Ethereum Cat Herders Update #53
The Merge — Kiln testnet, Mainnet Shadow Forking, Shanghai CFI proposals, Beacon chain Withdrawal Meta Spec, EIP-4844, EL client code name, EIPs Insight, PEEPanEIP, ECH Podcast and more.
Welcome to the latest edition of the Ethereum Cat Herders community update to share Ethereum protocol development updates, EIPs updates and bring you up to the speed since the last newsletter. Let’s take a quick read into what happened in the Ethereum ecosystem in March 2022.
TL;DR
- The Merge — Kiln reached TTD, Ethereum is Merged on testnet.
- CL meetings — Withdrawal Meta-spec proposed.
- ACD meetings — 6 EIPs moved to CFI for Shanghai
- EIPs Insight — 1 Final, 11 new Draft merged in the EIP repo.
- EL upgrade code name for The Merge — The Ethereum community decided Paris for EL and Bellatrix for CL clients’ specs codename for the Merge upgrade.
The Merge
Kiln
The Kiln public testnet is live. TTD on Kiln was reached over two weeks ago. Kiln Testnet Merge viewing was livestreamed. Prysmatic Labs published a report on the bug identified during on the Kiln Testnet. Teku’s Incident report is also available. The next few weeks are critical: lots of testing required. Members of each team should help support these efforts: work with Hive, Kurtosis, etc.
Shadow forking mainnet
Developers involved in testing are now planning to include more participants for shadow forking. Plan is to run devnet-6 next week, depending how that goes and Goerli shadow fork then do shadow fork of mainnet. Configs for devnet-6 expected soon. Mainnet Shadow fork sometime next week.
Consensus Layer Meetings
After the Kiln office hour discussion, CL devs discussed upcoming proposals for Withdrawal.
Meta-spec. Consensus layer changes
- PR-2836 — plan to merge it today
- PR-2854 — Credential change operation to be merged today
- Danny will post PR for Partial withdrawals proposal.
General clients update
- Nimbus v22.3.0
- Prysm v2.0.6
- Lighthouse Hydrogen-F
- Teku v22.3.2
- Lodestar Release v0.34.2
Resources
- What’s New in Eth2–25 March 2022
- CL meeting 83 — Agenda, Recording, Notes
- CL meeting 84 — Agenda, Recording, Notes
All Core Dev meetings
Part of ACD meeting is dedicated to discuss Merge and in the rest of the meeting, upcoming EIPs and network upgrade — Shanghai are discussed.
EIP-4844: Shard Blob Transactions
EIP-4844 introduces a new kind of transaction type to ethereum which accepts “blobs” of data to be persisted in the beacon-node for a short period of time. These changes are forwards compatible, not required for EVM execution, and small enough to keep disk use manageable.
Proto shared latest update on the progress made on EIP-4844 in the ACD meetings. People can also follow the website that has all related information.
- New meta-spec, lists all different resources / prototypes / etc.
- Consensus specs PR ready
- Execution-APIs PR ready
- Benchmarks (bench code done, machines / BLS libs being compared now). Including VerifyBlobs to batch-verify multiple blobs at once (much more efficient)
- Super new: EIP-4844 implementer notes, inlcuding benchmarking and optimization information.
- Ongoing prototype testing (and work-in-progress interop work with Prysm)
- Vitalik wrote a post about trusted setups, good information for the KZG trusted setup.
Shanghai EIPs discussion
Shanghai specs, EIP Tracker
Proposals Considered for Inclusion (CFI) for Shanghai are:
- EIP-3540: EVM Object Format (EOF) v1
- EIP-3651: Warm COINBASE
- EIP-3670: EOF — Code Validation
- EIP-3855: PUSH0 instruction
- EIP-3860: Limit and meter initcode
- EIP-4895: Beacon chain push withdrawals as operations
Core EIPs & executable specs
Considering the difference of Core EIP and ERC, the EIP standardization process has been under discussion for some time. With complex EIPs such as EIP-4844 in proposal queue, Ethereum developers are exploring ways to standardize Core EIPs.
- A proposal by Tim Beiko
- Discussion Link
Eth1.0 Clients update
- Geth — Ploitari (v1.10.17)
- OpenEthereum — v3.3.4
- Besu — 22.1.3
- TurboGeth — 2022.03.02-beta
- Nethermind — v1.12.6
- Ethereum JS — v4.1.3
Resources
- AllCoreDevs Update 010
- ACD meeting 133 — Agenda, Recording, Notes
- ACD meeting 134 — Agenda, Recording, Notes
Community Update
EL client codename for the Merge
The Merge is an Ethereum upgrade where blockchain is switching the consensus mechanism from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). Ethereum developers invited community participation to name the client spec code.
Following the general decision of selecting a star name for beacon chain and a city name for Execution Layer upgrade, the Ethereum community decided to go with Paris for EL and Bellatrix as the code name for CL clients’ specs for the Merge upgrade.
