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Ethereum Cat Herders Update #47

London upgrade is expected on Mainnet on August 04, 2021. Merge mainnet readiness, Address Space Extension working group updates, Beacon chain updates, Community & other Ethereum Cat Herders updates.

Pooja Ranjan
Ethereum Cat Herders
11 min readJul 14, 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. Survey closing soon.

Ethereum All Core Developers’ meeting

London upgrade

Live on Goerli & Ropsten:

  • Geth & Besu team spammed the testnets. No issues were reported on Goerli.
  • On Rinkeby tesnet, on Geth side, Peter S. explained that a few hundred txs queued up, due to max priority fee set up. It is resolved and not expected to happen on the mainnet.

London mainnet deployment is expected on the block of 12965000 on Aug 04, 2021.

  • effectiveGasPrice in pre-London blocks — Clients agreed to add an `effectiveGasPrice` in the transaction receipt, which returns the price paid post-execution by the transaction (i.e. base fee + priority fee).
  • Require gasPrice field for both legacy and EIP-1559 transactions — Ref: issue. Tool builders should be aware that gasPrice field will eventually be replaced with effectiveGasPrice.
  • For miners — London will double the block size on the network because EIP-1559 aims to keep blocks 50% full. This will happen automatically on the fork block, but after it, miners will need to adjust their target gas limit. If you want to keep having 15m gas of transactions on average, you will now need to target 30m. All mainnet-compatible mining clients have a JSON RPC call for this.

Merge

  • Merge Mainnet Readiness Checklist — Mikhail K., Danny R. put together this checklist to follow the Merge progress.
  • Peter S. mentioned that the Geth team is working on post-merge sync, and that eth/65 and lower versions of the eth protocol make it much harder to implement this.
  • Next steps — Merge team will work on writing (proto)EIPs, specs, etc. for the execution-layer changes to provide the context around each item on the checklist.

Shanghai Vs Merge

  • Discussion on planning the hardforks. Peter S. pointed that it’s difficult for client teams to focus on both Shanghai & Merge. Get the merge done and then focus on the feature fork. Moreover, the client team also needs to work on the client’s performance improvement. Ethereum's roadmap has a lot for the next 1–3 years, a better roadmap will help.
  • Micha said in the chat “I would love it if we could have a document like Shanghai — Q4 2021, Cancun — Q2 2022, Prague — Q4 2022, Osaka — Q2 2023. FWIW, I can appreciate how stuffy and anti-agile pre-planned hard forks is, but I think Ethereum core development has reached a scale where the coordination value of having a relatively strict schedule outweighs the benefits of a more agile solution.”
  • Possibility of Muirglacier 2 in Dec 2021— A hardfork to push difficulty bomb till the next fork.
  • Post merge world — Ethereum would not require upgrades at both layers simultaneously. However, coupling them will make sense. For EVM upgrade, it does not require any upgrade on the beacon chain. More will be figured out eventually.

Ethereum Core Devs meeting 117 #: agenda, video, Tim Beiko’s tweet. The next meeting is planned for July 23. Agenda.

Ethereum Core Devs meeting 116 #: agenda, video, Tim Beiko’s tweet, Notes. The next meeting is planned for July 09. Agenda.

Eth1.0 Clients update

  • Geth — Exodus Cluster (v1.10.5): enables the London hard fork for the Ethereum mainnet at block #12965000, estimated for the 4th of August, 2021. ork. (#23176)

— added an override flag which can be used to set the activation block. This flag is temporary and will be removed some time after the fork has successfully activated on mainnet.

— The Geth transaction pool has been redesigned in order to handle the new fee market created by EIP-1559.

— For miners: The transaction selection algorithm provided by Geth specifically picks transactions with the highest effective reward.

EIP-1559 also changes the gas limit voting system. To ensure that the gas available for transactions is the same as before the fork, the gas limit is doubled at the fork block. If you are using the --miner.gaslimit flag to participate in voting, you need to double the value of this flag to keep voting for the same value as before. You can use the miner_setGasLimit RPC API to update the target without downtime, but be aware that this does not survive a restart. The previous --miner.gastarget flag is deprecated post London and its value will be ignored.

