Good evening,
Tonight, I’m taking a closer look at centralization in Ethereum’s block-building market.
Recently, one entity, Titan, has amassed 50% market share, becoming responsible for building roughly half of all Ethereum blocks.
Below, I explain what this statistic does and does not indicate about protocol resilience, and what Ethereum developers are doing at the protocol level to respond to the realities of an increasingly centralized block-building market.
Let’s get into it.
Yours truly,
Christine D. Kim
🗒️ 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.)
First, here’s a quick summary of the latest Ethereum developer call, All Core Developers Testing (ACDT) #69.
Bal-Devnet-2
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) EthPandaOps team launched Bal-devnet-2 last Friday, February 6.
Bal-devnet-2 is a developer-focused test network for the execution layer (EL)- focused code changes in the Glamsterdam upgrade. To see the full list of EL-focused Glamsterdam code changes, refer to this Google spreadsheet.
Developers are investigating syncing issues with Nethermind and Nimbus EL client on the devnet.
Developers agreed on the call to increase the block gas limit on bal-devnet-2 in stages, first to 70 million, then to 100 million.
There is a breakout call to discuss minor specification changes in EIP 7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) this Wednesday, February 11.
Epbs-Devnet-0
Consensus layer (CL) client teams are continuing to work toward a planned devnet launch of CL-focused Glamsterdam features by the end of this month.
Eth/70
EL client teams are working towards a new major version of the Ethereum Wire Protocol, eth/70, which dictates communication between node peers.
The EthPandaOps team is presently testing eth/70 implementations in isolation from other Glamsterdam features. They plan to add it to a Glamsterdam devnet for further testing eventually.
Benchmarking
The EF and Nethermind are spearheading benchmarking efforts for the gas repricing code changes in Glamsterdam.
The EF hosted a dedicated breakout call on gas repricing efforts last Wednesday, February 4. A detailed breakdown of the timeline and deliverables for gas repricing benchmarks can be found on this Github page.
EthPandaOps demoed a new tool for benchmarking EL clients called Benchmarkoor. The tool runs standardized tests against multiple clients (Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth, Nimbus) in isolated Docker containers and collects performance metrics.
🌕 That’s all for my summary of ACDT #69. Continue reading for my insights on Ethereum development and governance. 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.)
Last week, Ethereum Foundation Protocol Prototyping Team Lead Toni Wahrstätter shared this statistic about Ethereum’s block building market:
Roughly every other Ethereum block is being built by the same entity.
While this data point highlights increasing centralization in Ethereum’s block-building market, it does not indicate a centralized point of failure within the protocol.
