EIPs Simplified: History and Process Explained | Devcon SEA

Hi. Hi, Alicia. Hi. Everybody, let's get excited about EIPs. This is officially the most excited anyone's ever been about EIP specifications.

Hi, I'm Hudson. I'm here today to talk about EIPs and their history along with Pooja. My introduction is that I work for Polygon Labs, but I used to do a lot of stuff in the protocol dev space for Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation. And I co-founded Ethereum Cat Herders, which is now run by Pooja. Pooja, do your intro.

Thank you so much, Hudson. I'm super excited and honored to be here at Ethereum's biggest developers conference, Devcon. This is my first time at Devcon, and this is my first time here on the stage. I hope that we are going to provide you good history of evolution of EIPs that started back in 2015, and Ethereum Cat Herders are now supporting it. So, um how we are going about it is like Hudson will provide you the basic con- concept of Cat Her- basic concept of EIPs, and then we'll take it from there.

Yep, absolutely. We got a lot of fun stats for you nerds out there. So, yeah, let's take it away. Um so, some of you here might like heard of EIPs, but not might not be aware of what they are. So, I'm here to give just a basic definition and then go into a little bit more about it.

So, an EIP stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposal. It's a design document to provide information for the Ethereum community to describe a feature for Ethereum. So, basically, it's the rules that we put in so that everyone can follow the same specification, the same set of standards, whether that be at the protocol level, so like how a geth client runs, how the protocol and network operate, or community standards up to a time such as the ERC-20 token standard and things like that. And they're a major opponent of Ethereum's decentralized governance. So, coming here today I realized that a lot of you might be in the younger crowd or on TikTok.

So, rather than actually go through the white paper step by step, I'm going to be going through the highlights while having this video run of a TikTok style white paper scroll down. So, that'll be hopefully keeping you all engaged as I talk about this. So, EIP-1, it yeah, describes the types of EIPs and how to write an EIP. So, if you're working on a decentralized system like Ethereum, like truly everyone has to come together and work on this thing. So, most people, you know, don't really know how that process works cuz there's a lot of stuff in the weeds.

As Pooja's going to explain, the Ethereum cat herders have done a great job of taking that process and making it a little bit more transparent for everybody. Um, but the types of EIPs are core EIPs. Those are the ones for the protocols like I mentioned. ERCs were an EIP for a while, but have recently been branched out into their own repository. We can go over that a little more later if anyone's interested.

There will be a Q&A section. So, feel free to queue up your Q&As. Um, and yeah, basically there's also some EIP editors. Those are the ones that go in and make sure that the EIP process is running smoothly. They're meant to more be like book editors.

They're not meant to actually make judgment calls on the like if the EIP is good or bad or right or wrong. They're here to make judgment calls on are they doing citations correctly? Is this within the realm of the rules of the EIP process? And over the years there's been different EIPs. I was an EIP for a very EIP editor for a very long time.

All right. Here's a quick history of it. Uh I'm going to bring back the video. Started in 2015 um after announcement at Devcon 1. It was based off of the Bitcoin improvement proposals, which is similar uh in nature where they're upgrading Bitcoin, and then also the Python improvement proposals where they uh have specifications to update Python among their diverse developer group.

Um EIP 1 was written by Martin Becze um and then heavily rewritten by me a year later. Um in the first year, there was like less than 20 EIPs written. So, we were like, let's uh spruce this up a little bit. And uh yeah, with that, there was a lot more EIPs written after. This is one of the ones I like to highlight as something that, you know, people might have heard about the DAO uh fork.

The at the time of the DAO fork, EIPs weren't being heavily used. So, after the fact, someone came in and made what's called a meta EIP, which goes on to explain, you know, what went into a previous hard fork or change in the protocol. Um as you can see, these are technical specifications. This isn't like, I'm coming in with an opinion, and we should make uh the official color of Ethereum green. This is like, "Hey, we should all you know, change all of our client code so that it can have a compression algorithm called uh Snappy compression, and the you know, data goes smoother or something like that."

For this one, the hard fork meta, it actually points out that there wasn't a a rollback on the DAO. There was just a regular state transition, and it defines it. So, if anyone is like, "Oh, you know, how did they do the DAO stuff?" You could go in here and see exactly how it's done. And if you're building a client, you can copy the specification.

External specification, multiple clients implementing the specification. Now, I'm going to pass this over to Pooja for the really cool stuff. Uh what's been happening since 2019 when the Ethereum cat herder started to play a role in all this. Pooja, come on. Give them a hand.

