Exploring why Ethereum’s Shanghai testnet hasn’t been a smooth sail

ambcrypto.com:

The Ethereum network is slated to end February with another major upgrade dubbed the Shanghai upgrade.

It will facilitate liquid staking, which is why it is heavily anticipated. As such, its development and successful rollout is very important.

Historically, we have seen delays pertaining to some past upgrades, usually associated with challenges in the development process.

The current development process for the Shanghai upgrade too has had its fair share of challenges according to Ethereum All Core Developers Execution Call (ACDE).

One of the biggest challenges that developers faced recently is s bug in the Geth EL client for the Shanghai release.

Preliminary findings revealed that Geth nodes were off-sync due to empty blocks. The Geth (EL) client has reportedly ironed out the bugs.

The ACDE call also created an opportunity for developers to discuss how to deal with large binary data types called blobs within the mempool and Ethereum protocol.

One idea was to mark transactions with zero-blob transaction types that require specialized logic.

After discussing the ideas around Zero blob transactions, developers opted to scrap the idea altogether. This is because they agreed that the ideas presented as solutions would add more complexity

Péter Szilágyi, a Geth (EL) developer had this to say about zero-blob transactions:

“The theory is super nice, super elegant, and insanely complicated. You can have a lot of large transactions in a block but you can only have one or two blob transactions in a block. That’s a huge behavioral differentiation.”

So far the challenges faced do not necessarily threaten the state of the network moving forward.

Moreover, worth noting is that the ACDE call also demonstrated the rapid nature of solutions and