Author: Christine Kim, Vice President of Galaxy Digital Research Team Translation: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance< /p>

On February 28, 2024, Ethereum developers held the 182nd All-Core Developers Conference via Zoom (ACDE) conference call. The ACDE Conference Call is a bi-weekly meeting series for developers to discuss and coordinate changes to the Ethereum Execution Layer (EL). This week’s session was moderated by Ethereum Foundation (EF) researcher Danny Ryan. The developers discussed beta updates for the Dencun upgrade as well as several candidate EIPs for Pectra. The most hotly debated EIP proposed for inclusion in Pectra relates to code changes related to account abstraction. Account Abstraction (AA) aims to introduce a higher degree of programmability to Externally Owned Accounts (EOA), which are accounts on Ethereum that are controlled by users rather than smart contract code.

Dencun Update

Ethereum Foundation Development and Operation (DevOps) Engineer Barnabas Busa shared an update on the final testing of the Dencun upgrade. The Ethereum Foundation announced on Tuesday, February 27, that the upgrade is now officially scheduled to be activated on the Ethereum mainnet on March 13, 2024. As discussed in last week's ACD call, developers are testing the final version of the client software on the mainnet shadow fork, a test network that mirrors the blockchain state of the Ethereum mainnet and Activity. Busa said developers have conducted different types of “spam testing” on the mainnet shadow fork. The node performed very stably during these tests, with network participation rates remaining close to 100%. While there were no issues, Busa noted that the spam test did severely impact the node in terms of computer resources, specifically memory and CPU usage.

Busa then reminded attendees that the Goerli testnet (testnet) will soon be deprecated. Anyone using the test network should move their operations to other Ethereum test networks before April 17. Busa said he has noticed that some large validator node operators on Goerli have decommissioned their machines. This caused a delay in Goerli's network finalization on February 28, but the Goerli network appears to have recovered. Ryan noted that Goerli’s online participation rate is already quite low, hovering around 70 percent. “Honestly, I don’t expect [participation rates] to continue until April 17,” Busa said. "But it's still cause for concern."

Busa asked his team when they should stop Devnet 12, a private test network launched last November for The client team tests their Dencun upgrade implementation. Just in case any last-minute client releases for Dencun need to be tested, the developers agreed to shut down Devnet 12 shortly after the Dencun upgrade goes live on the Ethereum mainnet.

Retroactive EIP for Pectra upgrade

Next, the developers discussed the Pectra upgrade Two retroactive Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). Retroactive EIPs are code changes that retroactively add constraints to the Ethereum protocol that for the most part already exist, but require clarification to address specific edge cases. The first retroactive EIP, EIP 7610, extended a rule limiting the creation of smart contracts to addresses with pre-existing storage. For more background on this code change, see the previous meeting minutes here.

One ​​concern about EIP 7610 is whether it will affect Verkle, a code change that developers are preparing for post-Pectra upgrades. Geth developer Gary Rong explained how EIP 7610 won't pose any problems for Verkle upgrades in the future. Hedera Hashgraph engineer and Besu client maintainer Danno Ferrin raised some unresolved concerns about how EIP 7610 might impact Verkle, which he said he will share on the Ethereum Improvement Proposal 7610 "Ethereum Magicians" discussion board.

The second retroactive EIP discussed by developers is EIP 7523, which will officially ban empty accounts from appearing in the state of Ethereum and the Ethereum test network. Ryan said that he will double-check who is doing the analysis to ensure that no accounts on any Ethereum network (mainnet or testnet) will be affected after the rule is implemented, and will discuss this issue again on the next ACDE conference call .

Account abstraction EIP for Pectra

Next, the developers discussed the inclusion Latent account abstraction EIP in Pectra. On February 28, a select group of developers attended a dedicated AA meeting to discuss the broad goals of the program and the various EIPs that could be implemented in the short and long term to achieve those goals. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said of AA’s goals, “So the long-term [goal is] this fundamental aspiration that ultimately we have to have some type of account system that allows on the one hand key rotation and [ On the other hand] key deprecation to make us resistant to quantum computing. Three, allow batch processing... [and] allow sponsor transactions and some other smaller features, of which, of course, the first two goals are obviously not achievable with EOA , thus making a fairly clear case for moving the ecosystem to a place beyond Ethereum account-centricity, but then the discussion turns to what the actual means of achieving these goals are, and some less clear specific details, and What a short-term roadmap actually is is that it delivers the benefits of what people want in the short term, but at the same time is compatible with those long-term [goals]."