— For wallet providers: The default transaction price calculation algorithm for EIP-1559 (eth_maxPriorityFeePerGas) follows the old mechanism, setting the max priority fee to the effective price paid on the network minus the current base fee; and setting the max fee to the priority fee + 2x base fee. This ensures that the total price paid per gas remains the same after the London transition if no explicit user involvement has been made. Alternatively, Geth exposes a new eth_feeHistory(blocks, head, percentiles) API endpoint which allows the user to query recent statistical infos about the amount of tips paid to miners and fees burned by transactions. Wallets are recommended to use this endpoint to give users multiple fee options to choose from

— Note for JSON-RPC users: eth_sendTransaction and eth_fillTransaction will create EIP-1559 transactions by default after the fork has activated.

— Note for users of Go/Java/ObjC contract bindings: accounts/abi/bind will create EIP-1559 transactions automatically after the fork. To take advantage of EIP-1559 in Go applications, please remember to update the go-ethereum module dependency to v1.10.4 or newer in your application's go.mod file.

— Note for users of ethclient: If you send transactions using the ethclient package and want to take advantage of the new fee model provided by EIP-1559, you must adapt your code to create transactions using types.NewTx(&types.DynamicFeeTx{...}). In order to know whether the fork has activated and the new transaction type can be used yet, simply check whether the BaseFee field of the latest block header is non-nil.

  • OpenEthereum v3.2.6
  • Besu — 21.7.0: This release contains the activation blocks for London across all supported testnets, EIP-1559 changes: accept transactions that have maxFeePerGas below current baseFee. Introduced transitions for IBFT2 block rewards. eth_feeHistory API for wallet providers. QBFT is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithm, building on the capabilities of IBFT and IBFT 2.0. It aims to provide performance improvements in cases of excess round change, and provides interoperability with other EEA compliant clients, such as GoQuorum.
  • Erigon (TurboGeth) — 2021.07.02-alpha
  • Nethermind —v1.10.77: [London/JSON RPC] For 1559 mined transactions gas price field will return effective gas price. For 1559 pending transactions gas price field will return MaxFeePerGas.
    [London/TxPool] Fix transaction replacement logic for 1559 transactions.
    [JSON RPC] Fixed reverted message for eth_call and eth_estimateGas
  • Ethereum JS — @ethereumjs/vm v5.5.0: Finalized London HF Support
    This release integrates a Common library version that provides the London HF blocks for all networks including mainnet and is, therefore, the first release with finalized London HF support. Included Source Files
    Source files from the src folder are now included in the distribution build. This allows for a better debugging experience in debug tools like Chrome DevTools by having working source map references to the original sources available for inspection. Other Changes & Fixes Improved browser compatibility by replacing instanceof calls on tx objects with functionality.

Merge Implementers’ meeting

Implementation updates

  • Prototype the Merge transition process — Mikhail provided the update. Part of the spec has been merged, implemented in Teku; tried in positive & negative test scenarios. Local miner was used, difficulty was predictable. Need more thorough testing.

Research updates

  • PRs available for the cleanup of the beacon chain spec.
  • PR for Randao is merged.
  • Discussed limitations of current JSON RPC consensus API and its future which brought up questions like HTTP vs WebSockets and the need or lack thereof for bidirectional communication.

Plans for Q3

  • Expecting London in a month, Altair in a couple of months. More focused on merge this quarter.
  • Beacon chain is in the feature-complete state. Focus on execution client specs this quarter. Consensus specs will be rebased on upgrades. All the EVM stuff will continue.
  • More testnets coming in this quarter.
  • The Merge call will be ending soon, discussing the merge will happen on the All Core Devs meeting and the Proof of Stake consensus layer meeting depending on the part that is going to be discussed.
  • A high-level checklist for Merge will be added to the PM repo.

Merge meeting 07#: agenda, video, Proto’s notes, ECH notes. The next meeting is scheduled for July 15, 2021, at 13:00 UTC.

