Ethereum ACDC latest meeting minutes: Electra Devnet 0 progress and other technical issues

Original title: "Ethereum All Core Developers Consensus Call #132 Writeup"

Original author: Christine Kim

Original compilation: 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 is the 132nd ACDC conference call. During the conference, developers shared the latest information about the first Pectra developer test network (Pectra Devnet 0), discussed open issues related to the specification, and emphasized the relationship with the network release. Research projects related to data availability sampling. Issues covered include Electra open questions, Electra-related open questions, and research open questions.

In terms of Electra open issues, developers are focusing on the impact of EIP 7251 and EIP 7549, as well as proposals to add a new EIP that will create universal EL requests. For outstanding issues related to Electra, the discussion included changes to the validator committee index type, changes to validator deposit data processing, and more. Christine Kim, vice president of research at Galaxy Digital, recorded the key points of this meeting in detail, and BlockBeasts compiled the original text as follows:

On March 21, 2024, Ethereum developers gathered on Zoom to participate in the All Core Developers Consensus ( ACDC) call #132 meeting. The ACDC conference call is a biweekly series, hosted by Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes, where developers discuss and coordinate changes to the Ethereum consensus layer (CL). This week, developers shared the latest information on their preparations for the first Pectra Developer Test Network, also known as Pectra Devnet 0. They discussed open issues regarding the Pectra Devnet 0 specification and briefly highlighted two unfinished research projects related to network publishing and data availability sampling.

Electra Open Issue

The Ethereum Foundation developers have released the initial CL specification and test vectors for Pectra Devnet 0. However, there are several outstanding issues regarding these specifications that may or may not be resolved in time for the first devnet launch. Stokes highlighted that one of the issues is related to EIP 7251 (increasing MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE). Developers seem to be leaning toward incorporating validator staked ETH as an execution layer (EL) triggerable action. However, for now, merging is defined as a CL operation in the initial Electra specification. “This is good because most of the processing logic required by the beacon chain is the same regardless of the source,” Stokes said.

Another open issue that developers discussed on the call related to EIP 7549 (Moving Committee Indexing Beyond Proof). EIP changes how validator proofs are aggregated and blocks are formatted. When Pectra is activated, it will be summarized that pre-upgrade proofs are no longer compatible with new proofs submitted on-chain. Stokes highlighted two possible solutions in a GitHub issue before the call. He wrote:

· Clients broadcasting both formats during the last Deneb era were careful not to produce slicable messages.

· Extend blocks with extra fields for pre-Electra proofs and allow only Deneb style during the first epoch of Electra.

Deneb is the combined upgrade name of the latest hard fork activated on Ethereum. Electra is the name of the CL upgrade for the next immediate hard fork on Ethereum.

Developers discussed both options during the conference call. Ultimately, they decided not to change the Electra specification for now, but to see how these missing proofs impact network security on the devnet.

The third open issue discussed by developers on the Electra-related call was the addition of a new EIP in the upgrade that would create universal EL requests. The EIP proposed by Geth developer "Lightclient" will simplify the process of sending update messages from EL to CL. Due to the rise of smart contract-based staking solutions, there has been an influx of EIPs activated on Ethereum, with proposals for Pectra to trigger various validator operations directly from EL instead of CL. The Lightclient proposal creates a common framework for propagating "contract-triggered requests" from EL to CL. Given that this EIP will change the way Pectra is designed, specifically the implementation of EIP 6110 and EIP 7002, Lightclient stressed that he hopes the customer team will provide feedback on his proposal as soon as possible. The developers have agreed to try and finalize Lightclient's EIP by the end of the week so that its specification can be built and shared by Monday, April 22.

The developers then discussed two other open issues related to EIP 7549 and EIP 7251 raised by Teku developer Mikhail Kalinin. The first concerns changes to the validator committee index type, while the latter proposes changes to the handling of validator deposit data. Stokes encouraged developers to review both proposals in more detail for further discussions in the coming weeks.

Finally, the last open issue related to the Electra specification discussed by developers is the increase in blob count. Ethereum Foundation developer operations engineer Parithosh Jayanthi said he hopes to conduct an analysis of blob activity after the Dencun upgrade and, based on this analysis, recommend a one-time increase in blob count to be included in the Electra upgrade. Ethereum Foundation researcher Ansgar Dietrichs emphasized that he also made a proposal to activate a gradual increase in blob counts, which should be considered in parallel with Jayanthi’s proposal to incorporate Electra.

Research Open Questions

During this week’s ACD conference call, developers briefly discussed two research projects. The first is a new research article by Ethereum Foundation researcher Anders Elowsson, which proposes a new model for thinking about and implementing changes to Ethereum’s issuance policy. The full post can be read here. Stokes encouraged developers during the call to review the post.

The second research project proposed by Lighthouse developer Adrian Manning has to do with proving subnets. As Manning said on GitHub, "This PR introduces the concept of 'network sharding', which is just an abstract concept that marks the node ID as a number (network sharding). We can then use this network sharding (number) to allocate topics to which nodes must subscribe long-term. Manning is seeking final input on his proposal so that his team can start working on PeerDAS, a data availability sampling solution for Ethereum. For information on data availability sampling, read this. Galaxy Research reports.

Nethermind developer Lukasz Rozmej asked if EIP 7547 has been approved for inclusion in the Electra upgrade. The developer reiterated that EIP 7547 has not been approved for inclusion. A developer building an Ethereum CL client called "Grandine" raised questions about Ethereum's fork selection rules in light of ongoing PeerDAS research. Grigaitis asked developers to contribute ideas to the PeerDAS working group.

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