With The Merge now firmly behind us, protocol developers have been making (record?) progress in a number of areas over the past few months. Withdrawals, Dunksharding, EOF, Workal Try, History Expiry, SSZ and more have all seen significant progress recently!
To help advance each of these threads, and to run Shepela through another series of stress tests, members of the customer team gathered in person for a week-long Interop event in Austria: Edelweiss ๐๏ธ
Unlike amphora, which had a sole focus on The Merge, the event featured two major tracks, focusing on Shepela and the ProtoSharding network upgrade, respectively. Several breakout sessions were also held to dive into other open problems. Here’s a brief overview of what was accomplished, as well as links to artifacts from the workshops and ongoing discussion threads.
shepela
The week started with the Shanghai/Capella mainnet shadow fork. Flooding the network with withdrawal credential update messages revealed performance issues on the network, and led to a separate consensus-layer queue design to process these messages.
Throughout the week, additional Dennets were launched and stress tested with large volumes of credential updates, withdrawals, and even bad blocks. The client implementation hardened over the weekend and is ready to fork on the newly launched Zhejiang testnet.
Assuming that the Shapela upgrade on ZheJiang goes without issue, the Cpolia and Goerli testnets will be upgraded next!
(proto) dansharding
The main EIP-4844 interop goal was the launch of a full-client EIP-4844 devnet. As of Friday, all clients were syncing over the network except for one!
Several design discussions also took place during the week stemming from the transaction pool design proposal. Questions about allowing “blobless” 4844 transactions, whether and how blocks and blobs should be combined for gossip and how to encode these transactions were discussed extensively and discussed in last week’s AllCoreDevs Exposed to the Execution Layer call.
Over the next few weeks, the teams expect to finalize all specific changes resulting from these discussions and launch a new Dennet.
EVM Object Format (EOF)
After being conditionally accepted and then removed from Shanghai, the EOF was one of the subjects where opinion differed most about the best way forward.
Whether EOF should ban code introspection, aim for minimal deployment ASAP, or only ever go live on L2s were all discussed during the week.
No concrete specifications came out of the workshop, but the teams now have a shared understanding of the design space and possible paths forward. The EOF Breakout Room will resume next week to continue this conversation!
everything else
In addition to these three topics, the teams discussed the future of lightweight clients on the network, how the EL and CL specs can converge processes (and potentially carve out ERCs from other EIPs), the launch of a new WorkTree testnet Done, put forward a proposal for SSZ to encode EL transactions, discussed changing the validator EL->CL deposit mechanism, and even started an a cappella annotated spec!
next steps
Less than a week after the event, client teams started discussing the Shepela timeline for the testnet. Keep an eye on this blog, as well as the client repositories, for announcements in the coming weeks!
For other efforts, such as EIP-4844, EOF, SSZ, expect to see active design discussions in the coming weeks, leading to prototype implementation later.
Shepela is almost here, and Denkun is clear on the horizon ๐
