Summary of the latest meeting of Ethereum core developers: Dencun will be activated on the mainnet on March 13th, and Electra upgrade will be launched.

24-02-23 11:31

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Original Title: "Ethereum All Core Developers Consensus Call #127 Writeup"

Author: Christine Kim

Translated by: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's Note:

The Ethereum All Core Developers Consensus Call (ACDC) is held every two weeks to discuss and coordinate changes to the Ethereum consensus layer (CL). This was the 127th ACDC conference call, during which developers discussed the Electra upgrade, staking reward proposals, and the development of light clients, and exchanged views on the technical and social impact of these issues.

In addition to discussing the Electra upgrade, preparations for Dencun and other potential proposals were also discussed. The conference call determined that the mainnet date for the Dencun upgrade will be March 13, 2024, provided that no major issues are encountered with the upgrade or client release.

Christine Kim, Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital, provided a detailed record of the key points of this meeting, which BlockBeats has translated from the original article:

On February 22, 2024, Ethereum developers gathered on Zoom for the All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) call #128 meeting. The ACDC conference call is a bi-weekly series where developers discuss and coordinate changes to the Ethereum consensus layer (CL). This week, the developers unanimously agreed to launch the Electra upgrade. Currently, the developers have agreed to include the following three Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) in the upgrade:

· EIP 6110, providing validator deposits on-chain.· EIP 7002, the execution layer can trigger an exit.

· EIP 7549, removes committee index from witness

Additionally, developers will also be conducting conceptual verification work on EIP 7547 (included in the list) in the coming weeks. If developers find that the code changes for EIP 7547 are easy to implement and test, and that their inclusion will not delay the implementation of the above three EIPs, developers agree to include EIP 7547 as the fourth EIP for Electra. Developers also reiterated their intention to keep Electra as a "small fork", meaning that the upgrade can be ready by the end of this year and activated on the Ethereum mainnet.

Dencun Upgrade Preparation

Except for the Lodestar (CL) client, all Ethereum clients have released the final version of the Dencun upgrade software. The Ethereum Foundation's (EF) developer operations (DevOps) team is using these final client versions and Lodestar's Dencun-ready candidate version to perform upgrade testing on the last dedicated test network. EF DevOps engineer Parithosh Jayanthi said that the final mainnet shadow fork of Dencun, which reflects Ethereum mainnet activity, was launched on Thursday, February 22. So far, Jayanthi said that the client release looks stable and there are no issues to report on the network.

DevOps team will conduct further testing on the shadow fork in the next few days. Assuming no major issues are encountered in the upgrade or client release, EF will release an official blog post on Monday or Tuesday, February 26 or 27, announcing the mainnet date for Dencun upgrade. Developers reached a consensus on the activation date of Dencun's mainnet on March 13, 2024 during a previous conference call. The Flashbots team also plans to release a new version of the MEV-Boost software early next week, which is a software for validators to earn MEV on Ethereum, and will be ready before Dencun goes live.

Electra EIP Discussion

Danny Ryan shared a summary of the Electra EIP discussion so far. He mentioned that the development work on Peer Data Availability Sampling (PeerDAS) and the Formal Proposal Builder Separation (ePBS) can be done simultaneously with Electra's preparation work. As both are high-priority research and development plans that client teams have expressed interest in participating in, Ryan suggested that the team should continue to invest resources in these efforts, but they may not necessarily be included in the Electra upgrade. Further research is needed before incorporating these code changes into Electra or subsequent upgrades.

Regarding the issue of EIP 7547 (included in the list), Ryan stated that the code changes are "simpler than expected for many developers, including himself." However, there are still some unresolved issues and unknown factors regarding the code changes, and he hopes to address these issues before including it in the Electra list. To this end, developers have agreed to conduct a "list inclusion concept verification crash course" in the coming weeks to more accurately assess its readiness for Electra.

Finally, Ryan offered his thoughts on the MaxEB change, which allows validators to earn rewards when their staked ETH balance exceeds 32 ETH. "I think many people consider [MaxEB] to be very valuable and important. However, I believe that there is enough concern about its complexity in the current fork, so we will put it on hold for now unless it quickly regains people's interest," Ryan said. Some developers have expressed opposition to these views. Dapplion from Lighthouse believes that MaxEB is not a complex code change. However, the developers on the current conference call agreed to only include the three EIPs agreed upon during ACDC #126, as well as investigate the readiness of upgrades to be included in the list.

Curve Proposal for Adjustment

Ethereum Foundation researcher Ansgar Dietrichs has proposed another potential proposal related to staking rewards for Electra. Due to the fact that ETH holders can easily stake on Ethereum through liquidity providers such as Lido, the demand for staking has increased significantly in recent years. More than a quarter of the total ETH supply has already been staked, and this share may further increase. Dietrichs and his colleague Caspar Schwarz-Schilling argue in their proposal that a high staking rate could lead to various negative external effects on the Ethereum protocol, including but not limited to increased peer-to-peer network load, unnecessary dilution of ETH value, and over-reliance on third-party smart contract protocols (such as Lido) to ensure network security.

Essentially, the proposal explains that the current issuance plan for Ether is higher than necessary, which means that Ethereum has paid too much for security. The proposal suggests reducing the issuance reward by 30%. Vasiliy Shapovalov, the founder of Lido, expressed concern about the proposal, stating that developers should further study how reducing staking profitability would affect validator node operators. Dietrichs agreed that further discussion is needed on the proposal and emphasized that although controversial in society, this change is technically very easy to implement. "We just want to start the conversation here basically because technically it's trivial," Dietrichs said. "I think this can basically be added to Electra until we still keep Electra open for small changes, and we should take the time to make this decision before that. This is not something we should rush to decide whether to include."

Electra Lightweight Client Roadmap

Nimbus developer Etan Kissling shared his views on SSZ-related EIPs in Electra related to light client development. SSZ is a serialization method used by CL to store and transmit data related to validator activity. Kissling wrote about updating the serialization format of the execution layer (EL) to SSZ to enhance compatibility between EL and CL and support EIPs related to light client development. Light client development is an effort to build nodes that can verify the Ethereum blockchain using minimal computing resources.

In his proposal, Kissling outlined the most important data structures that can be updated with the SSZ wrapper in the Electra upgrade. Danny Ryan encouraged the client team on the conference call to review Kissling's proposal and provide feedback.