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Ethereum Cat Herders Update #46

Stateless Ethereum, Merge implementers meeting, Altair and London upgrade progress, EIP-1559 gas API call, JSON RPC API spec may have a new placeholder, Ethereum users & developers survey, ECH meetings, community updates & more.

Pooja Ranjan
Ethereum Cat Herders
9 min readJun 22, 2021

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

TL;DR

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

Stateless Ethereum meeting

Image: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/verkle_and_state_expiry_proposal#The-roadmap

State expiry proto-EIP

  • In continuation to the group agreement from the last meeting, to have statelessness and state expiry at the same time (option 3), Vitalik Buterin shared Verkle and State expiry proposal. In the earlier meeting, it was evident that enough people were looking for statelessness to exist irrespective of state expiry and vice versa. It turned out doing both at the same time is easier.
  • State expiry is the states that are not read or written recently and get dropped out of state. Resurrection conflict was a challenge earlier which was solved with the address spaces which suggested there are different regions where the contract can be created and it can be modified within a minimum time.
  • Talking about The roadmap, he mentioned that the transition to verkle tree and state expiry will be at multiple stages. The period is not defined yet, it could be anywhere from 6 to 36 months depends on the development team.
  • Verkle tree EIP includes code verkelization.
  • The presentation couldn't be completed in the call hence a follow-up meeting is planned for June 23 at 1300 UTC to finish the walkthrough of the most recent State Expiry proto-EIP and to discuss the plan forward for the ongoing work on the efforts.
  • Recording available.

Useful resources:

Merge Implementers’ meeting

  • Mikhail is working on the transition implementation.
  • Clients are focused on Altair & London, the team will focus on research, have a bigger merge testnet.
  • Transition process being figured out, discussion on consensus API will be continued.
  • The non substantial but biggest change on the beacon chain specs are now merged. Justin Drake was working on it.
  • RANDAO could be send directly to EVM. Open PR to add RANDAO to execution payload. The value of new randao field in ExecutionPayload must be assigned to difficulty field of derived ExecutionBlock. Difficulty has to go, it could be renamed as randao.
  • Decision — The opcode will be renamed later.
  • Execution layer specs — Tim was looking for a list of changes and open questions like what execution layer needs to do and where these needs to be documented. Meta and Informational EIP could e a place holder as alot of non-consensus changes are also important to be documented that does not require a hardfork. Micah suggested to have multiple small EIPs. Large EIPs may get stuck.
  • Next steps — Tim, Mikhail, Danny and others to work together to figure the transition process first, list of consensus changes & execution side changes and where they will live. Create a checklist (without specifying timeline) and EIPs.

Merge meeting 06#: agenda, video, Proto’s notes. The next meeting is scheduled for June 30, 2021, at 15:00 UTC.

Eth2.0 Implementers meeting (Consensus Layer meeting)

Altair

  • Adrian Sutton put-up the Teku devnets.
  • Parithosh from the EF was introduced, he will be helping to stand up future long/short-lived testnets and looking into testnet dates.
  • Set a fork block for one of the testnets in the next meeting on July 1st . For mainnet fork — early August.
  • Mehdi working on fuzzing — Bugs & crash reports will be shared with each for Altair, confidentially.
  • Audit — The latest eth2.0-specs are not audited. Not a general practice for Eth1 clients as well.
  • Sync committee gossip — Teku found that many sync committee signatures were getting lost on the devnet. Adrain running an experiment to look into the issue.

Research Updates

  • Sharding update — Sharding spec with a new state format makes Merkle proofs commitment easier. Some discussion on MEV and Vitalik’s latest EthResearch post -Proposer/block builder separation-friendly fee market designs. Validators are encouraged to participate. Flashbots democratises MEV. A pull request is expected for future discussion.
  • Network crawler — Leo is working on network crawler that can power a dashboard. He will be continuing to work on common metrics standard.

Eth2.0 implementers meeting 66#: agenda, video, Ben’s notes.

Additional resources

Eth2.0 Clients’ update

Ethereum All Core Developers’ meeting

London upgrade

  • Testnets Announcement blog by Ethereum Foundation. ECH also published a London overview blog by Tim Beiko.
  • Calaveras devnet was spammed with transactions. Minor issues in Besu and Nethermind were identified, respective teams are working to fix it.
  • JSON RPC 1559 — An open PR by lightclient to Eth1.0.
  • On how to adapt eth_call to the various parameters that are introduced by EIP-1559, Peter S.(Geth) had a pull request that is merged now. It was very thorough and other clients agreed to follow a similar approach.
  • Priority fee — an open question about how client should return estimates for the priority fee (tip). Another round of discuss on Discord. Micha shared a comment summary on ACD Discord.

