the upcoming merger, when the current Ethereum mainnet, which is secured by a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, It will be merged with the proof-of-stake or PoS system.

As reported by the developers of the Ethereum Foundation, this upgrade adds support to thin clients for the central consensus, cleans the accounting of incentives of the state of beacons (beacons), fixes some problems with the incentives of the validators and increases the penalty parameters.