ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers agreed on Thursday to split the upcoming hard fork Pectra into two batches, aiming to make the large-scale upgrade less cumbersome and reduce the risk of mistakes or errors. The first package may be released in 2025 (as early as February).The first part of Pectra will include Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), including EIP-7702, which aims to improve wallets. The second part will see an EIP aimed at upgrading the Ethereum Virtual Machine (referred to as EOF).

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum protocol developer and Prysm maintainer Terence recently shared his views on his social platform, stating that Ethereum's roadmap is simpler than many people think, with most of it achievable within the next four years: maximizing data availability, improving censorship resistance, reducing trust through off-chain block construction and better slot utilization, achieving faster consensus finality, enhancing the staking user experience, finalizing staking economics, limiting execution layer storage, and implementing stateless execution.

ChainCatcher news, according to CoinDesk, Ethereum developers have set a final timeline for the "Dencun" upgrade. If everything runs smoothly on the Sepolia and Holesky testnets on January 30 and February 7, the developers will determine the date for "Dencun" to land on the Ethereum mainnet, with the current target being the end of February or early March.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum researchers have initiated the "RIP-7560 Native Account Abstraction" proposal, aimed at introducing changes to the consensus layer protocol rather than relying solely on higher-level infrastructure. This proposal merges EIP-2938 and ERC-4337 into a comprehensive native account abstraction proposal, suggesting that Ethereum transactions be divided into multiple steps, including validation, execution, and post-transaction logic. The validity of a transaction is determined by the outcome of the transaction's validation step.

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko summarized the latest Ethereum core developer execution meeting (ACDE), which introduced Devnet updates, new content for Dencun, and provided a comprehensive overview of Reth:Devnet-8 Status Update: The network is being finalized, and many clients have begun pushing new updates to it. Meanwhile, testing of the MEV/block building process has started using the developer tool system Kurtosis. Nethermind shared that their blob transaction pool is ready, and after a few days of testing on a single node, they have deployed it to all Dencun test nodes. Geth's blob transaction pool is also nearing completion. Besu is conducting broader maintenance on its transaction pool (to limit the size of Blob + non-Blob transactions), which is expected to be released in the next version. Erigon is still developing its pool, aiming to be ready for devnet-9.The meeting continued the discussion from last week's ACDC call regarding whether to add a constant cap to the validator activation queue. Subsequently, the proposal was officially named EIP-7514 (Add Maximum Epoch Loss Limit). In short, this would slow down the growth rate of the ETH staking percentage in the worst-case scenario.The meeting discussed another last-minute proposal: adding an opcode to the EVM to reveal the base fee of blobs. We have a similar opcode that can reveal the BASEFEE of EIP-1559, which was introduced simultaneously with the activation of the EIP. This allows L2 to more easily determine the correct gas price to charge users based on L1 data costs.The meeting discussed some updates to EIP-4788, which stores the beacon root in contracts on the EL. Over the past few weeks, we have conducted multiple audits and fuzz tests on the contracts, leading to some subtle changes described in this PR. The first is to explicitly handle a 0 timestamp, rolling it back (like other invalid timestamps) instead of returning 0. The second change is the buffer size. Assuming the slot time has changed, considering how modulo works, the original contract would lead to storage waste. By using a prime number (8191), it should utilize 100% of the buffer regardless of the slot time. Finally, gas optimizations were made to reduce the number of times CALLDATA needs to be loaded. Auditors will review these changes, and the final report is expected before the next ACDE. To ensure the smooth progress of fuzz testing and implementation, developers agreed to merge the proposed changes now.The meeting discussed how clients should handle cases where the system contract address is part of the state but is empty at the end of execution. Although this is practically impossible on the mainnet, it is an edge case that arises in testing by setting the address at genesis. Given the uniqueness of this edge case and the lack of explicit normative behavior, developers agreed to spend more time thinking about this issue and continue the discussion in Monday's testing call. This is a specification change.All of the above content is planned to be included in devnet-9. The client teams unanimously agreed that everything should be implementable and testable before next week's ACDC. The release date for devnet-9 will be agreed upon in that call.

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum community developer terence.eth tweeted that the Deneb/Cancun upgrade official testnet Devnet 8 has been launched and is progressing smoothly.Previous report, Devnet 8 is the first dedicated test network that will activate all relevant Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) finalized for the Dencun upgrade.

