Altair Upgrade Set to Activate on Ethereum Mainnet This Month

The upgrade represents a “low stakes warm-up” to prepare Beacon Chain developers and client teams for the coming Merge.

By Edward Oosterbaan, Christie Harkin

Oct 5, 2021 at 4:07 p.m. UTC

Updated Oct 5, 2021 at 4:20 p.m. UTC

(Clarisse Meyer/Unsplash) — A beacon light shining in a starry sky, representing Altair upgrade on Ethereum mainnet

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On Oct. 27, at epoch 74240, the Altair Beacon Chain upgrade is scheduled to activate on the Ethereum mainnet.

According to the Ethereum blog, the upgrade represents a “low stakes warm-up” to prepare Beacon Chain developers and client teams for the coming Merge, when Ethereum will transition from a proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.
It will provide the Beacon Chain with “light client support, minor patches to incentives, per-validator inactivity leak accounting, an increase in slashing severity, and cleanups to validator rewards accounting for simplified state management.”
Anyone operating a Beacon node or validator is required to update the client version to the new standard or risk being stuck on an incompatible chain.
Validators who do not update won’t be able to participate in the new consensus mechanism and will also face the risk of being slashed and paying penalties.
Because the upgrade only affects the consensus mechanism on the Beacon Chain, it will not affect end users of the current Ethereum proof-of-work blockchain.
In order to encourage robust code review of the Altair upgrade, the bug bounty bonus has been doubled until Nov. 27.
More information on how to update nodes and validators is available here.

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Edward Oosterbaan

Edward was an analyst on the CoinDesk Research team focusing on Ethereum and DeFi. He holds ETH, AVAX, OHM and a small amount of other cryptocurrencies.

Follow @TedDeFi on Twitter

Christie Harkin

Christie Harkin is CoinDesk's managing editor of technology. She holds some bitcoin and non-material amounts of other crypto tokens.

Follow @cryptowords on Twitter

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Edward Oosterbaan

Edward was an analyst on the CoinDesk Research team focusing on Ethereum and DeFi. He holds ETH, AVAX, OHM and a small amount of other cryptocurrencies.

Follow @TedDeFi on Twitter

Christie Harkin

Christie Harkin is CoinDesk's managing editor of technology. She holds some bitcoin and non-material amounts of other crypto tokens.

Follow @cryptowords on Twitter