How The Merge Impacts Ethereum’s Application Layer

Ethereum’s transition to proof of stake — The Merge — is close to: devnets are being stood up, specs are being finalized and neighborhood outreach has begun in earnest. The Merge is designed to have minimal impression on how Ethereum operates for finish customers, sensible contracts and dapps. That stated, there are some minor modifications price highlighting. Earlier than we dive into them, listed below are just a few hyperlinks to offer context concerning the total Merge structure:

The remainder of this put up will assume the reader is acquainted with the above. For these desirous to dig even deeper, the complete specs for The Merge can be found right here:

Block construction

After The Merge, proof of labor blocks will not exist on the community. As an alternative, the previous contents of proof of labor blocks change into a element of blocks created on the Beacon Chain. You possibly can then consider the Beacon Chain as turning into the brand new proof of stake consensus layer of Ethereum, superseding the earlier proof of labor consensus layer. Beacon chain blocks will comprise ExecutionPayloads, that are the post-merge equal of blocks on the present proof of labor chain. The picture beneath exhibits this relationship:

For finish customers and utility builders, these ExecutionPayloads are the place interactions with Ethereum occur. Transactions on this layer will nonetheless be processed by execution layer purchasers (Besu, Erigon, Geth, Nethermind, and so on.). Thankfully, because of the stability of the execution layer, The Merge introduces solely minimal breaking modifications.

Mining & Ommer Block Fields

Publish-merge, a number of fields beforehand contained in proof of labor block headers change into unused as they’re irrelevant to proof of stake. With the intention to decrease disruption to tooling and infrastructure, these fields are set to 0, or their information construction’s equal, somewhat than being fully faraway from the info construction. The full modifications to dam fields could be present in EIP-3675.

As a result of proof of stake doesn’t naturally produce ommers (a.ok.a. uncle blocks) like proof of labor, the record of those in every block (ommers) might be empty, and the hash of this record (ommersHash) will change into the RLP-encoded hash of an empty record. Equally, as a result of issue and nonce are options of proof of labor, these might be set to 0, whereas respecting their byte-size values.

mixHash, one other mining-related discipline, will not be set to 0 however will as a substitute comprise the beacon chain’s RANDAO worth. Extra on this beneath.

BLOCKHASH & DIFFICULTY opcodes modifications

Publish-merge, the BLOCKHASH opcode will nonetheless be obtainable to be used, however given that it’s going to not be solid by means of the proof of labor hashing course of, the pseudorandomness supplied by this opcode might be a lot weaker.

Relatedly, the DIFFICULTY opcode (0x44) might be up to date and renamed to PREVRANDAO. Publish-merge, it’ll return the output of the randomness beacon supplied by the beacon chain. This opcode will thus be a stronger, albeit nonetheless biasable, supply of randomness for utility builders to make use of than BLOCKHASH.

The worth uncovered by PREVRANDAO might be saved within the ExecutionPayload the place mixHash, a worth related to proof of labor computation, was saved. The payload’s mixHash discipline may also be renamed prevRandao.

Right here is an illustration of how the DIFFICULTY & PREVRANDAO opcodes work pre and post-merge:

Pre-merge, we see the 0x44 opcode returns the issue discipline within the block header. Publish-merge, the opcode, renamed to PREVRANDAO, factors to the header discipline which beforehand contained mixHash and now shops the prevRandao worth from the beacon chain state.

This variation, formalized in EIP-4399, additionally offers on-chain purposes a approach to assess whether or not The Merge has occurred. From the EIP:

Moreover, modifications proposed by this EIP enable for sensible contracts to find out whether or not the improve to the PoS has already occurred. This may be achieved by analyzing the return worth of the DIFFICULTY opcode. A price larger than 2**64 signifies that the transaction is being executed within the PoS block.

Block time

The Merge will impression the common block time on Ethereum. Presently underneath proof of labor, blocks are available in on common each ~13 seconds with a good quantity of variance in precise block occasions. Beneath proof of stake, blocks are available in precisely every 12 seconds besides when a slot is missed both as a result of a validator is offline or as a result of they don’t submit a block in time. In apply, this presently occurs in <1% of slots.

This means a ~1 second discount of common block occasions on the community. Sensible contracts which assume a selected common block time of their calculations might want to take this into consideration.

Finalized Blocks & Secure Head

Beneath proof of labor there’s at all times the potential for reorgs. Functions often await a number of blocks to be mined on high of a brand new head earlier than treating it as unlikely to be faraway from the canonical chain, or “confirmed”. After The Merge, we as a substitute have the ideas of finalized blocks and secure head uncovered on the execution layer. These blocks can be utilized extra reliably than the “confirmed” proof of labor blocks however require a shift in understanding to make use of accurately.

A finalized block is one which has been accepted as canonical by >2/3 of validators. To create a conflicting block, an attacker must burn a minimum of 1/3 of the whole staked ether. Whereas stake quantities could range, such an assault is at all times anticipated to price the attacker thousands and thousands of ETH.

A secure head block is one which has been justified by the Beacon Chain, which means that >2/3 of validators have attested to it. Beneath regular community situations, we count on it to be included within the canonical chain and ultimately finalized. For this block to not be a part of the canonical chain, a majority of validators would have to be colluding to assault the community, or the community must be experiencing excessive ranges of latency in block propagation. Publish-merge, execution layer APIs (e.g. JSON RPC) will expose the secure head utilizing a secure tag.

Finalized blocks may also be uncovered through JSON RPC, through a brand new finalized flag. These can then function a stronger substitute for proof of labor confirmations. The desk beneath summarizes this:

Be aware: the JSON RPC specification remains to be underneath lively growth. Naming modifications ought to nonetheless be anticipated.

Subsequent Steps

We hope this put up helps utility builders put together for the much-anticipated transition to proof of stake. Within the subsequent few weeks, a long-lived testnet might be made obtainable for testing by the broader neighborhood. There’s additionally an upcoming Merge community call for infrastructure, tooling and utility builders to ask questions and listen to the most recent technical updates about The Merge. See you there 👋🏻

Thanks to Mikhail Kalinin, Danny Ryan & Matt Garnett for reviewing drafts of this put up.