On January 5, Ethereum developers held the first all-core developer (ACD) conference call in 2023 after a two-week break. From 2023, the ACD teleconference will be renamed as the ACD Executive (ACDE) teleconference to reflect the developers' attention to the changes in the execution layer of Ethereum. The following content will answer for you.

1、 Topics related to the development of Ethereum consensus layer

The ACDE teleconference, hosted by Tim Beiko of the Ethereum Foundation, is one of the two conference series for Ethereum developers to discuss and coordinate changes to the Ethereum protocol, while the other series of conferences has been renamed by the developers as the ACD Consensus (ACDC) teleconference, focusing on topics related to the development of the Ethereum consensus layer.

At the 152nd Full Core Developer Implementation (ACDE) conference call, developers agreed to delete code changes related to EOF implementation from the Shanghai upgrade. For more information about EOF, please read the previous conference call minutes here. They also agreed to refuse to add the new EIP to Shanghai for upgrading, mainly to ensure that the schedule of pledge ETH withdrawal will not be delayed. As the only major code change for Shanghai upgrade, the pledge ETH withdrawal function is currently being tested on a developer test network. It is reported that the developers' goal is to launch the public test network upgraded by Shanghai/Capella next month, and the main network upgrade is tentatively scheduled to start sometime in March 2023. Subsequently, the developers briefly discussed the different serialization methods between the Ethereum execution layer and the consensus layer, and introduced the Poseidon hash function as a new EIP for precompiling EVM.

2、 Shanghai upgrade plan

Barnabus Busa, DevOps engineer of the Ethereum Foundation, updated the status of the pledge ETH withdrawal test. He said that the Shanghai developer test network launched before Christmas has now reached 4000 blocks. At present, all EL and CL client combinations are running on the test network, and some client combinations such as Teku-Erigon and Lighthouse-Erigon have encountered problems. Busa mentioned that developers are trying to launch a new developer test network as soon as possible with the help of the client team.

Then Marius van der Wijden, the software developer of the Geth (EL) client of the Ethereum Foundation, submitted a small design change to one of the smaller EIPs (EIP 3860) upgraded in Shanghai. Developers agree that changing the failure mode to OOG error will reduce confusion and vulnerabilities in client implementation.

3、 Delay EOF and exclude it from Shanghai upgrade

Next, a Geth (EL) client software developer (alias "lightclient") of the Ethereum Foundation introduced the latest progress in EOF implementation.

As a background, EOF represents the EVM object format, which has made some changes to the code execution environment of Ethereum. Among other changes, EIP related to EOF implementation will improve the transaction format of Ethereum to more clearly distinguish smart contract codes and data, and help EVM upgrade more easily in the future. "It is not easy to create the best [test] case for EOF. The problem is that there are many traps. So I think it will be very valuable if we focus on errors in some way," said Mario Vega of the test team of the Ethereum Foundation.

In order to cope with the continuing uncertainty surrounding the implementation of EOF, Ansgar Dietrichs, a researcher of the Ethereum Foundation, proposed that developers withdraw the relevant EIP from the Shanghai upgrade and commit themselves to actively solve these problems in implementation and the way forward for EVM upgrade in the next few weeks.

As EOF was excluded from the Shanghai upgrade, Marius van der Wijden temporarily proposed to include EIP 1153 in the Shanghai upgrade, while several developers who participated in the conference call strongly opposed the addition of new EIP in the Shanghai upgrade to reduce the risk of delayed pledge ETH withdrawal. Subsequently, the developers reiterated their commitment to try to launch the Shanghai Public Test Network with the goal of early February.

4、 RLP or SSZ?

The developers also discussed the proposal of Etan Kissling, a developer of the Ethereum Nimbus (CL) client team. Kissling shared this proposal at the previous ACDC conference call and summarized it as follows: In short, there are two fields encoded in different serialization formats between the EL block header and the CL execution payload header. Because of the different encoding methods of these two fields, it will bring additional costs and complexity to build wallets and Ethereum light clients. Andrew Ashikhmin stressed that the decision made on this issue is "urgent" because it concerns the upgrading of Shanghai.

5、 Two new EIPs

Finally, the developers briefly discussed two new EIPs. EIP 5843 introduces efficient modular addition, subtraction and multiplication to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). It is an EIP proposed by Jared Wasinger, a software developer of the Ethereum Foundation. However, Jared did not attend the conference call this week, which is why the developers agreed to discuss the EIP again at a future date.

Subsequently, Abdelhmaid Bakhta, the exploration director of StarkWare, introduced EIP 5988, which introduced a new precompile for Ethereum and improved the efficiency of running zero-knowledge proof on the network. "Basically, every time we want to prove a storage proof like Merkle proof, it is very expensive on Ethereum because we do not have any ZK-friendly hash function," Bakhta explained. With regard to this EIP, Dankrad Feist, a researcher of the Ethereum Foundation, said that in his view, it is too early to include any type of arithmetic hash functions into the protocol, because they are still in the early testing nature, and they may have an unknown impact on the security of Ethereum.

summary

To sum up, Evan Van Ness, founder of Ethereum Newsweek, tweeted that the Devnet test network of Ethereum pledge withdrawal has been launched recently. The relevant withdrawal function will be launched soon, possibly at the end of the first quarter of next year. Paritosh, a member of the Ethereum Foundation, commented, "We will soon have a more open test network for you to withdraw money."