ChainSafe’s Monthly Roundup: Issue #3
In April, ChainSafe made significant strides to ensure our services were ready for the evolving needs of the Ethereum, Polkadot and Filecoin ecosystems.
April was a month of exciting progress for the ChainSafe team, with notable achievements across the Ethereum, Polkadot and Filecoin ecosystems. With Ethereum's Pectra upgrade spanning April and May, we've had our work cut out for us.
From supporting Ethereum’s latest upgrades to preparing for the Filecoin Dev Summit, we’ve been busy ensuring our services remain top-notch. We’ve also shipped significant updates to our protocol implementations that set us up for even greater contributions to the decentralized future.
Here's what we've been up to!
Infrastructure
In April, ChainSafe's Infrastructure team made significant strides in ensuring our services are ready for the evolving needs of both the Ethereum and Filecoin ecosystems.
Ethereum
- We’ve upgraded all Ethereum clients in support of the Pectra fork, ensuring compatibility with the latest changes to the Ethereum network. This is crucial to avoid any disruptions in validator operations and to ensure our clients remain aligned with Ethereum’s protocol upgrades.
- We’ve removed all Holesky testnet infrastructure in favour of the newer Hoodi testnet. Our test environments are up-to-date and ready for future Ethereum development and testing.
Filecoin
- We’re attending the Filecoin Dev Summit in Toronto (ChainSafe's backyard!), a key event where we can share our latest work and learn from developers in the wider Filecoin community.
- Our team has continued to work on improving snapshots to ensure better performance and reliability of our services within the Filecoin network.
- An exciting update comes from our Filecoin Calibnet faucet, which has received some external support to improve the user experience. The Filecoin Foundation has provided UXI development support to revamp the faucet's UI, which will be rolled out later this month. Visit the Filecoin Faucet here, and be sure to check again in a couple of weeks :)
Protocol development
Lodestar v1.30.0
Lodestar v1.29.0 is a required upgrade for validators operating on Ethereum mainnet and Gnosis, ensuring compatibility with the Pectra hard forks occurring in April/May. Additionally, this update enables faster sync, better throughput, and reduced latency, especially under heavy network load.
- Protocol Upgrades: Incorporates
js-libp2p2.0 andsszv1.2, enhancing networking and serialization performance. - Gossipsub Enhancement: Enables the
IDONTWANTfeature in gossipsub to improve message propagation efficiency. - Attestation Optimization: Implements sorting of packed attestations by total effective balance, leading to more efficient block proposals.
- Performance Improvements: Introduces lazy loading for pending consolidations and refines epoch transition handling using
sszv1.2.0.
👉 For a detailed list of changes, visit the Lodestar v1.3o.0 Release Notes.
Gossamer
The Gossamer team continues to participate in the Web3 Foundation's Decentralized Nodes program. In March, we joined Kusama's active validator set with five nodes—now we're preparing our application to run nodes on Polkadot mainnet.
The Web3 Decentralized Nodes program, from the Web3 Foundation, is designed to increase the decentralization and resilience of Polkadot and Kusama networks by incentivizing infrastructure providers to run high-quality nodes.
Forest
This month, the Forest team joined the Filecoin Virtual Dev Summit in Toronto, where we had the chance to engage with the broader Filecoin community and showcase our contributions to the ecosystem.
One of our major highlights in April was the successful completion of the NV25 Teep upgrade and the F3 activation on the Filecoin mainnet, marking a significant step forward for the network.
Additionally, we’ve migrated our RPC benchmarks to a dedicated repository, reinforcing our ongoing commitment to performance optimization and ensuring transparency in our work.
About ChainSafe
ChainSafe is a leading blockchain research and development firm specializing in protocol engineering, cross-chain interoperability, and web3-enabled gaming.
Alongside its contributions to major ecosystems such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Filecoin, ChainSafe creates solutions for developers and teams across web3.
As part of its mission to build accessible and improved tooling for developers, ChainSafe embodies an open-source and community-guided ethos to advance the future of the internet.
