Meeting Date/Time: Tuesday, December 21st, 2021 at 15.00 UTC
Meeting Duration: 28 minutes, 43 seconds
Moderator: Pooja Ranjan
Notes: Shubhangi
DECISION/ACTION ITEM 74.1: Twitter poll to gather general sentiment on migration from Medium to Mirror.
DECISION/ACTION ITEM 74.2: William will connect with Trent to work on issues related to migration from Medium to Mirror.
DECISION/ACTION ITEM 74.3: Add discussion on migration from Medium to Mirror to ECH meeting 75.
DECISION/ACTION ITEM 74.4: Pooja will get in touch with Alita regarding json rpc spec writer Github issue.
Pooja: Alright, welcome to Ethereum Cat Herder’s meeting 74. I have shared the agenda in chat. So, today the first item listed here is the Merge. We are expecting the merge upgrade somewhere in Q1/Q2, 2022. Currently, the development stage is that we have a public testnet available. It’s called kintsugi testnet [1], and this is available for anyone who is running any current tab on Ethereum Blockchain. If they would like to check how the merge will look like, what changes are expected there, or anyone who wants to have a feel of what the transaction might look like post merge, we have multiple documents available for kintsugi testnet. I have linked some of them, the milestones [2], the testnet doc, and there was this explainer blog [3], which was based on the hackmd file documented by Maurice to participate in the testnet. So people, if you are interested to learn and participate in the kintsugi merge testnet please follow the documents and try to be a part of it. That’s about the network upgrade.
Pooja: Coming up to the ECH updates on the website side I think we might have to get some updates done. I think we have to update it with the Arrow Glacier and then some more documents on the merge side need to be updated there. On ECH engineering side, I don’t see Alita on the call, but there are some work done on the EIP bot side however we are looking for more contributions so if anyone would like to contribute on the ECH engineering side please reach out to me or Alita, show up on cat herders discord and we will be happy to engage you with the present activities that we have got.
Pooja: For the cat blazers, William is on the call. If you have any update, I know you have shared about the last cat blazers, but if there is anything else you want to add?
William: I’ve been doing the same work that I’ve been doing up until uh and we announced a while ago that we are thinking of spinning off kind of like a podcast type thing from PEEPanEIP. I’ve been trying to do some groundwork. I have some people who are likely willing to come on but I’ve been having some scheduling difficulties just kind of pinning that down. There’s been the work I’ve put in on PEEPanEIP also and I’m sure there’s a few things around that uh the EIP initiative to try and get more more ecosystem buy-in and ercs has had some good results which we’ll probably start seeing in January so there’s also been that one just collab just pretty good really good work that he’s been putting in over there for that.
Pooja: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for your update. That sounds really interesting to me I hope that things work out and we should start working on that. Well thank you.
Pooja: On EIP Insights [4], the link is added here in the agenda and I have updated it till December 20th so far. We have five new proposals and like we have quite interesting proposals of course, like 4488 - the transaction call data, gas cost reduction one, and there are couple of proposals related to erc 721 nft so please check out all of these new proposals which are available in the draft status they are merge in the EIP’s repository. There are three proposals which are back from stagnant to draft and three proposals have been moved from draft to review there is uh there is one proposal which went into the final of course that was the arrow glacier proposal and six proposals have been moved to stagnant, a few changes to EIP 1 and some non-normative changes to few final proposals. The detailed list is added in EIP Insight for December. Please check it out.
Pooja: On the PEEPanEIP side, we have recorded our last recording for the 2021 which was for EIP 4399 with Mikhail Kalinin [5] just before this call and so far we have multiple episodes recorded on the merge because merge testnet is something that people can experiment with in the holidays. So if you are interested to learn more about the proposals, we have covered both the proposal which are getting into the merge and testnets, and some other information so please check out the playlist merge on Ethereum youtube. In January, we’ll be having some new discussion. The calendar is provided here to check out what are the upcoming proposals and if you have any suggestion on a proposal that you would like us to include in one of our future episodes please do let us know, show up on Ethereum cat herders discord to talk about it, or just dm me. I’ll be happy to include that.
Pooja: Moving on to the notes section I don’t see much of the notes up this time. I guess that we are a little late on submission of notes. However there was this MEV breakout Room meeting [6] that turned out to be very interesting. People from flashbots project showed up and they gave a very good demonstration of how the MEV would look like after the merge. We have received some decent questions, even on the youtube comment section that we have shared with the developers to get them answered. So please check out the recording and we also have notes [7] available for this meeting because this seemed to be quite interesting and people are interested to learn more about how do we see MEV working after the merge, so please check out the notes that is available of course.
