Full Article + Links discussed in Podcast can be found here: https://ethstaker.cc/ethosphere-timeline-update-5-april-2021/

Hello Eth-fam, this is the weekly timeline update.

I feel that this week was relatively quiet compared to last week with what seemed like every project in the L2 space giving insane roadmap updates, both positive and negative.

• Protocol upgrades – The first of these, Berlin, upcoming on April 14th or 15th depending on your timezone, is on Rinkby testnet and still on track to go live according to this week’s All Core Devs call. The ETHStaker community is hosting an upgrade party for the Berlin Hardfork and will be distributing an exclusive POAP. There is a Cat Herders viewing party for those interested in watching it live with the various EIP authors, as well as a POAP distribution.
• After that on the Eth1 side we still have the London upgrade scheduled for July. This has EIP-1559 of course and the good news here is that Besu, Geth and Nethermind are already syncing on testnet. The general dev consensus is that London is in a very good place this early on in the timeline. Definitely, on track, integration testnet (named Aleut) spec exists.
• After London will be Shanghai. The consideration at the moment is twofold… 1- should The Merge go into Shanghai, and 2 – if so, what does that mean for other EIPs in the backlog? If the intent is to deliver ‘minimum viable Merge’ that implies that other EIPs may not get delivered for quite some time (possibly 1 year+). Does that make sense? So there is a big discussion happening at the moment on what, if any, additional EIPs should be being considered for London, Shanghai, and the subsequent upgrade. I’d recommend checking out the ACD call for the detail there, or follow Tim Beiko on Twitter. u/DCinvestor has also been posting on this topic seeking community views.
• While this discussion progresses, efforts on The Merge are accelerating. Work towards a locked down spec is going well. Community comms efforts have started. Everybody seems now to want to get it done – but not at the expense of 1559, mind you. Dev consensus seems to be that Merge efforts are in a good place, particularly after the first of the new bi-weekly Merge dev calls. The only concerns are around client team resources – there is a lot of work compounding, particularly if decisions are taken to load up London and Shanghai with other EIPs. This is very ‘watch this space’. The roadmap will be highly enlightened once the Rayonism hackathon at ETHglobal has taken place April/May. This is where the Eth1 and 2 client teams will be attempting to hack together a testnet Merge and Sharding with rollups if all goes well. Exciting stuff.