Good evening,
Ethereum developers came to a hard realization today. They may need to drastically scale back the scope of Glamsterdam to ship it by mid-year.
Some of my readers who have followed my newsletters from Pectra upgrade days may be groaning inwardly and thinking, “Not again!”
Now, developers haven’t acknowledged the clear mismatch between the scope and the proposed timeline for Glamsterdam.
They’ve only, as of today’s All Core Developer Consensus (ACDC) call, acknowledged there may be one, and if there is, they should address the issue by the end of February.
So, this is what I’ll be discussing in today’s newsletter: the rock and a hard place that Ethereum developers may find themselves in (yet again) in the process of shipping the Glamsterdam upgrade.
Let’s get into it.
Yours truly,
Christine D. Kim
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🗒️ Call Minutes
(For background on the ACD process and jargon used on these calls, refer to the Ethereum Governance 101 document in the ACD Toolkit.)
Announcements
Reminder that the status of the Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that were activated in the Fusaka upgrade should be updated to “Final” by the relevant EIP authors.
ePBS Devnet-0
Developers agreed to aim for interoperable implementations of EIP 7732, enshrined proposer builder separation (ePBS), by the end of February.
If not, they discussed potentially removing the EIP from the scope of Glamsterdam and reconsidering the proposal for a future hard fork.
Teku Node Slowdowns on Mainnet
In December, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) EthPandaOps team initiated a stress test on Ethereum mainnet to see how nodes would respond to a high volume of blob activity.
Enrico del Fante, a developer at Consensys who works on the Teku client, reported issues in their client that were discovered during these stress tests.
He said that his team is still working on mitigations to address known issues and asked the EthPandaOps team to hold off on further mainnet stress testing until their work is complete.
Del Fante also noted that the issues have slowed down his team’s efforts on other priorities, such as their work on Glamsterdam.
Engine API Change for BALs
EF Protocol Prototyping Team Lead Toni Wahrstatter reported an Engine API change impacting consensus layer (CL) client implementations for EIP 7928, block-level access lists (BALs).
He asked that CL client teams review the change and incorporate it into their BAL implementations.
Hegota Headliner Selection Process
EF Protocol Coordination Co-Team Lead and Chair of ACDC Calls, Alex Stokes, reminded call participants that headliner EIP proposals for the Hegota upgrade should be submitted by February 4.
He also encouraged headliner EIP authors to join one of the ACD calls before February 4 to give an overview of their proposals.
BALs Devnet-2
EF EthPandaOps Engineer Barnabas Busa asked if CL teams could have their BAL implementations ready for Devnet-2 launch. He noted that the changes should be minimal, only a day’s worth of work, as the EIP is primarily an execution layer (EL) change.
Partial Cell Proofs
CL client teams are working on a networking change to support further increases to blob capacity.
No CL team reported a fully working implementation of the change.
Stokes said that he will reach out to the author of the change or another relevant party to help coordinate ongoing efforts on this pull request (PR).
EIP-7688 Library Changes
EIP-7688, Forward compatible consensus data structures, is a proposal that developers are strongly considering for inclusion in Glamsterdam. Preliminary work on CL client programming libraries is required to implement EIP-7688.
Etan Kissling from the Nimbus team said that the Nimbus and Lodestar client teams have completed the preliminary work, while other CL clients are still working to update their libraries.
🌕 That’s all for my summary of ACDC #173. Continue reading for pointed takeaways on Ethereum protocol development, featuring direct quotes and additional context on key topics. To read the rest of the newsletter, make sure you are signed up for a premium subscription:
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🔎 Insights
(Quotes featured in this section may be edited for grammar and clarity. For more information on the people quoted in this section, refer to the ACD Call Directory in the ACD Toolkit.)
Between a rock and a hard place
The ACD call chairs, all of whom work at the EF, among others, have a strong desire to pin down a timeline for testing ePBS implementations on a multi-client devnet.
The problem is that the people working on ePBS can’t really give them one with strong confidence right now, as they are still in the early stages of feature development.
