Ethereum’s core developers are discussing the priorities for the next hard fork, potentially in late 2024 or 2025, following the Dencun fork. The debate is between a feature-focused set of smaller Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) or a major protocol upgrade introducing Verkle Trees to the execution layer. Verkle Trees, a new data structure, use less space and can be verified faster, addressing the issue of “state bloat.”However, there’s no consensus yet. Some developers advocate for focusing on Verkle Trees, while others suggest a feature-rich fork before fully turning to Verkle Trees. Among the features discussed, the EVM Object Format (EOF) and EIP-7002 were mentioned. EOF could be implemented by a smaller team and was a more isolated change to the code base. EIP-7002, the most upvoted EIP in the Ethereum Magicians forum, fixes a major design bug with staking.Another feature, EIP-7549, which only affects the consensus layer, aims to reduce the average number of pairings needed to verify consensus rules. After EIP-7549, the number of attestations needed for consensus would be reduced to just 22 from 1366. The specific approach and improvement proposals will be decided at a later date.
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