Pooja: We have EIP editor apprenticeship meeting planned for today. Last week we had this recording with Matt Ganett on EIP editing of course, so we moved the editor apprenticeship meeting for this week, so if you are interested please join the meeting which is right after this cat herder’s one.
Pooja: Alright, the next item is Events and a Hackathon, and we have recently seen the announcement of Devcon 6 [8], so the current plan is that it will happen somewhere in Q4. The venue hasn’t changed, it is still in Bogota, Columbia but the date is tentative. It’s somewhere in Q4. It’s not announced yet, however the announcement also includes the announcement of Devconnect [9], which is planned in Amsterdam. I see Annette on the call. She has more information about it. Over to you, Annette.
Anett: Hi Guys, so regarding the Devconnect, not sure if you guys are familiar with this event. Just to give you a quick overview, this event is going to happen in April, in nearly the last week of April, between 18th and 22nd April in Amsterdam.
This event will be like a huge space with many venues where people will self-organize these smaller events. Just to give you a quick overview of the events that will be happening there, for example there is eth staker, l2 beat, which will be like a roll-up event, eth magicians event as well, and many others which will be ended with the eth global hackathon happening there. This event will also have coworking space available for everyone to kind of like co work together or for the participants of the events to just go hit the coworking space if they need to.
So from magicians perspective, we are going to host 2 day event for around 250 people and we would like to have a huge venue which will be divided into smaller rooms and we will give a chance to many people to sort of like self-organize their rings or their like EIP sessions in the room. For the sessions that we will have the first day we want to focus more on community and processes. We want to host, for example, wallet rings, and talk about introduction into EIPs and ERCs, invite NFT standards group working group people and many others. We haven’t finalized the speakers yet for the session number one, but for the session number two, we would love to collaborate with Ethereum cat herders as well and from what we talked with Pooja yesterday, we’ve been thinking of hosting many EIPs, and hosting even more of like talks about the problems regarding the EIP and what kind of problems this EIP is solving so we’ve been thinking about the merge EIPs where we would love to talk about EIP 3675 [10], then EIP 4399 [11], and we have possible speakers Mikhail Kalinin, Danny, and Vitalik, and then other EIPs like 4488 [12] and 4444 [13], and we have a bunch of other recommendations for the event, and speakers. We will just see what kind of timeframe we will have for this session, so that’s kind of what we would love to do with cat herders, and I’m going to drop the link for the hackmd where you can find all information regarding this event, and if you have any suggestions, or anything else to add, feel free to either reach out to me, or add it directly to the document. Thank you.
Pooja: Thank you for this update Anett. So we are happy to collaborate and provide as much as support, in terms of, selection of the speaker or whatever support you need in terms of organizing. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to join there in person or not, but if anyone from the cat herders team are planning to join there in Amsterdam, please feel free to let us know. We will see if we can coordinate and the rest of the activities. Thank you for sharing the link of the talk.
Pooja: The next event is EthDenver[14] which is planned in late February from the 11th to 20th. These speakers on listing has started so if you want to participate as speaker or if you want to participate in the hackathon, or if you want to participate in any other event that is happening in the EthDenver, I think they have started accepting the application so please send your application, and if you are planning to join EthDenver, in person, do let us know.
Pooja: That’s all about events and hackathons, moving onto the initiatives and brainstorming. The first item listed here is ECH migration from Medium to Mirror. I know we discussed it last time but we wanted to have it here in this meeting to have some more thoughts collected from the group. I don’t know…William, if you would like to talk more about it or if you will have any new thoughts?...Well the general proposal is to move the current Medium blog that we have for cat herders from Medium to Mirror, and yeah, I understand that like… I’m sorry…William is having some microphone issue and…
William: Okay, I’m back now.
Pooja: Good.
William: Sorry about that.
Pooja: No problem. Over to you.
William: I can’t say I have much to add about that, I probably should have been thinking more about it, trying to work out just like maybe some general sentiment out of the twitter account what not … did we run a twitter poll on it in the end?
Pooja: I don’t think so.
