Ethereum developers consider EOF upgrade to EVM

Author: Macauley Peterson, Blockworks; Compiler: Deng Tong, Golden Finance

If there is one Ethereum upgrade that has been a forever bridesmaid, it is the EVM Object Format (EOF).

We were once engaged and planned to hold a wedding in Shanghai, but it was quickly abandoned by the developers, who were full of expectations for the future of Proto-Danksharding.

If you don’t understand what this sentence means, don’t worry. This is a metaphor for years of discussions on Ethereum’s all-core developer calls.

After Thursday's ACD (All Core Dev) conference call, we still don't know if EOF will finally have a chance to become the bride. But at least there is a clear proposal on the table.

Developers have strongly considered introducing EOF in the Shapella hard fork. However, a year ago, after some careful consideration, they decided to abandon EOF and instead focus entirely on staking withdrawals.

Once Shapella was safely delivered, EOF appeared again among Dencun’s candidate projects. Then it was shelved again, much to the regret of Danno Ferrin and Greg Colvin, two of the feature's main backers.

The consensus in April 2023 is that EOF is too large to be carried out together with EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding), so one of them must be selected. The latter, with its potential to significantly improve the user experience of second-tier rollups, ultimately won.

As a consolation, Ansgar Dietrichs of the Ethereum Foundation suggested making EOF the focus of the next upgrade (Prague). "It's too big to be the second in a hard fork," he said. Therefore, it should have its own upgrades.

Dencun, with 4844 as its "driver," is still on track to hit mainnet in March, as developers reported an "uneventful" hard fork of the Sepolia testnet on Tuesday.

Before the mainnet is released, there is only one testnet left, Holesky, and Dencun should undergo final testing on February 7.

Put EOF officially on the agenda

Thursday’s conference call was primarily aimed at understanding the current status of the next major feature fork. This consensus layer upgrade named “Prague” is named after the venue where Devcon 4 was held. Meanwhile, “Electra” — a name inspired by the blue-white giant star within the constellation Taurus — is the term used by execution clients to refer to the same upgrade.

Pectra's priorities are slowly emerging.

Ferrin once again promoted EOF, calling it "crucial to EVM in the next few years."

As the leader of the EOF implementation working group, Ferrin said developers "have entered 'delivery' mode."

The goal of EOF is to make Ethereum smart contracts more secure, efficient and developer-friendly. This is especially important for Ethereum dapp developers, as they typically do not participate in the bi-weekly all-core developer calls.

This has led some client teams to believe that EOF was not important in the past, and this impression has been difficult to change.

During the January 4 conference call, Dragan Rakita from the Reth client team expressed strong support for EOF, while Nethermind developer Lukasz Rozmej pointed out that EOF is easier to test than Verkle trees - this is next The main focus of competition for the fork.

Even Marius van der Wijden of Go Ethereum (Geth), who was once skeptical of EOF, seems to be relatively supportive of the idea.

van der Wijden said: "I have been gradually accepting EOF, but it is not a priority for me."

In a conference call on January 18, Paradigm's chief executive Technical officer Georgios Konstantonopolous said it was "something one person could accomplish in a few months."

Ferrin reiterated this view on a recent conference call, arguing that within the client team, the work on EOF and Verkle is done by different engineers, so committing to EOF support will not hinder work on Verkle. work progress.

However, Geth developer Guillaume Ballet of the Ethereum Foundation has not yet been convinced, fearing that EOF may have a detrimental impact on Verkle.

"If it does go first, I need to make sure we don't release something and then find ourselves in trouble," said Ballet.

Andrew Ashikhmin, a software engineer on the Erigon client team It is recommended that you try it out on the Verkle testnet while committing to EOF, and set aside time in the coming weeks for Verkle and EOF implementers to collaborate.

It's a bit of a "chicken or the egg" problem, as Ferrin observed.

“Before we can put it on Verkle’s testnet, we need to get it running on the client,” he said, adding that his Besu client team may be able to make it work soon. EOF is run for testing.

But he is convinced that EOF should be compatible with Verkle.

Ballet retorted: "I don't want a 'should', I want to see it work."

EOF is still trying to grab the bouquet, waiting for someone interested to bring it red carpet.