ACDT #63: Call Minutes + Insights

The call noting the ongoing debate on trustless payments

Good evening,

Tonight, I unpack the debate on the trustless payments feature in Glamsterdam. The discussion on this feature is interesting because it reminds me of the debates on the Merge and issuance changes. What all of these discussions have in common is that they involve protocol-level changes that affect the bottom line for businesses built on Ethereum.

Let’s get into it.

Yours truly,

Christine D. Kim

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(For background on the ACD governance process, refer to the Ethereum Governance 101 document in the ACD Toolkit.)

Fusaka

• Ethereum Foundation (EF) Developer Operations Engineer Barnabas Busa said the only issue from Fusaka mainnet activation last Wednesday was late attestations from validators running the Prysm client.

• As noted on Thursday, there was a bug in Prysm causing validators to produce outdated block attestations. A patch for the bug was promptly released by the Prysm team within a few hours of bug discovery.

• Prysm client developer James He reported that his team is working on a new release for publishing this week that includes the bug fix and new features like blob backfilling.

• EF Protocol Prototyping Researcher Bharath Vedartham said a third-party block builder known as Titan Builder failed to update their infrastructure correctly for Fusaka, but luckily, due to fallback mechanisms built into MEV-Boost software, this did not cause network disruptions.

• EF Networking Team Lead Raúl Kripalani presented an analysis of the impact of Fusaka on blob activity and networking. He noted that the Flashbots relay appears to be submitting blocks with no blobs at a higher frequency than other relays. He also stated his team is working on further analysis to evaluate the correlation between blobs in the mempool and missed slots.

Glamsterdam

• EF Developer Operations Engineer Stefan Starflinger reported progress in client implementations for EIP-7928, Block-Level Access Lists (BALs). He said there are still bugs in these implementations that need fixing and asked that the debug endpoint be added to all implementations, even those appearing to pass all tests.

• Felipe Selmo on the EF Testing team reported that new tests have been created to address gas boundary issues in BAL implementations.

• Starflinger said a BALs devnet will be launched after at least three clients can run on Kurtosis, a private Ethereum testnet, for 24 hours without failure.

• EF Security Researcher Justin Traglia said there was a breakout meeting on EIP-7732, Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), last Friday, where developers discussed dynamic penalties as a solution to the free option problem, the non-staked builder API, and trustless payments.

• Traglia said a decision on whether to remove trustless payments from ePBS specifications will be made at All Core Developer Consensus (ACDC) this Thursday.

• Traglia noted the next ePBS breakout meeting is on December 19. This will be the last one before developers break for the holidays, and starting in 2026, ePBS updates will be shared on the ACDT calls.

• Regarding testing for Glamsterdam, EF Testing Engineer “spencer-tb” asked how developers should test newly considered-for-inclusion (CFI’d) Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) on the execution layer (EL) side. Developers favored testing the newly added EIPs in Glamsterdam on top of BAL implementations, rather than separately or in parallel, to assess EIP interactions with BALs.

Layer-1 scaling

• Nethermind developer Kamil Chodala is working on the tooling for testing gas repricing EIPs in Glamsterdam. Chodala is also working on client improvements needed to raise the block gas limit to 75 million gas.

• EF Testing Team Lead Mario Vega said there is a new workflow for 100 million block gas limit benchmarking tests.

• Nethermind developer Marcin Sobczak shared a proposal for an RPC endpoint that will take a set of transactions and generate a block containing those transactions for improved block-building testing capabilities.

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🌕 That’s all for my summary of ACDT #63. Continue reading for pointed takeaways from the call, 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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(Quotes featured in this section may be edited slightly for grammar and clarity. For more information on the people quoted in this section, refer to the ACD Call Directory in the ACD Toolkit.)

At the heart of the matter, builders and relays are simply asking for more time to prepare for trustless payments.