Read more about other EL naming proposals here. Follow the recording of CL naming community meeting here.
Ethereum Improvement Proposals update
EIPs insight
In March, one proposal, EIP-4626: Tokenized Vault Standard was moved to Final. The EIP repository received 11 new proposals as Draft in Standard Track — Core, ERC and Interface category. 13 EIPs are moved to Stagnant.
2 EIPs are moved from Draft to Review status whereas 1 EIP, (EIP-3651: Warm COINBASE) is resurrected from Stagnant to Review and is being Considered For Inclusion for the Shanghai Upgrade.
In addition to this, EIP repo received 13 new proposals that are waiting to be merged as Draft.
A significant change to EIP-1 is limiting links to external resources. An improvement proposal SHOULD NOT include external resources as they may disappear, move, or change unexpectedly. There is a fresh PR submitted to further edit language for external resources. It is advised for a discussion thread.
Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians (FEM) is now strongly recommended to be the place for EIP discussion and respective link be added to the proposal’s discussion-to section. A pull request will be made to updated EIP-1.
Another helpful agreement related to policy to merge Pull Request in absence of author from EIPIP meeting 51 is that, “if a pull request to add a trivial grammar or spelling change or typo or minor bug like missing semicolon, or extra extraneous semicolon some code, to a Final proposal, has been sitting for a month; then at that point any of the editors can override and merge the pull request. This has been updated to EIP editor “apprentice” handbook for future reference.
Read more on EIPs status change here.
PEEPanEIP
Released video
- Kiln — The Merge Testnet & Goreli shadow forking with Marius and Parithosh J.
- EIP-4444: Bound Historical Data in Execution Clients with Alex Stokes
- EIP-4337: Account Abstraction via Entry Point Contract specs. with Yoav W., Kristof G.
Upcoming meetings
In the upcoming days, we are planning overview of proposals
- EIP-3855: PUSH0 instruction & EIP-3860: Limit and meter initcode with Alex Beregszaszi, Hugo De la cruz, Paweł Bylica
- Beacon chain withdrawal with Alex Stokes
Follow schedule for upcoming meetings here.
EIPIP meetings
Highlights of meetings organized in March are:
- Policy to merge Pull Request in absence of author to update EIP with Final status. This has been updated to EIP editor “apprentice” handbook for future reference.
- Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians (FEM) be the place for EIP discussion
- Limiting links to external resources.
Meetings:
EIP editors apprentice meetings
In March, we organized one meeting
- Meeting 14 (March 22, 2022) — Agenda, Recording
- The next meeting is planned on Tuesday, Apr 05, 2022, at 15:00 UTC. Agenda
EF blogs
- Finalized no. 34 the Ethereum consensus-layer
- Announcing the Kiln Merge Testnet
- Secured #2: Public Vulnerability Disclosures — Protecting the Ethereum consensus-layer
- Announcing Grants Round for Academic Research
Events & hackathon
ETHWMN Fellowship
(February 7 — April 3, 2022)
The ETHWMN Fellowship is an 8-week mentor-led program, exclusive for women, to upskill Web2 developers and enable them to make the transition to Web3 using Ethereum while providing a comprehensive overview of the ecosystem. Pooja Ranjan from ECH is one of the mentors helping with the fellowship program.
Devconnect
- Devconnect Amsterdam, Netherlands April 2022:
Ethereum Cat Herders are engaged in facilitating the event with Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians. FEM aims to host the Ethereum Magicians Council, similar to what OG Community is used to — fish bowl / circle discussions, topic voting, group discussions. It will include talks with leaders who will facilitate sessions and encourage people to talk about issues in the Ethereum Ecosystem. Day 2 sessions are co-organised by Ethereum Cat Herders. Read more in the blogpost.
Ethereum Cat Herders
International Women’s day celebration
To celebrate the International Women’s Day with the Ethereum Community, Ethereum Cat Herders organized annual International Women’s Day event, “The Future of Inclusion 3.0” on March 8th 2022 in association with BlockchainNYC. Read more on guests and organizers here and follow the recording for interesting conversation of the panelists.
ECH Podcast
In March, we released three episodes on Ethereum Cat Herders Podcast.
ECH Engineering
EIP bot & EIPV
The ECH Engineering team is working on fixing bugs & issues of EIP bots. Recently we onboarded Jose Alfanso to help us with closing bot-issues.
We are currently looking for a Ruby developer to be a maintainer for the jekyll rendering for EIP GitHub.
Learn2Earn
A group of contributors at ECH are developing a project to help increase awareness of EIP and other important concepts in Ethereum and also earning a POAP by following a video, participating in an easy quiz.
The progress on the project can be followed on GitHub.
ECH meetings
Follow the recording & notes from ECH meetings (March) in here.
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