TL;DR

mergeNetsplitBlock on Sepolia

"mergeNetsplitBlock" is a basic fork on the Execution Layer that does not have any particular use. It is just a hard fork and is'nt really needed. It makes p2p discoverability much easier as it verifies the fork id. This upgrade does not change anything else about the Sepolia testnet. It simply verifies the correct chain fork ID that all nodes should be connecting to.

The "mergeNetsplitBlocks" fork on Sepolia is expected to activate a week after the Goerli Merge activation, mostly on 15th August. The Goerli testnet will also undergo this hard fork roughly a week after The Merge is activated on the Mainnet.

Goerli Updates

The devs have picked an activation schedule for the Merge upgrade on Goerli. The Prater Beacon Chain Epoch, which will activate on Bellatrix which will ready Prater to merge with Goerli, is epoch 112260. This is expected to hit on 4th August at 12:24 UTC.

Henceforth, the Prater Beacon Chain will merge with the Goerli testnet at a TTD of 10,790,000.

If you are a staker, validator or anyone using the Goerli Testnet, this is the last chance to test everything before the Mainnet.

Shadow Fork Updates

Goerli Shadow Fork 5 happened roughly an hour before the meeting. The participation rate from validators on the shadow fork dropped from 98% to around 86%.

Prysm-Nethermind returned an error and Teku-Nethermind needs some help.

The issue might be with the sync state that the client was in when TTD was hit.

Also at the end of the call, the Teku-Erigon node had self healed and came back online.

There will be another Mainnet Shadow Fork on 5th August and the configurations will be out soon. The developers will also be testing MEV Boost on Goerli shadow fork tomorrow.

Want to know more about Shadow Forks? Have a follow-up of our article here

Mainnet Merge Activation

It is important that EL client open communication channels between CL and EL nodes through the Engine API before the parameters such as TTD for mainnet Merge activation are set. This is because for security reasons mainnet Merge parameters may not be communicated to node operators earlier than 2 weeks from the expected activation date.

Geth, Erigon, Nethermind and Besu, which are all four EL client teams, were in agreement about making sure this functionality is ready as soon as possible.

EIP 44's / EIP-4444 and EIP-4844

Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4444 seeks the amount of historical data that nodes need to keep up and the goal is to limit the amount of storage for historical data past some age and to limit the amount of p2p traffic for syncing the data.

EIP-444 will be applicable now and also post merge.

For the full details, checkout the given Github links:

The next step is to do a full export on the Goerli Testnet and then reimport it on a fresh node post the Goerli merge.

EIP-4844 introduces a new transaction type on Ethereum for supporting rollups and make them much cheaper on the network. There are ongoing breakout sessions for learning more about EIP 4844 development.

The next breakout session will be on 29th August. This session will include specification issues, implementation stuff etc.

To know more about EIP-4844 have a follow-up here and to know more about EIP-4444 have a follow-up here.

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