Ted Hisokawa
Sep 07, 2024 01:28
Ethereum developers attended ACDC Call #141 to discuss updates on the Pectra upgrade and issues related to proof-of-work calculations for home stakers.
On September 5, 2024, Ethereum developers gathered via Zoom for the All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) Call #141. This call is a series of biweekly meetings where developers discuss and coordinate changes to Ethereum’s consensus layer (CL), the Beacon Chain. The call was chaired by Ethereum Foundation (EF) researcher Alex Stokes.
Pectra DevNet 2
Debugging work on Pectra Devnet 2 is almost complete. Prysm developer Terence Tsao reports that his team has resolved a non-final bug found in Devnet and has not encountered any further issues. EF Developer Operations Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi confirmed that Pectra Devnet 2 may no longer be supported, as the Prysm bug has been fixed.
Jayanthi also noted that not all client teams will be ready for the Pectra Devnet 3 release. Devnet may go live with a few implementations, with others added later. Stokes noted that issues with EIP 7702 may need to be addressed in the execution layer (EL) clients before being added to Devnet.
Pectra Specification Update
Several updates to the Pectra implementation have been discussed on the CL side. The first is an update to EIP 7251, which addresses an edge case where the correlation penalty applied to validators with a large stake of ETH was incorrectly calculated. This fix is in the final review stage and will be merged into the Pectra CL specification soon.
Another update was to improve the efficiency of accessing and storing certain components of the EL payload in the Beacon block body. This change is also nearing completion.
Geth developer Felix Lange proposed a new strategy to improve the communication of validator withdrawal and merge requests from EL to CL. The proposal aims to reduce unnecessary overhead in EL and CL clients.
Teku developer Mikhail Kalinin discussed creating a queue for deposit requests to avoid unnecessary load on CL clients during surges in deposit activity. This queue is also designed to prevent preemptive attacks on withdrawals. Nimbus developer Jacek Sieka supports this idea, noting that caching deposits would be less error-prone.
Various improvements to the Ethereum networking layer based on EIP 7549 were also discussed. These changes aim to improve hash calculations and bandwidth for CL clients.
PeerDAS DevNet 2
The latest implementation of PeerDAS is being tested locally by clients. Both Lodestar and Nimbus teams are running a new Kurtosis configuration that is spinning up private testnets. PeerDAS Devnet 2 is expected to be based on the Pectra upgrade.
Stokes recommended reusing the stress tests used for the Deneb upgrade on the PeerDAS testnet and increasing the number of blobs as per EIP 7742.
PeerDAS proof computation
Developers discussed how to handle proof computation for validators running on resource-constrained devices. EF researcher Dankrad Feist proposed accelerating research on decentralized block building, allowing home stakers to avoid proof computation and rely on more powerful nodes.
Stokes recommended going with a solution that prepares blobs in CL to reduce computational load. He asked Feist to create a group or Discord channel to start this work asynchronously from the call.
Research Discussion
Nimbus developer “Dustin” has proposed to remove all references to SSZ Union from the CL spec, as it is not used in the CL client. This proposal aims to better align the CL spec with existing client implementations. Portal teams that use SSZ Union in any way will be consulted before finalizing the removal.
The developers emphasized that EF is providing significant funding and support to the Portal Network, reaffirming its importance to the Ethereum protocol.
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