Thank you so much Hudson for providing the basic be great if you had this clicker that I stole from you. Thank you Hudson for providing the basic overview of what EIPs are and how we have evolved it over a period of time. Now we discussed about the EIP one which basically documents the process. If anybody wants to propose a proposal, how they can do that. It's everything over there online.

I'm going to fast forward a few years and start talking about how we are moving forward with it. This image. I'm sure Ethereum developers may relate with this. And people who are following all core dev calls regularly may understand what does this signifies. There are so many good proposals out there.

Developers are proposing different proposal for the improvement of Ethereum blockchain to make sure the blockchain is running smoothly securely and be able to achieve all the all the ideas that we had in the initial days of having a decentralized community. Not possible to include all of these upgrade all of these EIPs into one upgrade and I know this is a challenge for coordinators. Hudson had been all core dev coordinator for very long time. Yeah, now that was that that sucked hard. I'm glad it's better now, Pooja.

Let's go over why it's better. So as we understand among many other challenges of decentralized community, the biggest challenge was how we are going to do these upgrades. How do we select these EIPs and what the process should look like. There were multiple proposals shared with us by the community starting with EIP 233 by Axic Alex Bergsazi. He is also one of the EIP editors.

He shared a proposal to suggest how we should have the hard fork which is now called as network upgrade. Later on uh um Afri uh proposed another suggestion on how we should do that. A few years down the line when I joined, I looked into all these proposals and suggested something on top of EIP-233 like how we should go ahead and select EIPs and when we should mark it as like closing line. We cannot accept any more proposal after this because we need to get it tested and we need to get it uh deployed on uh public testnet to make sure that it is it would be running very well on the main net when it is deployed. If people are following Devcon, there was a talk by Tim Beiko and Danny Ryan on flight and train model of network upgrade process.

Perhaps you can watch it later on. The best outcome of all these discussions were very interesting fact and that fact was how we should name EIPs. As people may know, Ethereum has two layer execution layer and the consensus layer. So, all the execution layer upgrades were named after the Devcon city, starting with Devcon zero, Berlin. Uh all the upgrades were named after that.

And at the time we were into proof of work, so we also had to look into the upgrades which were required for ice age. So, for ice age, people decided to go with glaciers. You can find Muir Glacier, Grey Glacier, so on so forth. Similarly, when uh beacon chain was launched after a year, people had to do upgrade for the beacon chain and the first upgrade they said that we are not going to stick just to city. We are going to go sky and get the names from stars.

And they started getting names alphabetically. The first upgrade they had was Altair upgrade, then Bellatrix, then Capella, and so on so forth. To manage all these chaos, Ethereum cat herders were brought into picture. We we we thought that we would be helping Ethereum blockchain in a way that with this chaos, we bring the minimum amount of order that Ethereum may need to move forward. We try to come up with different ideas.

EIP IP is one of the most important ideas where we are looking into the process improvement of EIP process and network upgrade. One question that was there in everybody's mind like how we are going to manage the standardization of EIPs as well as the network upgrade. So, the first thing that was done was the splitting up of these two processes. The we don't want to have it dependent. As we understand, Ethereum was growing.

Many proposals were in line. Many proposals made it to the final status, but some of them could not. I'm going to talk about some of the proposals which actually helped shaping Ethereum's future which which helped shaping the process that is being done here. Most of the process-related proposals are documented as meta E and for them we have editors to review. So, there's an EIP which I have documented to suggest editors guideline how people can join us, support us as an editor.

About the network upgrade, we already discussed there were so many proposals out there and uh we are now having a proposal where we are defining how EIP can be categorized into different stages of network upgrade. You can find so many stages of inclusion right here like proposed for inclusion, considered for inclusion, scheduled for inclusion, and that's not all about it. Yesterday we had a workshop. There is one more DFI coming for you. So, stay tuned for that as well.

These are our great EIP editors who have helped shape our Ethereum blockchain, but this is not all. This is just from 2019 till date whom we have onboarded recently. There were many more editors. Hudson was also one of those and as he mentioned that Martin and many many more people were there. Some of the editors are not active anymore, but their contribution cannot go cannot be forgotten about it because they have worked so hard to bring us where we are today.

Let's have a quick recap of magical moment of Ethereum. Ethereum started with Genesis and 2015. Then we had that DAO hard fork. Hudson talked about it. Proof of stake came in 2022.

