Method

Shippeth gathers releases and blog posts from a fixed list of Ethereum projects, orders them by the rules described here, and links every entry back to its origin with the excerpt quoted word for word.

What never appears

• Nightly builds, snapshots and unstable channels.
• A prerelease whose version number gives no hint of its contents. When the number marks a candidate, a beta, an alpha or a preview, the entry moves to release candidates instead. A handful of projects ship only prereleases, and the register notes that beside the source so their work still appears.
• Drafts.
• Work a source published about a chain outside Ethereum. Auditing firms and infrastructure teams take on whoever hires them and post every report to one feed, and an audit of a TRON library once topped this page on the reputation of the firm alone. The flag that drops such pieces is set by hand on those few sources, because almost everywhere else a rival chain in the headline still marks Ethereum coverage: Starknet explaining how it bridges Bitcoin, Erigon announcing that it will drop BNB Smart Chain, the Ethereum Foundation taking apart Bitcoin maximalism. Any headline that also names Ethereum or one of its layers keeps the entry.
• A post a publisher files under a section we do not follow. Company blogs mix product news with sports betting, market commentary and evergreen guides, and we drop those by the publisher’s own category labels rather than by reading the headline, which would also have thrown out “How to Create and Validate EIP-4844 Blob Transactions”. A news outlet works the other way round, where we name the one desk we want and let the rest fall away, so a market column that mentions a bill in passing never arrives as policy coverage. A headline naming Ethereum comes in under whatever desk filed it. The labels that apply to each source live in the register the collector reads.

How ranking works

The ranking measures quality in hours of head start. An entry sits in the order as though it had appeared that many hours later than it really did, so a release worth three days of head start keeps ahead of the fresh minor releases around it for three days and then drifts down as it ages. Time and quality set the whole order between them, with no decay curve to tune and no separate term for recency.

Publication time is rounded down to a six-hour window before anything else, so entries from one window rank as equally old and quality alone tells them apart. Left unrounded, an hour of freshness bought an hour of quality outright, and a trivial release from ten minutes ago outranked a substantial one from the morning. The window runs to six hours and not twelve because two entries three hours apart can land on opposite sides of a boundary, which at twelve hours forced them as far as eleven hours apart; at six the widest gap measured over sixty days came to two.

The size of a version step is judged against the release before it, from the same project and the same line of development, by the leftmost digit that changed. Clients that date their releases keep the month where a minor version would fall, so 26.8.1 to 26.9.0 reads as a minor, and 26.12.0 to 27.1.0 reads as a minor across the new year, not the major the bare number suggests.

Two of the bonuses shrink as a project spends them freely, because a mark means something only while it stays rare. The version bonus weighs against how often that project takes a step of the same size. One execution client has run to major 27 in 53 releases and moves the first digit at 47 of them, so its major is worth 11 hours, while another has moved the first digit once in its life and earns 46. The urgency bonus thins the same way against how freely a project marks its releases at all. Across 11,165 releases one client called 96 per cent of them urgent and another 11, and past the halfway mark the word earns nothing, because by then it describes the project’s template and not the release in front of it.

A publication that numbers its instalments in the title and has carried the column past twelve parts loses a day on each. The number drops out of the title and the name left behind identifies the column, so the write-up of every core developers call and a weekly digest at issue 39 sink back while a two- or nine-part essay holds its place. The penalty only moves a part down the order and never drops it from the stream.

The strength bars run to three, and the third opens at the figure of a security advisory, so a reader may take three bars as that serious. They appear beside releases only. A release declares its weight twice, in the version it moves and in the language of its notes, and the ranking reads both, while an article declares neither, and the 455 articles from network-critical projects split ten scores between them, so a bar on an article would have measured its publisher while passing for a verdict on the piece. Of 12,856 releases, 60 show three bars, and 59 of those quote urgency wording from their own notes.

A patch whose notes offer no reason to look loses a day and a quarter, which it needs because the floor under any network-critical release once climbed above the ceiling over any article. A patch that does carry urgency wording keeps its full standing, as a security fix ships as a patch more often than not.

The first mark to appear settles the entry, so notes that name both a vulnerability and a breaking change come out marked Security. The wording that set the mark travels with the entry, and the internal reporting displays it, so every mark leads back to the sentence behind it.

The words are read only from the release notes, and only within their first 2000 characters. They count on releases and pass over articles, where the same word belongs to the subject and not to a warning: a firm that audits contracts writes vulnerability into nearly everything, which once dressed a write-up of a capture-the-flag contest in the red of a security advisory. The patterns appear here so a reader can hold a mark against them. An entry marked Security holds its standing whatever its version number reads.

