With The Merge now decisively in the past, protocol creators have been advancing across a (record?) variety of fields over the last few months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle tries, historical expiry, SSZ and more have experienced substantial progress recently!
To facilitate the advancement of these topics, and to conduct another round of Shapella stress evaluations, client team members convened in person for a week-long interop gathering in Austria: Edelweiss 🏔️
In contrast to Amphora, which solely concentrated on The Merge, this event featured two primary tracks, emphasizing the Shapella and ProtoDanksharding network enhancements respectively. Numerous breakout discussions were also hosted to explore various unresolved challenges. Below is a concise summary of what was achieved, along with links to materials from the workshops & ongoing discussion threads.
Shapella
The week commenced with a Shanghai/Capella mainnet shadow fork. Saturating the network with withdrawal credential update notifications uncovered performance dilemmas on the network, prompting a modified consensus-layer queuing structure to handle these messages.
During the week, additional devnets were initiated and stress-tested with significant volumes of credential updates, withdrawals, and even corrupted blocks. Client implementations concluded the week reinforced and prepared for the fork on the recently-launched Zhejiang testnet.
If the Shapella upgrade proceeds smoothly on Zhejiang, the Sepolia and Goerli testnets will follow suit!
(Proto)Danksharding
The primary EIP-4844 interop objective was to establish an all-client EIP-4844 devnet. By Friday, nearly every client was synchronizing on the network!
Numerous design conversations also took place throughout the week, originating from a transaction pool design proposal. Debates concerning whether to allow “blobless” 4844 transactions, how and if blocks & blobs should be interconnected for gossip, and methods for encoding these transactions were thoroughly examined and surfaced during last week’s AllCoreDevs Execution Layer call.
In the upcoming weeks, teams aim to finalize all specification modifications resulting from these discussions and launch a new devnet.
EVM Object Format (EOF)
After being conditionally accepted and subsequently removed from Shanghai, EOF emerged as one of the topics with the most divergent views on the best way forward.
Whether EOF should prohibit code introspection, aim for a swift minimal deployment, or even only ever be activated on L2s were all points of discussion throughout the week.
No definitive specification emerged from the workshop, but teams now possess a common understanding of the design landscape and potential pathways ahead. The EOF breakout rooms will continue next week to further this dialogue!
Everything Else
In addition to these three subjects, teams engaged in discussions about the future of light clients on the network, exploring how the EL & CL specs processes could align (and possibly distinguish ERCs from other EIPs), launched a new Verkle Trie testnet, proposed to SSZ encode EL transactions, discussed modifying the validator EL->CL deposit mechanics, and even initiated a Capella annotated specification!
Next Steps
Less than a week following the event, client teams have commenced discussions on Shapella timelines for testnets. Stay tuned to this blog, and also to clients’ repositories, for updates in the upcoming weeks!
For other initiatives, such as EIP-4844, EOF, and SSZ, anticipate active design dialogues in the approaching weeks, culminating in prototype implementations thereafter.
Shapella is on its way, and Dencun is distinctly visible on the horizon 🌅
