During the last month and a half, the Ethereum core development and research teams have been building upon the progress made in the last year, and with the specter of last year's security issues now well behind us, work has begun in full force on implementing the Metropolis hard fork.
First, ongoing progress on the collaboration with the Zcash team and the implementation of zk-SNARKs:
On the proof of stake front, myself and Vlad and others have continued to solidify the Casper specification and converge on a roadmap. A key focus of our work has been on a notion of “protocol armor”, which can turn many classes of traditional Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus algorithms into “attributable-fault consensus algorithms”, where if there is a protocol failure then not only do you know that a large number of validators were faulty, but you also know whom to blame. The work has not yet been fully written out, though it will be further formalized and presented soon, and anyone interested is free to follow along at https://gitter.im/ethereum/casper-scaling-and-protocol-economics.
A post on parametrizing Casper was written here: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/parametrizing-casper-the-decentralization-finality-time-overhead-tradeoff-3f2011672735
We had two core dev meetings, and have approved the following EIPs for likely inclusion into Metropolis:
Additionally, there were a few changes to the EIP process itself: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5rp8mr/update_to_eip_ethereum_improvement_proposal_system/
Work on Mist, Swarm, ENS and associated infrastructure is continuing at a rapid pace; Swarm is now at the stage where it can serve the wallet app, though the incentivization logic is not yet in place.
Work on programming languages is also moving forward:
Work on implementations is progressing:
We wish everyone a happy Valentine's day!