William: Okay so we should, we should probably take a look at doing that just also to gather a general sentiment on it. I think you were about to summarize it, maybe I’ll throw in a word on it myself also. Mirror is a more decentralized blogging platform. A lot of prominent people in the space, a lot of prominent drivers in the space are using it, and I propose moving it to be maybe our primary place where we’re putting blogs. We’ve been with Medium. Medium gives us certain analytic benefits. Trent, just to answer your question, No, ECH does not participate in the write race and does not have a sub domain. But they’ve also opened it up, so theoretically we’ll be able to publish, though it would be in our own sub domain, even without just participating in the write race. So we lose certain kinds of analytics that may help us understand or have some level of insight into audience, what they wanna see, whats working, isn’t, but at the same time could be a more decentralized option more in line with the ethos that we strive to represent, and I think a valuable example of using the tools that we’re in the ecosystem of. In terms of analytics, yes Pooja, the chief analytics but we have used the analytics to gain fair amount of insight and that’s just understanding like what helps us, it helps us see what articles seem to connect with an audience, how far the reach is, what people stick around and read, things like that.
Pooja: Yeah. Right. I mean, it has helped us. In the past, we had couple of articles one of them was written by William Shawn himself. I think it was from one of the Devcons, when he came back and he put his idea into a blogpost. I think there were more people from the ECC…Tim and Helena were also there. So we just want to find different ways of connecting with community and these analytics definitely help us, like what sort of articles are people liking so far. We have been making use of that, but I’m not very confident about the change with the Mirror that we are expecting. I haven’t looked into it that much but I’m sure William is alright, so if William, if you would not have any issues taking the lead on this migration, I’ll be happy to, like you know, you looking over it.
William: I will try to be in touch with you outside the…there are probably some things that we should do. I do think that we should participate in the write race, which is basically is the ability to have, I guess a better account on Mirror. Basically, it’s voted on a weekly basis, trying to get a reference to it before in chat, I think Trent asked if Ethereum Cat Herders had their own subdomain. There are people who have been nominated through the write race get their own subdomain to publish through.
Trent: I think I can jump in here
William: Oh yeah, yeah, please do.
Trent: So I’m a member of the Mirror Dao I guess technically, and the write race has been…
William: Oh I hadn’t realized…
Trent: Yeah the right race actually was paused, I think, a few weeks ago, maybe a month ago at this point, for a number of reasons, and right now they’re reevaluating what it’s gonna be. So that doesn’t exist anymore, and what they’re doing is going for offering subdomains and DAO Partnerships to organizations and people that they think are producing good work, and would be positive contributors to the organization over the long term, so what I’m saying is, I can probably help get a subdomain for cat herders if that’s something you wanna pursue. And for Pooja, you don’t have to migrate everything if you want to still keep the analytics. Like William said, you can, it’s a nice experiment, and using web3 tools. Data is backed up with Arweave, and you know, it’s similar to Uniswap where anybody can develop a front end for this stuff, and yeah, it’s a really nice tool. I’ve used it a lot for some experiments, the staple works book, and 1559 NFTs. It’s a great team. And yeah, I’m just saying that if you guys do decide to do that I’m happy to propose to Mirror that we give you a subdomain.
William: Could I be in this with you…
Trent: Oh, sorry?
William: Could I be in touch with you on discord about it?
Trent: Of course, yeah.
William: Okay, so that’s what I’ll do then. I’ll probably just try to make a last run on this just to make sure we are all in agreement that it’s like worth going for, then I’ll reach out to you on discord and see what we can do about it.
Trent: Cool. Sounds good.
William: Awesome, thanks a bunch.
Pooja: Yeah, sure. Thank you so much. I didn’t realize that you’re a member of the Dao. It’s been helpful, like people joining the cat herders call and we are getting to know about like which group they are belonging to, so that’s always super helpful, and when we were thinking about Mirror…having you here…I think we can coordinate our…see how we can move forward.
Trent: Yeah, the membership is just…if previously if you just passed the write race then you got a subdomain and membership into the DAO…you know…you can participate in the decision-making of the organization and now it’s just they are trying to figure out a better structure for the organization for membership…would be so if you guys were able to get a subdomain that would mean you were given DAO membership as well and uh you could possibly contribute or just be part of their organization as well…either William or Pooja…whoever wanted to.
Pooja: Alright, well thank you so much I think William has more context than me so I think we can talk offline and maybe he can get in touch with you to see how we can proceed with this. Cool.
