After almost three months into the “reboot” of the C++ team, I would like to give an update about the team itself, what we did and what we plan to do.

Team update

The so-called C++ team currently consists of Paweł Bylica (@chfast), Greg Colvin (@gcolvin), Liana Husikyan (@LianaHus), Dimitry Khokhlov (@winsvega), Yann Levreau (@yann300), Bob Summerwill (@bobsummerwill), me (@chriseth) and (kindly “donated” by Eris Industries) RJ (@VoR0220).

Paweł is the original author of the llvm-based EVM-to-native just-in-time compiler, re-joined in April and will continue improving the JIT.

Greg joined in February and already achieved substantial speedups for the C++ implementation of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, using his experience from implementing the Java Virtual Machine for his former employer Oracle.

Liana and Yann are working on Solidity and its IDEs (yes, plural, see below!).

Dimitry is in charge of the consensus tests and is also working on the C++ core.

Bob joined in February (having been part of the community for a longer time) and is currently leading the ambitious effort of disentangling the C++ codebase. He was also a major contributor to the homestead guide.

RJ joined Eris industries in March and is working on the Solidity compiler.

Furthermore, the coordination and co-operation between the C++ and the Go teams is on a completely different level than before. One of the reasons why we improve the interpreter is to get a water mark for the go-ethereum interpreter and lessons learnt during that process will directly feed into the go interpreter, just to name one example.

Announcing Remix

Developing Solidity itself and providing resources and tools for people writing smart contracts and dapps is one of the largest areas of work for the C++ team. An essential such tool is a debugger for Solidity and the Ethereum Virtual Machine so that developers can “look inside” the virtual machine and find the exact spot in their code that is not doing what they expect it to do. Our IDE Mix is a wonderful piece of software that provides exactly this. Unfortunately, most people do not use it and prefer browser-solidity or just some unit testing tools.

This is understandable, people do not want to switch editors (I guess this is also why we got a vast number of Solidity plugins for existing IDEs in the past months) or install extra software. Furthermore, the relative amount of external contributions we received for the html5+js-based minimalistic IDE browser-solidity compared to C++/Qt-based Mix is just overwhelming.

Because of that and also in an effort to increase modularity, reusability and openness, we decided to rethink the way we want to provide developer tools: With the remix project we will create a set of reusable html5+js modules for developing and debugging smart contracts.

This means that it will be possible to integrate a debugger for EVM and Solidity into browser-solidity (which will also move to a more prominent place in the future), but also into visual studio code, atom, sublime, basically any IDE that is html5+js-based. You will even be able to fire up the debugger inside Mist, also for transactions in the past!

It is probably a bit too early to try out remix, but if you want, follow the instructions in the repository, but be sure to use the latest develop version of cpp-ethereum as backend node.

For everyone else: Here is a screenshot of an early proof of concept version:

Other Tasks

Concerning the current focus for other projects, we are improving the runtime performance of the virtual machine. Greg already made great progress in that area and still has a lot of ideas. We are currently setting up general benchmarks, so that we can compare the performance of different implementations and the difference between interpreters and just-in-time compilers. We plan to make the just-in-time compiler available to other implementations like py-ethereum and of course go-ethereum.

For Solidity, the main areas of work are currently fixed-point types, structs as part of the ABI and extending the usefulness of libraries via “inlineable” functions and templates. Furthermore, we would like to invite the community to write and publish useful libraries. Special thanks to Alex Beregszaszi (@axic), Nick Johnson (@Arachnid) and Andreas Olofsson (@androlo) for making a great start there!

Finally, we want to reduce the pain that is currently caused when working with the C++ codebase, especially due to external and intra-dependencies. We are already almost at the point where Solidity can be compiled in isolation and the goal is to move back to our old home, the ethereum/cpp-ethereum repository, splitting parts off only where it makes sense, namely for Mix, Solidity and EVMJIT.

Since the last C++ DEV Update, a lot of things happened in the engine room which were not really visible to the outside. This post wants to give an overview about what we are currently working on.

Apart from the features side, Bob has been working on a proposed process for re-licensing of the C++ runtime client code to Apache 2.0, as has been mentioned a few times in the past month or two. Expect more news on that very soon.

Eth Unit-Test Mode

Not only because it is essential for being able to perform our Solidity end-to-end tests via IPC, Dimitry Khoklov and others added some new RPC endpoints to the eth client which allow much more flexibility for testing smart contracts. If you use eth –test -d /tmp/test and connect to the ipc port at /tmp/test/geth.ipc (we recommend using ethereum-console for that because it already has these features added) you can:

• change the blockchain parameters (e.g. remove proof of work checking and pre-fund certain accounts)
• mine a certain amount of blocks (at around 30 blocks per second)
• modify the timestamp of the current block (to e.g. test timeouts in your contracts)
• revert the blockchain to a given block number

This allows us to run our currently 305 Solidity end-to-end tests in around 46 seconds on a moderate computer. Each of these tests include at least two (often more) transactions and the same amount of mined blocks.

More information about these features can be found at https://github.com/ethereum/ethereum-console.

Please note that this is currently only available for the binary that is provided via the ubuntu dev ppa.

Virtual Machine Speedup

Greg Colvin spent the last months speeding up the C++ implementation of the EVM interpreter. He harvested what he calls the low-hanging fruits (he worked for Oracle on the Java interpreter before…).   The most important improvements so far have been replacing 256-bit calculations with 64-bit calculations for gas metering, and making sure that no more metering calculations are done for each VM operation than necessary.  These and other changes resulted in the following results for Paweł Bylica’s nascent benchmark suite. The following chart shows the speedup relative to the old cpp ethereum interpreter (cpp int (old)).

To be fair, we have to tell what these benchmarks measure. The first benchmark (where the evmjit goes off the scale with a speedup of 472x) does a million empty loops, and shows how slow the EVM’s computed goto is compared to the direct jump of a JIT – fixing that is next on the stack.  The second benchmark is a bad random number generator that does a million loops with four multiplications and four additions per loop.  It is dominated by 256-bit calculations, so a JIT makes less difference.  (Note that the Go JIT does not compile to native code, but to a faster interpreted representation.)

In practice, these speedups will only be relevant to “number-crunching” contracts because the computation time is otherwise largely dominated by storage access. On the other hand, the “rng” benchmark is quite similar to cryptographic operations which pulls such things further into the realm of actual on-chain implementations.

