Ethereum Dev Gear Up For Shanghai/Capella Upgrade & Increased Bug Bounty

The Ethereum Foundation has announced the final releases of client upgrades ahead of the upcoming Shanghai/Capella upgrade on Ethereum mainnet, scheduled for April 12th. 

The All Core Developers Consensus (ACDC) call was chaired by Ethereum Foundation researcher Alex Stokes, who kicked off the meeting with updates from representatives of Ethereum client teams, who gave updates on the status of their final releases for the upgrade. 

In his closing remarks, Tim Beiko, the Chair of ACDE calls, noted that once all final client releases for the upgrade were published, he would compile them into a blog post on the ETH Foundation website.

The Ethereum Foundation has urged all node operators on ETH to upgrade their nodes before the upcoming upgrade. The Foundation has also doubled the maximum bug bounty for identifying a vulnerability in the Shanghai/Capella upgrade from $250,000 to $500,000. 

Developers identifying a bug are encouraged to report it to the Ethereum Foundation through its website.

Ethereum Developers Discusses Deneb Upgrade & Decoupled Blobs

During the ACDC call, developers also discussed the upcoming Deneb upgrade, which centers around ETH Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4844, also known as proto-dank sharding. 

To improve network performance, developers discussed decoupling blob transactions from blocks so that blocks can be gossiped, rebroadcast, and verified independently of blobs. 

The execution layer (EL) of Ethereum can now pass along proofs about blobs to the consensus layer (CL) that the CL can easily validate. Developers reviewed a pull request from Gajinder Singh, a developer for the Lodestar (CL) client, which was a minor addition to Deneb specifications due to the decoupled design of blobs from blocks.

The developers also discussed the third MEV-Boost community call, scheduled for March 30th, to educate at-home validator node operators, staking pools, MEV builders, and relays about the new software releases related to MEV-Boost. 

Finally, developers reviewed test executions for Deneb and EIP 4844, which take a couple of seconds to start up and initialize the appropriate libraries. Developers are working on optimizing these initialization costs to reduce the delays and execute tests on the code more efficiently.

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