With Merge now firmly supported, protocol developers have made (record?) progress in several areas over the past few months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle attempts, record expiration, SSZ, etc. have all made significant progress recently!
To advance each of these threads and run another series of Shapella stress tests, client team members gathered in person at Edelweiss šļø, a week-long interoperability event in Austria.
unequal AmphoraFocusing on The Merge, the event featured two main tracks focused on Shapella and ProtoDanksharding network upgrades respectively. Several breakout sessions were also held to explore other outstanding issues. Below is a brief overview of the work accomplished and links to outputs from the workshop and ongoing discussion threads.
Chapella
This week started with the Shanghai/Capella mainnet shadow fork. Flooding the network with revoked credential update messages revealed performance issues in the network and led to different consensus layer queue designs to handle these messages.
Additional devnets were rolled out throughout the week and stress tested, including massive credential updates, withdrawals, and even bad blocks. The client implementation wrapped up the week and was ready for the newly released fork. Zhejiang testnet.
Assuming the Shapella upgrade occurs without problems in Zhejiang, the Sepolia and Goerli testnets will be upgraded next!
(Proto)Danksharding
The main goal of EIP-4844 interoperability was the release of all clients on the EIP-4844 devnet. By Friday, all but one client was synced on the network!
Several design discussions took place throughout the week. Trading pool design proposal. Questions about whether and how to allow “blobless” 4844 transactions For gossip, you need to combine blocks and blobs. How to encode these transactions has been widely discussed and appeared last week. Call AllCoreDevs execution layer.
Over the next few weeks, the team hopes to finalize any specification changes resulting from these discussions and release a new devnet.
EVM Object Format (EOF)
EOF has been one of the topics with the most diverse opinions on the best direction following its conditional approval and subsequent exclusion from Shanghai.
Should I use EOF? Inhibit code checkAim for minimal deployment as quickly as possible Only Live broadcasts on L2 were all discussed this week.
Although no concrete specifications emerged from the workshop, the team now has a shared understanding of the design space and potential future paths. that much EOF Small Meeting Room Let’s start again next week to continue this conversation!
everything else
In addition to these three topics, the team discussed the future of light clients in the network, and how the EL and CL specification processes could (and potentially) be integrated. Separate the ERC from other EIPs.), has launched a new product. Verkle Trie Testnetsubmit a proposal to , SSZ encoded EL transactionArgument Validator EL->CL deposit mechanism changeand even Capella tin specifications!
next stage
Less than a week after the event, the client team began discussing Shapella’s schedule for the testnet. Keep an eye on this blog and the client repository for announcements in the coming weeks!
For other efforts, such as EIP-4844, EOF, and SSZ, we expect active design discussions to occur in the coming weeks, followed by prototype implementation.
Shapella is almost there and Dencun is clear on the horizon š