With The Merge now firmly behind us, protocol builders have been making progress throughout a (document?) variety of areas over the previous few months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle tries, historical past expiry, SSZ and extra have all seen important progress lately!
With the intention to assist transfer every of those threads ahead, and to run by way of yet another sequence of Shapella stress exams, shopper workforce members gathered in particular person for a week-long interop occasion in Austria: Edelweiss 🏔️
Not like Amphora, which had a singular give attention to The Merge, this occasion had two main tracks, centered on the Shapella and ProtoDanksharding community upgrades respectively. A number of breakout periods had been additionally held to dive into different open issues. Here’s a temporary overview of what was achieved, in addition to hyperlinks to artifacts from the workshops & ongoing dialogue threads.
Shapella
The week started with a Shanghai/Capella mainnet shadow fork. Flooding the community with withdrawal credential replace messages revealed efficiency points on the community, and led to a unique consensus-layer queueing design to course of these messages.
All through the week, further devnets had been launched and stress examined with massive quantities of credential updates, withdrawals, and even dangerous blocks. Consumer implementations ended the week hardened and prepared for the fork on the newly-launched Zhejiang testnet.
Assuming the Shapella improve occurs with out concern on Zhejiang, the Sepolia and Goerli testnets will likely be upgraded subsequent!
(Proto)Danksharding
The principle EIP-4844 interop aim was the launch of an all-client EIP-4844 devnet. By Friday, all however one shopper had been syncing on the community!
A number of design discussions additionally came about through the week, stemming from a transaction pool design proposal. Questions round permitting “blobless” 4844 transactions, if and the way blocks & blobs should be coupled for gossip and the way to encode these transactions had been mentioned extensively and surfaced on final week’s AllCoreDevs Execution Layer call.
Over the subsequent few weeks, groups hope to finalize all spec adjustments ensuing from these discussions and launch a brand new devnet.
EVM Object Format (EOF)
After having been conditionally accepted after which faraway from Shanghai, EOF was one of many subjects the place opinions about the most effective path ahead diverged probably the most.
Whether or not EOF ought to ban code introspection, goal for a minimal deployment ASAP, and even solely ever go stay on L2s had been all mentioned through the week.
No concrete specification got here out of the workshop, however groups now have a shared understanding of the design area and potential paths ahead. The EOF breakout rooms resumes subsequent week to proceed this dialog!
All the pieces Else
Apart from these three subjects, groups mentioned the way forward for mild shoppers on the community, how the EL & CL specs processes may converge (and doubtlessly carve out ERCs from other EIPs), launched a brand new Verkle Trie testnet, put ahead a proposal to SSZ encode EL transactions, mentioned changing the validator EL->CL deposit mechanics, and even began a Capella annotated spec!
Subsequent Steps
Lower than per week after the occasion, shopper groups have begun discussing Shapella timelines for testnets. Maintain an eye fixed out on this weblog, in addition to on shoppers’ repositories, for bulletins within the coming weeks!
For different efforts, reminiscent of EIP-4844, EOF, SSZ, anticipate to see lively design discussions within the coming weeks, resulting in prototype implementations afterwards.
Shapella is sort of right here, and Dencun is obvious on the horizon 🌅
