🟣 Ethereum’s Pectra split
Plus, Chaos in oracle land, and what’s GHOing up
Donovan Choy & Macauley Peterson
September 23, 2024
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Eth Core devs agree to hard fork split
Oracle competition
Chart: GHO goes up
CT: Waxing nostalgic
Core Developers agree to split Pectra hard fork into two phases
During the last All Core Developers (ACD) call, Ethereum developers reached a tentative consensus to divide the upcoming Pectra hard fork into two separate updates. They confirmed that approach during last week’s Consensus Layer meeting, with all client teams in favor.
The decision is driven by the need to deploy essential network improvements quickly and safely, and a general feeling that the current scope of Pectra is too much for a single fork, according to Alex Stokes, who moderated the call.
"I think everyone agrees the current fork is just too big," he said.
The split is partly due to issues encountered in the testing phase. Devnet 2 faced downtime due to a bug in the Geth client that affected other clients such as Prysm and Teku. Although these issues have been patched, Devnet 3 still lacks many of the features slated for inclusion in the fork, notably Ethereum’s EVM Object Format (EOF) — the subject of intense debate over the past year.
Developers concluded that segmenting Pectra into two parts would allow them to focus on a limited subset of improvements and ship "Pectra A" quicker, while reserving others for "Pectra B." Even so, as September comes to a close, the assumption is Pectra A won’t reach Ethereum mainnet until late January or February.
Pectra A will include the most critical updates that have already been tested in Devnet 3.
The second phase, "Pectra B," will include more complex proposals like PeerDAS, which focuses on decentralized data availability sampling, and changes to EOF. The EIPs for EOF have been a major point of contention — having been repeatedly postponed — but they had looked finally ready to ship in Pectra. But so far, EOF hasn’t made it into a Devnet due to unresolved issues, such as the handling of certain NFTs, and potential problems with the DELEGATECALL opcode involving legacy contracts.
If a DELEGATECALL is made to such a contract, it can lead to unintended behaviors, effectively making the contract unusable or "bricked," according to core dev Frangio. This is reminiscent of the Parity Wallet incident in 2017, where a vulnerability caused over 500,000 ETH to be locked irretrievably, he said.
The consensus was that EOF inclusion would delay the fork too much, or as Paradigm core dev "Oliver" put it, "if we move EOF to the first split then there’s no point in splitting really."
The big outstanding question is: What will become of Pectra B’s scope? There was some concern that Pectra B could become another large, unwieldy fork if additional features are added beyond what has been initially agreed upon.
As for Pectra A, project coordinator Tim Beiko stepped in to temper expectations, suggesting the only path to quick shipping is to split along the lines of the EIPs already implemented in Devnet 3. And table a final decision on Pectra B for a couple of weeks, at least.
Chaos Labs launches new Solana oracle with Jupiter
Oracles powers the multibillion dollar financial systems on blockchains, providing a way to access data from offchain sources.
They’re a crucial piece of infrastructure that has historically seen near-monopolies by one player on each L1 chain. Chainlink has traditionally dominated Ethereum, while Pyth and WINkLink have cornered the Solana and TRON chains, respectively.
In the past year, each incumbent player has lost market share as competition in the oracle vertical continues to heat up.
That trend is only looking to accelerate. The risk advisory firm Chaos Labs announced "Edge" at Token2049 last week, its new oracle product on Solana with its launch partner, Jupiter Exchange.
Edge is providing a vertically integrated value-add to protocols through its own algorithmic risk engines on Chaos. The oracle also employs both the traditional push-based models that were pioneered by Chainlink, and newer pull-based models that were later developed for faster transaction speed use cases like perpetual futures trading.
According to its official press release, Edge has a TVS (total value secured) of $30 billion in trading volume for Jupiter alone over the last two months. This establishes Edge as a real threat in the high-frequency, low-latency oracle category to Pyth, Solana’s dominant oracle provider.
The market maker Wintermute has also selected Edge for its upcoming political prediction market, OutcomeMarket, on Ethereum.
Similar to Pyth on Solana, Chainlink cannot afford to rest on its laurels in Ethereum land.
On Ethereum, Chronicle, the in-house oracle powering Sky (Maker) for the past year, is also venturing out. Two weeks ago, Chronicle launched decentralized price feeds to support Coinbase’s cbBTC on Base and Ethereum mainnet. Last Wednesday, Chronicle also announced a points system for Sky users who supplied USDS.
— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)
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GHO goes higher:
The total circulating supply of Aave’s GHO stablecoin is seeing steady growth, hitting $150 million yesterday. Based on Etherscan, 76.5% of GHO ($115 million) is staked on Aave’s GHO staking module, suggesting that the stablecoin’s growth is largely being driven by Aave’s dominance in the lending vertical of DeFi.
— Donovan Choy
SKALE is a modular network of EVM-compatible chains with pooled security. As the pioneer of the chain subscription model, its main value proposition is offering a gas-free blockchain experience for end users. SKALE chain growth will be a key metric to follow as the network’s economic sustainability depends on new chains joining the network and paying a monthly subscription fee.
Sanko Game Corp (DMT) is a crypto-native gaming and social media studio building a suite of products ranging from Animal Crossing-style games to an onchain Twitch competitor. They raised funds publicly, have high float and could pose as an antithesis to low-float, high-FDV crypto gaming infrastructure projects with less organic activity if they are able to deliver on their next suite of upgrades, new games and expansions.
SKALE is a network of EVM-compatible chains with pooled security. SKALE stands out by offering a gas-free blockchain experience for end-users. It is able to do this by shifting validator compensation to developers. This business model has allowed SKALE to find traction in the gaming sector, demonstrated by the activity in the Nebula and Calypso hubs. As the network matures, SKALE chain growth will be a key metric to follow as the network’s economic sustainability depends on new chains joining the network and paying their monthly subscription fee.
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The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.
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