The BLOBs are live on Goerli.
Ethereum’s Goerli testnet successfully forked on “Dencun”, featuring the EIP-4844 “Proto-Danksharding” innovation.
This paves the way for two more major testnet forks to secure Ethereum’s mainnet move, now expected at the end of March.
The consensus that emerged from Thursday’s All Core Devs meeting was to have a new version of the software ready by the middle of next week. This could be used for both the Sepolia and Holesky testnets, scheduled for January 30th and February 7th respectively.
Dencun’s “blob” concept is a key component of the update and refers to a large portion of data that is not directly included in an Ethereum block but is instead referenced by the block.
By including additional data for transactions, Ethereum will better serve rollups that use the mainnet for data availability. The rollups are expected to see cost savings of around 90%, which they will pass on to users in the form of cheaper transactions.
To know more: Dencun and Pralectra: Ethereum Core Developers Plot Ambitious 2024
Even though the data in blobs is stored off-chain, the integrity and availability of this data is still maintained. Blobs are designed to be cryptographically secure, ensuring that the data they reference is immutable and verifiable.
Customer diversity wins the day… once again
A small consensus issue in the popular Prysm client caused the forked chain to have difficulty finalizing blocks.
Terence Tsao, protocol developer at Offchain Labs, which develops the Prysm client, estimated the resulting delay at around four hours while the team worked through the issue.
“When Prysm moved from Capella to Deneb state, we kept the historical path blank instead of reporting it, so this issue was quite easy to find,” Tsao told colleagues on the ACD call.
The bug has not been seen in the numerous Devnets (developer networks) run in recent months because these are derived from testnets and contain insufficient history to trigger the issue.
“This is one of those very rare edge cases,” Tsao said. “I am grateful to Goerli, because otherwise we probably would have only got it later.”
Even so, Prysm now operates on fewer than 40% of the Ethereum network’s nodes, meaning that a drop in validation participation rates would be bad, but not catastrophic, if it happened on the mainnet – and indeed, a similar incident has verified in March.
To know more: Ethereum Developers Release Final Report on SNAFU Purpose
Goerli himself will retire this month. The Ethereum Foundation and other developers have encouraged users to move to the new Sepolia testnet, which will serve as the primary testnet for dapp developers in preparation for Goerli’s shutdown.
Another testnet, Holesky, was launched in September 2023 and is intended more for infrastructure and protocol development.
To know more: Ethereum Holešky testnet launch hits slowdown
The Prysm bug was the only major issue observed after the fork and which can be easily avoided in the future according to Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, who however called it “a failure” that “should” be caught very soon Mountain.”
Ryan said he plans to spend some time “making sure there’s nothing else strange about the fork boundary test.”
Client teams have expressed no reservations about sticking to the previously outlined release and testnet schedule, awaiting the results of the next fork in less than two weeks.