Last week, Ethereum client, testing and research teams from around the world gathered together for a week of intense work on the Pectra network upgrade, PeerDAS and the Verge.
Similarly to previous events like Edelweiss 🏔️ or Amphora 🏺, the focus of the Nyota ✨ interop was achieving multi-client interoperability across the different technical tracks.
In addition to this, Nyota was preceded with a first of its kind public event: Frontiers Africa, where core devs & researchers spent the day meeting & exchanging with builders from across the region.
Frontiers Africa
Inspired by the impactful trips that borderless.africa organized in Africa last year, the continent quickly became a top contender to host interop. To maximize the impact of having over 100 core Ethereum contributors in one of the places that can most benefit from it, we organized a one day community event right before interop: Frontiers Africa.
The purpose of the event was to allow L1 maintainers and local builders to learn from each other. After a few morning panels, the agenda was filled with breakout sessions for attendees to take part in two-way conversations on topics ranging from the Ethereum roadmap, to the onboarding journey for core contributors, how to build applications for mass adoption on the African continent and how to bridge the African and global communities.
Frontiers Africa had over 350 local attendees along with interop participants. The event hopefully laid the groundwork for more, larger, Ethereum-focused events taking place across Africa!
Nyota ✨
This year's interop event focused on three main technical tracks: Pectra, PeerDAS and Verkle. In addition to these, the teams also made progress on EOF, SSZ, History Expiry and more.
Pectra Devnet 0
The main focus of Nyota was cross-client interoperability on devnet-0. Teams were expected to come to interop with full implementations and spend the week gradually building towards multi-client devnets running smoothly.
On the first day, we saw many 1:1 devnets, where specific EL:CL pairs could run together locally. Quickly, more complex devnets started appearing, with a 5×5 one launching mid-week! While in past interop events this would have represented all client combinations, Nyota had two new client teams join for the first time: Grandine and Reth.
By the end of the week, all but one client was running on devnet-0, and external dependencies such as relays were getting tested. As a final test on the last evening of the event, an execution layer-triggered withdrawal was sent over the network, with the validator successfully exiting and the network finalizing smoothly!
Verkle
Prior to interop, Verkle contributors were expected to join the Kaustinen testnet. While this wasn't achieved by all teams ahead of the event, by the end of the week all but two teams had at least partial implementations, with many also supporting post-transition networks from genesis.
In addition to implementation work, one key goal for the Verkle track was to try and resolve many outstanding spec issues. The various sessions on the topic resulted in a draft PR to the EIP for broader discussion before finalizing the changes.
PeerDAS
Last but not least, the PeerDAS track is likely the one where the most progress was made throughout the interop. At the start of the week, only two of the consensus layer clients had partial implementations.
By Friday, all six teams could distribute and receive data to subnets, all but one could serve the data over RPC, multi-client devnets had been stood up, and some teams had started working on sync integrations!
Everything Else
In addition to the core technical tracks, teams made progress on a range of other initiatives, such as:
…and even an entire SSZ Technical Track!
Next Steps
Expect the notes and draft PRs coming out of Nyota to be refined into formal specs & proposals over the next few weeks. While many ideas were discussed throughout the week, any changes to the Ethereum protocol will be brought up, as always, on AllCoreDevs calls.
Over the next few weeks, teams expect to finalize the scope of the Pectra network upgrade and continue testing their implementations. Once this process has completed, an announcement will be made for the upgrade deployment on existing testnets.
Thank you to everyone who participated in interop and made it both an incredibly productive and fun week. Special shout out to the EthPandaOps, specs and testing teams whose work enabled everyone else to hit the ground running. For Amphora 🏺, our interop target was to stand up a single devnet by the end of the week. This time, we launched over 100!
