With the merge now behind us, protocol developers have made progress in a (record?) number of areas over the past few months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle tries, history expiration, SSZ, and many others have all seen significant progress recently!
To move each of these threads forward and run another round of Shapella stress tests, the client team members gathered in person for a week-long interoperability event in Austria: Edelweiss 🏔️
Contrary to AmphoraThe main theme of this event was The Merge, with two main tracks, focusing on Shapella network upgrades and ProtoDanksharding respectively. Several working sessions were also held to address other open issues. Here’s a quick overview of what was accomplished, along with links to artifacts from the workshops and ongoing discussion threads.
Shapella
The week started with a shadow fork of the Shanghai/Capella mainnet. The flooding of the network with withdrawal ID update messages exposed performance issues on the network and led to a different design of the consensus layer queue to handle these messages.
Throughout the week, additional development networks were launched and stress tested with large amounts of credential updates, withdrawals, and even bad blocks. Client implementations ended the week hardened and ready for the fork onto the new Zhejiang Test Network.
Assuming the Shapella upgrade goes smoothly on Zhejiang, the Sepolia and Goerli testnets will be upgraded next!
(Proto)Burst of Grace
The main goal of EIP-4844 interoperability was to launch a fully client-based EIP-4844 development network. As of Friday, all but one client was synchronized on the network!
Several design discussions also took place during the week, stemming from a transaction pool design proposal. Questions about allowing 4844 “blobless” transactions, if and how blocks and blobs must be paired for gossip and how to encode these transactions have been widely discussed and surfaced in the last week Calling the AllCoreDevs execution 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)
After being conditionally accepted and then expelled from Shanghai, the EOF was one of the issues on which opinions on the best way forward diverged most.
If EOF should introspection of the prohibition codeaim for minimal deployment as soon as possible, or even only The commissioning of L2s was one of the issues discussed during the week.
No concrete specifications emerged from the workshop, but the teams now have a shared understanding of the design space and potential paths forward. EOF Meeting Rooms resume next week to continue this conversation!
Everything else
In addition to these three topics, the teams discussed the future of thin clients on the network, how the EL and CL specification processes could converge (and potentially separate ERCs from other EIPs), launched a new Verkle Trie test networkpresented a proposal to SSZ encodes EL transactionsdiscussed modification of the EL->CL validator deposit mechanicsand even started a Capella Annotated Specifications!
Next steps
Less than a week after the event, customer teams have started discussing Shapella timelines for testnets. Keep an eye on this blog, as well as customer 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 implementations.
Shapella is almost here, and Dencun is clearly on the horizon 🌅
