The official website of the Ethereum Foundation released the 2023 Q1 roadmap on January 9. This article explains its roadmap in detail.
Ethereum has made frequent moves in the New Year. It not only confirmed the Shanghai upgrade at the developer meeting on January 8, including the public test network in February and the main network launch plan in March, but also released the Ethereum Fund on January 9 The 2023 Q1 roadmap of the official website (Ethereum.org), this article explains its roadmap in detail.
Cooperate with Shanghai’s upgrade
The most important move of Ethereum at the beginning of this year is the upcoming Shanghai upgrade, and this is also the first time since the launch of Beacon Chain that it supports ETH withdrawal and allows pledgers to receive rewards.
To this end, the Ethereum official website will develop a launchpad to simplify this step as much as possible. On the launchpad page, there are not only detailed step instructions, but also development guides for various environments.
The main process includes steps such as selecting the client, generating private keys, uploading deposit data, linking wallets, generating digests, and transactions, and each step will be explained in detail.
Taking client selection as an example, Ethereum.org also provides client configuration guides in multiple languages, including Java (Besu), Geth (Go), Erigon (Go) and C#/.Net (Nethermind), as well as the Various development environments including third-party service provider Infura.
In order to improve the decentralization of network nodes and improve the censorship resistance of the network, the Ethereum official website encourages developers to configure their own clients as much as possible instead of relying entirely on integrated suites such as Infura.
On this basis, the Ethereum official website will also undertake more educational work. In view of the fact that after the Shanghai upgrade, withdrawing pledged ETH will become a permanent function of Ethereum, the Ethereum official website will add instructive content for ordinary users, explaining Withdrawal workflow.
In addition, in order to keep up with the upgrade content of the Ethereum mainnet protocol, the Ethereum official website will also follow up and release the new protocol changes, and will popularize it around the Ethereum roadmap, striving to use more popular and concise terms. The language explains the principles and functions of Ethereum to developers and the public.
Going mainstream
In the planning of the Ethereum official website, Ethereum should not only explore its use in the blockchain world, but also "go out" and bring in, expand communication with the external mainstream world, and actively absorb new development methods and technologies to Bring Ethereum to the public eye.
Introducing more AI features
In the previous community plan of Ethereum official website, an important task was the multi-lingual translation of official website documents, including technical documents and daily articles. Relying on the collective collaboration of volunteers, mainstream languages were covered, but there were problems such as untimely updates and insufficient translation. Exact question.
For example, in Q3 of 2022, the internationalization of the Ethereum Foundation blog requires translation support in multiple languages. In order to make the blog more accessible to non-English speakers, some content has been appropriately reduced.
In this update to the roadmap, the Ethereum official website plans to use more machine translation to improve the accuracy of translation. Although this proposal is still under discussion, it is enough to expand the communication capabilities of Ethereum.
Compared with translation, the threshold for AI mapping is not that high. The graphics on the Ethereum official website have always had a clear style. In 2022, Text 2 Image (text to image) models, such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, has demonstrated the ability to create works of art.
Ethereum’s official website has made it clear that in Q1, it will explore using these tools to create more illustrations for it, striving to obtain a better user experience through storytelling with pictures and texts, and reduce reliance on manpower.
Towards mainstream development
In this update, the Ethereum official website will make greater efforts to support Geth as its own client. In Q4 last year, Geth implemented some new functions and tests. In Q1 this year, it will continue to complete the remaining functional support.
Geth (go-ethereum) is the Go implementation of Ethereum. Geth is also one of the earliest Ethereum clients and currently the largest development client, accounting for about 70% of the total.
In addition, the Ethereum official website will also allow developers to participate in the Google Summer of Code for more preparation and support. Unlike Ethereum developers who are limited to the blockchain field, the Google Summer of Code is a global online programming program, focused on bringing new contributors into the open source space.
The selected participants will work closely with the project within three months. In the first quarter of 2023, the Ethereum official website will collect and prepare potential participating projects and cooperate with participants to apply to become a selected project for Google Summer of Code.
Miscellaneous: Design and community improvements
In addition to being oriented to developers and cooperating with the Shanghai upgrade, the Ethereum official website will also make more preparations for user experience. The most critical of these is the improvement and upgrading of the design system, which mainly includes:
1. The introduction of open design will attract more community members to participate;
2. Reconstruct the design system and use currently mature components to reduce the pressure of redesign;
3. Deploy the UI library to comply with W3C modern standards and unify it with the overall Ethereum style
4. Update the email subscription function and add an email API subscription mechanism in addition to the previous RSS subscription mechanism;
5. Open the position of community administrator to better coordinate community work and promote community activity.
This quarterly plan of the Ethereum official website highlights matters related to the upgrade of the Ethereum main network. The explanation and development cooperation of the pledge and withdrawal functions are the most important work priorities. In addition, Ethereum will be promoted to a more mainstream The development field is also the focus of its work.