The Ethereum developers, during a conference call, discussed the details of the upcoming Deneb upgrade for the consensus layer, which will form part of the Dencun hard fork.
gm, for anyone who missed yesterday’s acdc call, here’s a quick summary:https://t.co/NUA9OcrBiH
— Christine Kim (@christine_dkim) June 16, 2023
Experts considered the following proposals to improve Ethereum for inclusion in the upgrade:
- EIP-7044 — improves user interaction, ensuring that signed validator exits remain valid indefinitely (proposed by the Lodestar developers and already included in the Deneb specifications);
- EIP-7045 — enhances network security by extending the sliding window for including attestation slots from one to two epochs (proposed by Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan; undergoing further discussion and final verification);
- EIP-4788 — simplifies interaction with dapps. The upgrade will expose to them inside EVM information about the chain state for low-trust access (proposed by Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes).
The latest EIP is also included in the execution-layer Cancun upgrade package — the second part of Dencun — and, a week earlier, received the green light to be included in the hard-fork specification.
Developer Mikhail Kalinin presented EIP-6988, which changes the logic for selecting a validator as proposer of a block. According to Stokes, this upgrade is not yet ready for implementation.
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“I think we should focus on what will enter the final Deneb release. There appear to be a number of design questions. Several studies are planned that we want to run regarding this particular feature. I suggest deferring its consideration for now,” said he.
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Online, the developers continued discussing the possibility of increasing the maximum number of binary data arrays (BLOB) per block from 4 to 6. Earlier, the recommendation was put forward by Dankrad Feist of the Ethereum Foundation. Client teams agreed to test the option in Devnet 6 and reach a final decision in two weeks.
The Nimbus developer raised the issue of increasing the number of block reorganisations in the mainnet after the activation of the Shapella upgrade (Shanghai-Capella).
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“Over the last six months we’ve moved from almost no reorganisations to several per hour. There’s no good answer as to why this is happening, only a couple of theories. It seems the number grows with the number of validators. The situation has certainly worsened after Shanghai,” he noted.
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In this regard, Nimbus proposed extending the four-second window for aggregating validator attestations. Colleagues considered adding 1–2 seconds and agreed on the need for further research to develop a concrete proposal.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Michael Noyder proposed removing the cap of 32 ETH on the effective balance of validators to limit the growth of their active set.
Under the current configuration, validators do not earn staking rewards on amounts above the cap. This forces those looking to deploy larger capital to break it into multiples of 32 ETH and register additional nodes.
According to Noyder, increasing the effective balance to 2048 ETH will slow the growth in the number of validators, delivering a number of benefits such as:
- simplifying the implementation of future roadmap updates, such as finalising a transaction in a single slot;
- reducing unnecessary message volumes at the peer-to-peer level;
- increasing the attractiveness of solo staking;
- simplifying the work of providers of related services.
The developers agreed to continue discussing Noyder’s idea through various channels.
In November 2022, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published an updated road map for the development of the network with a focus on scaling via zk-Rollups.
In June 2023, he proposed a “recipe” for the ecosystem’s sustainable development.