Paweł Bylica is working on a C-language interface between the virtual machine implementation and the client that hosts it, with the goal of being able to plug different VMs into an Ethereum client. This way, geth can also potentially benefit from our changes to the C++ virtual machine and especially from the LLVM just-in-time compiler.

Note that these changes are not yet released, but they are part of the ubuntu dev ppa.

Remix

Yann Levreau and Liana Husikyan are working on our new EVM debugger remix. We released the alpha version some days ago:

Application – Instructions

For now, you can “only” use it to inspect every single step in the execution of any transaction in the blockchain, look at the current stack, memory and storage contents and see the sequence of instructions. The next step will be to also allow source-level debugging where you can see the current position in the source code, step on line or instruction level and see the decoded values of the variables (instead of only the raw hex values).

The debugger is for you, the community, and we were delighted to hear that etherscan has already integrated Remix into their blockchain explorer.

Repository Reorganisation

Bob Summerwill is dedicated to bringing back C++-Ethereum to its former home, https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum and thus remove the unnecessary and confusing split into multiple sub-repositories. We are making great progress there, one of the first really visible steps was to decouple the testing infrastructure of Solidity from the virtual machine implementation. The Solidity tests can now be compiled without the virtual machine and they are run by communicating with a specially configured eth process (the one mentioned above) over the regular IPC interface.

The next steps here are to disentangle the rest of the code, modify the test automation and continuous integration accordingly and perform the actual move.

Together with this step, we unfortunately have to say goodbye to Mix and AlethZero (the spirit of mix will live on in the new remix project). The burden they drag along would be too big, because it includes Qt and a tight coupling with Solidity. As already explained in earlier posts, a loose IPC-based coupling of these tools to a small client implementation makes us much more flexible and the community support that comes with a change to JavaScript and Web-based tools like remix and browser-solidity is just overwhelming in comparison.

Formal Verification

We are extending the existing formal verification tools integrated with Solidity to cross-contract calls. This would enable automated proofs that e.g. a recursive call attack is not possible against a certain contract. Also, as why3 (the tool we use to do the heavy lifting) was recently ported to browsers, we can probably expect it to be available right inside browser-solidity and other tools like blockchain explorers!

There is a first proof of concept including explanations that shows how automated verification can be used to show that it is impossible to steal money from a solidity contract, even if recursive calls are allowed.

This proof of concept will hopefully evolve into a usable tool in the next weeks.

Several people from the community and from inside the Foundation are currently working on tools for Solidity or the EVM in general. These include:

1. Solidity AST analysis for warnings by Dave Hoover (@redsquirrel)
2. A Read-Eval-Print version of Solidity by raineorshine: Solidity-repl
3. Control-flow analysis graph also by raineorshine
4. EVM disassembler by Nick Johnson

Hey everyone, I spent some time with our Canadian friends in Toronto after presenting “Ethereum: The World Computer” at Blockchain Training Conference last month and I wanted to provide a quick update on some of the exciting happenings in the Ethereum dev ecosystem. Lots of things are brewing behinds the scenes, so let’s jump in!

Projects

Mist

Ethereum wallet has been refined significantly over the last several months expanding support to arbitrary contract interaction via the “custom contracts” tab. This is a massive improvement over sending transactions on the command line, as was often required in Frontier. With several new team members doing work with the Ethereum Foundation, new versions of Mist are now rolling out and will incorporate improvements to Geth and Eth as they are integrated. If you’re using an old version, update to Mist 0.8.0 for the latest goodies.

Screenshot Mist 0.8.0

Remix

After all the hard work spent reorganizing the C++ codebase, the CPP team has shifted gears from Mix to Remix, as the IDE now targets the web. Remix has hit it first alpha, and published with a demo online. Check out its repository at https://github.com/ethereum/remix for more info. In general, EVM IDEs aren’t yet popular, so this could be a major step forward in approachability, like the online Solidity compiler has been. New security tools, such as EVMDIS as expected to be released to the community. Work is also being done so that formal verification can detect recursive call patterns. More details can be found in Christian’s C++ DEV Update.

ENS

Diagram of example ENS hierarchy with multiple records

Not an official project, but closely related to many projects, Nick Johnson has started work on the Ethereum Name Service. The encompasses smart contract-based resolvers with standard API. The specification supports delegation by name component (separated by “.”) and multiple types of records. It’s possible to build gateways to plug-in to existing systems, like DNS. Currently, a draft specification with a reference implementation is available in solidity and discussion is ongoing on Gitter. This could have large implications for general usability of many services on Ethereum network from wallet aliases to friendly Swarm node names.

Protocols

Light client

Something to watch closely is light-client functionality entering public testing phase. Zsolt has been working on this code for months and the team looks poised to merge it into the main repo soon. The new code decreases chain sync time to under 30 mins from genesis block and under a minute when used week-to-week. This builds on top of work that Peter did for the fast sync functionality that is now the default in Mist (–fast). More work is being done to improve log/receipt retrieval, and several iterations to the protocol is expected over time, so this is not the last you’ll hear about LES!

Tweet of light client running on embedded device

Swarm

Swarm is also being vigorously tested as PoC2 demonstrating economically self sustaining storage and distribution layers. Viktor, Dani, and Aaron have been working hard to ensure the code is as bug-free as possible before launching it on testnet. Nick has developed a simulation script for network and communication verification which will go a long way towards this effort. One of the exciting features of their work is the accounting & incentive systems allowing for long-term storage and retrieval of data. If you want to know more, the Swarm team has been featured in several YouTube videos which explains how everything works.

Data storage & retrieval on Swarm

Though called many other names, this enables a vision for decentralized storage where you own your own data. Currently, while there are a few blockchain-based apps, full availability of Swarm will allow for those blockchain-backed apps to become full DApps and run 100% decentralized inside Mist.

IPFS & Raiden

On a collaborative note, continued discussion between the IPFS and Ethereum teams may allow them to share a protocol in the future, allowing both ecosystems to benefit from their respective network effects. Further, work going towards Raiden and Swarm turned out to be complementary as solutions were working towards solving similar problems. I’m told that the Raiden Network can be used as a payment channel for the Swarm incentive system, which would help address some privacy and scalability concerns while also multiplying their own efforts. Knowing that they are reinforcing makes me even more excited for what’s in store for the future!

Wrap-up

Devcon2 is right around the corner, with sessions scheduled for September 19, 20, 21 during the Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai, China. Ethereum Foundation’s information website is now online at ethereumfoundation.org/devcon and more information about the Summit can be found at blockchainweek2016.org. Despite having a larger venue, space will still be limited, so register now!

