Summary of the latest meeting of Ethereum core developers: Dencun upgrade review, Pectra upgrade code changes

Original title: "Ethereum All Core Developers Execution Call #183 Writeup"

Original author: Christine Kim

Original compilation: Luccy, BlockBeats

Editor's note:

The All Core Developers Consensus Call (ACDE) of Ethereum is held every two weeks to discuss and coordinate the development of Ethereum. Changes to the execution layer (EL). This is ACDE's 183rd conference call. During this meeting, developers reviewed the impact of the Dencun upgrade and discussed possible code changes included in future Pectra upgrades.

In addition, developers have also discussed several EIPs, including EIP 2537, EIP 3074 and EIP 7547, which have been approved. Some proposals have sparked controversy among developers, such as EIP 7645, which renames the ORIGIN opcode to SENDER, and a series of agendas related to Dencun upgrades.

Christine Kim, Vice President of Research at Galaxy Digital, recorded the key points of this meeting in detail. BlockBeasts compiled the original text as follows:

On March 14, 2024, Ethereum developers gathered on Zoom to participate in the All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) call #183 meeting. The ACDE Conference Call is a biweekly series of meetings hosted by Tim Beiko, Head of Protocol Support at the Ethereum Foundation, where developers discuss and coordinate changes to the Ethereum Execution Layer (EL). This week, developers shared a review of the Dencun upgrade, which went live on mainnet on Wednesday, March 13. Major Rollups, including Base, Optimism, zkSync, and StarkNet, have begun leveraging Dencun’s upgraded blobs to reduce transaction fees for users. “This is a big, really big fork that we’ve been working on for over two years, so it’s really cool to see it go live,” Beiko commented. The developers also discussed potential code changes that could be included in Pectra, the next major Ethereum upgrade after Dencun.

Dencun Review

Ethereum developers share comments about the early impact of the Dencun upgrade on the network. Due to a high proportion of validator operators upgrading their software to support the hard fork, the network did not experience any meaningful outages or block processing delays. In fact, Prysm developer Terence Tsao noted that the network appears to be processing new transactions and blobs faster than he initially expected. Although he expected that blob transactions would arrive later than blocks due to their large size, due to optimizations deployed by the "private source" relay to obtain additional MEV rewards from blobs and blocks, in fact blobs, despite their The weight is heavier and seems to arrive earlier than the blocks. For more information on Blob trading, read this Galaxy Research Report. For more information about MEV, please read this Galaxy Research Report. For more information about MEV relay, please read this Galaxy Research Report.

Tsao’s second observation about the early impact of Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade is that his node experienced approximately one more block reorganization per day than before the upgrade. Three to four times. Tsao said that prior to Wednesday, his nodes were experiencing approximately 15 reorganizations per day, and that the upgraded nodes would see approximately 17 to 18 reorganizations per day. Ethereum nodes are computers that connect to and verify the Ethereum blockchain. Tsao asked other developers on the call if their nodes were experiencing a similar increase in reorganizations. There was no immediate response to the question on the call.

As the Dencun upgrade is completed, developers will The status of the nine Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) included in the upgrade is updated to "Final". Beiko said he will begin reminding relevant EIP authors of this update in the coming week. Additionally, he noted that developers have previously informed the Ethereum communityAnnounced that the Goerli test network will be abandoned shortly after the Dencun upgrade mainnet goes online. While developers planned to support the test network by April 15, 2024, the network has begun to experience delayed finality and disruption due to a large number of users and node operators exiting Goerli ahead of the deadline.

Pectra EIP

The developers then discussed some EIPs that might be incorporated into Pectra upgrades. The EIP discussed first has received Approved, which is EIP 2537. One of the authors of EIP 2537, Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes, raised an issue related to the implementation of the proposal. "noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Three open issues. The proposal introduces new cryptographic primitives for Ethereum that smart contract developers can leverage to build more secure and high-performance decentralized applications. Technically, this EIP introduces these primitives in 9 new precompiled forms, with these operations built directly into Ethereum’s execution environment rather than implemented through smart contracts.

Stokes One of the questions regarding EIP 2537 is whether additional precompilers should be created to allow "point decompression", which may be Layer-2 rollups and other A better way for "data constrained environments" to take advantage of the new cryptographic primitives introduced by this proposal. Stokes also noted that gas cost changes would need to be made to the proposal to accurately price these new operations. After some discussion about the trade-offs between different design choices for the EIP, Stokes said he would get more feedback from the Rollup team at the next Rollcall, a regular coordination call between major Ethereum rollups. The next Rollcall is scheduled for Wednesday, April 10 at 14:00 UTC.

EIP 3074: AUTH and AUTHCALL opcodes

Developers discussed related to Pectra upgrade The second EIP is EIP 3074. This code change is One of three major EIPs expected to be included in Pectra, all of which are working to introduce greater accountability for user-controlled accounts. Programmability and flexibility, also known as Externally Owned Accounts (EOA). In supporting the adoption of EIP 3074 in Pectra, Metamask wallet developer Dan Finlay said: "EOA has proven to provide an inflexible authorization system for many people, with millions of dollars of funds being lost every day. We believe in 3074 is an opportunity for the protocol layer to bring some opportunities for user security, which can then be implemented at the wallet layer. 3074 allows EOA holders to adopt smart contracts to authorize their transactions, which may eventually mean that the fully authorized single private key is completely offline, and Ensure that more people use the security and usability model that we continue to improve."

