Highlights
- Mainnet Merge date (with TTD) announced
- Sepolia post-merge upgrade
- Mainnet Shadow Fork 11
- Kiln testnet to be deprecated
- MEV-boost relay censorship
Mainnet Merge date (with TTD) announced
In the last ACD call it was predicted that there might be a steep hashrate decrease after the DAG size increases 5GB mark but seems like there is not that much of a difference hence they will continue with the previously agreed upon TTD value which is 58750000000000000000000 and will hit on mainnet around Sept 15.
Sepolia post-merge upgrade
Sepolia post-merge upgrade was supposed to be on Aug 17 but it didn't happen then because of the lesser amount of active attestation validators. The predicted date for the upgrade is Aug 21 at block 1735371. Track the upgrade here.
Mainnet Shadow Fork 11
Mainnet Shadow Fork 11 successfully happened on Aug 18 with 99.8% pre-active node participation which dropped to about 97% participation which is really a less fall so in terms of participation this is the nicest shadow fork to date. The minor issues that came forward were that; there were some invalid blocks produced by Erigon and Nethermind had some issues with Nimbus which got fixed
Kiln testnet to be deprecated
The deprecation will be announced in the Ethereum Foundation blogpost releasing next week and Kiln will be deprecated on the day of mainnet hitting Bellatrix which is around Sept 6 so (if any) protocols are using Kiln they get enough time to upgrade.
MEV-boost relay censorship
Vitalik Buterin gave his opinion on two different kinds of censorship that happen on the network.
First is Soft forking which means if 51% of the validators do not want to add a certain number of transactions then they might start attesting an alternative version of the Ethereum blockchain.
The second one is excluding transactions from individual blocks, this has a greater possibility because most Flashbot relays allow validators to attest transactions they would like to do. Further Vitalik added that censoring transactions on Ethereum might face backlash from all the validators.
Currently Flashbots, a relay operator censors transactions from the MEV searchers who propose transaction bundles with MEV rewards to the relay. But post-merge Flashbots will only accept entire blocks instead of transaction bundles which will ultimately get built on third-party block builders. So, instead of attesting all the transactions only those will get attested which are processed by Flashbots.
Bloxroute, a blockchain infrastructure company will also be running MEV relays post merge which will not be censored, hence this adds to the choice of relays validators will have. The original proposal by Micah Zoltu was to stop supporting these relays in order to have an ease of attestations post-merge but this might impact negatively on the ecosystem.
Hence, the final conclusion came out to that it will not be a wise a decision to completely stop using relays and with the competition among Bloxroute and Flashbots relays the ethos of the Ethereum ecosystem will not be compromised.
Read more
Read more about Ethereum in previous Bulletins -Ethereum Bulletin
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