The rise of DeFi right after the ERC-20 token launch and in 2024 4844 integration with layer two projects. Here are some of the fun facts that I have collected from EIP-1. EIP-1 as I mentioned is our master document that describes the process and also suggests how things should move forward. So as we know that there are over 7,000 Like the number current number of EIPs is over 7,000, but the those are not sequential. We really do not have 7,000 EIPs.

Sequential number numbering started to happen from 2023. Before that we were using different methods. We were trying to organize these things. So we came up with some centralization idea. One of those were the fellowship of Ethereum Magician.

Like people if you want to discuss your proposal, there has to be one place where people can find all sort of information. Pro comments, against comments, specification changes comments and everything else. If this is something which is decentralized, it's become very hard to identify the issue and it becomes too late to fix the specs before it goes on to the mainnet. So what one quick thing, the external link one which was basically like the longest GitHub discussion I've ever been in. That was the like most heated not not most heated, but it was like, "Hey, we shouldn't have people doing external links cuz they could expire."

And then everybody had a very strong opinion for a year and a half. Some of these take a year and a half to get through. That's why decentralized governance is really hard, but really worth it because we end up with stuff like this. Right. The EIP-5757 is something that is helping out with the addition of permission for the external link that authors can add.

I was talking this morning with an ERC editor and he was having so much concern that I cannot make an EIP without adding an external link. So, this is the way to get your external links in. Here are some more fun facts for you as you may understand that not all EIPs make it to the final status. Some of them are stagnant, some of them are withdrawn, many of them are in process, but at any point of time we have around 25% of proposals which are into final status. I would like to highlight the last chart on the on your right side, maybe.

You can look into that. We have received the highest number of drafts in 2024 and the purple line, 52% of them were ERC. So, our editors are doing an incredible job of managing all these pull requests and merging them as drafts. Let's have a quick look at my vision of seeing this standardization process and network upgrade process. I would love to see these process go automated as much as possible.

Right now, sequential numbering is happening, but it is happening with the help of manual intervention. Someone has to allocate this number. I would love to get up a bot do that and most of the review process being managed by the GitHub uh bot we can create as much as possible. It would be nice to uh keep a track of implementation because that is very important the standard we are creating is being implemented by different projects. Similarly, on upgrade side we would love to have a fixed cadence if it is possible at all.

I know it's challenging, the community comes up with different ideas every other day, but it would be nice to know when we should be expecting an upgrade. So, this is my dream. I hope one day we get over there. We are looking forward to have a better process for brighter Ethereum. Thank you everyone for coming out and listening patiently for this.

If you have any question, please feel free to share. Yes, please go ahead. Uh yeah, I don't have to do it in mic or if they're doing a Oh, here we go. Yes. Yes.

Oh, we're actually not doing live Q&A. So, you scan the QR code and you can No, I'm I'm I'm sorry. Unfortunately, we have to do it. This is the process for everything at Devcon is you scan the QR code and you put the question there cuz we don't have microphones to hand to people. So, if you have a question, go ahead and scan that QR code right there and we will get your answers and you can see them up there and you can vote for them.

So, this is the the whole process for all of Devcon. Um Sorry that I can't take live questions. Oh, no worries. I have another solution for you. Ethereum Cat Herders have an impact booth right outside.

If we can't answer any of your question right here, please come find us outside. Yeah, what I was going to mention, I want to make sure before we got off stage, the Ethereum Cat Herders, we didn't go deeply into what that is. A lot of it deals with EIPs, but uh it actually is a really really really good way to get started in Ethereum if you've just been like browsing Twitter, maybe not posting, but you're like, I kind of want to start talking to people, getting involved. Uh if you go to Ethereum Cat Herders uh Discord, if you go into some of the spaces, it's very welcoming and there's things you can do even for small uh bounties like uh taking notes at core developer meetings or some of the side protocol meetings. Uh so, I think that that's really important.

Actually, how does it work now? I haven't been there in a while. It is pretty cool that I'm very happy to share that not only it provides an opportunity to make your first step to the Ethereum ecosystem, but also if your work is being appreciated by client team, you can perhaps make a room in your client development team. So, please come find us. We are here to help out with anything that may help you get involved with Ethereum protocol development.

Absolutely. Um, I don't think there's any questions, so Yes. Thank you guys so much. Um, and again, for every stage, it's going to be that QR code to ask questions. Um, it should be super, super simple.

Um, thank you guys so much, and we will start our next session at 1:00 p.m. Um, so you guys have a short little break before that. And again, please feel to feel free to speak to our speakers if you had any questions that you didn't get to ask right now. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you, everybody.