Christine Kim, Vice President of Galaxy Research, posted that on July 27, Ethereum core developers gathered on Zoom to hold the 114th All-Core Developer Consensus (ACDC) conference call. Moderated by Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, the ACDC conference call is a bi-weekly series where developers discuss and coordinate changes to the Ethereum Consensus Layer (CL). This week, developers discussed updates to Deneb's testing efforts as well as updates to two EIPs that might be considered for inclusion in the next CL upgrade after Deneb, now called Electra.

Last week, developers shadow-forked the Sepolia testnet and are currently updating tools in preparation for the launch of Devnet #8. Devnet #8 is expected to launch later or early next week. Ethereum Foundation researcher Hsiao-Wei Wang is preparing a new version of the CL code spec for Devnet #8, which will be ready for client teams by Monday, July 31st.

There are also two EIP upgrades included in the next update, EIP 6914 and EIP 6110. EIP 6914 This code change creates a way to reuse validator index numbers for validators that have completely exited the beacon chain. By ensuring that there are no large gaps in the validator index as nodes process withdrawals and scan the validator set, this prevents CL nodes from being unnecessarily computationally burdened. EIP 6110 changes to attach new validator deposits to EL blocks so that the responsibility for deposit inclusion and verification is done on EL rather than CL. Shifting responsibility will bring several benefits, including: reduced complexity in Ethereum client software design; increased security of validator deposits; and improved validator user experience.