Ethereum ACDE Meeting 199: Client teams begin work on deploying EIP 7742 for Pectra Devnet 5

Christine Kim, vice president of research at Galaxy, concluded the 199th Ethereum Core Developer Executive (ACDE) call, during which developers reaffirmed the decision to include EIP 7742 in Pectra, a prerequisite for increasing blob capacity in the upgrade, and discussed the merits of doubling the block gas limit by changing the default settings of client software within two years of the Pectra upgrade. This does not require a hard fork, and developers have not yet made a decision on this change. Developers launched Pectra Devnet 4 on October 18, 2024. EF Developer Operations Engineer Barnabas Busa said that Erigon, EthereumJS, and Grandine clients have experienced issues on the new development network. Pectra Devnet 3 has been shut down. Busa and his team will conduct further testing of clients on Devnet 4 in the coming weeks. Developers then discussed various specification changes for Pectra that should be included in Pectra Devnet 5. First up is the gas cost changes for EIP 2537, precompiling for BLS12-381 curve operations. Geth developer Felix Lange presented EIP 7685, a specification update, general execution layer requests, and related changes to the engine API. Most developers are in favor of these changes. However, Lange noted that he expects some pushback from consensus layer (CL) client teams, as these changes could impact their deployment of the EIPs. Developer Tim Beiko said that based on the approval of these changes so far, they should now be added to the Pectra Devnet 5 deployment. Busa said that both EIPs are already on the list of specifications required for Pectra Devnet 5. Based on feedback on the proposed changes to EIP 7702, Beiko suggested changes to the proposal involving the use of hard-coded return values. Beiko said that once these changes are completed and reviewed, they should be included in the Pectra Devnet 5 specification list. Developers reiterated the decision from last Thursday’s ACDC call to include EIP 7742 in Pectra to separate blob counts between CL and EL. Representatives from client teams including EthereumJS, Lodestar, Prysm, Besu, and Nethermind all said they have begun work on deploying EIP 7742 for Pectra Devnet 5. Erigon developer Giulio Rebuffo shared updates on EIP 7790, the controlled gas limit increase guide, and the new controlled gas target increase strategy for 7783. Beiko suggested shelving the discussion due to the lack of consensus on EIP 7790 and continuing it asynchronously in other forums. Finally, Beiko said that changing the block gas limit is not something that Ethereum protocol developers can control, and therefore, it is not their highest priority.