Evolving Ethereum With Improvement Proposals | Pooja Ranjan - EthCatHerders

[Music] hello everyone thank you for joining us here on my community talk and learn more about Improvement proposals today we will learn the evolution of ethereum with Improvement proposal I'm Puja ranjan I work with ethereum cat herders and ethereum Cat herders is a group to support ethereum protocol you just have heard a wonderful talk by Chiki to know about protocol contributors we just discussed why project should fund protocol Guild and I'm going to give you some more reasons for that I believe EIP plays an important role in ethereum protocol call the governance has a huge Community engagement and in next 20 minutes I'm hoping that uh you would learn about the process the governance the network upgrade and the role of improvement proposal in that you would know where to and how to contribute to ethereum standards for main net application layer and layer two projects since the launch of ethereum we have been following EIP 1 as a standard process EIP ethereum Improvement proposal is a design document providing information to technical specification describing new feature the process and whatever goes into the ecosystem some of you may already know about the structure the type and the category of improvement proposal it is divided into three type meta standard and informational meta is something that is a mandatory requirement for the community to follow for the blockchain to follow informational are just added for adding more information to the community it is optional people may follow or not follow the standard track which is divided further into four different categories core networking interface and ERC are the most active type of uh proposals that we would look around and all of these are being reviewed by EIP editors and we will learn more about it the process of suggesting Improvement proposal is very simple anyone can make a pull request move it into draft and they can leave it open for editors to add comment when move to review status we collect Community feedback try to incorporate suggestions if possible and thus we try to make sure whatever we are proposing is a good standard for the ethereum community it could be for protocol layer it could be for application layer and you would also learn to learn about the layer two Improvement proposals generally these proposals are left into last call for 14 days and then move to final status if no further changes are suggested sometimes it ends up in withdrawn when author does not want to move it any further or there is some other proposal which is a better fit stagnant is an intermediary phase and it is moved into the status by EIP B when it is unattended for over 6 months living is is a special status provided to proposals which are never expected to reach to the final status however we believe that these proposal will keep receiving changes updates EIP 1 is one of the living status proposal and we have only two the community was small and the process was simple we were doing well but as ethereum grow as blockchain ecosystem evolved the need of managing Community increased we wanted to have proposals which are efficient which are well-maintained and it it should be properly reviewed for that there was a need of repository split proposal 7329 ERC EIP repository split talks about that last year in summer of 2023 authors light CL and Dano Farin documented this proposal to explain what is there with this repository split so our current GitHub repository looks something like this so now we have ethereum SL eips for EIP which are non-application based and for application based uh proposals we have ethereum SL RC's you may notice that interface is common on both the sides that's because we also need interface proposal for client coordination client interoperation as well as for application layer connection and now we have two different sets of EIP editors and ERC editors to make sure all these proposals are well maintained well reviewed the process did not change much it is the same except we added a little bit more information for the core proposals so core proposals are proposals which are considered for ethereum Network upgrade that gets into the blockchain here we have defined the timeline when they can move these proposal from one status to another obviously the first one is moving into the draft and it can be opening a simple poll request when proposal is ready or the clients some of the clients have agreed to implement them then it is considered for for either inclusion or maybe moved on to the devet for testing purposes that is the point when proposal can be moved to review status similarly moving to last call is not as same as other proposals here we move on to the last call when a proposal is on the public test net we go uh go for testing on different level so we have devet we have public test net and then finally a proposal is deployed on on the main net so until that proposal is deployed we cannot move it to the final status little did we know application layer Community grouped together and they introduced another set of proposals for layer two projects called rollup Improvement proposals they are called as rips but don't get confused they are here to live the structure does not look very different it is more or less similar like other GitHub repositories but now our repository got expanded now we have three different repositories to track these proposal track these standards which are built for ethereum ecosystem and we have three different set of editors here if you will notice that uh the category under standard track for rips are also mentioned as core and that's because these proposals could be deployed on the ethereum main net it will be when the time comes so we have considered it to be kept under the core category only instead of having rip as a separate category now if we are doing so many things around ethereum ecosystem how we are managing it that's where ethereum caters comes into the picture we are proud to say that we engages with the community at multiple levels we facilitate meeting create educational content and communicate it to the community EIP IP meetings are the meetings where most of the governance related decisions are being taken this meeting is organized once in two week and all EIP authors ERC authors and rip authors are invited they discuss on the state of the present uh process also review any recommendation changes suggested for the current process they also review some proposals some pull requests which are existing in the repository but they don't know what to do because sometimes it could be very difficult to make a decision because ethereum has a very diverse Community we want to make sure that every voice is heard everyone is listened to attended to so we want to make sure that even if it could be a decision by EIP authors person has been given enough time Community has been given enough space to respond to react to and then we make any decision we'll learn a little bit more about it moving uh into the governance part now for governance uh we have three key players editors authors and the community as I was just explaining here starting with the EIP number allocation like EIP number has always its own charm its own significance you may have heard about erc2 which went popular when blockchain ecosystem was growing most of the projects were based on erc2 they use that as a token and it is a very very popular token standard some of the protocol followers may have heard about EAP 1559 and whoever are following ethereum upgrade must have known about EIP 4844 so yes EIP number has its own significance and its own value in the ethereum community allocation of these numbers were very simple we simply used to uh use the pull request number or the issue number to make sure that okay fine this is going to be the EIP number but some Notorious parties started making misuse of this process they