Ethereum Developers Prepare for Shanghai Launch and Agree to Ban Zero Blob Transactions

By Tsunami On Feb 17, 2023

On February 16, 2023, the Ethereum developers gathered for their bi-weekly All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) call #155, to discuss and coordinate changes to the protocol of Ethereum. Chaired by the Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko, the meeting focused on changes impacting the execution layer (EL) of Ethereum.

During the call, developers discussed a bug in the latest Shanghai release for the Geth EL client that was discovered on the Zhejiang test network. They agreed to move forward with launching Shanghai on the Sepolia test network later this month on February 28. Additionally, they made progress on planning for the Cancun upgrade, agreeing to exclude zero blob transactions from the mempool and Ethereum protocol.

The Geth (EL) client team encountered an unexpected issue with their nodes on the Zhejiang testnet. Nodes failed to properly download and initialize blocks with zero withdrawals and transactions. The Geth developer Marius van der Wijden explained that the issue was that if they received a block that had no transactions, uncles, or withdrawals, they would set the withdrawal hash to nil, and fail to download the block body and initialize it properly. The Geth (EL) client team has issued a fix, and other client teams confirmed they would double-check the logic for handling empty blocks in their latest releases.

During the ACDC call the previous week, Ethereum client teams agreed to launch the Shanghai upgrade on the Sepolia testnet on February 28. To do this, client teams would need to cut new releases for Shanghai by early next week. All client teams confirmed they could do this and were comfortable moving forward with the upgrade on Sepolia by the end of February.

Furthermore, the Ethereum developers discussed how the Ethereum protocol and mempool should handle transactions formatted as blobs that do not contain any data. Geth (EL) developer Péter Szilágyi was against creating specialized logic for zero blob transactions, as it would increase protocol complexity. Developers agreed to ban zero blob transactions from the Ethereum protocol in their implementation of EIP 4844 for the Cancun upgrade.

Etan Kissling, a developer of the Ethereum Nimbus (CL) client team, gave an update on progress for updating Ethereum EL block headers to an SSZ format. Kissling noted that there were two main approaches for updating transaction representations in the block header and that developers would create prototypes of both to see how these approaches differ in practice.

In summary, the Ethereum developers made significant progress in their meeting, agreeing to exclude zero blob transactions from the Ethereum protocol, fixing a bug in the latest Shanghai release, and planning for the launch of Shanghai on the Sepolia test network. Developers also discussed updates to transaction representations in the block header and changes to the EL testing experience. The Ethereum community eagerly anticipates these upgrades and changes.

Read more: