@ethereumjs/block v5.0.0-rc.1

This is the release candidate (RC1) for the upcoming breaking releases on the various EthereumJS libraries. The associated release notes below are the main source of information on the changeset, also for the upcoming final releases, where we'll just provide change addition summaries + references to these RC1 notes.

At time of the RC1 releases there is/was no plan for a second RC round and breaking releases following relatively shorty (2-3 weeks) after the RC1 round. Things may change though depending on the feedback we'll receive.

Introduction

This round of breaking releases brings the EthereumJS libraries to the browser. Finally! 🤩

While you could use our libraries in the browser libraries before, there had been caveats.

WE HAVE ELIMINATED ALL OF THEM.

The largest two undertakings: First: we have rewritten all (half) of our API and elimited the usage of Node.js specific Buffer all over the place and have rewritten with using Uint8Array byte objects. Second: we went throuh our whole stack, rewrote imports and exports, replaced and updated dependencies all over and are now able to provide a hybrid CommonJS/ESM build, for all libraries. Both of these things are huge.

Together with some few other modifications this now allows to run each (maybe adding an asterisk for client and devp2p) of our libraries directly in the browser - more or less without any modifications - see the examples/browser.html file in each package folder for an easy to set up example.

This is generally a big thing for Ethereum cause this brings the full Ethereum Execution Layer (EL) protocol stack to the browser in an easy accessible way for developers, for the first time ever! 🎉

This will allow for easy-to-setup browser applications both around the existing as well as the upcoming Ethereum EL protocol stack in the future. 🏄🏾‍♂️ We are beyond excitement to see what you guys will be building with this for "Browser-Ethereum". 🤓

Browser is not the only thing though why this release round is exciting: default Shanghai hardfork, full Cancun support, significantly smaller bundle sizes for various libraries, new database abstractions, a simpler to use EVM, API clean-ups throughout the whole stack. These are just the most prominent additional things here to mention which will make the developer heart beat a bit faster hopefully when you are scanning to the vast release notes for every of the 15 (!) releases! 🧑🏽‍💻

So: jump right in and enjoy. We can't wait to hear your feedback and see if you agree that these releases are as good as we think they are. 🙂 ❤️

The EthereumJS Team

Default Shanghai HF / Merge -> Paris Renaming / Full Cancun Hardfork Support

The Shanghai hardfork is now the default HF in @ethereumjs/common and therefore for all libraries who use a Common-based HF setting internally (e.g. Tx, Block or EVM), see PR #2655.

Also the Merge HF has been renamed to Paris (Hardfork.Paris) which is the correct HF name on the execution side, see #2652. To set the HF to Paris in Common you can do:

import { Chain, Common, Hardfork } from '@ethereumjs/common'
const common = new Common({ chain: Chain.Mainnet, hardfork: Hardfork.Paris })

And third on hardforks 🙂: the upcoming Cancun hardfork is now fully supported and all EIPs are included (see PRs #2659 and #2892). The Cancun HF can be activated with:

import { Chain, Common, Hardfork } from '@ethereumjs/common'
const common = new Common({ chain: Chain.Mainnet, hardfork: Hardfork.Cancun })

Note that not all Cancun EIPs are in a FINAL EIP state though and particularly EIP-4844 will likely still receive some changes.

New API to set Hardforks

Our APIs to (re-)set a a hardfork within a library had grown old over all changes on how this is done over the years. 😂

We therefore removed the outdated getHardforkByBlockNumber() and setHardforkByBlockNumber() methods in @ethereumjs/common (artificially expanded with the option to also pass a TD or timestamp) with a more adequate hardforkBy() method flexibly taking in the adequate value type for a HF change, see PR #2798:

common.setHardforkBy({ blockNumber: 5000000n }) // Setting a mainnet common to a Block from `Byzantium` (and so: to `Byzantium` HF)
common.setHardforkBy({ timestamp: 1681340000n }) // Setting a mainnet common to a post-Shanghai timestamp
common.setHardforkBy({ blockNumber, timestamp }) // Setting a common with to a not pre-known HF using both block number and timestamp

There is a third option td which is Merge specific and should normally not be used except for a very rare set of dynamic Merge-HF scenarios.

For the Block library we also updated the old concurrent hardforkByBlockNumber and hardforkByTTD options to a unified and simplified setHardfork option for the constructor, see PR #2800.

API Validation Methods Clean-Up

We have cleaned up and unified the validation methods in the Block library, see PR #2792.