No more than one entry from a project reaches the promoted section on a given day.

A few sources belong under “Also collected” whatever they score. A company blog that mostly documents its own product earns a place in the record and repays a search, and it fills its topic in the stream, yet one wallet maker on its own held 53 per cent of the Wallets group and eleven of its first twenty-five rows, at the 2-hour scores the rules had already handed it against the 26 and 28 of the houses beside it. A chronological stream orders entries and does not drop them, so this call rests with the source, set by hand and written into the register. A release from one of these sources that carries a security notice rises all the same.

What reaches the top section

Weight decides the order among the entries that qualify, and qualifying turns on the entry itself. A release reaches the promoted section when something in it makes the case: a security note, a major version, coverage across several publications, or a companion post from the project. An article qualifies as a matter of course, because a person sat down to write it, where a release can leave a build pipeline with no hand on it.

The section exists because the head of the page once went to whichever project carried the biggest name. A consensus client shipping its routine monthly minor scored 101 hours, 90 of them earned by being a client that publishes seldom and 11 by the release itself, and at roughly six such releases a month one of them led the page every fifth day or so on the author’s name alone. Everything that misses the bar waits in the stream.

When several outlets report the same thing

A release states its urgency in its own notes. An article cannot, since no blog post will call itself important, so agreement between publications stands in for it: when several cover one thing within three days, that agreement is the story, and it appears once with a link to each rather than as three rows running together. A second independent source adds half a day of head start, a fourth about a full day.

Grouping turns on rare pairs of words in the headlines. “Clarity act” shows up in a handful of pieces and serves as evidence, while “act” by itself falls in every second bill and means little. Two pieces from one publication never group, because a house writing twice on its own subject runs a series and corroborates no one. Hovering a group shows the words it rests on.

The label reads “also reported”, which is the most the measurement will bear. Across 474 articles it turned up eight groups, six of them one event and two the same subject in separate pieces, so “the same story” would overstate a quarter of them.

Editor’s picks

An editor’s pick wears a marker and moves nothing in the order. It keeps the place the rules give it, with our note alongside. The site runs no paid placement and no advertising, and should either arrive, a label will say so and a slot of its own will hold it, clear of the ranking.

Releases and articles

The two switches answer two audiences. A reader running nodes or writing contracts comes for the versions and skims the prose, while a reader following the ecosystem from the business side comes for the writing and would otherwise scroll past eleven thousand version numbers to find it. Topic and form run on separate axes, which is why the switch sits apart from the topic chips: Scaling with articles only is a fair view, and one row of chips could never carry it. Everything shows by default, because the combined overview is the whole point.

Release candidates

A release candidate holds the same information as the release behind it, often by several days, and it takes a section of its own below the stream. Nethermind 2.0.0-rc2 ran to 623 changes and a reworked archive layout and stood as the most informative entry of its week, back when it fell in with the automatic nightly builds. An entry lands here when the project flags the release as a prerelease and the version names it a candidate, a beta, an alpha or a preview. The version alone would gather the wrong ones, as Noir names every release v1.0.0-beta.N and flags none of them; the flag alone would flood the section with automatic builds, as Xatu flagged 91 releases in the year to 16 September 2026 and named none of them. Nightly builds, snapshots and canaries keep out.

Links open in a new tab

Every outbound link opens a fresh tab, and it tells a screen reader as much. A reader who came back to this page would otherwise lose their filter, their scroll position and a full server render across eleven thousand entries. The referrer rides along on purpose, so the sites linked from here can see that Shippeth sent the reader.

Counting opens and shares

Links pass through /go/<id>, which notes that an entry was opened and then forwards to the source, and the share button copies that same link. These counts stay out of the ranking and will remain out of it, because a ranking that rewards clicks rewards whatever is most clickable, and on a page of release notes that is the wrong thing to reward. They also appear nowhere on the site: nothing authenticates a click, and a number printed beside an entry is one that any visitor with a loop can run up. We read them in the internal reporting and leave it there.

Our own projects

Stereum Services FlexCo runs Shippeth and also builds Stereum and StereumLabs, and its founder runs RockLogic GmbH, whose blog appears in the register with the rest. Entries from all four wear a Founder affiliation marker in every view, compact rows included, and not one of them gains a place in the order for it.

What we get wrong

The rules are blunt, and a patch can outweigh a minor version without the ranking ever knowing it. Against that, nothing is hidden. The stream runs in the order things appeared, everything the rules push below the line waits under “Also collected” within reach of the search box and the crawlers, and every entry names its project and its publication and links back to the source.