Soldøgn Interop
Last week the Lighthouse team, alongside other client teams, spent a week working on the Glamsterdam upgrade in Svalbard. We made the most of the midnight sun to push Glamsterdam client implementations forward. By the end of the week clients had a stable devnet running Glamsterdam across multiple execution and consensus client implementations.
What is Interop?
Interop events are hosted by the Ethereum Foundation and happen roughly once a year. The goal is to bring core developers and researchers together under one roof to make concentrated progress on the upcoming fork. Being in the same room accelerates progress in ways remote work can't match. Normally we all work for different companies across different timezones and can only communicate online. In person work allows us to quickly iterate on ideas, catch implementation gaps in real time and have the type of spontaneous technical discussions that are hard to replicate async.
ePBS
Our main focus was EIP-7732 Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS). We already had a working implementation, and the week in Svalbard gave us a great opportunity to harden it and fill any remaining gaps. There is still work to be done, but the interop event helped us make significant progress. We merged core features, caught and fixed a number of bugs, and had deep technical discussions with other client teams that will help drive specification changes going forward. Some notable progress we made:
- Reached consensus on implementation details regarding the builder flow.
- Caught an issue across all client implementations in which execution requests could invalidate voluntary exits.
- Added new ePBS validator duties.
- Hardened the new Payload Timeliness Committee attestation flow.
- Made significant progress on our revamped data availability module.
- Iterated on ePBS related sync changes.
- Discussed plans for honest payload reorg mechanisms to help protect honest block proposers.
- Added significant test coverage across new ePBS-related code paths.
- Stress tested our ePBS implementation against other consensus layer clients in adverse network environments.
Exploring Svalbard
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Working long hours on the Glamsterdam upgrade in a snowy lodge out in the Arctic Circle could have ended up like The Shining. To avoid this, we made sure to take the time to explore what Svalbard had to offer.
A snowmobile tour allowed us to take in the beauty of Svalbard and let us reach places we couldn't have made it to on foot or by car.
A tour of Mine #3 gave us a glimpse into what life was like for those who built the town. The old mine now hosts the Arctic World Archive, which holds backups of books, films, manuscripts, pictures, and source code (including Ethereum's).
We visited the Global Seed Vault which provides long term backup storage for the worlds seeds.
We took a boat tour along the remote Svalbard coastline, taking in views only reachable by sea.
We took time to unwind in a floating sauna. Some team members even jumped into the freezing ocean water before rushing back to the warmth of the sauna.
Looking forward
Glamsterdam interop was a productive week and a strong signal that the upgrade is converging. We are grateful to the Ethereum Foundation for hosting us and other client teams this memorable week. We're looking forward to continuing this work and shipping ePBS. Glamsterdam is coming. Stay tuned.
