All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #74, March 16, 2026

Protocol Calls & happenings
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2

Call details

Video, transcript & chatlog

Bal breakout summary

Summary by @Nerolation [copied from Eth R&D Discord]

  • Optimization benchmarking are on-track
    • next steps: benchmark batch IO on shadowfork + bloatnet using worst-case stateful benchmark tests
  • Based on the benchmarking results
    • Do we keep the state locations for batch IO improvements?
    • Consider reordering BAL ordering (moving from lexicographical ordering to access based ordering)?
  • eth/71 - not discussed: client pls have a look
  • snap/2 - quickly introduced: relevant for Geth, Besu, Nethermind and Reth (likely not relevant for Erigon’s sync)

Open question regarding snap/2:

Should we reuse the Message IDs from snap v1 for snap v2, or should we keep counting? another question I’d add: Should we make sure that snap v2 is rolled out across clients with Glamsterdam to avoid some clients not supporting it (thus not being able to support nodes that already use it during sync)? Would be great to get a temp check if client think this is feasible for glamsterdam. The efficiency improvements and simplification are quite significant, thus we should actively consider it.

ePBS breakout summary

Summary by @potuz [copied from Eth R&D Discord]

  • Teku and Nimbus are debugging networking issues that are at the current time unexplained. They hope to be able to join soon. It’s good to notice that joining on syncing is much harder than joining from genesis.
  • Prysm, Lodestar and Lighthouse expressed interest in continuing on top of devnet zero instead of devnet 1. There are still many bugs and codepaths that can be hardened before moving to test new spec versions, and the big chunk of the testing will happen anyway on these codepaths.
  • Not enough people had an informed opinion on which option for the PTC lookeahead to use and since the change is trivial eitherway and there’s no rush on the new devnet, we decided to postpone that decision. This change will be included in whatever devnet we launch next.

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