Ethereum Magicians Protocol Roadmap Session Devcon6 Recap
Highlighting discussion points from Ethereum Protocol Roadmap session, including all additional links regarding this session, notes. Sessions: The Merge, Roadmap — Post Merge, Shanghai rapid fire EIP session.
Devcon is the biggest Ethereum conference happening in the Ethereum ecosystem. This year was the 6th version of Devcon which the whole ecosystem has been waiting for 3 long years!!! The Ethereum Foundation hosted us in Bogota, Columbia. We spread out across 6 floors (including the basement), hosting 444 speakers and 6k attendees from 113 countries from all around the world!
Devcon this year was very builder focused, full on builder energy dominated the whole venue. Even people had been lining up in front of the rooms to get in and see talks, many rooms were fully packed and you couldn’t watch your favorite talk in person as people were lining up minutes upfront to catch their favourite talks.
The hottest topics dominating this year’s Devcon were zk, EVM, layer 2 and MEV which dominated the schedule. The talks were touching post-merge ideations and were super developer friendly.
Highlights from the Ethereum Magicians Ethereum Roadmap Session
The Merge Session:
- Most of the devs agreed that The Merge was a fantastic process but very stressful due all the technical complications like not enough time for hive tests,
- The testing process was a good idea with a lot of coordination. Some devs were disappointed with MEV because they had little time to test it and correct failures.
- Client Teams expressed concerns towards Flashbots being the only relayer as it could censor transactions
- Because core development team is anti-financialization, it felt wrong to think about MEV and it was only until later that they realized how much interplay there was between MEV and censorship
- Nethermind has an Internship Program, one of the projects is core development as well and guidance is provided. The Ethereum Foundation has an Ethereum Protocol Fellowship Program. Nethermind's IP is accepting Interns all year round, Ethereum Foundation runs Fellowship Program in cohorts
Roadmap — Post Merge Session:
- EIP-4844 introduces new tx type which means more places for forking based on timestamp needs to happen
- The EF has testing team and is looking to scale this team of client testers. If you are interested to be apart of Client testing team please reach out to mario.vega@ethereum.org
- Vitalik: “Is it possible to have a hard fork in February and one in June?” “Thinking about it from the perspective of tech debt of L2 and rollups… philosophical goals of 4844 is to be the change to end all changes for L2s in the sense that 4844 introduces point evaluation breaking pile and the concept of blobs, and that allows L2s to set their code once and write their code and launch it… and no matter how much we mess around with sharing design later, as long as we are in parameters, rollups will be able to breathe easy and won’t have to do that re-architecting again. There is value in getting that phase done earlier, because the earlier they can get to the phase of where they can start learning instead of having to clear eventually. It is worth talking to L2s about this.
- Rolling out hard forks takes 3–4 months of deliberation
- Coinbase is working with Protolambda on EIP-4844 with Prysm and Geth. The difference between each one next year is massive. We have products that have been built on-chain that we want to launch in Q4 and Q1 of next year and we can’t right now because at the scale we are operating. Bringing 10s of millions of customers into our wallet products, it’s too expensive. Most customers in US cannot pay for and we as a business cannot subsidize the cost for them. So what does it mean in the context of these conversations, the people who don’t understand the benefits of decentralization or security. There are all these other EVMs. Can’t we just deploy on this? Waiting until next year is feasible, 2024 is not good. Let’s make list of things we need and give it to Coinbase or optimism and we are ready to through resources at it. We want to come to table with you so the end result is millions of more users are using ETH by end of next year
- The challenges of pushing 4844 is that basically with 4844 devs are telling the people “Use L2s” but the rollups are not secure. Right now, most of the L2 aren’t trustless, they haven’t implemented fraud proofs. Despite the fact that they are putting data in L1, you cannot use it to prove that the rollup is wrong.
- Most core devs at the session agreed that staked ETH withdrawals for the Shanghai should be prioritized but it was not as clear whether devs would also prioritize EIP-4844 for the same upgrade given that the implementation of EIP-4844 is comparatively more complex and research heavy
- Idea: what if we prototype some ideas related to EVM txs formats on an L2 and that way the library and the tooling can adapt to that on L2, and all downstream stuff is ready and L1 can implement it when it’s ready and not have to rush.
Shanghai rapid fire EIP session:
- 12 EIPs pitched and given feedback from Core Devs
- All of the EIPs mentioned during this session can be found alongside with discussion threads here
- Nothing specific to highlight there, go ahead and read the notes for more specific overview
Links regarding this session
Session slides — Magicians intro, Session schedule, our Devcon5 Session recap
Recording: Ethereum Magicians Roadmap Session — Starts at 2:38:00
Notes
- Full notes in English from Marcus
- Compiled notes in Spanish and English from Ariiellus
This session was mentioned in “Learnings from Devcon VI: Ethereum is Failing Forwards” by Christine Kim
Devcon6 Highlights & Recap Threads
We also hosted ERC Lightning talks session by Timdaub. This session was full of great lightning talks by the Ethereum Magicians Community. Thank you Tim for hosting it!
ERC Lightning talks — Starts at 3:27:00
One of the most memorable Devon6 talks was by our BTC Maxi friend Eric Wall — Social Slashing focused on censorship resistance on a validator level.
Great Devcon6 Recap thread from DeFiDave
Community & Organisers recap of Devcon6 Podcast ! Lot’s of great insights on Devcon Bogota, next Devcon location, Talks, and even controversial takes! With Nick Johnson, Anett, David Hoffmann, and Joseph Schweitzer.
What was quite unexpected but long awaited, teams like Coinbase started becoming more interested in the EIP process. Noticing the importance of standardization on a protocol level, ensuring that EIPs are pushed forward, supporting EIP testing.. Feels like the EIPs are finally getting noticed by bigger players in the industry. Thank you Jesse from Coinbase for getting involved in the standardization and helping champion EIP-4844!
Ethereum Magicians Devcon5 Sessions recap
Thank you to Tim Beiko for being the best co-host of this session, thank you to Skylar and Heather for letting Ethereum Magicians host Roadmap session at Devcon6! 🇨🇴