Timeline

  • Tim will share the testblock and follow up with every clients.
  • None of the client node will have mainnet block.
  • There will be one more release after the testnet fork.

Yellow paper EOA clarification (EIP-3607: Reject transactions from senders with deployed code)

  • Dankrad brought it up to address collision issue between EOA and contract. It was identified that someone can use a collision finding algorithm to exploit. It doesn’t seem to be an eminent threat, but may need addressing. A fix is suggested in the proposal-3607.
  • Geth team will work to get the fixture test, compliance ready for after London. Martin suggested, it is important to agree and have consensus, no need to tie it with London. Could be merged in Geth sooner rather than later.
  • Nethermind is not mining on mainnet,so will not implement it.
  • The EIP is Standard Track Core proposal that can be added with a soft fork, no hardfork required. It will not be included in London upgrade.
  • Next steps — This will this be documented in Yellow paper. Geth will implement it first. Consensus rule — Once that implementation is out, the canonical chain (the one supported by core devs) if this is exploited is the chain that doesn’t include a transaction from an address with code. Miners, users, and chains can update as they like.

EIP-3074: Audit Report

Ethereum Core Devs meeting 115 #: agenda, video, Tim Beiko’s tweet. The next meeting is planned for June 11. Agenda.

Additional resources

Eth1.0 Clients update

EIP-1559 Gas API Call (Breakout #10)

  • Geth team did some 1559 transactions. Experimented with 20 Full nodes and 2 Light client nodes. Th idea was to delay test consensus to keep this mechanism to feed the effective miners rewards. Next steps would be to take the min tip of recent blocks and offer something below the median to test.
  • Concern with current Geth — if there is spike in usage, those will be short lived, remembering history. A new Geth proposal to address this is proposed.
  • Summary (Tim) — Create or collect data for building oracles related to lowest gas price accepted by over the last n blocks with full blocks filtered out and the full blocks. Calaveras devnet is available for people/wallets to test. At least one more API call will be scheduled.

EIP-1559 Gas API Call #10: agenda, video, ECH notes.

EIPIP working group

  • ERC process & standardization — A proposed ERC process & an alternate proposal. matt garnett suggested that it would be good to see the discussions on how to improve smart contract standards. Also with the changing dynamics, it’s actually EIPs that could be treated differently.
  • Update EIP-1: A pull request is created to add an EIP editor and missing links. As an exception, for EIP-1 bot could be updated to ask approval of at least 2 EIP editors before the auto-merge. Issue created for ECH engineering team to work on it.
  • New EIP editor onboarding — I’ve documented an EIP/ERC editor handbook for new resources to refer to.
  • Initial work on the eth-bot, a bot created to help EIP editors, is completed.
  • JSON RPC API spec — Matt G. rewrote json-rpc spec. Future work will be based on that. All EIP-1559 related JSON work is completed. A new resource is being onboard to speed up the task. A proposal of creating a new JSON RPC API spec repo after the London upgrade.

EIPIP meeting 35#: agenda, video. The next meeting is scheduled for June 30, 2021, at 15:00 UTC. Agenda.

Events & Hackathon

  • Gitcoin Grants Round 10 (June 16-July 01, 2021) —Gitcoin Grants is quarterly fundraising event that enables open source projects of all sizes to seek and receive community funding. It is also accompanied with a hackathon.
  • Eth CC 4 (July 20–22, 2021) —The Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) is the largest annual European Ethereum event focused on technology and community. Three intense days of conferences, networking and learning.
  • ETHOdyssey (July 2 — August 1, 2021) — Get ready for ETHOdyssey: A Global Ethereum hackathon part of the ETHIndia Online series. Application closing soon!

Ethereum Cat Herders

Peep an EIP

https://youtu.be/AC1FS3LmoT4
https://youtu.be/E02THhW-yTE
https://youtu.be/iaAEGs1DMgQ

Upcoming meetings

ECH Origin Story

https://twitter.com/EthCatHerders/status/1404879458696314880

Follow the less-known origin story of the Ethereum Cat Herders on this Twitter thread.

Ethereum users & developers survey

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeugRHv93fizew0zeqXFOOnQIbjbWnVHoThLJR3f3g6gVvXhQ/viewform

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 sponsored by Nethermind.

ECH meetings

  • The Ethereum Cat Herders meeting #60: agenda, video, notes. The next meeting is scheduled for June 22, 2021, at 1500 UTC. Agenda.

Support the Ethereum Cat Herders

Share your question, comments, and suggestions with me on Twitter. Thank you for reading 🙏.

— The Ethereum Cat Herders

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Pooja Ranjan
Ethereum Cat Herders

Written by Pooja Ranjan

469 Followers

Herder-in-chief @EthCatHerders, Founder @ether_world, EIPsInsight.com. I share news and views about blockchain technology. Ethereum.

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