Meet "Cancun" - Looking forward to the latest upgrade of Ethereum in early 2024, which will reduce costs and increase efficiency, benefiting Layer 2!

Ethereum’s “Cancun Upgrade” currently has new progress: On February 8, 2023, at the Ethereum Foundation’s 176th meeting, developers agreed that if things go well, a Goerli fork date will be set in early 2024, with the goal of activating the Goerli Dencun testnet in January 2024.

As for the specific completion time of the Ethereum “Canun Upgrade,” based on speculation from industry insiders regarding the current protocol development progress and testing completion progress, it is expected to be officially implemented between March and April 2024.

The significance of Ethereum’s “Cancun Upgrade” is no less than “Shapella Upgrade”——Because this upgrade is the key to further expansion of Ethereum, it can increase the transaction volume that the Ethereum network can respond to per second, and will also open a new stage of development of Ethereum’s data storage and retrieval capabilities.

For blockchain users holding digital assets，The most intuitive changes that Ethereum’s “Cancun Upgrade” will bring to digital asset transactions are:The gas fees required for digital asset transactions on the Ethereum Layer 2 network will be significantly reduced, perhaps by as much as 14 times.

imToken now supports all Layer 2 networks and EVM compatible chains on Ethereum. After the “Cancun Upgrade” is completed, users holding digital assets can experience the assets of the Ethereum Layer 2 network with higher cost performance and cheaper gas fees through imToken. trade. In addition, imToken supports OP and Polygon, and you can also enjoy relatively lower network operation costs by directly using imToken’s Swap function.

For blockchain developers, it is important to know that after the Ethereum “Cancun Upgrade” is officially implemented in 2024, the Goerli test network will no longer be used. It is recommended that developers migrate to the Sepolia test network as soon as possible.

imToken now fully supports the Sepolia test network, and supports the test asset claim of the Sepolia test network through the “faucet” entrance.

Learn “Cancun upgrade”

Cancun is a famous tourist city in Mexico and the venue for the Devcon 3 conference. According to the naming rules of Ethereum upgrades, upgrades named after place names are upgrades for the Ethereum execution layer.

The codename of the Ethereum consensus layer upgrade synchronized with this “Cancun Upgrade” is Deneb, therefore, the official name of the complete version of the execution layer and protocol layer of this Ethereum upgrade has been determined as “Dencun upgrade”. Dencun is a compound word of Cancun + Deneb.

The following is”Cancun Upgrade”. Let’s learn about the Improvement Protocols (EIPs for short) worth focusing on.

01

The protagonist of “Cancun Upgrade”: EIP-4844

Ethereum sharding prototype

▶ Improvement goals:Solve the scalability (i.e. expansion needs) of Ethereum, help reduce the transaction costs of Ethereum’s Layer 2 (Layer2) Rollups solution, and increase the speed of Rollups.

▶ Improved background:The cost of the Ethereum Layer 1 mainnet (Layer1) has remained high, and necessary improvements are urgently needed to reduce the overall operating cost.

Currently, scaling solutions on Ethereum are primarily Layer 2 Rollups.

In practice, the Rollups solution helps users save a lot of operating costs (hereinafter referred to as Gas Fee). For example, on behalf of project Optimism, the regular cost of Gas Fee is only 0.001 gwei, which is far lower than the regular cost of the Ethereum layer 1 mainnet; ZK Rollups’ solution has better data compression performance, does not require the inclusion of signature data, and is cheaper, even down to one percent of Ethereum’s Layer 1 mainnet.

However, for a wider range of users, gas costs are still a relatively expensive burden even after the Rollups solution. In addition, Ethereum’s efficiency in processing parallel transactions is still low, and it can only handle double-digit transaction volume per second. These require new improvements to help improve scalability.

Sharding - is a powerful improvement method to solve the above problems, but it is not yet implemented in Ethereum. The timely proposal of the improvement plan EIP-4844 is to solve the above needs and implement the sharding upgrade. , found a trade-off that can be applied to Ethereum at the current stage, and laid an early technical foundation for Ethereum to achieve overall data sharding in the future.

Therefore, EIP-4844 was once called “Proto-danksharding”, which is the “prototype of sharding”. The word dank also has a different origin. It is taken from the name of Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist. He once said: “EIP-4844 will become an accelerator for Rollups.”

Currently, in order to more intuitively display the technical improvements of EIP-4844, the title of the EIP-4844 improved protocol has been uniformly described as “Shard Blob Transactions”.

▶ Improvement content (completed technical improvements):

• Introducing Blob transactions: Blob is the abbreviation of Binary Large Object. Blob transactions are a new transaction type that will be used in future sharding.
• Introduce all execution layer logic required to implement future full sharding.
• Introduce cross-validation logic for all execution and consensus layers required to implement future full sharding.
• Implements layering between beacon block validation (i.e. Ethereum layer 2 data) and blob data availability sampling.
• Introduces beacon blocks to implement most of the logic required for future full sharding.

△ Complete sharding concept diagram (by Vitalik Buterin)

Source: foresightnews

▶ Notes:Blobs were originally designed to help carry Ethereum layer 2 data. At the same time, Blob, this set of data vectors, is stored by the nodes of the Ethereum consensus layer, so it cannot be read by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) of the execution layer. It is this separation of data that achieves Reduced fees for Ethereum Layer 2 Rollups solutions.

Additionally, the blob’s data will be deleted after 18 days.

In order to reduce the pressure on the main network caused by improvement proposals, EIP-4844 sets an upper limit on the increased storage space of each beacon block compared to the future implementation of complete sharding, limiting it to a data size of about 0.5 MB (about 4 Blobs) at most. ), but this upper limit is expected to increase in the future.

