Ethereum Developers Discuss Pectra Upgrade and PeerDAS in Consensus Call #140

On August 22, 2024, Ethereum developers gathered over Zoom for All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) call #140, according to Galaxy.com. The bi-weekly meeting focused on discussing and coordinating changes to the consensus layer (CL) of Ethereum, also known as the Beacon Chain. The call was chaired by Ethereum Foundation (EF) Researcher Alex Stokes.

Pectra Upgrade

Stokes flagged a new CL specifications release for the Pectra upgrade, tagged as v1.5.0-alpha.5, encouraging client teams to review it. EF Developer Operations Engineer Parithosh Jayanthi noted that the Geth client has produced invalid blocks on Pectra Devnet 2, which developers are investigating. Additionally, the Erigon client is facing issues staying connected to the canonical chain, and there is a JSON RPC standardization issue in execution layer (EL) clients causing additional problems.

Pectra Devnet 3

Stokes confirmed the launch of Pectra Devnet 3 in one week’s time, with specifications available here. The update to EIP 2935, which saves historical block hashes in state, will be incorporated into Devnet 3. More information can be found here.

EIP 7251 Update

Developers are considering an update to EIP 7251 to address an edge case where the correlation penalty is incorrectly computed for a slashed validator with a large effective balance. Stokes encouraged client teams to review the updates, which can be found here.

Beacon Block Body Update

Developers discussed adding a new field in the Beacon block called “ExecutionClientRequests” to simplify state transitions post-Pectra upgrade. The proposal can be reviewed in detail here.

Engine API Update

A proposal by Geth developer “Lightclient” to simplify block conversion for EL clients was generally well-received. The change, which aims to unify requests into a single type, can be reviewed here.

PeerDAS

EF Developers Operations Engineer Barnabas Busa announced that PeerDAS Devnet 2 would launch on August 23. Stokes shared progress on EIP 7742, which aims to update the blob gas target and maximum dynamically. Representatives from Lodestar and Lightclient teams expressed support for including EIP 7742 in the Pectra upgrade.

Developers also discussed blob count configurability in clients but made no concrete decisions. Progress continues on EIP 7688, forward compatible consensus data structures, though its inclusion in Pectra remains undecided. Further details can be found here.

Research

Developers agreed to name the next CL upgrade “Fulu” after a star in the Cassiopeia constellation. A representative from ProbeLabs shared insights on message propagation through Ethereum’s networking layer post-Dencun upgrade. Their analysis can be read in more detail here.

For more detailed information, visit Galaxy.com.

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