When further discussing the design of EIP 3074, it is mainly the users under this EIP that Authorization of transactions and reliance on transaction-sponsored trust relays, Beiko recommends that developers spend more time considering the merits of EIP 3074, first by considering other EIPs related to other account abstractions related to Pectra, and second by considering all other proposed inclusions in Pectra EIP. If included in Pectra, Finlay said Metamask could quickly take advantage of this code-changed feature sometime this year. The developers also briefly discussed the benefits of first prototyping the proposal on a Rollup such as Polygon to work out any implementation issues and design details. Geth developer "Lightclient" raised objections to the idea of suspending approval of EIP 3074's proposal in Pectra until other EIPs are prioritized, saying that this code change "is a very simple implementation" and will not prevent developers from upgrading Contains other code changes. Nonetheless, Beiko confirmed that the next steps for EIP 3074 will be to finalize its specifications and prototype the design with the client and/or Rollup team, before revisiting whether to prioritize incorporating this code change into Pectra.

EIP 7547: Inclusion list

Then, Ethereum Foundation researcher Mike Neuder re-proposed EIP 7547 Incorporating Pectra's argument. For background on EIP 7547, listen to this Galaxy Research's Podcast. Regarding the motivation for the proposal, Neuder said: "The point I'm trying to make is that if we decide not to use include lists in Electra, we will let the MEV infrastructure continue to grow for the next year and a half to two years, and we don't. Make any change. From our side, I think that in itself is a very positive decision because not doing anything is almost as strong as doing something. So that's the first point I want to make. The second point is , the scope of changes to this inclusion list is generally quite controlled. We have been working on this proof-of-concept specification, which is a POC specification that just tries to reduce the risk and show that the changes in the consensus layer, execution layer and engine API are fairly small. Hopefully this Can incentivize its adoption in this fork."

The Reth client team expressed support for incorporating EIP 7547 into Electra. Representatives from the Geth, Lighthouse, Lodestar, and Nethermind client teams said they are prototyping the code change. Additionally, Besu developer Justin Florentine expressed personal support for incorporating this code change into the next Ethereum upgrade. Neuder encourages developers to review the latest EIP specification, And post any thoughts or questions in the Discord channel containing the list. He also said that he would host a breakout session on the implementation details of the inclusion list next Monday, March 18, at 14:00 UTC.

EIP 7623: Increased Calldata cost

Next, Ethereum Foundation researcher Toni Wahrstätter re-shared his Proposal to reduce Ethereum's maximum block size by increasing the cost of calldata. Calldata is where batched transaction data from Rollup is typically stored in Ethereum transactions. However, with the introduction of blobs in Dencun, Rollup can now temporarily store user transaction data on Ethereum at a significantly cheaper cost than calldata. "The good thing is that this rebate mechanism basically enforces, 'If you bring a lot of calldata into the EVM, you need to use it too. Otherwise, use blobs.'" Ethereum Foundation researcher Ansgar Dietrichs said at a conference on EIP 7623 commented in the chat. Wahrstätter sharesnew on how increasing calldata costs will affect user transactions Analysis. He said the cost increase would only affect 4.5% of Ethereum transactions and 1% of Ethereum users. Wahrstätter said his next step is to contact the Rollup team during the next Rollcall to get their feedback on his proposal. Beiko mentioned that since this EIP represents a trivial change to the Ethereum codebase, developers do not need to decide on incorporating it into Pectra immediately, but rather in the next few ACDE calls.

EIP 7645: Rename ORIGIN to SENDER

Has been Ethereum since 2014 Cyrus Adkisson, an early developer of Ethereum, proposed changing the name of the Ethereum opcode ORIGIN to SENDER to fix misuse of the opcode by smart contract developers. “The ORIGIN opcode is a bit outdated. It represented the account that initiated the action and paid the gas fee for the transaction, which was the same until we got true [account abstraction]. By mid-2017, the general consensus was to use ORIGIN for everything. This is all bad news for many reasons. One, origin can be used in a cross-site scripting manner to steal assets and abuse permissions if the permissions are defined in TX ORIGIN terms. ORIGIN will break compatibility because your contract It cannot be used by other contracts, and ORIGIN is almost never useful," Adkisson said.

Adkisson's proposal sparked opposition from some developers. Besu client maintainer Danno Ferrin said that without EOF, which is another set of code changes to the EVM, it would be impossible to accurately check all use cases of an opcode before changing its alias. The EOF code specification is also expected to be incorporated into Pectra, whose specification has been frozen and reference tests are being written for the proposal, Ferrin said. However, when it comes to changing the aliases of Ethereum’s existing opcodes, Ferrin said that in his opinion, it seems “totally impossible” without negatively impacting potential users of ORIGIN.

Freelance Ethereum developer Charles Cooper agrees that changing the semantics of an opcode is "dangerous" because some users may rely on the opcode for important use cases . Instead, Cooper proposes increasing ORIGIN's fuel cost to help alert users that it is deprecated and prevent its use. "This is probably a more subtle change from a compatibility perspective," Cooper said.

ACDE 184 Agenda

Due to time constraints, as these meetings are only an hour and a half maximum, Beiko suggested that certain agenda items be moved to the next discussion on the ACDE call. One of the agenda items postponed to ACDE 184 is the Reth client team’s research on Ethereum state growth. Before ending the call, Beiko asked the developers for their thoughts on whether the weekly Monday test call would continue. These calls are designed to coordinate testing efforts among the client teams for the Dencun upgrade. With the Dencun upgrade complete, the developers have agreed to stop regular Monday testing calls and restart the new series as the Pectra upgrade gets closer to being ready for multi-client testing work.

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