Ethereum "Berlin" upgrade overview: launched on April 10, including four EIPs

Following the "Muir Glacier" upgrade, the Ethereum blockchain plans to implement the "Berlin" upgrade. According to its specifications, the Ethereum mainnet blockchain is expected to be activated at block height 12_244_000 on April 10, 2021. The specific time may be advanced or delayed due to fluctuations in block times.

It’s been 15 months since the last network upgrade, and we’ve made a lot of progress in that time. Ethereum network clients are ready to activate 4 proposals to improve the network’s performance and lay the foundation for further upgrades in the future.

Slightly different from previous Ethereum network upgrades, the content and progress of this upgrade will not be presented in a single EIP. If you want to understand its content, please read the "Berlin" network upgrade specification and track its progress in the eth1.0-specs repo.

What changes will the “Berlin” upgrade include?

The “Berlin” upgrade will introduce the following EIPs to the Ethereum network:

EIP-2565: Change the gas cost of modulo/exponentiation operations

The EIP-2565 proposal is a repricing of the previous EIP-198 (modular exponentiation of large numbers); initially, EIP-198 introduced a precompiled module for modular exponentiation, which allowed us to introduce many cryptographic algorithms that require modular exponentiation, such as RSA signature verification. EIP-2565 reduces the gas cost of this module to be on par with the cost of performing other operations. Watch Kelly Olson's explainer video for an overview of the proposal and some interesting charts about the gas repricing.

EIP-2718: Standardized transaction envelopes

This EIP introduces a new transaction type, which itself can serve as an envelope to more conveniently enable support for multiple transaction types.

When Ethereum first launched the mainnet, there was only one transaction type with fields "To" (indicating the purpose of the transaction) and "Data" (to include arbitrary data in the transaction). In order to reach consensus, Ethereum clients must work in unison to ensure that they apply the same state changes when processing the same transaction. Therefore, if the "To" field is 0, all clients must interpret the "Data" field as a deployment contract and execute it in a specific way.

Over time, the need for transaction types changed. This was reflected in the EIP-155 (Simple Protection Against Replay Attacks) proposal. However, no new transaction types were introduced at that time, it was a social consensus among client teams to interpret the field differently. The Spurious Dragon hard fork (that included EIP-155) was a consensus change hard fork because all clients needed to agree on the interpretation of the field. EIP-2718 does not help to undo the complexity introduced by EIP-155, but it prevents the introduction of more complexity in the future, and it makes it easier to add new transaction types (such as transactions in the form of EIP-1559). For a deeper understanding of the proposal, watch Micah Zoltu explain EIP-2718.

EIP-2929: Increase gas cost of state access opcodes

This EIP increases the gas consumption of a transaction when calling SLOAD, *CALL, BALANCE, EXT*, and SELFDESTRUCT for the first time. For example, it increases the gas consumption of functions in the CALL family from 700 to 2600, and the gas consumption of the SLOAD family from 800 to 2100. However, this high cost is only triggered once for any address or storage slot (within a transaction). If called multiple times, subsequent calls will only consume 100 Gas each time.

The goal of increasing the gas consumption of these operations is to mitigate the DoS attack surface that remains in the Ethereum protocol. In addition, it will also help limit the size of witness data in the environment of stateless Ethereum implementation. Currently, the bandwidth required to include Merkle proofs is much larger than a reasonable size required to verify a block, so everyone is looking for some way to impose an upper limit on witness data. While EIP-2929 does not solve all problems, it is a step forward. Another benefit is that calls to precompiled modules will become cheaper: this EIP removes the additional 700 Gas that must be paid when accessing precompiled modules.

EIP-2930: Optional access lists

The idea behind this proposal is to correct the destructive effects of EIP-2929 on existing contracts and alleviate the increased gas consumption caused by EIP-2929. This proposal will introduce a new transaction type that can contain an access list (a list of addresses and storage item keys) to allow the transaction to indicate the state it plans to access. By specifying an access list, clients can process transactions more easily, and gas consumption can be safely reduced.

Watch Vitalik B. and Martin S.’s video explaining EIP-2929 and 2930 for more details and their benefits for the Ethereum blockchain.

What’s the news on EIP management and Ethereum governance?

Curious kids who have questions about the upgrade time interval, please take a look!

The Muir Glacier upgrade consisted of only one proposal, which was to postpone the ice age of Ethereum PoW mining. Because we couldn’t wait to deploy it with any other proposals, the Muir Glacier upgrade took place in January 2020.

In order to design a better network upgrade program, volunteers from the Ethereum community, including EIP editors, EIP authors, client developers, Ethereum Cat Herders, and other community members, jointly established the EIPIP organization. The Ethereum Cat Herders also hosted an Ethereum key component installation survey to better understand the current status of Ethereum client diversity.

At the same time, client developers are also working on proposals to improve performance, security, and help future upgrades. Because there are no frequent upgrades, developers can maximize their development time, and we can expect more new features to be introduced in the subsequent "London" upgrade in the near future.

That said, there is always room for improvement, and your feedback is vital to helping us continue to improve the quality of our upgrade process.

I am a node operator/miner, what should I do?

Please download the latest version of your Ethereum client.

Thanks to all the developers, client teams, EIP authors, EIP editors, and everyone who joined the Ethereum network upgrade journey! See you at the next upgrade.

You can follow us at the Ethereum Cat Herders on Twitter, Medium, GitHub, Website. And our Discord.

You can use tokens on Gitcoin and Clr.fund to express your love for us!

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Original link: https://medium.com/ethereum-cat-herders/the-berlin-upgrade-overview-2f7ad710eb80
Author: Pooja Ranjan
Translation: Ajian