With The Merge now firmly behind us, protocol builders have been making progress throughout a (file?) variety of areas over the previous few months. Withdrawals, danksharding, EOF, verkle tries, historical past expiry, SSZ and extra have all seen important progress just lately!

As a way to assist transfer every of those threads ahead, and to run by way of another sequence of Shapella stress assessments, consumer group members gathered in particular person for a week-long interop occasion in Austria: Edelweiss 🏔️

Not like Amphora, which had a singular give attention to The Merge, this occasion had two main tracks, targeted on the Shapella and ProtoDanksharding community upgrades respectively. A number of breakout classes had been additionally held to dive into different open issues. Here’s a transient overview of what was completed, in addition to hyperlinks to artifacts from the workshops & ongoing dialogue threads.

Shapella

The week started with a Shanghai/Capella mainnet shadow fork. Flooding the community with withdrawal credential replace messages revealed efficiency points on the community, and led to a distinct consensus-layer queueing design to course of these messages.

All through the week, extra devnets had been launched and stress examined with massive quantities of credential updates, withdrawals, and even unhealthy blocks. Consumer implementations ended the week hardened and prepared for the fork on the newly-launched Zhejiang testnet.

Assuming the Shapella improve occurs with out problem on Zhejiang, the Sepolia and Goerli testnets can be upgraded subsequent!

(Proto)Danksharding

The primary EIP-4844 interop objective was the launch of an all-client EIP-4844 devnet. By Friday, all however one consumer had been syncing on the community!

A number of design discussions additionally passed off in the course of the week, stemming from a transaction pool design proposal. Questions round permitting “blobless” 4844 transactions, if and the way blocks & blobs must be coupled for gossip and the best way to encode these transactions had been mentioned extensively and surfaced on final week’s AllCoreDevs Execution Layer name.

Over the subsequent few weeks, groups hope to finalize all spec modifications ensuing from these discussions and launch a brand new devnet.

EVM Object Format (EOF)

After having been conditionally accepted after which faraway from Shanghai, EOF was one of many matters the place opinions about the very best path ahead diverged essentially the most.

Whether or not EOF ought to ban code introspection, purpose for a minimal deployment ASAP, and even solely ever go stay on L2s had been all mentioned in the course of the week.

No concrete specification got here out of the workshop, however groups now have a shared understanding of the design house and potential paths ahead. The EOF breakout rooms resumes subsequent week to proceed this dialog!

All the pieces Else

Apart from these three matters, groups mentioned the way forward for gentle shoppers on the community, how the EL & CL specs processes might converge (and probably carve out ERCs from different EIPs), launched a brand new Verkle Trie testnet, put ahead a proposal to SSZ encode EL transactions, mentioned altering the validator EL->CL deposit mechanics, and even began a Capella annotated spec!

Subsequent Steps

Lower than per week after the occasion, consumer groups have begun discussing Shapella timelines for testnets. Preserve an eye fixed out on this weblog, in addition to on shoppers’ repositories, for bulletins within the coming weeks!

For different efforts, reminiscent of EIP-4844, EOF, SSZ, count on to see lively design discussions within the coming weeks, resulting in prototype implementations afterwards.

Shapella is nearly right here, and Dencun is evident on the horizon 🌅