△ Data updated on 2023/12/11

△ Data source: I2fees.info, statistics on 2023/12/8

02

An overview of the improvement proposals confirmed for implementation in the “Cancun Upgrade”:

• EIP-4844
• EIP-1153
• EIP-6780
• EIP-4788
• EIP-5656
• EIP-7516

In addition to the high-profile improvement proposal EIP-4844 mentioned above, as of December 8, 2023, the improvement proposals that have been confirmed to be implemented in this “Cancun Upgrade” also include:

▶ EIP-1153 “Transient Storage Opcodes”: Add transient storage opcodes.Transient storage is a solution specifically designed to solve the internal communication of blocks.

Transient storage does not change the semantics of existing operations. Transient storage data will be discarded after each transaction. The server disk will not be accessed. There is no need to clear the storage slot after use, and the client does not need to load the original data.

Therefore, relatively speaking, the advantage of using transient storage to solve communication problems within blocks is that the Gas Fee is low, and there is no need to consider the refund of operating fees due to temporary storage in future Ethereum data storage designs. . However, EIP-1153 is not intended to address the use of temporary storage data in existing smart contracts.

▶ EIP-6780 “SELFDESTRUCT only in same transaction”: Modify the function of SELFDESTRUCT opcode, to prepare for the future application of the Verkle Tree architecture (commonly referred to as “Volkle Tree”) in Ethereum.

Currently, Ethereum uses the Merkle Tree architecture (commonly referred to as “Merkle Tree”) architecture. Using the SELFDESTRUCT opcode can make a large number of changes to the account status, for example, you can delete codes and storage. However, when the Verkle Tree architecture is applied to Ethereum in the future, accounts cannot be easily modified or deleted, because the Verkle Tree architecture will store each account in a different account key, and these keys will not be connected to the root account. .

Therefore, EIP-6780 proposes modifications to the functionality of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode. According to EIP-6780, the modified SELFDESTRUCT opcode no longer has the ability to change or delete accounts during use, and will only be used to transfer ETH to the caller, but there is an exception when SELFDESTRUCT is operated by a smart contract is called within the same transaction that was created.

△ Implementation progress of Ethereum Cancun upgrade-related improvement proposals on the client (as of 2023/12/8)

Image source: github@Cancun Network Upgrade Specification

▶ EIP-4788 “Beacon block root in the EVM”: Expose the beacon chain block root in the Ethereum Virtual Machine.The beacon chain block root is a cryptographic accumulator (Accumulators) used to prove any consensus state.

Exposing the beacon chain block root in the Ethereum Virtual Machine will allow trust-minimized access to the Ethereum consensus layer. This is also an improved protocol that facilitates use case development and will support use cases such as Staking Pools and smart contract bridges to improve their Trust Assumptions.

▶ EIP-5656 “MCOPY - Memory copying instruction”: Provides an efficient Ethereum virtual machine instruction that can be used to copy memory areas. Memory copying is a basic operation and is very useful for various calculation-intensive operations. However, future implementation on the Ethereum Virtual Machine will also incur operating costs.

The instruction introduced by EIP-5656 is a new instruction that did not exist before. If smart contracts that have been released use this new instruction, they must pay attention to compatibility and may need to adjust their operations.

▶ EIP-7516 “BLOBBASEFEE opcode”: Introduce opcode BLOBBASEFEE.This opcode is the same as the BASEFEE opcode associated with the EIP-3198 protocol, except that BLOBBASEFEE returns the Blob base fee according to the EIP-4844 protocol in this Cancun upgrade.

When the “Cancun Upgrade” schedule was officially determined (around April ~ May 2023), the execution layer protocol EIP-2537 (precompiled BLS12-381 curve operation) that may be added to the “Cancun Upgrade” was hotly discussed ), EIP-5920 (introducing the new operation code PAY), as of December 8, 2023, are still not shown in the upgrade schedule.

△ Client integration test progress, Devnet-12 has been activated (as of 2023/12/8)

Image source: github@Cancun Network Upgrade Specification

03

“Cancun Upgrade” Synchronized Ethereum Consensus Layer”Deneb upgrade” Improvement proposals confirmed for implementation include:

• EIP-7400
• EIP-7045
• EIP-7514

▶ EIP-7400 “Perpetually Valid Signed Voluntary Exits”: Realize permanently valid signed voluntary exits.This technical protocol is mainly to lock the exit signature domain of the validator on the current Capella consensus layer. After “Cancun Upgrade”, it will be permanently valid.Reduce the complexity of staking operations on Ethereum.

▶ EIP-7045 “Increase max attestation inclusion slot”: Increase the maximum authentication packaged plaintext ciphertext (plaintext slot). This technical protocol will be critical to current LMD-GHOST safety analysis and rule validation. Currently, validators on the chain have 32 plaintext slots to prove broadcasts. After the EIP-7045 technical protocol is implemented, validators may have as many as 64 plaintext slots to prove broadcasts.

▶ EIP-7514 “Add Max Epoch Churn Limit”: Add Max Epoch Churn limit. The purpose of implementing this technical protocol is to mitigate the negative externality issues caused by the growth of the total amount of staked ETH. EIP-7514 is a transitional solution, and there will be technical solutions specifically designed to address the above issues in the future.

As the total amount of ETH pledged increases, a large number of unrestricted validators will lead to an increase in noise data, and the data pressure on the Ethereum consensus layer will also increase. EIP-7514 Technical Improvement Plan To address the above issues, it is recommended to set the Max Churn limit to 8. This not only reduces the number of active validators added to the set, but also limits the unlimited growth of the set.

referenceLink:Reference cExam link

[1] Cancun Network Upgrade Specification，https://github.com/ethereum/execution-specs/blob/master/network-upgrades/mainnet-upgrades/cancun.md

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