# Merge call Quick call notes, 1 July 2021 ## Implementation updates ### Transition prototype Teku prototype progress of the Merge transition: https://github.com/txrx-research/teku/pull/5 ## Research updates ### New API Food for thought, API to change. Listed known problems: https://hackmd.io/@n0ble/problems_of_consensus_json_rpc JSON-RPC from rayonism is sufficient for a prototype, not quite for production. - Micah: Unidirectional vs Bidirectional, undecided: - bidirectional is considered "highly desirable" (Mikhail) - unidirectional was used in Rayonism - Consensus block validity: Set-head and block-insertion have different meanings, validity must not rely on set-head only - Independent message flow: Remove assumption of sequential messages in API - HTTP overhead and HTTP asynchronous communication problem - Failure recoverability - Depends on bidirectional communication - Extensibility - Danny: state-sync has requirements too - HTTP 1: has keep-alive header, widely supported, but not a good candidate for bidirectional comms - HTTP 2: can be persistent, but support may not be good - Websockets: supports bi-directional, easy to use/support everywhere Mikhail: encoding for another discussion, also to consider with new API Remaining discussion: Payload size, compression, encoding, etc. relevant too. Jacek: against complexity, too many connections / protocols (libp2p TCP, discv4 UDP, discv5 UDP, devp2p TCP, eth2 api JSON-REST, eth1 JSON-RPC http/ws, etc.). Micah: Execution and Consensus clients will likely have separate API interfaces, even in far future, since they innovate/extend independently with non-standard API. ## Q3 - State sync for Merge - Consensus API (both exec/consensus teams to work on this) - Testnets in later part of this quarter - Include London in execution client - Include Altair in consensus client - Testing! Unified eth1/eth2 testing especially - Merge call / Consensus/Execution calls may reorganize Danny/Mikhail: prepared more detailed list of things to look into for Merge, will post to PM repo