Ethereum EIP-1559 Progress Update: DoS Risk is Still the Biggest Obstacle

Note: EIP-1559 is one of the most anticipated Ethereum improvement proposals, which will change the Ethereum fee market. According to Tim Beiko, senior product manager at ConsenSys, the biggest obstacle to the implementation of EIP-1559 is still the DoS risk problem, and there are already some solutions. The following is Tim Beiko's summary of the latest progress of EIP-1559:

1. We discussed EIP-1559 again at the AllCoreDevs meeting, and the DoS risk remains the main obstacle to its final deployment, with no new objections for now.

2. Besu and Nethermind clients are syncing to the 1559 testnet, we are debugging Geth consensus issues, and a lot of R&D work is going on;

3. Mainnet readiness checklist is now live;

4. Ethereum Cat Herders released a community survey report on the EIP-1559 proposal!

Implementation Updates

A lot has happened since we published our progress update on EIP-1559 three weeks ago!

First, we discussed EIP-1559 in the AllCoreDevs#97 meeting, where we not only shared the progress of the update, but also asked the relevant client teams about the main obstacles they faced and whether these factors had changed since the discussion in ACD#77.

The good news is that they don’t have any new major objections to EIP-1559! Some minor issues were raised, such as the goal of the EIP being a bit unclear (is it about improving user experience? burning fees? or increasing throughput?), but no new objections have emerged. In addition, the Nethermind team was surprised by the simplification of the specification.

The bad news is that the risk of Denial of Service (DoS) on Ethereum is still a major issue we need to address before deploying EIP-1559. Fortunately, efforts like EIP-2929 (now part of the next temporary testnet YOLOv2) and snapshot methods like Geth (flat state database) may help.

Second, we had another EIP-1559 implementer meeting. We covered a lot: Besu and Nethermind were both syncing on the 1559 Clique testnet, Vulcanize was still trying to debug a consensus issue on Geth, multiple simulation scenarios were in development, and we were ready to start writing changes to the JSON-RPC spec to support EIP-1559 style transactions.

Third, I created a mainnet readiness checklist to document the conditions under which EIP-1559 is ready. I will update as issues arise and are resolved. Given that predicting dates for Ethereum is almost unrealistic, this should help the community understand the progress of EIP-1559.

Our biggest win so far has been getting PR#2924 into the spec, which greatly simplifies EIP-1559! We can now treat legacy transactions as EIP-1559-style transactions, setting the gas price to the sum of the base fee and the tip. This means that legacy transactions don't have to be deprecated (but will pay slightly more in tips), which means we don't have to have a transition period, and we don't have to maintain two parallel transaction pools!

Research and Development Updates

At the implementer meeting, Barnabé Monnot detailed his team’s simulation work. The entire recording is worth listening to, but in short, his team is simulating a variety of potential scenarios, from quantifying the user experience benefits of EIP-1559 to analyzing various user behaviors.

Monnot has published two reports on the results of his simulations, and we can expect to see more shared in the coming weeks. Barnabé also gave a more detailed overview of his work this week as part of the Taipei Ethereum Conference.

Another point worth pointing out is that Vitalik himself mentioned EIP-1559 in his proposed Ethereum roadmap centered on rollups. By making it easier to include the next block in Ethereum, EIP-1559 is beneficial to rollups that rely on on-chain transaction confirmations.

Community Updates

As mentioned in the last update, the Ethereum Cat Herders have reached out to various projects in the community to get feedback on EIP-1559. Now, the Cat Herders have processed the first batch of responses and have published a preliminary community outreach report. The report contains both a summary of the core findings and a FAO answering frequently asked questions.

Ethereum Cat Herders would love to talk to more wallets and exchanges for the next version of the report. If you can help, please reach out to me on Twitter.

Other Updates

1. Vitalik released a new slide deck about EIP-1559;

2. I shared some content about EIP-1559 via video on Bankless;

3. As part of the EthOnline Future of Ethereum summit, I will be giving an overview talk on EIP-1559 on October 23rd.

Next step

If there’s anything you’d like to see in these updates, let me know on Twitter (I’m @timbeiko)!

In the coming weeks, you can expect:

1. There has been more progress on the Geth<>Besu<>Nethermind testnet, hoping to test mining support for EIP-1559 by launching a PoW network;

2. A series of EIPs to add support for 1559 in the JSON-RPC specification. The first one is ready!

3. Ethereum Cat Herders are reaching out more to wallets and exchanges to gather feedback on 1559;

4. Some additional simulation reports may be published to analyze different scenarios;