Ethereum Core Developers Discuss Network Issues and Potential Solutions

According to PANews, Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko recently summarized the Ethereum Execution Layer Core Developer Conference (ACDE). The conference first discussed the increasing number of missing slots on the network, with blocks containing missing blobs being propagated. After examining vulnerabilities in all clients, it was found that 99% of the blocks with this issue were sent by the relay bloxroute. The team is currently investigating the problem. There were some comments/questions about the mev-boost circuit breaker, which would return to local block construction if clients saw more than five consecutive missing slots. However, since the missed slots did not occur consecutively, it was not triggered here. After some discussion, developers agreed not to increase the sensitivity of the circuit breaker (as it could become an attack vector) but to consider a more refined, relay-specific automatic disconnection mechanism. Additionally, the conference discussed the growth of Ethereum's state history, stating that the emergence of various cross-chain bridges has led to historical data growth far exceeding state growth. Dencun has already provided some assistance in this regard (bridging historical data growth has been reduced by 50%, with an overall reduction of 33%), but the overall rate of historical growth is still about 10 times the rate of state growth. Although the issue of state growth is not just the size of the state itself but the problem of accessing the state, these figures once again emphasize the importance of focusing on historical data. Developers unanimously agreed that research on EIP-4444 should continue, with the ideal goal of stopping the provision of pre-merge history records on the Ethereum p2p layer by next year. The conference then discussed two 'retrospective EIPs,' namely EIP-7610 and EIP-7523. EIP-7610 proposes an implicit constraint for contract creation, simplifying some client codebases and removing some test cases that only exist to cover theoretical edge cases. EIP-7523 proposes banning empty accounts to potentially prevent denial of service (DOS) attacks. The meeting also continued discussions on the Pectra upgrade, with developers sharing some benchmark tests they had done on EIP-2537 to determine the correct Gas costs. The Reth team said they would also run benchmark tests to determine the correct Gas costs. Developers updated some potential issues with the inclusion list under account abstraction, which are still pending resolution. Additionally, about ten EIP advocates lined up to share updates/reasons for their proposals, including EIP-5920, EIP-7609, EIP-2935, EIP-7545, EIP-7212, EIP-7664, and EIP-6493.