There was general agreement about dropping pre-merge history on May 1st, but a lot of back and forth regarding the implementation and testing details until then. Notably, what eth/ protocols should clients add/change as part of the Pectra hard fork release, if and how to deploy history expiry to testnets prior to mainnet activation, etc.
Teams agreed to continue the conversation on the R&D discord and potentially have a breakout room in January if things can’t be resolved async
Decoupling Gas Limit & Payload Size
@arnetheduck shared a set of proposals to deal with gossip limitations on the consensus layer, a few of which involve adding additional restrictions to the execution layer.
EL developers were generally against adding size restrictions to blocks in addition to the gas limit, or having a per-transaction gas limit, but further conversation is needed. Teams are encouraged to share their thoughts on the issue directly.
eth/69
@yperbasis proposed keeping NewBlock and NewBlockHash as part of the eth/69 networking protocol, as they are useful messages for networks who did not go through The Merge. Ethereum doesn’t broadcast these fields post-merge anyways.
Feedback requested on the latest changes to the EIP, no comments on the call.
@petertdavies highlighted that there are legal considerations people should be mindful of when engaging with these proposals.
EIP-7508
This EIP proposes to reserve a transaction range for L2s to adopt different transaction types than L1, similarly to what EIP-7587 did for precompile addresses. No objections to move from Draft to Review.
EIP-4803
Confirmed that this EIP has been retroactively applied by client teams, but not in EL specs yet. @petertdavies to open an issue to track this in EELS, but no objections to considering the EIP “applied from genesis”