A host of Ethereum core contributors were recently in Nairobi, Kenya where they conducted some technical upgrades and spent a day engaging builders from the continent.
“Ethereum client, testing and research teams from around the world gathered together for a week of intense work on the Pectra network upgrade, PeerDAS and the Verge,” said Tim Beiko, a non-executive employee of the Ethereum Foundation who runs the core protocol meetings for Ethereum.
“Similarly to previous events like Edelweiss 🏔️ or Amphora 🏺, the focus of the Nyota ✨ interop was achieving multi-client interoperability across the different technical tracks.”
Ahead of their scheduled work activities, the contributors participated in Frontier Africa on May 12 2024, an event which drew over 350 local attendees from across the continent. This was a day of exchanging with L1 contributors about the Ethereum roadmap, paths to becoming a core dev, building applications for African users & more.
#Vitalik, the Founder of #Ethereum, back in Kenya for the #EthereumFrontiersAfrica @VitalikButerin pic.twitter.com/sXYO1O91NZ
— BitKE (@BitcoinKE) May 12, 2024
Beiko said the continent became a top contenteder to host the one-week interop work, inspired by the impactful trips that took place in Africa in 2023.
To maximize the impact of having over 100 core Ethereum contributors in one of the places that can most benefit from it, they organized a one day community event right before interop: Frontiers Africa.
This year’s interop event, dubbed Nyota, focussed on 3 main technical tracks:
- Pectra – The main focus of Nyota was cross-client interoperability on devnet-0. Teams were expected to come to interop with full implementations and spend the week gradually building towards multi-client devnets running smoothly
- Verkle – In addition to implementation work, one key goal for the Verkle track was to try and resolve many outstanding spec issues. The various sessions on the topic resulted in a draft PR to the EIP for broader discussion before finalizing the changes
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PeerDAS – Last but not least, the PeerDAS track is likely the one where the most progress was made throughout the interop. At the start of the week, only two of the consensus layer clients had partial implementations. By end of week, all six teams could distribute and receive data to subnets, all but one could serve the data over RPC, multi-client devnets had been stood up, and some teams had started working on sync integrations!
Expect the notes and draft PRs coming out of Nyota to be refined into formal specs & proposals over the next few weeks. While many ideas were discussed throughout the week, any changes to the Ethereum protocol will be brought up, as always, on AllCoreDevs calls.
Over the next few weeks, teams expect to finalize the scope of the Pectra network upgrade and continue testing their implementations. Once this process has completed, an announcement will be made for the upgrade deployment on existing testnets.
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