Ethereum will continue to rule 2021 with its open source platform to write and distribute decentralized applications.

The internet should be recognized as a public utility.  And, therefore, Ethereum have recently partnered with Cloudflare to provide better services for eth.link, thus taking the most important step to make decentralized web more accessible to the average person.

On January 18th, Ethereum Name Service are transitioning their ENS + IPFS gateway service hosted at eth.link to a version developed and run by Cloudflare.

The transition is not to an already existing Cloudfare product to manage the eth.link service, rather they have been working exclusively for over a year with Cloudfare to develop an ENS + IPFS gateway service.  On January 18, 2020 they will be pointing their DNS domain eth.link at their new service.

The major purpose of the eth.link service is to make it possible for users to append “.LINK” to the end of a .ETH name to access an IPFS website at the name just like any normal website.  There is no special browsers or extensions required for this process.

Users are wondering if there are plans to support other decentralized storage layers?

Ethereum Improvement Proposals Up Next

Berlin, the next hard fork is due with the list of 4EIPs grabbing attention they are:  EIP-2929: Gas cost increases for state access opcodes * EIP-2930: Optional Access List Txs * EIP-2718: Typed Transaction Envelope * EIP-2315: Simple Subroutines.

EIP-2929: Storage accessing opcodes have historically been underpriced & malicious txs which take 20-80 seconds to execute can be created today. This EIP increases the cost of state accesses by ~3x.

EIP-2930: Roughly 0.18% mainnet txs will be broken by EIP-2929. In an effort to mitigate this breakage, this EIP introduces a new type of tx which can specify which storage slots will be read & pay a discounted fee (~10% off) upfront.

EIP-2718: This EIP specifies a new format for txs which begin with a “discriminator” to allow for clients to interpret different txs. EIP-2930 is the first use of this EIP & EIP-1559 will likely be the second user. New format = `type || payload.`

EIP-2315: The last EIP scheduled for Berlin adds support for subroutines. Traditionally, contracts that wanted to emulate this functionality need to juggle general stack data & return addresses. This adds a new stack solely for tracking addresses to return to.

Expecting to see more of meet ups regarding these proposals this year.  Hopefully another busy year for Ethereum.