Ethereum’s Shapella upgrade is set to be released soon, with the last mainnet shadow fork scheduled for next week, according to Ethereum developer Tim Beiko’s recent Twitter thread.
The upgrade addresses concerns raised about code and gas observability, aiming to remove them as much as possible from EOF contracts. The link provided in the thread highlights all the necessary changes, which were previously spread across multiple EIPs.
The announcement of the upgrade came out earlier this week, with Lodestar putting out a new optional release, and Prysm also possibly doing so before the upgrade. The versions announced for both are compatible with Shapella.
Nethermind has some significant updates planned for its first post-fork release, but has delayed them to minimize any risks when Shapella goes live. Testing is in its final stages, with the cross-client EVM fuzzing of the latest releases.
The discussion in the Ethereum ACDE included the proposal to deal with SELFDESTRUCT through EIP-6780, which will follow the rules laid out in EIP-4758 except when SELFDESTRUCT happens in the same transaction as a contract creation.
This proposal aims to balance implementation complexity and not break deployed contracts. Contracts will be analyzed more thoroughly in the coming weeks, and CFI EIP-6780 has been agreed upon for Cancun to signal that it will happen. However, the final decision about inclusion will be made once further analysis is done.
The Ethereum ACDE also discussed the implementation of the builder override flag in EL clients, which would allow ELs to suggest the CL override external builders based on heuristics.
This could help in cases of censorship that are detectable by clients, such as transactions re-orged out or pending despite a high max fee, etc. Client teams said that they can likely start prototyping this soon, and API changes will be merged once prototype implementations are ready.
