AllCoreDevs Update 013 ⛓ - Tim Beiko

Welcome to another AllCoreDevs update 👋

A whole quarter has gone by since the last one of these --- time flies! In the meantime, hopefully you noticed that Sepolia, Goerli/Prater and, of course, mainnet merged 🐼!

A third cohort of the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship was also kicked off, and old testnets were sunset. More on that last bit below 👇

TL;DR 🐼

We did it, we merged 🎉! It was quasi-flawless 🍾!
AllCoreDevs and CL calls are on pause for a few more weeks. Conversations about Shanghai candidate EIPs are happening on Ethereum Magicians and IRL. Calls resume on October 27 📺
Kiln has been shut down. With Rinkeby and Ropsten's sunset dates on the horizon, infrastructure providers are starting deprecations 🌅

Post-Merge Cooldown 🏝️

The last year was, to say the least, intense. Teams worked tirelessly to get The Merge ready. After a winter of spec changes, spring of shadow forks and summer of testnet upgrades, mainnet-ready clients were finally released and everyone spent weeks refreshing bordel.wtf, waiting for TTD to hit. On September 15th, at 6:42 UTC, it happened, and Ethereum transitioned to proof-of-stake 🐼!


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Merge panda, courtesy of Teku

Hours later, only minor issues were reported on the AllCoreDevs call. One week post-merge, the assessment was the same on the consensus layer call. All things considered, things went about as smoothly as they could have🍾!

So, with that done, teams agreed to take a well-deserved break from the regular cadence of ACD & CL calls. That said, work on the next upgrades is still happening in the background.

Shanghai Candidate EIPs 📜

With The Merge done, eyes are starting to turn to the next network upgrade: Shanghai/Capella 🌃

On the consensus layer, Capella is expected to include Beacon Chain withdrawals, and potentially EIP-4844. On the execution layer, Shanghai already has several EIPs under consideration. So much so that, earlier this year, we decided to pause adding more to the list until The Merge had passed.

While we wait for ACD calls to resume, EIP champions who want their EIP considered for Shanghai are encouraged to signal this on Ethereum Magicians using the shanghai-candidate tag.

This way, conversations about the merit of specific EIPs can happen asynchronously, and contributors have the opportunity to take a step back without feeling like they may miss a decision about a specific EIP being included or rejected from Shanghai.

Breakout Rooms & F2F Discussions 📣

While most conversations have been happening on Ethereum Magicians and discord, calls and in-person sessions have been organized for topics where synchronous discussion is needed.

Specifically, EIP-4844 has had series of public calls covering both the work on the KZG Ceremony and the client implementation prototypes. As a reminder, the KZG Ceremony is required to provide the randomness seed to be used as part of sharding data verification. @pintail had a great ELI5 here, and more info on the process can be found in this repo.

Next week, during Devcon, an Ethereum Magicians gathering is organized to serve as both a retrospective on The Merge and an opportunity for client teams, researchers, developers, EIP champions, and other attendees to discuss future changes to Ethereum. It's also expected that there will be several follow-up sessions covering specific EIPs, or sets of proposals, such as this one on EVM-related EIPs.

This mix of async discussions and live breakouts will hopefully help formal conversations about Shanghai's scope be both better informed and more effective once they resume. This will be the main topic of the next AllCoreDevs, scheduled for October 27th.

Testnet Deprecations 🌅

As announced back in June, Kiln, Ropsten and Rinkeby are being deprecated in favor of Goerli & Sepolia.

The Kiln testnet was recently sunset and Ropsten is scheduled next, with a shut down date of December 2022. Rinkeby will stay up until mid-2023, but will not apply any post-London network upgrades, including The Merge. It therefore isn't an ideal staging environment for mainnet anymore.

In addition to this, infrastructure and tooling providers are now starting to remove support for these networks. Both Etherscan and ethers-rs have made such announcements this week. Expect more of these in the months to come.

So, if you haven't done so yet, you should be moving to Goerli or Sepolia very 🔜!

Next Steps 👀

That's it, we merged, Holy shit, we merged !!! and things didn't break! It's still a bit surreal.

https://twitter.com/TimBeiko/status/1577386632210419713

Looking ahead, planning is slowly starting for the next network upgrade, with discussions happening in both virtual and physical forums 🦄

If you want to help secure Ethereum's data layer, keep an eye out for announcements related to the KZG Ceremony. In the meantime, make sure you're moving to Goerli or Sepolia.

See you in Bogotà 👋🇨🇴!

Thanks to Joe Schweitzer & Trent Van Epps for feedback on the draft. Cover image by Ningyu He.