Ethereum at Berlinterop: fusaka-devnet-1, berlinterop-devnet-2, and Gas Limit tests – all part of core scalability and efficiency upgrades. Despite all of Ethereum’s technical advancements over its competitors, we’re seeing ETH price movement, Ethereum Foundation leadership changes, its strategy updates, and even scandals surrounding these events. Let’s observe further developments.
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Ethereum Checkpoint #4 – fusaka-devnet, Gas Limit testing, and Other Critical Improvements
The interop week held as part of Berlin Blockchain Week began with the launch of fusaka-devnet-1, a new network, berlinterop-devnet-2 by day five. Developers identified numerous critical changes that will require discussion in the ACD process before being included in the main network. If approved, the next step will be to move to Sepolia toward the end of the summer, without the need for a devnet-3.
A stress-testing challenge with a leaderboard was held during the week, where developers earned points for breaking or hardening the devnets. They reached a consensus on a safe immediate throughput level and a plan for reaching 45M. Client optimizations that ensure the safety of this level are expected to be released within the next week.
“Interop weeks are enormously productive as they remove async-communication barriers and create contagious motivation among devs and researchers.”
A broad range of L2 and ZK teams participated. For example, the L2 session featured representatives from Arbitrum, Base, OP Labs, Polygon, Scroll, ZKsync, and others. They outlined three key areas of focus:
- L2s as users of L1 – increasing the number of blobs and reducing finality time;
- L2s as stakeholders in EVM changes – the need for early awareness of changes affecting calldata and extensibility;
- L2s as a source of architectural expertise – scaling proposals based on real-world experience with high-throughput systems.
The ZK section brought together more than 15 teams, including Brevis, Scroll, RISC Zero, Matter Labs, ZKM, and Starkware. Their top focus areas included:
- Guest programs and ISA – teams agreed that it’s too early to enshrine any specific ISA; riscv64gc-unknown-linux-elf remains the preferred target. Nethermind aims to publish its zkVM benchmarking framework by year-end.
- Standardization and security – consensus was reached on unifying syscalls and shared Rust libraries calling precompiles; a 300KB proof size was considered acceptable, and the groth16 wrapper was deemed unnecessary.
- zk-stateless client – the goal is to launch a zk-verified stateless client (based on Reth) by year-end. The main challenges include censorship-resistant state sources and prover incentive models.
Slot Restructuring, History Expiry, and Consensus Layer Hardening
The slot restructuring session covered two directions: shortening slot times and adjusting sub-slot timing structure. Dependencies discussed included ePBS, Delayed Execution, and FOCIL. Benefits included fresher market data, smaller block sizes, more competitive builder markets, and improved censorship resistance.
Two action items resulted:
- addressing the outstanding questions in the active PR
- adjusting spec language so clients must attest as soon as a block is validated, and then wait until the four-second mark
For history expiry, progress was made on Era file specifications. In the coming weeks, details will be published on default validator behavior to drop pre-merge history on the mainnet, as well as a planned mechanism for distributing dropped history. The architecture will be discussed during an upcoming open community call on Friday.
The CL-hardening effort covered 26 areas for improving the resilience of the consensus layer. Among the most important were enabling checkpoint sync from a nonfinalized state and optimizing client resource usage during nonfinality periods. Ongoing discussions are happening in the #consensus-dev channel of the Ethereum R&D Discord server.
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Conclusion
It’s hard to overstate how foundational the changes the Ethereum Foundation is introducing really are, and how actively they are approaching implementation. The roadmap for these improvements reaches far ahead and is densely packed, which is also a positive signal. The main thing is that these changes remain coherent and continue to reflect the interests of all parties. Stay tuned for updates in crypto, blockchain, and DeFi.
