Despite encountering a bug in the latest Shanghai release for the Geth EL client, Ethereum developers have agreed to proceed with the launch of the Shanghai upgrade on the Sepolia test network later this month.
The bug was discovered on February 16th during the All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) call #155, which the Ethereum Foundation’s Tim Beiko chaired. The bug affected the Geth EL client and was discovered during testing on the Zhejiang test network.
Ethereum Developers to Implement Changes to Protocol
The Geth (EL) client team has since issued a fix for the bug, which caused nodes to fail to download and initialize blocks with zero withdrawals and transactions.
During the ACDE call, representatives of the Nethermind and Erigon (EL) client teams confirmed that they would double-check the logic for handling empty blocks in their latest releases to ensure that they were not vulnerable to the same bug. In addition, the developers agreed to exclude zero blob transactions from the mempool and Ethereum protocol.
The developers discussed how the protocol and mempool should handle transactions formatted as blobs that do not contain any data and ultimately agreed to ban zero blob transactions from the protocol in their implementation of EIP 4844 for the Cancun upgrade.
Despite these issues, developers are committed to launching the Shanghai upgrade on the Sepolia test network on February 28th. To achieve this, client teams must cut new releases for Shanghai by early next week, and all client teams have confirmed they can do so.
Furthermore, developers will begin testing the circuit breaker mechanism of MEV-Boost software in the coming weeks. Additionally, the Ethereum Nimbus (CL) client team is making progress on updating Ethereum EL block headers to an SSZ format, with two main approaches currently being considered.
However, the Ethereum protocol is constantly evolving, and its developers are working hard to make it even better. While bugs and issues are to be expected along the way, developers remain committed to moving forward and delivering the Shanghai and Cancun upgrades, which are critical to the continued success of Ethereum.
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