I hope 2016 will prove to be a pivotal year for blockchains. UI/UX is improving rapidly over what was available just a couple years ago and with solutions like Raiden for state/payment-channels, some of the privacy and scalability problems of blockchains are eased. Combined with research advancements targeted for Serenity, we are on pace to overcome many of the obstacles Vitalik once listed as hard problems.

Keep Calm and Code On
 

This week marks the completion of our fourth hard fork, Spurious Dragon, and the subsequent state clearing process, the final steps in the two-hard-fork solution to the recent Ethereum denial of service attacks 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 additional optimizations to clients are finished to allow quicker reading of state data.

In the midst of these events, we have seen great progress from the C++ and Go development teams, including improvements to Solidity tools and the release of the Geth light client, and the Parity, EthereumJ and other external development teams have continued pushing forward on their own with technologies such as Parity’s warp sync; many of these innovations have already made their way into the hands of the average user, and still others 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, we expect that the results of the work will start to bear fruit very soon.

Metropolis

Metropolis is the next major planned hardfork for Ethereum. While Metropolis is not quite as ambitious as Serenity and will not include proof of stake, sharding or any other similarly large sweeping changes to how Ethereum works, it is expected to include a series of small improvements to the protocol, which are altogether much more substantial than Homestead. Major improvements include:

• EIP 86 (account security abstraction) – move the logic for verifying signatures and nonces into contracts, allowing developers to experiment with new signature schemes, privacy-preserving technologies and modifications to parts of the protocol without requiring further hard forks or support at the protocol level. Also allows contracts to pay for gas.
• EIP 96 (blockhash and state root changes) – simplifies the protocol and client implementations, and allows for upgrades to light client and fast-syncing protocols that make them much more secure.
• Precompiled/native contracts for elliptic curve operations and big integer arithmetic, allowing for applications based on ring signatures or RSA cryptography to be implemented efficiently
• Various improvements to efficiency that allow faster transaction processing

Much of this work is part of a long-term plan to move the protocol toward what we call abstraction. Essentially, instead of having complex protocol rules governing contract creation, transaction validation, mining and various other aspects of the system’s behavior, we try to put as much of the Ethereum protocol’s logic as possible into the EVM itself, and have protocol logic simply be a set of contracts. This reduces client complexity, reduces the long-run risk of consensus failures, and makes hard forks easier and safer – potentially, a hard fork could be specified simply as a config file that changes the code of a few contracts. By reducing the number of “moving parts” at the bottom level of the protocol in this way, we can greatly reduce Ethereum’s attack surface, and open up more parts of the protocol to user experimentation: for example, instead of the protocol upgrading to a new signature scheme all at the same time, users are free to experiment and implement their own.

Proof of Stake, Sharding and Cryptoeconomics

Over the past year, research on proof of stake and sharding has been quietly moving forward. The consensus algorithm that we have been working on, Casper, has gone through several iterations and proof-of-concept releases, each of which taught us important things about the combination of economics and decentralized consensus. PoC release 2 came at the start of this year, although that approach has now been abandoned as it has become obvious that requiring every validator to send a message every block, or even every ten blocks, requires far too much overhead to be sustainable. The more traditional chain-based PoC3, as described in the Mauve Paper, has been more successful; although there are imperfections in how the incentives are structured, the flaws are much less serious in nature.

Myself, Vlad and many volunteers from Ethereum research team came together at the bootcamp at IC3 in July with university academics, Zcash developers and others to discuss proof of stake, sharding, privacy and other challenges, and substantial progress was made in bridging the gap between our approach to proof of stake and that of others who have been working on similar problems. A newer and simpler version of Casper began to solidify, and myself and Vlad continued on two separate paths: myself aiming to create a simple proof of stake protocol that would provide desirable properties with as few changes from proof of work as possible, and Vlad taking a “correct-by-construction” approach to rebuild consensus from the ground up. Both were presented at Devcon2 in Shanghai in September, and that’s where we were at two weeks ago.

At the end of November, the research team (temporarily joined by Loi Luu, of validator’s dilemma fame), along with some of our long-time volunteers and friends, came together for two weeks for a research workshop in Singapore, aiming to bring our thoughts together on various issues to do with Casper, scalability, consensus incentives and state size control.

A major topic of discussion was coming up with a rigorous and generalizable strategy for determining optimal incentives in consensus protocols – whether you’re creating a chain-based protocol, a scalable sharding protocol, or even an incentivized version of PBFT, can we come up with a generalized way to correctly assign the right rewards and penalties to all participants, using only verifiable evidence that could be put into a blockchain as input, and in a way that would have optimal game-theoretic properties? We had some ideas; one of them, when applied to proof of work as an experiment, immediately led to a new path toward solving selfish mining attacks, and has also proven extremely promising in addressing long-standing issues in proof of stake.

A key goal of our approach to cryptoeconomics is ensuring as much incentive-compatibility as possible even under a model with majority collusions: even if an attacker controls 90% of the network, is there a way to make sure that, if the attacker deviates from the protocol in any harmful way, the attacker loses money? At least in some cases, such as short-range forks, the answer seems to be yes. In other cases, such as censorship, achieving this goal is much harder.

A second goal is bounding “griefing factors” – that is, ensuring that there is no way for an attacker to cause other players to lose money without losing close to the same amount of money themselves. A third goal is ensuring that the protocol continues to work as well as possible under other kinds of extreme conditions: for example, what if 60% of the validator nodes drop offline simultaneously? Traditional consensus protocols such as PBFT, and proof of stake protocols inspired by such approaches, simply halt in this case; our goal with Casper is for the chain to continue, and even if the chain can’t provide all of the guarantees that it normally does under such conditions the protocol should still try to do as much as it can.

One of the main beneficial results of the workshop was bridging the gap between my current “exponential ramp-up” approach to transaction/block finality in Casper, which rewards validators for making bets with increasing confidence and penalizes them if their bets are wrong, and Vlad’s “correct-by-construction” approach, which emphasizes penalizing validators only if they equivocate (ie. sign two incompatible messages). At the end of the workshop, we began to work together on strategies to combine the best of both approaches, and we have already started to use these insights to improve the Casper protocol.