Eth2.0 Implementers meeting (Ethereum Consensus Layer meeting)

Altair planning

  • More coordinated devnet is needed.
  • Pyrmont is set to sunset after the Altair. More devnet will be set up at the end of the next week.
  • Pyrmont will be forked first. Target forking Pyrmont by the end of the month, final decision to make in the next call.
  • Prater testnet will be forked right before the mainnet.
  • Most clients are working. Lots of testing & fuzzing to do to move into the production version of Altair.
  • Parithosh, Proto and Danny will discuss and propose a configuration for a Devnet launch at the end of next week.

Research

  • Merge code will be rebased on Altair
  • Execution payload
  • Eth2.0 Metrics repo — Pari has a PR to be merged. After this is merged Leo & Pari will move to a different set of Metrics.

Eth2.0 implementers meeting 67#: agenda, video, Ben’s notes, ECH notes.

Eth2.0 Clients’ update

Stateless Ethereum meeting

Address Space Extension (Working group)

  • A new working group looking into the Address Space Extension.
  • So far five meetings have been facilitated by Ansgar Deitrichs led by Alex B. (Axic).
  • The Ethereum Cat Herders are providing support with making the recording available for the community to follow the research discussion.
  • Follow the recordings for ASE meeting 5 and earlier meetings in the Stateless Ethereum playlist.

Resources

State expiry proto-EIP (contd.)

EIPIP working group

EIP Process

  • New (Core) EIP process — Having the EIP documentation as is; the only change will be in the Specification section which will have the Pull Request link and no details.
  • No change in the (Network layer) EIP Process.
  • No proposal received on separating protocol & feature (core) proposals.

EIPIP meeting 37#: Agenda. The next meeting is scheduled for July 14, 2021, at 15:00 UTC. Agenda.

Community

Events & 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

Image courtesy: Courtney Hedger
  • We’ve received our first grant from the Ecosystem Support program.
  • Over 500 contributors showed up on Gitcoin Grant 10.
  • Decent support on CLR.fund Round 7.
  • A token of appreciation from Moloch DAO.
  • Ben Edgington & Christine Kim gave the Ethereum Cat Herders a shoutout in the community segment of Coindesk’s Eth2.0 round-up. Listen to the episode here.

Thanks to the great Ethereum community to come forward, appreciate and support the work of Ethereum Cat Herders!

Community partnership

We’re happy to announce that the Ethereum Cat Herders are supporting the ETH Odyssey — An ETH India hackathon.

About ETHOdyssey

The mainstream is waking up to the wonders of the blockchain. With more eyes on the ecosystem than ever before, this is an unparalleled opportunity to build the decentralized applications that the masses will use.

Get ready for ETHOdyssey: A Global Ethereum hackathon part of the ETHIndia Online series!

  • Learn all about the latest in the ecosystem, including the exciting worlds of DeFi, Oracles, Meta transactions, and of course, the talk of the town NFTs!
  • Get access to mentorship from the best in the industry!
  • Win over $45,000 in bounties for your efforts!

Peep an EIP

Recorded

https://youtu.be/FlFKZR_ofSo
https://youtu.be/QwCPrw-4d98
https://youtu.be/Kv643dgRmMI

Upcoming

  • The Merge special with Mikhail Kalinin on July 27, 2021 at 1400 UTC.
  • Block Gas Limit (Ethereum anniversary special) with Vitalik Buterinon July 30, 2021 at 1830 UTC.
  • For upcoming meetings follow the PEEPanEIP schedule.

Thanks to Willaim Xuan for making short videos of PEEPanEIP to give you a quick peep of what we discussed in the talk.

Catblazer

ECH meetings

  • The Ethereum Cat Herders meeting #62: agenda, video. The next meeting is scheduled for July 20, 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

Ethereum
Ethereum Cat Herder
Blockchain
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Altair

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Pooja Ranjan
Ethereum Cat Herders

Written by Pooja Ranjan

468 Followers

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

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