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Ethereum Core Meeting: June Deployment of Difficulty Bomb, "Shanghai Upgrade" Opens Beacon Chain Withdrawals, Emphasizes Merge as Top Priority

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Ethereum Core Meeting: June Deployment of Difficulty Bomb, "Shanghai Upgrade" Opens Beacon Chain Withdrawals, Emphasizes Merge as Top Priority

Ethereum developer Tim Beiko released the latest meeting notes of core developers, including issues with the deployment of the Kiln testnet client, expected time for the difficulty bomb, EVM upgrades, withdrawals on the Beacon Chain, Layer 2 fee reduction, and the upcoming "Shanghai" upgrade.

Original article link: https://tim.mirror.xyz/M_3JZXBkvXnr3W1222WIDo1ipMuFymszjH-FP40CO5c

Merge Testnet Kiln

Following the Kintsugi testnet, Kiln was launched on 3/15, encountering issues such as invalid blocks, client synchronization, and deployment. The team is currently conducting testing and has requested more developers from the community to participate in testing. The team also thanked the following projects for participating in the test:

  • Kurtosis
  • Tenderly
  • Lido
  • Uniswap
  • EthStaker
  • Infura
  • Blockdaemon

If no critical issues arise, Kiln is expected to be the final testnet.

Difficulty Bomb

The arrow-shaped glacier upgrade Arrow Glacier in December last year was postponed to June to allow developers enough time to focus on the merge process.

The Difficulty Bomb code exponentially increases the Ethereum mining difficulty to decrease the Proof of Work (PoW) mining rewards, pushing miners to upgrade their nodes to the Proof of Stake (PoS) mechanism.

Shanghai Upgrade

The Shanghai upgrade includes several significant updates:

EVM Object Format (EOF): Proposed by the Ipsilon team, this improvement to the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) enhances EVM without breaking existing contracts, providing new features for contracts deployed with specific identifiers to continue running.

Beacon Chain Withdrawals: EIP-4895 allows the Beacon Chain to process all or partial withdrawals and include them in the execution layer, enabling validators to withdraw staking rewards while maintaining the required 32 ETH stake.

Layer 2 Fee Reduction: Due to existing Layer 2 solutions verifying transaction data on the Layer 1 execution layer, most end-user costs still come from data storage on the execution layer. Developers proposed two solutions:

  • Reduced data call costs: EIP-4488 reduces the cost of storing L1 call data (CALLDATA) from 16 gas per byte to 3 gas.
  • Sharding: EIP-4844 brings Ethereum closer to deploying complete sharding. This proposal introduces Blob shard transactions, similar to mini-shards, where all nodes need to verify Blob data, but the data block is only temporarily accessed rather than permanently stored.

Other improvement proposals can be found here:

  • EIP-3651: Reducing gas costs for accessing COINBASE addresses.
  • EIP-3860: Limiting initcode size, introducing Gas Metering.
  • EIP-3855: Reducing contract code size.

Ethereum Execution Layer Specification (EELS)

The execution layer specification is progressing smoothly, with the next step coordinating the upgrade process between the execution layer (EL) and consensus layer (CL).

Protocol Guild

The Protocol Guild (PG) is a public goods funding mechanism that compensates protocol developers and contributors. Tim Beiko emphasized being a member and receiving rewards from it.

Unlike the common salary structure in the crypto industry, the PG provides members with tokens from various Ethereum projects sponsored by projects, rather than ETH. There are approximately a hundred members, including Beiko. Members will be regularly updated with new contributors added and outdated contributors removed.

While the PG is still in the experimental stage, it may assist infrastructure like Gitcoin and public goods funding in the future. The PG will further integrate smart contract frameworks and run for about a year with limited donations to ensure the mechanisms for technology and governance are sound.

Next Steps

Beiko emphasized that the merge remains the core developers' top priority, aiming to run multiple short-term development networks within a month for applications and infrastructure service providers to seek feedback. The Shanghai upgrade, Ethereum Execution Layer Specification, and Protocol Guild will also continue to progress.