In the meantime, I have written some documents and FAQs that detail the current state of thinking regarding proof of stake, sharding and Casper to help bring anyone interested up to speed:

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1maFT3cpHvwn29gLvtY4WcQiI6kRbN_nbCf3JlgR3m_8 (Mauve Paper; now slightly out of date but will be updated soon)

State size control

Another important area of protocol design is state size control – that is, how to we reduce the amount of state information that full nodes need to keep track of? Right now, the state is about a gigabyte in size (the rest of the data that a geth or parity node currently stores is the transaction history; this data can theoretically be pruned once there is a robust light-client protocol for fetching it), and we saw already how protocol usability degrades in several ways if it grows much larger; additionally, sharding becomes much more difficult as sharded blockchains require nodes to be able to quickly download parts of the state as part of the process of serving as validators.

Some proposals that have been raised have to do with deleting old non-contract accounts with not enough ether to send a transaction, and doing so safely so as to prevent replay attacks. Other proposals involve simply making it much more expensive to create new accounts or store data, and doing so in a way that is more decoupled from the way that we pay for other kinds of costs inside the EVM. Still other proposals include putting time limits on how long contracts can last, and charging more to create accounts or contracts with longer time limits (the time limits here would be generous; it would still be affordable to create a contract that lasts several years). There is currently an ongoing debate in the developer community about the best way to achieve the goal of keeping state size small, while at the same time keeping the core protocol maximally user and developer-friendly.

Miscellanea

Other areas of low-level-protocol improvement on the horizon include:

• Several “EVM 1.5” proposals that make the EVM more friendly to static analysis, facilitating compatibility with WASM
• Integration of zero knowledge proofs, likely through either (i) an explicit ZKP opcode/native contract, or (ii) an opcode or native contract for the key computationally intensive ingredients in ZKPs, particularly elliptic curve pairing computations
• Further degrees of abstraction and protocol simplification

Expect more detailed documents and conversations on all of these topics in the months to come, especially as work on turning the Casper specification into a viable proof of concept release that could run a testnet continues to move forward. ]]> https://earlybirdsinvest.com/ethereum-research-update/feed/ 0 57648 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/explore-androids-exciting-september-update-music-sharing-and-your-own-custom-bot-await/ https://earlybirdsinvest.com/explore-androids-exciting-september-update-music-sharing-and-your-own-custom-bot-await/#respond Wed, 03 Sep 2025 18:34:01 +0000 https://earlybirdsinvest.com/explore-androids-exciting-september-update-music-sharing-and-your-own-custom-bot-await/

What you need to know

• Google launches LE Audio Auracast for synchronized listening on multiple devices like the Pixel series 8 and Sony headphones.
• Introducing Androidify: create your personalized Android bot with AI tools to reflect your unique style.
• Revamped Gboard enhances texting with AI suggestions and a new Emoji Kitchen for expressive sticker creations.

New month, new drop! Google just announced a whole host of new Android features, AI-powered tools, and an exclusive Pixel feature drop today (Sept. 3). This update brings several fun tools for Android users, along with expanded support for LE Audio sharing and Auracast.

Users will finally be able to pair two LE Audio Bluetooth headphones to one phone, so two people can listen to the same track at the same time. No more trying to hit play at the exact same moment — you’ll both be in sync! This just makes it more intimate for two people to basically watch anything together, whether you’re at a cafe or on a plane; watching your favorite show becomes seamless.

And this feature isn’t limited to just two people; if you’re with a group and want to share a catchy soundtrack you’ve just been hooked onto, you can also share the audio with multiple people, thanks to Auracast.

All you have to do is connect their headphones to your phone by scanning a QR code or with a single tap using Google’s Fast Pair — without needing to hand over your earbud. It can pretty much transform your next hangout session with your friends into a private silent disco, without the hassle of looking for a speaker or having them open up the soundtrack on their devices. However, for this feature to work, both the phone and headphones must support LE Audio.

Furthermore, LE Audio Auracast will now become available for Google Pixel 8 series and newer, Samsung flagship devices released since 2023, and some Xiaomi and POCO models.

Android bot that looks like you

Androidify yourself, with a selfie and Google’s AI – YouTube

Watch On

Imagine yourself as an Android bot in a superhero costume, or you’d simply like to turn a fun picture of yourself into one that features an Android bot that looks just like you! Google is finally bringing a tool called “Androidify” that will let you build your own Android bot.

All you have to do is upload a selfie onto the web or the Google Play app, write a prompt, add some accessories, and see what AI builds. The tool will then use “Gemini 2.5 Flash to caption the photo, Imagen to generate your custom Android bot, and (in some cases) Veo 3, Google’s latest video generation model, to animate your bot with different vibes.

This is definitely a cool tool to bring tap into the creative side of you, or probably experiment with your style as an Android bot. You can check out some inspiration from Google’s own experiments with their mascot, like their garage band filming a music video or an Oreo superhero saving the world from an asteroid.

Additionally, Google notes that animating your Android bot into an 8-second video on Veo is a feature restricted to Fridays in September, with a limited number of creations available.

Along with these major drops, Google is also making it easier to text with AI-powered suggestions on Gboard. It will seamlessly provide prompts on the go so you can “review your tone to be more formal, expressive, or concise.” It will also help with spelling and grammar prompts to make sure your message is accurate and fully vetted, based on your personal needs.

Additionally, the tech giant is bringing Emoji Kitchen updates to help you mash up two of your favorite expressions or emojis into one fun sticker. For example, if you love flying shoes, you can pick both stickers and let AI do its magic!

“Browse the library, save your favorite options, and explore unique emoji suggestions, created just for you.”

Finally, users will also be able to share their images and videos with just a tap. With the redesigned Quick Share, you can toggle between sending and receiving, preview the photos you’re sharing, and open received files right away.

It will also give you live updates, showing you how long it will take for your files to be transferred with a new progress indicator.

We’ve been hard at work getting to know so many amazing people and projects, and are extremely excited to announce the recipients of the Wave III of the Ethereum Foundation Grants Program!

We kicked off 2018 with a blog post to galvanize scalability research for first and second-layer solutions. Since then, we’ve committed over $11M to 52 projects dedicated to advancing the Ethereum ecosystem. Grants have funded multiple plasma and state channel implementations, diverse client research, enhanced developer frameworks, security audits, and so much more (find them all in the previous posts: Wave I & Wave II)!

A Look into the Selection Process

Since the Grants Program has picked up, we’ve received feedback requesting greater transparency into our processes and a deeper look into the various types of projects considered. Here’s a funding snapshot and grant process update:

Funding Snapshot

The EF Grant Program provided more than $11M in support to 52 projects since early 2018 (Waves I, II, and III).

