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Ethereum All Core Developers Consensus Call #137 Writeup

Ethereum All Core Developers Consensus Call #137 Writeup - Galaxy Research

On July 11, 2024, Ethereum developers gathered over Zoom for All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) call #137. The ACDC calls are a bi-weekly meeting series where developers discuss and coordinate changes to the consensus layer (CL) of Ethereum, also called the Beacon Chain. This week the call was chaired by Ethereum Foundation (EF) Researcher Alex Stokes. Developers discussed progress on Pectra Devnet 1 and PeerDAS Devnet 1. They also discussed research on fork choice test generation led by TxRx, a research team within blockchain software company Consensys.

Pectra Devnet 1

CL and execution layer (EL) clients are ready for the launch of Pectra Devnet 1. Developers expect to launch the next testnet next week. A developer by the screen name “pk910” said that his team, presumably the EF Developer Operations (DevOps) team, is testing client combinations between Nethermind, Geth, Teku, Nimbus, Lodestar, and Grandine. EthereumJS and Lodestar developer Gajinder Singh noted that the EthereumJS client is already for testing on Pectra Devnet 1.

PeerDAS Devnet 1

EF DevOps Engineer Barnabas Busa shared that CL client teams are working on fixing bugs from PeerDAS Devnet 1. Once all client fixes are in, Busa said developers plan on relaunching PeerDAS Devnet 1 hopefully by the end of the week. Stokes shared an update on his pull request (PR) to change the hard coded blob gas limit on the EL and CL. He said he is working on delineating the impacts of this PR on the CL vs EL and formalizing the changes into an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) for potential inclusion in the Pectra upgrade.

Fork Choice Testing Update

The TxRX research team at Consensys has implemented an initial version of their fork choice test generator. The test generator is intended to identify bugs in client software that may result in a chain split and any areas where client software may deviate from CL specifications in a non-trivial way. This is research supported by a grant from the EF. The team, represented on the call by Alexander Vlasov and Mikhail Kalinin, requested feedback on their work as they seek to refine test suites and enable more flexible test generation. More information about the fork choice test generator can be found here.