## [STEEL - February 2025] - Prague Devnet-6 - EELS and EEST integration - Hiring - EELS & EEST in the EIP Process - EOF Testing ## - Prague Devnet-6 Specs and Testing On February 13th, EELS made their first release that follows the new versioning scheme to mark the specification of Prague's Devnet-6, which is the same finalized spec that will make it to Mainnet: https://github.com/ethereum/execution-specs/releases/tag/v1.17.0rc6.dev1 On January 30th, EEST made their last pre-release that also follows the Devnet-6 spec: https://github.com/ethereum/execution-spec-tests/releases/tag/pectra-devnet-6%40v1.0.0 This release was used to verify client implementations using hive to validate their readiness before joining the Devnet-6. The release contains more than 22,000 tests that were written through the course of this and last year and incorporate all Execution Layer EIPs that are included in the Pectra Hard-fork. ## - EELS and EEST integration Some quality-of-life improvements were implemented this month that improve EELS+EEST integration: - Tracing is now enabled to allow easier debugging when writing tests in EEST and filling them using EELS (Thanks to Felipe from the Snake-Charmers for driving this feature!): https://github.com/ethereum/execution-spec-tests/pull/1174, https://github.com/ethereum/execution-specs/pull/1109 We are also planning on bringing some of the libraries that are used by both repositories together in order to have less code duplication. ## - Legacy Test Porting Efforts continued this month to translate legacy [ethereum/tests](https://github.com/ethereum/tests/) into EEST this month: - [EIP-152 precompiled contracts with Blake2](https://github.com/ethereum/execution-spec-tests/pull/1067) - by Stu from the Snake-Charmers. - [Calldata copy tests](https://github.com/ethereum/execution-spec-tests/pull/1056) - by Paul from the Snake-Charmers - [A Guide to Porting Original Ethereum Tests to EEST](https://ethereum.github.io/execution-spec-tests/main/dev/porting_legacy_tests/) - by Rahul from ARG We also now have a label in the EEST repository to easily track the effort: https://github.com/ethereum/execution-spec-tests/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+label%3Aport ## - EELS & EEST in the EIP Process This month we created a PR to the EIP repo in order to update EIP-7723 and include EELS and EEST as part of the process of getting an EIP included in the Ethereum upgrading cycle: - [Update EIP-7723: Update 7723 to include EELS/EEST in CFI](https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/9290) The topic was brought on the [ACD call on February the 13th](https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/1271#issuecomment-2631397146) and was generally well received although some challenges were brought up by some of the developers: - Having EELS and EEST implementations as prerequisites for the EIP to be included in the fork could lead to "gate-keeping" by the repositories maintainers. As a potential solution, it was decided that opening a PR would suffice and that having the PR merged was not required. - Concerns about the python implementations being an unnecessary overhead from the client devs perspective, since a client proposing an EIP would have to implement it twice (once in EELS and once in their own client). The STEEL team argued that having a neutral implementation where all EIPs are implemented is very valuable for the testing cycle, since it becomes a burden to generate tests when there's multiple implementations in different clients of multiple EIPs that must be combined. - Concerns regarding teams' bandwidth, EELS & EEST, with one perspective from the Stateless (verkle) team stating that, during last year, EEST team was unable to deliver in time some of the tests that they required because the team was "severely understaffed". We have already started expanding the team this year, and also we consider the repositories more approachable from how they were last year, making the repos much more friendly to EIP-writers and newcommers who wish to implement in EEST & EELS themselves. ## - Hiring Felix officially joined the team at the beginning of February to focus on the EEST repository and testing of the upcoming features to the Execution Layer. We also extended an offer to Carson, who accepted to join the team on March to focus in EELS and work alongside Sam, Peter and Guru. We are still working on finding candidates to fill the Consensus Layer Testing position. Some candidates have made it to the second technical interview and for many different reasons we have decided not to extend an offer yet.