With The Merge firmly behind us now, the protocol’s developers have made progress across a (record?) number of areas over the past few months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle attempts, log expiration, SSZ and more have seen a lot of progress lately!
In order to help move each of these leads forward, and for another series of Shapella stress tests, members of the client’s team gathered in person for a week-long interop event in Austria: Edelweiss 🏔️
unlike amphora, which had a unique focus on The Merge, this event had two main tracks, focusing on Shapella and ProtoDanksharding network upgrades respectively. Several breakout sessions were also held to delve into other open issues. Below is a brief overview of what was accomplished, as well as links to artifacts from the workshops and ongoing discussion threads.
Chabela
The week started with a shadow fork of the Shanghai/Cabella mainnet. Flooding the network with pull credential refresh messages revealed performance issues on the network, and led to a different design in the consensus layer queue to handle these messages.
Over the course of the week additional devnets were launched and stress tested with loads of credential updates, pulls and even bad blocks. The client apps finished the week hardcore and ready to fork over the new launch testnet zhejiang.
Assuming that the Shapella upgrade occurs without a problem in Zhejiang, the Sepolia and Goerli testnets will be upgraded next!
(proto) Danksharding
The main goal of the EIP-4844 interoperability was to release the EIP-4844 devnet device to all clients. By Friday all but one of the clients on the network were syncing!
Several design discussions also took place during the week, stemming from a Transaction pool design proposal. Questions about allowing “blobless” 4844 transactions, if and how Blocks and points must be combined for gossip How to encrypt these transactions has been widely discussed and surfaced last week Call the AllCoreDevs implementation layer.
Over the next few weeks, the teams hope to finalize all specification changes resulting from these discussions and launch a new devnet.
EVM Object Format (EOF)
Conditionally accepted and then removed from Shanghai, the EOF has been one topic in which opinions differ on the best path forward.
Whether the EOF Introspection is a prohibition symbolaim for a minimal publication as quickly as possible, or even Just Ever go live on L2s all discussed during the week.
No specific specifications have been released from the workshop, but the teams now have a common understanding of the design space and potential paths forward. the EOF rest rooms Resume next week to continue this conversation!
Everything else
Apart from these three topics, the teams discussed the future of lightweight clients on the network, how EL & CL specification processes might converge (and possibly Truncating ERCs from other EIPs), launch a new file Verkle Trie testnetput forward a proposal to SSZ encrypts EL transactionsdiscussion Change the EL checker -> CL deposit mechanicsand even started a file Annotated Capella specifications!
next steps
Less than a week after the event, client teams began discussing schedules for Chabela for test grids. Keep an eye on this blog, as well as on customer repositories, for announcements in the coming weeks!
For other efforts, such as EIP-4844, EOF, and SSZ, we expect to see active design discussions in the coming weeks, leading to implementation of prototypes thereafter.
Chabela is almost here, and Dencon is clearly on the horizon
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