Our funding allocation remains true to the program’s original purpose, awarding nearly $7M to scalability projects. After this, security has been granted almost$2M, #buidl projects (projects that improve user experience) received $1.6M, and DevEx projects (projects that improve developer experience) received$744K. While dollar allocation remains heavily focused on scalability, the number of projects funded are more evenly distributed between categories.

Grants Process Update

The EF Grants program is constantly evolving. With this round, we’ve refined our internal processes to ensure timely fund disbursement. We understand how quickly the space moves and believe in the importance of expedient fund dispersal to the front line. Eventually, we aim to award grants on a rolling basis in order to provide more immediate support to the projects and teams leading the charge for decentralization and transparency.

Ideal applicants come with strong technical knowledge, project roadmap, and show a commitment to fostering collaboration within the ecosystem. For more information about applicant expectations and process workflow, please see our Applicant Expectations and FAQs.

Wave III

With each round, the grants program evolves. Our goal is to effectively grease the wheels for projects building the critical infrastructure of our young community. There are many tracks to lay down before Ethereum “makes it” and it’s been incredible to see all the projects working to lay down these tracks.

The applicant pool for Wave III offered a record number of strong teams and innovative ideas. It’s fascinating and humbling to see the diversity of projects from around the world with a shared interest in fostering the development of Ethereum. These are folks spending their free time reading ethresear.ch, developing new libraries and wallet designs, and engaging in communities discussing the latest in DApp usability and security…and we love them for that.

Without further ado…

We are proud to announce our Wave III Finalists!

Scalability

• StarkWare — $4M with 6K ETH Performance-based Bounties. Development of standards report and production-quality software for optimized STARK-friendly hash functions and tooling
• Force Move Game Framework — $300K. Force move games state channel framework
• Harmony — $90K. Minimal sharding and random beacon chain

Security

Usability

Developer experience (DevEx grant)

Building for the end user (#buidl grant)

• DappNode — $250K. Mass full node adoption
• Uniswap — $100k. DEX framework
• Nethermind — $50K. .NET client implementation
• thaEth — $20K. Gnosis Safe UI Design

Education

Hackternhips

Scalability will continue to be a focus of EF grants, but we also look to fund other critical work. This includes better UX, new clients, high-level languages, better developer tools, and efforts to make Ethereum applications more secure. With Wave III, we expanded into education and community efforts in order to help bring new talent into the ecosystem.

Want to #BUIDL with us?  See the dev wishlist below and follow links to learn more. If you can imagine a project relating to the topics listed, submit an application and talk to us!

Wishlist for the next grant round

Scalability

1. More payment and/or state channel implementations
2. More plasma implementations
3. More shasper implementations
4. Improving efficiency of existing clients such as geth & parity
5. A tokenless “Lightning Network” for Ethereum
6. WebAssembly R&D

Privacy

1. STARKS R&D
2. BLS12-381 implementations in new languages
3. libp2p Python implementation

Usability

1. Improve private key management and transacting in Ethereum
2. Alternative wallet / client designs
3. Standards and portability between wallets
4. Tooling that improves developer experience
5. Improved documentation & developer/user education videos
6. Tokenless end user products
7. Vyper development
8. More security focused high-level languages
9. Non-transferable ID tokens

Security

1. Security audits for Vyper
2. Smart contract audits
3. Particularly, audits for ERC20, ERC223, ERC721, multisig wallets, vaults
4. Tooling that prevents vulnerable code
5. IDE with a visual debugger
6. Privacy Solutions

Hackternships

You already have a job (or school)? No problem! Suggest a problem you want to solve and we’re happy to fund a 10-week $10K externship for your spare-time working on Ethereum. (Successful projects will be featured at a developer conference. We are also looking to hire and fund from this pool of side projects. If you’re looking for where to start, look at the list above.)

—  Wave I / — Wave II / — Wave III / — New to wishlist

For more inspiration…

• Read the original DevGrant post.
• Read the post that kicked off the current program.
• Find the grantees from Wave I and Wave II.
• Keep up to date with research here and here.

Bonus: Grant Ops Contest!

With the growing number of applicants, we’ll be needing to create an official website for the Grants Program. Do you have any ideas on how to make the website fun, transparent, and useful to future grant applicants? (mmhmm) Great! Because we will be running a contest and crowdsourcing ideas from all of you. Selected ideas will receive some unicorn love and some ETH. Stay tuned for details on how to participate!

1. Introduction

Ethereum Community,

Ethereum’s future is bright. Over the last 12 months the Ethereum community — a global collection of developers, entrepreneurs, researchers, and passionate users — has made tremendous progress. Every week, new applications built on Ethereum launch to mainnet, scalability solutions come online, and ETH 2.0 moves closer to key milestones. Ethereum remains the de-facto platform for decentralized applications, and is used every day to secure billions of dollars in digital assets.

The Ethereum Foundation’s team is thrilled to see the progress happening across the community. We have worked to support the ecosystem since Ethereum’s earliest days as a non-profit dedicated only to doing what is best for Ethereum.

As the ecosystem has matured, the Ethereum Foundation has refined its focus. “Doing what is best for Ethereum” doesn’t mean trying to do everything — it means focusing on where we can add the most value, and leaving space for others to add value in the areas that they will be the most effective.

So what is the Ethereum Foundation’s role today?

The Ethereum Foundation is a resource allocator, a voice in the ecosystem, and an advocate for Ethereum to the world.

Resource Allocator

Today, the Foundation holds approximately 0.6% of all ETH, as well as reserves held in cash. These resources are intended to decrease over time, as they are invested in critical work across the ecosystem. These are significant amounts of capital but they are not infinite. It is our responsibility to ensure that every last dollar and wei is spent effectively.

We are also working to grow the Ethereum ecosystem’s funding base. This means encouraging other organizations besides the Foundation to support high-priority projects, and supporting innovative mechanisms for funding, including Gitcoin grants and MolochDAO. Efforts like these give us better leverage from our existing resources, and help build a sustainable path for funding vital projects far into the future.

A voice in the ecosystem

We understand that many look to the Foundation as a valued voice even as we move to proactively empower others. That voice is a resource that can be used effectively to advance Ethereum. We are able to, for instance, bring attention to important but relatively unknown projects, share valuable information about Ethereum’s progress with the public, and encourage the growth of regional Ethereum communities.

Moving forward, expect the Ethereum Foundation to be a more active voice in the Ethereum community.

