Summary of the 107th Ethereum Core Developers Consensus Meeting

On April 20, 2023, Ethereum developers held the 107th core developer consensus conference (ACDC). The meeting was hosted by a researcher from the Ethereum Foundation and focused on the modifications to the Ethereum consensus layer (CL), the progress of Deneb, and other proposals in the upcoming Cancun upgrade aside from EIP-4844.

Deneb测试网络#5

After the successful activation of the Shanghai upgrade, developers quickly turned their attention to the preparations for Cancun. Cancun is the name of the next upgrade for the Ethereum execution layer (EL), while Deneb is the corresponding CL upgrade name. Developers discussed the final scope of the Cancun/Deneb upgrade, which will center around EIP-4844 (implementation of blob transaction types).

The preparations for Deneb began with the launch of test network #5. A developer stated that the fifth test network of EIP-4844 will be launched next week. Currently, some clients are conducting trial runs in preparation for the release of the test network.

The Engine API has a minor change that merges the "getPayloadV3" and "getBlobsBundleV1" calls into one. This change has not yet been merged into the EIP-4844 specification, but will be completed in the next few days for testing on testnet #5.

The developers also discussed how to reinsert blob transactions into blocks during chain reorganization. Since blob transactions are separate from regular transactions, the blobs after reorganization can only be obtained from transactions in the public memory pool. Considering that many transactions bypass the memory pool, one solution is to have the CL pass the blob data of each block to the EL, which can then cache it until the block is completed. Another approach is to require users who submitted transactions that bypassed the memory pool to resubmit their transactions during chain reorganization events.

Some developers tend to transmit blob data to the EL so that transactions can be reinserted during reorganization. However, this approach may further undermine the abstraction between the EL and CL layers and may conflict with future implementations of data availability sampling ( DAS ) upgrades.

Deneb Additional Proposal

In addition to EIP-4844, the Deneb upgrade also considers other code upgrades:

1. EIP-4788: Publicly exposes the state of the CL Beacon Chain in the EL, allowing smart contracts on the EL to have minimal trust access to the CL.

2. EIP-6914: Allows the reuse of validator indexes that have fully exited the network and have been inactive for a long time. Due to high complexity, it may be postponed to a hard fork after Deneb.

3. A potential code change involves backfilling data from the Beacon Chain genesis block and creating new "historical summary" content.

4. PR 3175: Prevent validators from being penalized for proposing blocks while exiting the queue, providing protection against "high failure mode."

5. EIP-6493: Solving the issue of how nodes handle blob transaction types that are formatted in SSZ on the CL but encoded differently on the EL.

Developers tend to include EIP-4788, PR 3175 along with EIP-4844 in the next upgrade.