Part 1 of Why we Should Ship EOF and Other Upgrades Before Verkle.

This post will primarily be the background and educational portion of the post. It is designed to support part 2.

Part 1:

Link to Part 2 on Reddit.

Link to part 1 and 2 combined Google doc. Feel free to share it.

What is Pectra, and why should you care?

Ah, who doesn’t love a good Ethereum Upgrade. A lot of people love and invest in Ethereum because of its ambitious roadmap. A roadmap, however, is only good if each component in the roadmap helps the end users in some way and if each stop along the way actually makes it into the protocol. Fortunately, Ethereum has a great track-record of shipping. The next upgrade Ethereum core developers hope to ship is named Pectra. You may have heard the name Pectra before, but you may not really understand what is in it. That is where this and its sister post may prove helpful to you. Although I must confess, I do have an ulterior motive. Hopefully by the time you are finished reading this and its companion post you will walk away with two things. In the first post you will gain a better understanding of how a decentralized network like Ethereum Upgrades, and in the second, my ulterior motive where I plead my case for including EOF, PeerDAS, the SSZ transition, and possibly inclusion lists before shipping Verkle. This can be accomplished in one of two ways; the first is that the core devs bundle these upgrades into Pectra making it Mega Pectra. The second is where the core devs insert a new fork between now and Verkle where they include all the aforementioned upgrades.

How does Ethereum Upgrade?
For those of you who are unaware, there is a website called Ethereum Cat Herders that links to resources about each upgrade Ethereum has ever undergone. For the intents of this post, I don’t want to start at the very beginning, (although I’ve heard that it’s a very good place to start) but rather explain how an Ethereum upgrade works starting with the Merge. The Merge was an upgrade that, well, merged the two layers of Ethereum together. See, there are two layers of Ethereum. One is called the Execution layer (EL), and it involves smart contract logic, the execution of the aforementioned smart contract logic, and the transaction pool, also known as the mempool. The Consensus Layer (CL) involves the rules that validators must follow to create, propose, and attest to a new block. If you forget what each layer does, the names of the two layers, execution and consensus, are fairly self-explanatory.

Each layer has its own clients that follow the rules set by something called the Ethereum specifications. Very briefly, the specifications are the basic rules that all clients must adhere to in order to follow the same (canonical) chain. The names of the EL clients are Reth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, and Geth. On the CL side we have Loadstar, Nimbus, Teku, Lighthouse, and Prysm.

Because Ethereum has two layers, we get this cool property where both layers can upgrade independently of each other. They can upgrade together if an upgrade on one layer also affects code in the other. So far, since the Merge, both layers have upgraded at the same time. The Merge had two upgrades, the EL was called the Merge, and the CL was called Bellatrix. Generally, EL upgrades are named after cities that Ethereum Conferences have been held at, and the CL upgrades get their name from the name of a star in alphabetical order. The Merge upgrade switched Ethereum from a Proof of Work consensus model to a Proof of Stake consensus model. This lowered the issuance of new Ethereum tokens by about 90%. The next upgrade was called Shapella (Shanghai and Capella) which allowed stakers to withdraw their staked Ether. The next, and most recent upgrade was named Dencun (Cancun and Deneb) and saw the rollout of proto danksharding where layer 2’s on Ethereum can post their data in a cost-efficient manner that has allowed transactions on Layer 2’s to be 90+% cheaper.

Each week members from the EL and/or CL clients meet on a recorded zoom call to discuss relevant updates focusing on one layer that alternates every other week. EL teams will meet one week, and CL teams will meet the next and so on.

Anyone can research and draft an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) and can go on these meetings to “champion” their EIP in front of the developers and the devs can give you feedback on things to change or decide to implement it into a future Ethereum upgrade.

My ulterior motive with this post is to persuade enough of you to talk about my suggestion on whatever platform you like and hopefully get the ear of someone who could bring it up in the next meeting. They are planning on freezing the scope of the Pectra Upgrade over the course of the next two weeks. CL is this Thursday May 30th, and the EL will freeze the scope on the following Thursday, June 6th. I hope that the devs will consider either including much more EIP’s in Pectra turning it into Mega Pectra, or that they will have another upgrade after Pectra that includes these important changes.

Resources you can learn more about EOF:
PEEPanEIP discussing EOF with Danno Ferrin

Galaxy To EOF or Not? A discussion with Christine Kim with Danno Ferrin. I recommend watching all of this, but at 24:21, Danno Ferrin explains that he can’t keep waiting for EOF to be implemented, he would need to move on.

A Twitter (X) thread detailing each EIP from EOF