An advocate for Ethereum to the world

To the outside world, Ethereum can be confusing — and that’s probably an understatement. Many newcomers don’t understand our vibrant and decentralized ecosystem because they’ve never seen anything like it before.

When someone (a major company, a government or a regular person) finds their way into our world, the Ethereum Foundation is often their first stop. The first thing we tend explain is that the Ethereum ecosystem is distributed and not owned or operated by any foundation or organization. Our Foundation helps to represent Ethereum to the outside world as an effective portal that people can pass through to the ecosystem itself.

We also recognize a need to take more initiative in growing the Ethereum ecosystem, on-boarding developers and improving the developer experience. As discussed in more detail below, we intend to deploy significant resources towards these goals.

2. Our Philosophy

Ethereum is not a typical open-source project, and the Foundation is not a typical organization. Successfully fostering a vibrant decentralized Ethereum ecosystem requires a specialized approach.

Even as we deploy significant resources across the ecosystem to improve Ethereum, we must do so in a way that maintains the core spirit of decentralization. We have deliberately adopted a philosophy of subtraction, which informs everything that we do.

In plain language, following a philosophy of subtraction means resisting the natural tendency of organizations to grow and accumulate value within themselves, and ensure instead that this value is created outside the Foundation in the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

Instead of capturing opportunities for ourselves, we distribute those opportunities to the community. Instead of pulling everything in-house, we push our resources out to teams across the ecosystem. We don’t compete with the ecosystem — we are thrilled when other organizations create value, because that means Ethereum is becoming more decentralized and sustainable.

The Ethereum Foundation succeeds if Ethereum succeeds, and Ethereum succeeds with a strong decentralized community. That understanding governs how we work.

3. Highlights from Ethereum Foundation-supported teams

The last 12 months have been a crucial period for Ethereum, and we have worked extremely hard to support teams across the ecosystem. Encompassing all the progress made by teams supported by the EF in this letter is impossible, but here is a selected sample:

ETH 2.0 client teams

ETH 2.0 is a name given to a set of transformative upgrades for the Ethereum protocol. Last year, this effort moved from a research project to an engineering effort. Client teams supported by the Foundation including Nimbus, Prysm, Sigma Prime, and Substrate Shasper are among those working to turn ETH 2.0 into a reality.

Over the last few months the Nimbus, Prysm, and Sigma Prime’s Lighthouse testnets have launched. These teams and others are now stabilizing and optimizing their clients, getting ready for multi-client testnets.

Many resources are shifting into testing, fuzzing, and audits over the coming months. We engaged Runtime Verification to formally verify the deposit contract and to formally specify the Beacon Chain. This is in addition to considerable effort by the research, development, and security teams involved in ETH 2.0 toward reliability and security.

ETH 1.x

The ETH 1.x initiative, which started last year, focuses on improving Ethereum’s short term scalability and sustainability with an eye to easing the transition to ETH 2.0. Efforts we’ve funded include Alexey Akhunov’s research into stateless clients and state fees, and Andrew Ashikhmin’s research into sync protocol improvements.

Work continues on essential projects like Geth and Solidity as well, and regular updates from all supported teams are on the way.

ZK-rollup

ZK-rollup uses succinct zero-knowledge proofs to enable Ethereum to reach hundreds of transactions per second. We’ve supported Barry Whitehat and Matter Labs’ collaboration, which has led the way on research, development, and implementation.

ETHGlobal

ETHGlobal hosts Ethereum hackathons around the world, focused on on-boarding new developers into the ecosystem and facilitating project and company creation. At a recent event, ETHCapeTown, 70% of attendees were from South Africa and 40% of attendees were new to Ethereum.

Ethereum Academic and Research Collaboration

The Ethereum Foundation hosted three research workshops at Stanford and MIT, through which dozens of talented mathematicians, computer scientists, and economists were introduced to research problems originating in Ethereum. Many have continued working on these problems, leading to progress in areas essential to the future of Ethereum including Casper CBC, VDFs, Plasma constructions, succinct zero knowledge proof based systems, liveness, and safety bounds for Ethereum 2.0 among others.

Additionally, the Cryptophage collaboration between the Ethereum Foundation, Supranational, and Protocol Labs produced a solution to renowned cryptographer Ron Rivest’s LCS35 time capsule crypto-puzzle that required only two months, as opposed to the projected 35 years.

Working with prominent organizations to encourage their engagement with the Ethereum ecosystem

In our role as an advocate for Ethereum to the outside world, the Foundation has worked to encourage high profile organizations to engage with Ethereum in ways that strengthen the whole ecosystem.

Notably, we have been working closely with Microsoft in a long-term commitment to support the Ethereum developer experience through Visual Studio Code and the new Azure Blockchain Service.

We have also connected with large entities like HTC and Opera, encouraging them to engage with the Ethereum community and support Ethereum-based applications, and with non-corporate organizations like UNICEF to help find ways to use Ethereum for social good.

There’s a lot more being done by Foundation-supported teams than just the examples listed above. Stay tuned for more updates coming from these teams in the next few weeks.

4. Allocating Resources over the next 12 months.

An ecosystem-level view for Ethereum support

Today, we’re excited to share more information about the Foundation’s priorities for the next year, and how we expect to allocate resources across the ecosystem.

As we’ve learned and iterated, we’ve made necessary changes to our processes and priorities. When the Ethereum ecosystem was much smaller, it made sense for the Foundation to prioritize several “in-house” teams to work on the most fundamental projects. As the community grew, we began a Grants program that enabled us to support more teams throughout the ecosystem.

Today, it shouldn’t matter to the Foundation whether a project is “internal” or “external”. What matters is that we’re spending resources effectively, and that Ethereum’s goals are accomplished. This is why we are moving toward an “ecosystem level view” when allocating resources by looking at the whole picture rather than at a subset of it.

Over the next year, the Ethereum Foundation plans to spend $30 million USD on key projects across the ecosystem. This budget is insulated against downward ETH price movement.

We believe that this is a critical time for Ethereum, justifying significant investments in important work across the ecosystem.

Allocating across such a large and vibrant ecosystem is a substantial optimization challenge. We are constantly re-evaluating and optimizing our decisions, and new opportunities for leverage appear every day.

