After the core developers left, who will coordinate the Ethereum hard fork upgrade?

Ethereum developers are looking for a new expert to help coordinate the upcoming hard fork upgrade.

At the Ethereum core developer conference call last Friday (March 1), participants discussed who would replace Afri Schoedon as the coordinator of Ethereum's hard fork upgrade.

Hudson Jameson, community relations manager at the Ethereum Foundation, emphasized that the coordinator’s responsibilities include: deciding which Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIPs) to test and implement, submitting (implementing EIPs) for reference, and determining the date of the final hard fork.

“They won’t be dictators in this, of course, but they will make suggestions or offer different options,” Hudson Jameson added on the call.

Ultimately, the ethereum core developers in attendance agreed that the role of hard fork coordinator could be divided among two or three people, rather than entrusting it to a single individual.

Hudson Jameson concluded that the task of evaluating applicants will be delegated to a volunteer group of ethereum people called the Ethereum Cat Herders, which was formed in January by developers Lane Rettig, Jameson, and Schoedon “for broader coordination and project management purposes.”

On February 17, Afri Schoedon, a core developer of the Ethereum Parity client and coordinator of the Ethereum hard fork, compared the Ethereum Serenity expansion plan with the blockchain interoperability protocol Polkadot on social media and suggested that developers move to Polkadot. "Polkadot does what Serenity should do."

Afri Schoedon was fiercely criticized online for this, and he angrily quit the Ethereum community and stopped related work. (Click to view related reports)

Coordinate the "ProgPow" audit

Ethereum successfully implemented a double fork on March 1, greatly reducing the block time (from 20 seconds to 13 seconds). Currently, Ethereum core developers are preparing for two things: the next hard fork upgrade called Istanbul and a possible upgrade to the new mining algorithm ProgPoW.

The Istanbul hard fork is expected to take place around October 2019, and proposals for the Istanbul hard fork upgrade have been collected. The deadline for submitting upgrade proposals is May 17. The Istanbul hard fork upgrade may consider EIP1418's proposal on blockchain rent.

Regarding ProgPoW, Jameson gave an update note that the blockchain testing platform WhiteBlock will be responsible for conducting benchmark experiments to compare the performance of various Ethereum mining equipment on ProgPoW; a second audit is also underway to test whether specialized mining hardware can be built and deployed - this hardware will use the ProgPoW algorithm.

At this time, Cat Herders has not finalized which company will conduct the second audit.

Jameson also highlighted that more than half of miners in the Ethereum ecosystem (93%) support ProgPoW, according to an ongoing “hashvote” tally by blockchain analytics site EtherChain.

Hashvote is specifically targeted at Ethereum miners in the ecosystem, who utilize an additional data field in their operations that can indicate whether they support the proposal.

Currently, discussions on the ProgPoW proposal are still ongoing.

Editor's note: The original text comes from coindesk , the author is Christine Kim , and the translator is Qin Xiaofeng of Odaily Planet Daily.