Ethereum Cat Herders Update #45

London upgrade’s latest devnet — Calaveras is up, introduction to EIP-3584, London Infrastructure Readiness call, Consensus layer implementers meeting, Altair upgrade special PEEPanEIP, Ethereum blockchain users survey and more clients & community update.

Welcome to the latest edition of the Ethereum Cat Herders community update to bring you up to speed since the last update.

📢 If you interact with the Ethereum blockchain, run Ethereum 1.0 or Eth2.0 node(s), or otherwise contribute to blockchain technology, consider responding to Ethereum blockchain users and developers survey.

Ethereum All Core Developers’ meeting

London upgrade

• 1559 issue — Malicious bloated 1559 transactions. Martin explained the issue and possible solutions.
• General agreement is adding consensus rules:

[1] maxFeePerGas < 2²⁵⁶

[2] maxPriorityFeePerGas < 2²⁵⁶

[3] maxFeePerGas >= maxPriorityFeePerGas

[4] sender.balance >= gasLimit * maxFeePerGas (Cap on consensu level and mempool level)

• London spec updated with the latest commit.

London devnets — Baikal & Calaveras

• Baikal — Lot of testing, some signers are not including all the tx. Besu and Geth seems to be working fine. Nethermind found some issue, in the process of merging. OpenEthereum is in sync but not on Baikal officially yet.
• Calaveras — Martin shared the 3rd devnet for London — Calaveras’s details for clients to join.

London timeline

• Decision of block number for forking the first testnet will be taken in the next AllCoreDevs meeting.
• Clients’ release will be on the following week.

Gas: DoS protection & decoupling worst/average performance

• Alexey introduced the proposal. Research published at A Third Way: Coordinating the gas limit.
• The proposal is to capture the Execution bomb and separate them from the transaction pool.
• Erigon team will continue the research work. If you’re interested to contribute, contact Alexey Akhunov.

EIP-3584 — Block Access List

• Gajinder Singh & Piper Merriam introduced the proposal. According to summary, this is a proposal to build a block’s access_list and include its fingerprint AccessListRoot in the block header.

Ethereum Core Devs meeting 114 #: agenda, video, Tim Beiko’s tweet. The next meeting is planned for June 11. Agenda.

Additional resources

• ACD newsletter — AllCoreDevs Update 003 by Tim Beiko.
• Core Dev Apprenticeship Program received ~400 applications.

Eth1.0 Clients update

• Geth — Maroon Sea (v1.10.3)
• OpenEthereum v3.2.6
• Besu — 21.1.7. Added support for the upcoming CALAVERAS ephemeral testnet and removed the configuration for the deprecated BAIKAL ephemeral testnet. Fix invalid transfer values with the tracing API specifically for CALL operation.
• Erigon(formerly known as TurboGeth) — 2021.05.04-alpha. Switching to the new DB engine, MDBX (default), please resync your nodes. LMDB support will be dropped in future releases. Improvements on London hard fork. Fixed Baikal support regression.
• Nethermind — v1.10.72. London — RPC renaming baseFee -> baseFeePerGas. Introduced support for EIP-3541 (Reject new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte). This feature is disabled and it will be part of London hardfork. Add support for baikal (London Devnet) network.
• Ethereum JS — @ethereumjs/vm v5.4.0. London HF Support — full support for the london hardfork. Please note that the default HF is still set to istanbul. You therefore need to explicitly set the hardfork parameter for instantiating a VM with the london.

London Infrastructure Readiness (EIP-1559 Wallet Interfaces) Call

• Cheatsheet for Wallets and Designers
• Some wallets shared presentation of how they are developing the UI for users and what information is made available for end users.
• Most of the infrastructure providers rely on gas API. Organizing a call this Fri at 1400 UTC to discuss best way to provide gas API.
• Agenda, video

Eth2.0 Implementers meeting (Consensus Layer call)

Over 5 mil ETH supply is locked up in the deposit contract with over 150K validators supporting beacon chain.

Altair

• Latest eth2.0-specs
• Features are stable. It is not a spec freeze but intentional freeze, pending engineering team feedback.
• Expected timeline: Mid June — short-lived testnet, end of June/early July — forking testnet, end of July — mainnet.
• PR open for config, looking for feedback from client team — https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/pull/2390

Research Updates

• Rayonism — Testnet closed, it was a success.
• Next step — Rebase the production, implement the API. Finalize specs for merge transition.

Merge

• Work on the state sync by Geth team
• Clients are focused on Altair & London, team will focus on research, have a bigger merge testnet.
• Transition process being figured out, discussion on consensus API continued.
• Withdrawal specs — https://hackmd.io/@zilm/withdrawal-spec
• Vitalik added Altair spec to repo, feedback invited.

Spec discussion

• A proposal for sync committee alignment, feedback invited.
• Teku (Adrian Sutton) looking into it. Some corner cases identified. General view seems to be that not syncing with the sync committee period is ok.

Eth2.0 implementers meeting 64#: agenda, video, Ben’s notes, Alex Stokes tweet, ECH’s notes.

Additional resources

• Finalized no. 26 — the Ethereum consensus-layer by Danny Ryan
• What’s New in Eth2–22 May 2021 by Ben Edgington

Eth2.0 Clients’ update

• Nimbus-eth2 — v1.3.0. This release offers safer and easier options to migrate to Nimbus from other clients. It also brings further performance optimizations.
• Lighthouse — Pencilvester.
• Lodestar — Release v0.23.0. Altair 1.1.0-alpha.5 — Beacon Chain, allow to run validator with interop key range, allow disabling BLS multi-thread pool. Use eth2-clients / slashing-protection-interchange-tests & add support for v5 slashing protection interchange.
• Prysm — v1.3.9
• Teku — 21.5.0.

EIPIP working group

Splitting out EIP repository into EIPs & ERCs repositories

• The Merge may bring a new process for core EIPs. This may result moving core proposals out of EIPs GitHub and ERCs will be there to be managed by the editors using ethereum/eips GitHub.
• Revisit the decision to split EIPs-ERCs repo after a few months.

EIPIP meeting 33#: agenda, video. The next meeting is scheduled for June 02, 2021, at 15:00 UTC. Agenda.

Ethereum Cat Herders

Peep an EIP

https://youtu.be/KdhHJa2SEwY

• Altair — Accounting reform with Alex Stokes
• Altair proposals (Eth2)with Danny Ryan & Vitalik Buterin on Jun 03, 2021 at 2:30 pm ET
• EIP-3541: Reject new contracts starting with the 0xEF byte & EIP-3540: EVM Object Format (EOF) v1 with Alex Beregszaszi, Paweł Bylica, Andrei Maiboroda on June 09, 2021.

ECH meetings

• Website — The ECH Website is now live. We would like to get more feedback on it.
• Member’s promotion — Shane Lightowler is promoted from ECH Contributor to ECH Member.
• Survey — ECH is conducting a survey to collect the requirements of the new & existing blockchain developers’ to be able to provide support with tools and documentation. This survey is being sponsored by Nethermind.
• The Ethereum Cat Herders meeting #59: agenda, video, notes. The next meeting is scheduled for June 08, 2021, at 1500 UTC.

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