To help clarify how we define our highest priorities, we describe below three primary categories of resource allocation: (i) Building the Ethereum of tomorrow, (ii) Supporting the Ethereum of today, and (iii) Developer Growth & Awareness.

i. Building the Ethereum of tomorrow

$19 million earmarked over next 12 months

Ethereum remains a highly ambitious technical project, and significant resources are required to fund the R&D that will realize the Ethereum community’s ambitions. Critical work is underway across the ecosystem on active engineering projects like ETH 2.0, and on more long-term investments like growing the academic community’s involvement in Ethereum technology.

This includes:

• ETH 2.0: Client teams, Research, VDF, documentation and communication
• Layer 2: State channels & Plasma
• Continuing work on eWASM
• Smart contract languages
• Formal verification, auditing, and specification work
• Zero-knowledge R&D, including ZoKrates
• Ethereum “Phase 3 and Beyond” R&D
• Working directly with academic institutions and attracting exceptional research talent

ii. Supporting the Ethereum of today

$8 million earmarked over next 12 months.

Ethereum is used in production today to secure billions of dollars of assets and as a base layer for many hundreds of live applications. We believe that it is vital to continue supporting these efforts to ensure that “Ethereum 1.0” continues to be the world’s dominant smart-contract platform.

This includes:

• Many initiatives under the banner of “ETH 1.x”
• Geth
• Solidity
• Web3.js and Ethers.js

iii. Developer Growth & Awareness

$3 million earmarked over next 12 months

Developers, developers, developers.

Ethereum is a platform and the developers who build on it are a key part of our future. It is critical to invest in developer relations, education, and on-boarding today in order to grow the Ethereum community and to ensure our continued success. This is especially important in Asia, where significant opportunity exists for Ethereum to grow.

This figure also includes more traditional efforts to grow awareness of Ethereum, through marketing efforts at both technical audiences and at users of Ethereum-based applications.

This includes:

• Developer education & on-boarding
• Supporting community event organizations focused on developers, like ETHGlobal
• Continuing to run Devcon as a yearly gathering for the Ethereum ecosystem
• Supporting regional Ethereum community organizations
• Developer experience improvements and developer tooling
• Attracting exceptional developer talent
• Encouraging browsers and other mass consumer technologies to seamlessly integrate Ethereum into their user experiences
• Continued improvements to ethereum.org

5. Thank you!

Ethereum’s progress over the last 12 months is worth celebrating, and as we look ahead we’re more excited than ever before.

Everything we describe above, every technical improvement, event and initiative was accomplished by one of you. This may be a letter from the Ethereum Foundation, but it’s a letter about the Ethereum community. Whether you are new to all of this or you’ve been around since Genesis, thank you for all of your support and contributions. We are excited to keep building the Ethereum ecosystem together.

​​Microsoft has released the KB5064081 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 24H2, which includes thirty-six new features or changes, with many gradually rolling out. These updates include new Recall features and a new way of displaying CPU usage in Task Manager.

The KB5064081 update is part of the company’s optional non-security preview update schedule, which releases updates at the end of each month to test new fixes and features coming to the next month’s  Patch Tuesday.

Unlike regular Patch Tuesday cumulative updates, monthly non-security preview updates do not include security updates and are optional.

You can install the KB5064081 update by opening Settings, clicking on Windows Update, and then “Check for Updates.”

Because this is an optional update, you will be asked if you want to install it by clicking the “Download and install” link unless you have the “Get the latest updates as soon as they’re they’re available” option enabled, which will cause the update to automatically install.

You can also manually download and install the KB5064081 preview update from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Windows 11 KB5064081 highlights

Once installed, this optional cumulative release will update Windows 11 24H2 systems to build 26100.5074.

The August 2025 preview update features numerous new additions that are gradually rolling out, including an updated method for displaying CPU workload metrics in Task Manager.

For years, Windows Task Manager’s Processes tab displayed CPU usage using a “Processor Utility” metric, which could display confusing or incorrect results.

The method ignored the number of cores a processor had, so a single, maxed-out core on a 16-core CPU could show overall usage at 100%. It also compared workload against the chip’s base clock speed rather than its actual operating frequency, so when turbo boost pushed cores above their regular speed, usage could spike beyond 100% and then get clipped in the display.

These quirks meant the numbers shown in the Processes tab usually did not match what was displayed in the Performance or Users tabs, or within third-party monitoring tools.

According to WindowsLatest, Microsoft has now standardized CPU reporting throughout Task Manager, with the Processes tab now using the same formula already used in the Performance and Users tabs.

The new CPU load is calculated as:

(Δ Process CPU Time) ÷ (Δ Elapsed Time × Logical Processors)

This updated CPU utilization formula is now rolling out with this update.

For users who prefer the legacy view, Microsoft has added an optional “CPU Utility” column in the Details tab. However, by default, Task Manager will now show consistent CPU metrics across the entire application.

The complete list of changes that are gradually rolling out includes:

• [Recall] New! Recall opens to a personalized homepage that puts your recent activity and top-used apps and websites front and center, making it easy to pick up where you left off. After turning on snapshot collection, the homepage highlights key productivity features like Recent Snapshots, which show the latest snapshots to help you quickly resume tasks, and Top Apps and Websites, which display the three apps and websites you’ve used most in the past 24 hours. You can set filters in Settings to control which apps and websites are saved in snapshots. A new navigation bar on the leftmost side of the screen provides quick access to Home, Timeline, Feedback, and Settings.

• [Click to Do] New! When you launch Click to Do for the first time, you’ll see a quick interactive tutorial. It shows how to complete tasks faster by demonstrating actions on both text and images—such as summarizing large blocks of text or removing image backgrounds. To revisit the tutorial later, select More options  > Start tutorial.

• [General] New! When an app requests access to location, camera, microphone, or other device capabilities, Windows shows a redesigned system dialog box. To emphasize the privacy prompt, the screen dims slightly, and the prompt appears at the center of the screen.

• [Taskbar] 

  • New! The larger clock with seconds is now back in the notification center, displayed above the date and calendar. To turn this option on, go to Settings > Time & language > Date & time, and turn on Show time in the Notification Center.

  • Fixed: If you accidentally click and drag your mouse across the taskbar preview thumbnail, the preview might stop working.

• [Search on the Taskbar]

  • New! When you use Search from the Windows taskbar, a new grid view will help you more quickly and accurately identify the desired image within your search.

  • New! Search on the taskbar now provides clearer status information. If your search results are incomplete while your PC is organizing files in the background, Windows shows a notice with a link to check progress. You can dismiss the notice when you’re done. There is also a status for files and folders, so you can easily tell whether they’re available online (cloud) or stored on your device.

