Ethereum ACDE Conference: Introduction of Devnet updates and Dencun upgrade additions. The next conference will determine the release date of devnet-9.

On September 15th, Tim Beiko, an Ethereum core developer, summarized the latest Ethereum core developer execution meeting (ACDE) in a BlockBeats article. The meeting covered updates to Devnet-8, new additions to Dencun, and a comprehensive overview of Reth. 1. Devnet-8 status updates: The network is being finalized and many clients have started pushing new updates. Developer tools system Kurtosis is being used to test MEV/block building processes. Nethermind shared that their blob transaction pool is ready and has been deployed to all Dencun test nodes after testing on a single node for a few days. Geth's blob transaction pool is also nearing completion. Besu is conducting a more extensive check of its transaction pool to limit the size of Blob + non-Blob transactions and is expected to release it in the next version. Erigon is still developing its pool and hopes to prepare for devnet-9. 2. The meeting continued the discussion from last week's ACDC conference call on whether to add a constant upper limit to the validator activation queue. This proposal was officially named EIP-7514 (adding a maximum epoch loss limit). In short, in the worst case, this will slow down the growth rate of ETH equity percentage. 3. The meeting discussed another last-minute proposal: adding an opcode to the EVM to publicly disclose the basic cost of Blob. We have a similar opcode that publicly discloses the BASEFEE of EIP-1559, which was introduced at the same time as the EIP activation. This makes it easier for L2 to determine the correct gas price to charge users based on L1 data costs. 4. The meeting discussed some updates to EIP-4788, which stores the beacon root in the EL contract. In the past few weeks, we have reviewed and fuzz tested the contract multiple times, resulting in some subtle changes described in this PR. The first is to explicitly process a 0 timestamp, causing it to roll back (like other invalid timestamps) instead of returning 0. The second change is the buffer size. Assuming slot time changes, the original contract would result in storage waste, considering the workings of modular arithmetic. By using a prime number (8191), the buffer should be used 100% regardless of slot time. Finally, gas optimization was performed to reduce the number of times CALLDATA needs to be loaded. Auditors will review these changes and are expected to receive a final report before the next ACDE session. To ensure smooth fuzz testing and implementation, developers agreed to merge the proposed changes now. 5. The meeting discussed how clients should handle system contract addresses that are part of the state but are empty at the end of execution. Although this is actually impossible on the mainnet, it is an edge case that occurred during testing by setting the address at genesis. Given the special nature of this edge case and the lack of clear specification behavior, developers agreed to spend more time considering this issue and continue the discussion at the testing conference call on Monday. This is a specification change. All of the above is planned to be included in devnet-9. The client team agrees that all content can be implemented and tested before the next ACDC conference call next week. During that call, the release date for devnet-9 will be determined.