started adding empty issues to grab something called as you know fancy IP number they they thought that if they would get fancy IP number it would become popular as rc20 but that created problem for EIP editors cleaning up the GitHub repositor so on so forth so they decided to discard the process and the new process of sequential EIP number allocation was brought into the picture this decision was obviously taken by EIP editor but as I'm mentioning ethereum Community is diverse and we would like to include everybody for that purpose we have created proposal 5069 it's a document which talks about the dos and dones of EIP editors it talks about what editors can do and if they cannot do what is the alternative suggested here this is the second and living proposal existing on ethereum repository when there are cases when we are not able to make any simple decision what we do is we create call for input do not get it confused with CFI CFI is for uh core proposals only and this is call for input that means editors are inviting input it will look something like uh the screen shared on the right side of it it is a GitHub issue where editors are requ requested to add their input Community can also do that but based on the inputs received votings are done by editors and based on the voting we make a decision on whether to keep this thing on or not we want issues to be closed we want PLL request to be addressed but there should be a timeline for that so for this purpose we have decided a time line of 30 days and in case uh the decision the Voting is not is not clear it's indecisive then keeper of consensus make the decision for the group talking about keeper of consensus at this point keeper of consensus is our editor Sam Wilson Sam Wilson has proposed some of the future Improvement for EIP proposals and the process that we are maintaining so far so whatever we are talking right now is not a part of the present process but it could be he propos proposes Charter Charter propos the concept of working group that means providing some autonomy to the group to the repository and to the people for whom these standards are being built they can publish their proposal they can facilitate discussion and they can uphold the quality which so far is a responsibility of EIP editor these could be semi autonomous bodies and they can have their own governance VIP editors can be a member of them but most of the responsibility will be on shoulders of working group so now how would it look like well we have already seen the three GitHub repository and it is my representation of working group here so if we are going by the uh repositories I can imagine for core proposals because we have two different sets of uh layers here we could we could have two different uh uh working groups groups similarly for application side we have a ERC Dev meeting so that could be ERC working group and wallet working group for rollups we have just one as of now all these things all these proposals will lead us toward Network upgrade especially the core one some of you may have heard about the Denon upgrade which we are expecting next week and it will be followed by Prague Electra and Osaka F star the name is not decided yet uh this is my um speculation of timeline uh it's not official yet denb or canun which is also known as Denon is going to be our next hard for which we are expecting on March 13th at 1355 UTC ethereum cat herders would be live streaming them in association with the ethereum foundation e stakers Anthony Cal we would want to make it a Community event we would invite everyone to join us and follow the countdown and make sure that you have already upgraded your NS if you are a validator if you are running um ethereum chain uh clients please upgrade it to the latest release that has been published on blog. ethereum.org grade has already been tested on garly sepolia and Halli and just we are counting down it's almost ready and we are so excited to have this thing this upgrade include nine proposal nine proposal to make some changes to the ethereum blockchain what could be those changes if this is a question the answer is the peep and EP Series this series we organ we organize this uh podcast to invite all EIP authors to talk about these proposals which goes into the hard work they talk talk about the utility the specification the implementation and why they want to have this on ethereum chain this could be a little technical but it is a very good overview of proposals that get into ethereum blockchain let's talk a little bit about hardfork meta hard Fork meta basically describes what is getting into an upgrade if you take a look here proposal 606 has documented the first upgrade on ethereum blockchain ever which is called homestate we used to maintain this hard for meta e but that was discontinued after mure Glacier that happened in January 2020 if I have not mistaken at the time we started building up execution specs we started documenting uh the specs into Python language so we decided to move all specs inmd format in the execution specs however as I was mentioning earlier the ecosystem grew ethereum evolved and people decided to bring it back now we have two layers of chain and U two layers in a chain and we would like to make sure that people are aware of the specs getting into it so Tim beo documented proposal 6 7568 to backfill since uh Berlin to chappella and now we have hardw work meta available for all future upgrades now when we are having these upgrades we have hard meta we would like to add it with proposals for Denon we have already seen the final list it has been tested on the test net and it is expected on the main net in just in less than a week I guess um so for future upgrades what we are going to do we are going to open discussion this is the list of proposals which have been proposed it it is there for inclusion they are called as consider for inclusion and for Osaka the list is also very tentative but proposal which we could not include in prag and Electra have been moved forward we could only uh include few proposals because we want that uh client team get enough time to work on these proposals and make sure they are Robos well if all these information may have uh inspired you if you want to make a contribution to the ethereum protocol or to the application layer or to the RO my recommendation here would be start following developers call these are all public call available on E protocol YouTube so you can follow um all codev meetings you can also join ethar Discord you will be flooded with lot of channels on your left side of the screen but that is there to help you out only like you will find your area of interest and you can go ask questions that you would like to it could be overwhelming but uh when you get into it people would be around to support you to answer your questions similarly if you are interested on the research side of it if you are someone who would like to document a standard for ethereum protocol or for ethereum ecosystem the recommendation is to go check out e Research Forum e research are for uh research papers and many of the proposals comes out from there every proposal has to be discussed and for that we create this Fellowship of ethereum magician page where we discuss it with the community and collect their feedback to all these things to make all these uh things happen in the ethereum ecosystem we are proud to be supporting ethereum protocol this is the list of ethereum cers contribution we try to contribute on different levels so if you are interested in contributing to even ethereum caters you can reach out to me um I'll be around here to answer any questions but in case you find this on online and you would want to reach us here are some of our contacts to connect with us thank you everyone for joining us here today and to learn more about ethereum and Improvement proposal that has made contribution in the evolution of ethereum have a great