• [Lock screen] New! More widget options and support for lock screen widget personalization (previously referred to as “Weather and more”) are rolling out. After initial launch with Windows Insiders in the European Economic Area (EEA), these updates are expanding to all regions. You can add, remove, and rearrange lock screen widgets such as Weather, Watchlist, Sports, Traffic, and more. Any widget that supports the small sizing option can be added. To customize your lock screen widgets, go to Settings > Personalization > Lock screen.

• [File Explorer] ​​​​​​​

  • New! Dividers now separate top-level icons in the File Explorer context menu.

  • New!​​​​​​​ When you’re signed in with a work or school account (Entra ID), File Explorer will display people icons in the Activity column and the Recommended section at the top of File Explorer Home. Hover over or select a person’s icon to open their Microsoft 365 Live Persona Card, which shows who they are and how they’re connected to the file.

  • Fixed: If you try to use the unblock open in Properties for a file, it still shows as blocked when you open Properties the next time.

• [Windows Hello]

  • New!​​​​​​​ As part of the enhanced passkey features released in September 2023, you’ll see a redesigned Windows Hello interface. These modernized visual updates support fast, clear communication that appear across multiple authentication flows, including the Windows sign-in screen, passkey, Recall, the Microsoft Store, and more.

     The Windows security credential experience for passkey offers a cleaner, more intuitive interface designed to support fast, secure sign-in. You can now easily switch between authentication options such as passkeys or connected devices.

  • Fixed: Windows Hello might recognize your face on the login screen, however it would still fail and then prompt you to enter your pin. If you continue experiencing issues, you might need to go to the Facial Recognition section under Settings > Accounts >Sign-in options and select Improve recognition.

  • Improved: Fingerprint login after standby is now more robust.

• [Settings] 

  • New!  Windows activation and expiration prompts match the Windows 11 design and appear as system notifications when action is required. There also have been improvements to messaging under Settings > System > Activation.

  • New! You can go to Settings > Privacy & security > Text and Image Generation to see which third-party apps have recently used generative AI models provided by Windows. You can also choose which apps are permitted to use them—putting you in charge of your device’s AI experience.

  • New! As part of the Copilot+ PC experience, the agent in Settings helps you quickly find and change settings. Initially available on Snapdragon®-powered Copilot+ PCs, agent in Settings now supports AMD- and Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs. It currently works only when your primary display language is set to English.

  • Fixed: Settings might crash if you attempt to add a security key under Settings > Account > Sign-in options.

• [Task Manager] New! Task Manager now uses standard metrics to show CPU workload consistently across all pages, aligning with industry standards and third-party tools. If you prefer the previous view, you can enable a new optional column called CPU Utility in the Details tab to display the earlier CPU usage value shown on the Processes page.

• [Widgets]

  • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​New! Multiple dashboards are now available in your Widgets Board. This gives you more space for your favorite widgets and helps you stay informed with a feed that connects you to current events. A new navigation bar on the left side makes it easy to switch between your widget’s dashboard and other views like the Discover feed. After initial launch in the EEA, these updates are expanding to all regions.

  • New!  A new visual experience is available for the Discover feed on the Widgets Board. The layout is more organized, personalized, and engaging. Copilot-curated stories are now included, offering a well-rounded view of each topic with summaries, videos, and images from trusted MSN premium publishers. To customize your feed, go to Widgets > Discover dashboard > Personalization settings.

• [Windows Backup for Organizations] New!​​​​​​​ Windows Backup for Organizations is now generally available! Experience seamless device transitions with enterprise-grade backup and restore. Whether you’re refreshing your organization’s devices, upgrading to Windows 11, or deploying AI-powered PCs, this solution helps sustain productivity with minimal disruption, ensuring business continuity and organizational resilience.

• [PowerShell 2.0] Starting in August 2025, Windows 11, version 24H2, will no longer include Windows PowerShell 2.0. This legacy component was introduced in Windows 7 and officially deprecated in 2017. Most users won’t be affected, as newer versions such as PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7.x remain available and supported. If you use older scripts or tools that depend on PowerShell 2.0, update them to avoid compatibility issues.

• [Live captions] Fixed: Changing the opacity of live captions in Settings > Accessibility > Captions > Caption Style, has no effect.

• [Input]  

  • Fixed: Attempting to type Chinese with an IME after copying something with CTRL + C can result in the first character not displaying.

  • Fixed: An underlying issue related to textinputframework.dll could result in certain apps like Sticky Notes and Notepad crashing.

• [dbgcore.dll] Fixed: An underlying issue with dbgcore.dll could result in certain apps, including explorer.exe, crashing.

• [Kerberos]​​​​​​​ Fixed: There might be an underlying crash in Kerberos when attempting to access a cloud file share.

• [Login] Improved: Addressed some underlying cases which could lead to you seeing a blank white screen, or a screen saying, “just a moment”, for a few minutes when logging into your PC.

• [Miracast] Fixed: An issue where, on certain devices, audio would initially play but stop a few seconds after casting to a TV.

• [Audio] Improved: Addressed an underlying audio service stops responding which could impact the ability to play audio in certain cases.

The good news is that some fixes or improvements in the KB5058502 update are available immediately:

• [Device management] Fixed: This update addresses an issue that prevented some system recovery features from working properly due to a temporary file sharing conflict. This affected certain device management tools and disrupted key functions on some devices.

• [File system]​​​​​​​ Fixed: An issue in Resilient File System (ReFS) where using backup apps with large files could sometimes exhaust system memory.

• [Input]  

  • Fixed: This update addresses an issue with the Chinese (Simplified) Input Method Editor (IME) where some extended characters appear as empty boxes.

  • [Fixed This update addresses an issue that prevents typing on the touch keyboard when using the Microsoft Changjie, Microsoft Bopomofo, or Microsoft Japanese Input Method Editors (IMEs). The issue occurs after switching to a previous version of the IME.

• [Performance] Fixed: This update addresses an issue that slows application installation on ARM64 devices. Some installers might take longer to complete.

Microsoft reports two known issues with this release: a bug that causes incorrect CertificateServicesClient (CertEnroll) errors to appear, and lag/stuttering in audio and video performance when using Network Device Interface (NDI) to stream or transfer feeds between PCs.

The company is now rolling out a fix for the CertificateServicesClient (CertEnroll) errors , but it is gradually rolling out over the next four weeks. 

The full release notes for KB5064081 can be found in this support bulletin.