ChainCatcher news, Galaxy's Vice President of Research Christine Kim published a summary of the 111th Ethereum Core Developers Consensus Meeting. This meeting finalized the scope of the Cancun upgrade, including EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding) and EIP-4788, EIP-6988, EIP-7044, EIP-7045, and EIP-4788. Additionally, developers suggested increasing the maximum effective validator balance from 32 ETH to 2048 ETH and raising the maximum blob count per block from 4 to 6.First, developers discussed which CL-centric EIPs to include in Deneb. Teku developer Mikhail Kalinin provided an update on EIP-6988, which proposes a code change to prevent slashed validators forcibly ejected from the network from being selected by the protocol as block proposers. EIP-7044 proposes a code change to improve the staking experience, ensuring that signed validator exits remain permanently valid. EIP-7045 proposes a code change to enhance network security by expanding the inclusion range of proof slots. EIP-4788 proposes a code change to improve the staking experience by publicly disclosing the root of beacon chain blocks, which contain EVM internal chain state information for trust-minimized access by DApp developers. Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes stated that there are plans to merge the aforementioned three EIPs into the Deneb specification in the coming weeks and encouraged CL client teams to review them as soon as possible.Meanwhile, the CL client teams have agreed to test the increased blob count on the next EIP-4844 testnet Devnet 6 and will make a final decision on this matter within two weeks. In relation to the discussion around the maximum blob count, Nimbus developer arnetheduck raised the issue of increasing block reorganization on the mainnet after the Shanghai upgrade. arnetheduck proposed considering changing the 4-second deadline to aggregate validator proofs and send them through the network, and decided to investigate further.Ethereum Foundation researcher Michael Neuder proposed removing the 32 ETH staking cap to help reduce the growth of the active validator set. Developers discussed the potential drawbacks of this change and the possibility of launching partial and full withdrawals directly from the EL as part of the proposal for smart contract initiation. Developers agreed to continue discussing the implementation details of asynchronously changing the effective balance of Ethereum validators on ETHMagicians and Discord. Additionally, Ethereum core developers held their first coordination call regarding the launch of the Holesky testnet, which is expected to replace the existing Goerli testnet by the end of the year. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, the EDCON (Community ETHereum Development Conference) 2024 annual conference for Ethereum developers will be held in Japan.It is understood that EDCON is a non-profit global annual Ethereum conference organized by Linktime, De University of Ethereum, and ETHPlanet, dedicated to serving the Ethereum ecosystem and promoting interaction and communication within the global Ethereum community.Since its inception in 2017, it has gathered over 10,000 participants, more than 2,000 developers, over 300 speakers, 450+ projects, and more than 400 supporters. The online event's viewership has even surpassed 300,000+. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum Beacon Chain community health advisor superphiz.eth posted on social media that Ethereum developers have deployed a fix for the Ethereum clients Teku and Prysm to prevent attestation flooding, addressing the recent finality issues affecting the Ethereum Beacon Chain and restoring network stability. The Ethereum Foundation stated in a blog post that the root cause of the finality issues is still under investigation, but "it appears to be caused by high load on certain consensus layer clients, which in turn was triggered by an anomaly."ChainCatcher previously reported that the Beacon Chain experienced a block production halt on Friday and early Saturday. (source link)

ChainCatcher news reports that according to the latest official announcement, the core developers of the Ethereum blockchain plan to conduct the Shanghai+Capella upgrade on the Sepolia test network on February 28 at epoch 56832. Shanghai+Capella, also known as Shapella, aims to enable ETH withdrawals from network validators, a feature that was not enabled during the network's transition to PoS consensus ("the Merge").This upgrade combines changes to both the execution layer (Shanghai) and the consensus layer (Capella). In order to complete the final upgrade in March, developers plan to conduct multiple phases of public testing. The upcoming release on Sepolia is the second public testnet for the deployment upgrade.Earlier this month, Shapella was tested on the Zhejiang testnet. After deploying Shapella to the Sepolia testnet, developers expect to transition to the Goerli testnet for the final phase of testing before the mainnet release in early March.Previously, ChainCatcher reported that the Ethereum Foundation stated in a recently published article that the Shanghai+Capella (Shapella) mainnet upgrade is entering its final pre-release sequence—public testnet. Shapella includes many features, but the most important for stakers and the consensus layer is the support for withdrawals. Exiting validators can withdraw their full balance, while active validators with a balance exceeding 32 ETH can make partial withdrawals. Additionally, the first long-standing public testnet, Sepolia, is scheduled for an upgrade on February 28. (source link)

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum Foundation DevOps engineer Parithosh stated on his social platform that the first public withdrawal testnet Zhejiang, prepared for the Shanghai/Capella upgrade, will launch on February 1 at 23:00. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum developer @pcaversaccio stated that he has recently drafted and submitted EIP-6269, which aims to standardize the definition of "fully equivalent EVM."It is reported that EVM equivalence enables the feasibility of "write once, deploy everywhere," allowing the existing Ethereum stack to integrate directly with L2 systems, including debugging tools, node client implementations, and EIP standards. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum developer Terence.eth from the Arbitrum development team tweeted that the release of the scaling solution EIP-4844's Devnet 3 has been postponed to next week, which was originally scheduled for November 30.Terence.eth explained: "The CL (consensus layer) team needs more time to handle specification testing and synchronization protocols. The EL (execution layer) team needs to rebase the 4844 changes on top of the fork using a timestamp mechanism. Consensus is being reached on using mainnet values for configurations and presets to ensure compatibility with the field element size of the KZG library and the size of each blob." (source link)

ChainCatcher news, Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden stated that the development team has released a devnet to test the validator staking withdrawal feature. According to the plan, the Ethereum Shanghai upgrade next year will officially enable the staking withdrawal feature on the Ethereum mainnet. (source link)

ChainCatcher news, according to The Block, Ethereum developers have launched a developer network to test validator withdrawals of Ethereum staking.Ethereum developer Marius Van Der Wijden stated that this network is the first developer network to support testing for withdrawals, but currently, the network is only focused on testing this feature, while other features of the Shanghai upgrade are still pending testing. (source link)

ChainCatcher message, Ethereum developers lightclients urge DApp developers to stop using the Goerli testnet and switch to the Sepolia testnet. This is due to the ETH supply issues on the Goerli testnet that are difficult to resolve. (Source link)