Ethereum developers are gearing up for an upgrade that could bring about the most fundamental changes to the network's programming environment since the first smart contract blockchain shook the cryptocurrency industry when it launched nearly a decade ago.

This Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) is called the EVM Object Format (EOF). The proposal has been heavily discussed by developers this year, with some participants concerned about potential security risks. The EOF is now set to be included in a major change package expected later this year or early next year, called the Pectra hard fork.

The EOF proposal is a series of smaller changes aimed at updating the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the programming environment that executes smart contracts on the blockchain and is said to be Ethereum's secret to differentiating itself from Bitcoin and other early decentralized networks when it launched in 2015.

Specifically, EOF will make smart contracts more developer-friendly, especially for those building decentralized applications using the Solidity or Vyper programming languages. A series of extremely subtle changes could break existing smart contracts, so the developers added a new version that allows decentralized application (dApp) builders to choose which version of the EVM to use when deploying their code.

Parithosh Jayanthi, core developer at the Ethereum Foundation, said:

“EOF will be the first major change to the EVM in many years. It sets the stage for future upgrades to the EVM and demonstrates the intent of the base layers to continue improving the EVM.”

EVM Standard

As the first and largest smart contract blockchain, Ethereum defined the programming standard that many other blockchains have adopted. Other layer 1 blockchains have also found ways to be compatible with the EVM, recognizing the importance of this piece of technology in the blockchain industry.

But developers are now looking to introduce a newer version of the EVM to enable more secure smart contracts and dApps to be written, and some developers have some concerns that the process will have unintended consequences for the network.

Currently, the EOF component of Ethereum's next Pectra hardfork upgrade consists of 11 EIPs.

EOF proposals were proposed in the previous Dencun upgrade, but as Ethereum developers wanted to work on proto-danksharding – another important improvement that would make storing data on the blockchain cheaper and faster – they removed EOF and proposed Pectra to reconsider.

One notable EOF critic is core developer Marius Van Der Wijden. He said in an interview at the Ethereum Community Conference in Brussels:

“The problem I see is that doing these operations, doing these verifications, these checks is also part of the consensus. That means if we implement our verification process successfully and there is a bug in it, it will have an unexpected problem.”

Van Der Wijden's deep concern with EOF is “the big disadvantage we're going to have to maintain this EVM alongside the old EVM. Because the old one's not going to go away, is it? And people are pretty much using the old one.”

However, most core developers say that the benefits EOF will bring to the Ethereum ecosystem far outweigh the risks.

Danno Ferrin, an independent contributor to the Besu client team, says:

“EOF is ready, the implementation is complete, and language users like Solidity are supporting it. Once the feature is ready and complete, it’s time to ship it or kill it forever. EOF also solves a huge number of technical problems that EVM has not solved since its inception,” Ferrin said.



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