In the short term, developers are evaluating three major AA EIPs, namely EIP 3074, 5806, and 7377. Developers on the call were divided on the pros and cons between EIP 3074 and 5806. One point of contention is the extent to which EIP 3074 requires users to double-sign transactions and relies on decentralized means of initiating transactions off-protocol AA standard ERC 4337, and others regarding the relative complexity and security of EIP 3074 compared to 5806 Sexual debate. Developers generally agree that EIP 7377 is the least controversial AA EIP because it is orthogonal to the other two AA EIPs in terms of use cases. EIP 7377 is designed to help users easily migrate their assets from Ethereum accounts to new smart contract wallets, while the other two EIPs are primarily focused on creating new AA features that support batch transaction authorization and gas fee sponsorship.

Developers did not reach consensus on the three EIPs and agreed to continue discussing them in the coming weeks.

Pectra's other EIP proposals

In addition to the account abstraction EIP, developers also Several other EIPs proposed for inclusion in the Pectra upgrade are briefly discussed:

• EIP 7623: Adding calldata Gas fees: The proposal proposes to increase regular transaction costs on Ethereum primarily for data availability. By adjusting calldata gas fees on Ethereum, this EIP reduces the number of calldata transactions that can reasonably fit into a block, thereby lowering the maximum block size. Reducing the block size allows for more blob transactions. Danny Ryan recommended that developers involved in discussions review the EIP in the coming weeks.

• EIP 2537: BLS12-381 Curve Operation Precompilation: This proposal introduces a new cryptographic signature scheme to Ethereum and has been approved Incorporated Pectra upgrade. Antonio Sanso, one of the authors of the proposal, raised some questions about its implementation. Danny Ryan recommends documenting the issue and distributing it to developers outside of the call for further discussion.

• EIP 5920: PAY opcode: This proposal creates a new operation that allows users to send ETH to an address without triggering function at any address. Geth developer Marius van der Wijden said that after further discussion of the EIP with other teams, it turned out that testing the proposal was more complex than expected. Van der Wijden also pointed out that the specification of the proposal is not yet complete. Ferrin added that the PAY opcode is currently assigned the same code number as another opcode (AUTH opcode) and therefore needs to be corrected by its author.

• EIP 7609: Lower Temporary Storage Pricing: This proposal proposes lowering temporary storage pricing for common smart contract use cases such as maintaining reentrant logs. Store opcode price. Both Van der Wijden and Ryan agreed to gather data on how temporary storage opcodes are used once the Dencun upgrade goes live, and then revisit its pricing.

• EIP 7639: Stop providing historical data before Proof of Stake: The proposal sets a time for execution layer (EL) clients tables so that they stop providing historical data prior to the merge upgrade. The motivation for this code change is to reduce the amount of data that Ethereum nodes need to store permanently. The proposal also commits nodes to a standardized way of constructing merged historical data and retrieving them from external sources. Teku developer Mikhail Kalinin noted that this EIP relies on another EIP (EIP 6110) that was approved for inclusion in the Pectra upgrade during a previous ACD call. The developers agreed to review EIP 7639 in more detail in the coming weeks.

Engine API and JSON RPC changes

In addition to the above On the topic, Ethereum core developers also discussed engine API and JSON RPC changes.

Teku developer Mikhail Kalinin raised some questions related to the implementation of the confirmation rule, which is a CL mechanism that can confirm in about 12 seconds (one slot ) time to confirm whether a block will remain in the canonical chain under certain assumptions and be finalized. This is a powerful feature because many applications built on Ethereum can operate with information from earlier block confirmations. However, exposing data about early block confirmations requires some changes to the Ethereum Engine API and JSON RPC. Due to limited call time, Ryan suggested discussing these changes in more detail during the ACD call next week or the week after that.

Light client breakout room meeting

Ryan reminds developers that next Wednesday (3 There will be a dedicated session on September 6th) to discuss the light client roadmap for the Pectra upgrade. For background information on the light client discussion, see the minutes of the previous meeting.

New Ethereum client version proposal

Finally, van der Wijden proposed a A proposal was made to build a new version of the Ethereum client that would save nodes 550GB of bandwidth during the initial sync process. Van der Wijden said he is preparing a formal EIP for the new version, but a draft of its specifications can be found here . Ryan encourages developers to review the drafts and ask any questions on Discord.