Pooja: And that’s on Mirror and the next item listed on here is about ECH video, so we have been working on it, but unfortunately we are not able to finish up the video, so we have tried to move it to the kind of the three year celebration of the cat herders. Here is the slide that I have prepared so far. I was working with Shubhangi, and Ken, and some other people on this and we are hoping to convert this slide in a form of video that would be talking about what we did in the past and what the cat herders is all about. I think that we can probably add the main things of 2019, 2020, and 2021 as well. Yeah, then we can come up with a nice video with some sound effect and everything else. So here is the slide, and we want our video to be a very small one, so not too big. so that can be used as a clip, and we are planning to keep it on our cat herders website. If anyone has any further suggestion or anything they would like to add or see please reach out to us.
Pooja: The last item here is about the B-star naming. So we had organized a community call. Hsiao Wei from the foundation was working on getting a B-star name finalized for the consensus layer client code and yesterday we had this call organized and based on the responses received on the Github issue, we had a winner, I think Bellatrix is the name of the star that is selected. I’m gonna release the video right after this call. We have the recording, and I’m gonna release the video of this, and yeah I don’t know…anything more to add, Shubhangi?
Shubhangi: So the timeline for the naming process was quite limited so I think one of the things we could talk about later is how to organize the steps for the next naming process. I think Bellatrix is a good name, but I think there’s still not a complete consensus about whether it should be used instead of the merge, or for the next available upgrade, and I think that’s something that will be discussed in the Ethereum community in the next few days?
Pooja: Yeah, that totally makes sense. Of course, yeah, we did realize that because this process, the naming process was in a period when most of the developers are focused on the test net and other stuff which were like having higher priority than getting a name to the code so possibly we can be more organized and we’ll have more time to discuss it in advance. So that’s about it. moving on to the next item that is ECH funding.
Pooja: I’m very happy to share that in the last Gitcoin round we had received contribution from over 529 users. Its amazing to see how many people are supporting us and we got some great donations from some of the contributors, something around 500 bucks and 50 bucks, and I mean, the number of people, the number of users who are supporting us, that matters so thank you everyone who supported us during the last Gitcoin round 12 and I’m very happy to announce that we have received the grant from Moloch Dao for another six months and that grant is for different tasks that is being done and we are, we are hoping to add some more people to the group maybe, or maybe fund some more tasks based on the bounties. So you have any ideas…if you want to work on any initiative and you don’t know where to reach out…to whom to reach out to…please reach out to cat herders discord, and we’ll try to work with you and get that idea shared with the rest of the community members.
Pooja: All right and that’s about it on the cat herder’s pm, I do not see any new issue, though the json rpc spec writer requirement is still open. I don’t know, I don’t see Alita, or the other guy on the call, so let me get in touch with them if you need to keep this issue open for any further, if not then we’ll be closing it. And on the funding side I see there are three new issues. We’ll try to um initiate the transaction this week and that’s about it.
Pooja: Looking into the last meeting notes, there are three decision / action items. Shubhangi will work with the team to create a year-end ECH video…yes we are working on it and we are hoping to release that in early January. I have already shared the slides so it’s going to be a very short video clip, but I hope that would be useful. Number two, share discord incident report [16] with the committee. So we have shared the discord incident report on the cat herder’s GitHub, that was also shared in the last newsletter, and it contains most of the information and the timeline that…like when the incident happened and what steps we did take up to work around or maybe make sure that it doesn’t happen in the future, so if you’re interested in learning more about it, check out the report. And last item was Pooja will add migrating to Mirror from Medium yes uh we have discussed this item here today uh we’ll hope to see more information or a concrete decision on that in the upcoming meeting so I’ll keep it on the agenda for next meeting as well.
Pooja: That’s all from the items listed here. Anyone has any other thing to bring up today? Well I think it has been a great year. This is the last meeting for 2021 and it’s been great working with all the community contributors, especially the dear cat herders who have been there with us and multiple upgrades, like we had four upgrades this year and we have seen a lot of documents going out, a lot of talk, a lot of outreach, so I sincerely thank everyone being a part of this great ecosystem. Thank you everyone for joining this meeting, hope to see you guys on January 4th, 2022, have a great year, happy holidays.
Texas Farmer: Thanks a lot. Thanks Pooja
William: Yeah, thanks everybody. Have a good one.
Shubhangi: Thank you everyone. Happy Holidays.
Santosh: Thank you everyone.
- Pooja Ranjan
- William Schwap
- Anett
- Trent
- Shubhangi
- Brent Allsop
- Texas Farmer
- Santosh
[1] Kintsugi Testnet
[4] EIP Insights
[7] MEV Breakout Room Meeting Notes
[8] Devcon 6
[9] Devconnect
[10] EIP 3675
[11] EIP 4399
[12] EIP 4488
[13] EIP 4444
[14] EthDenver