At ACDE #165, Ethereum ETH 0.93% developers discussed: impact analysis on EIP-6466 and 6406; progress on Cancun/Deneb testing efforts; inclusion of builder coverage flags to the engine API; a ring buffer.
First, EIP-6466 and EIP-6406 are code changes that update the data encoding in the two block header fields transactions_root and receipts_root from RLP to SSZ.
Security audit firm Dedaub’s impact analysis of EIP-6466 vs. EIP-6406 was done to determine the impact of these code changes on deployed and actively used smart contracts on Ethereum.
The analysis found that the SSZ update will affect three main projects: LayerZero, zkBridge (cross-chain bridge) and oracle. Although the applications were affected, Dedaub director Neville Grech said all three applications could be upgraded to accommodate the code changes implemented through EIP-6466 and 6406.
Regarding the Cancun/Deneb test, Parithosh Jayanthi, a DevOps engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, stated that the Devnet #7 Cancun/Deneb upgrade was successfully launched on June 30. The testnet is being successfully completed and some issues with the client implementation have been found.
Jayanthi said that once the client team fixes the outstanding issues, he will try to send blob transactions to the network over a longer period of time to see how the network handles the load of 3 target blobs/block (increased from the target of 2 blobs) / block during the last testnet.
Regarding the inclusion of builder override flags into the engine API, Teku (CL) developer Mikhail Kalinin asked the EL client team if they would be willing to accept the engine API changes in the Cancun upgrade. Kalinin is asking client teams to review the builder flag Engine API changes on GitHub and to speak up if they object to their inclusion in Cancun before July 10th.
If there is no objection to this change, Kalinin stated that he will incorporate the necessary changes into the Engine API specification for inclusion in the Cancun/Deneb upgrade, changes to the Engine API will not be documented as EIPs.
Additionally, EIP-4788 introduces a new precompilation, a cost-effective smart contract operation that will expose information about CL on EL to prevent overuse of storage space through code changes.
This feature will unlock many use cases for decentralized applications, such as staking pools and re-staking protocols, that would benefit from trust-minimized access to CL state.
Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes said the modification will be incorporated into the final EIP-4788 specification for implementation in Cancún as soon as possible.
