\n<\/p>\n
This week marks the completion\u00a0of our fourth hard fork, Spurious Dragon<\/a>,\u00a0and the subsequent state clearing process<\/a>, the final steps in the two-hard-fork solution to the recent Ethereum denial of service attacks<\/a> that slowed down the network in September and October. Gas limits are in the process of being increased to 4 million as the network returns to normal, and will be increased further as\u00a0additional optimizations to clients are finished to allow quicker reading of state data.<\/p>\n In the midst of these events, we have seen great progress from the\u00a0C++ and Go development teams, including improvements to Solidity tools<\/a> and the release of the Geth light client<\/a>, and the Parity, EthereumJ and other external development teams have continued pushing forward on their own with technologies such as Parity’s warp sync<\/a>; many of these innovations have already made their way into the hands of the average user, and still others<\/a> are soon to come. At the same time, however, a large amount of quiet progress has been taking place on the research side, and while that progress has in many cases been rather blue-sky in nature and low-level protocol improvements necessarily take a while to make it into the main Ethereum network,\u00a0we expect that the results of the work\u00a0will start to bear fruit\u00a0very soon.<\/p>\n