The Block.validateTransactions() method, previously overloaded with different return types depending on the input, has been split up into:

Block.transactionsAreValid(): boolean
Block.getTransactionsValidationErrors(): string[]

Other renamings:

Block.validateTransactionsTrie(): Promise<boolean> // old
Block.transactionsTrieIsValid(): Promise<boolean> // new

Block.validateUnclesHash(): boolean // old
Block.uncleHashIsValid(): boolean // new

Block.validateWithdrawalsTrie(): Promise<boolean> // old
Block.withdrawalsTrieIsValid(): Promise<boolean> // new

EIP-4844 Support (Status: Review, 4844-devnet-7, July 2023)

While there might be last-round final tweaks, EIP-4844 is closing in on its final format. A lot of spec changes happened during the last 2-3 months and these are included in this release round. So the released version should be relatively close to a future production ready version.

This release supports EIP-4844 along this snapshot b9a5a11from the EIP repository with the EIP being in Review status and features/changes included which made it into 4844-devnet-7.

KZG Initialization -> @ethereumjs/util

The global initialization method for the KZG setup has been moved to a dedicated kzg.ts module in @ethereumjs/util for easy reuse across the libraries, see PR #2567.

The initKZG() method can be used as follows:

// Make the kzg library available globally
import * as kzg from 'c-kzg'
import { initKZG } from '@ethereumjs/util'

// Initialize the trusted setup
initKZG(kzg, 'path/to/my/trusted_setup.txt')

For further information on this see the respective section in @ethereumjs-util README.

New Block Header field: dataGasUsed / new excessDataGas Helpers

For the Block library the most significant change is that there is now a new header field dataGasUsed if EIP-4844 is activated (via Common), see PR #2750.

Additionally there are the following three dataGasUsed/excessDataGas related new helper methods:

BlockHeader.getDataGasPrice(): bigint
BlockHeader.calcDataFee(numBlobs: number): bigint
BlockHeader.calcNextExcessDataGas(): bigint

Other Library Changes

• Update eip4844 blocks/txs to decoupled blobs spec, PR #2567

Block: fromExecutionPayload() / fromBeaconPayloadJson()

Two new handy constructors have been added to the Block class to bring the consensus and execution parts of Ethereum closer together:

Block.fromBeaconPayloadJson() allows to initialize an Ethereum execution layer (EL) block with a payload received from the beacon chain (consensus layer (CL)) via an RPC call. 🤩 The new constructor can be used as follows:

const block = await Block.fromBeaconPayloadJson(payload, { common })

If you already have the execution payload embedded within a beacon block you can alternatively directly use the Block.fromExecutionPayload() constructor.

Hybrid CJS/ESM Build

We now provide both a CommonJS and an ESM build for all our libraries. 🥳 This transition was a huge undertaking and should make the usage of our libraries in the browser a lot more straight-forward, see PR #2685, #2783, #2786, #2764, #2804 and #2809 (and others). We rewrote the whole set of imports and exports within the libraries, updated or completely removed a lot of dependencies along the way and removed the usage of all native Node.js primitives (like https or util).

There are now two different build directories in our dist folder, being dist/cjs for the CommonJS and dist/esm for the ESM build. That means that direct imports (which you generally should try to avoid, rather open an issue on your import needs), need an update within your code (do a dist or the like code search).

Both builds have respective separate entrypoints in the distributed package.json file.

A CommonJS import of our libraries can then be done like this:

const { Chain, Common } = require('@ethereumjs/common')
const common = new Common({ chain: Chain.Mainnet })

And this is how an ESM import looks like:

import { Chain, Common } from '@ethereumjs/common'
const common = new Common({ chain: Chain.Mainnet })

Using ESM will give you additional advantages over CJS beyond browser usage like static code analysis / Tree Shaking which CJS can not provide.

Side note: along this transition we also rewrote our whole test suite (yes!!!) to now work with Vitest instead of Tape.

Buffer -> Uint8Array

With these releases we remove all Node.js specific Buffer usages from our libraries and replace these with Uint8Array representations, which are available both in Node.js and the browser (Buffer is a subclass of Uint8Array). While this is a big step towards interoperability and browser compatibility of our libraries, this is also one of the most invasive operations we have ever done, see the huge changeset from PR #2566 and #2607. 😋

We nevertheless think this is very much worth it and we tried to make transition work as easy as possible.

How to upgrade?

For this library you should check if you use one of the following constructors, methods, constants or types and do a search and update input and/or output values or general usages and add conversion methods if necessary:

// header
BlockHeader.fromHeaderData(headerData: HeaderData = {}, opts: BlockOptions = {})
BlockHeader.fromRLPSerializedHeader(serializedHeaderData: Uint8Array, opts: BlockOptions = {})
BlockHeader.fromValuesArray(values: BlockHeaderBytes, opts: BlockOptions = {})
new BlockHeader() // deprecated
BlockHeader.raw(): BlockHeaderBytes
BlockHeader.hash(): Uint8Array
BlockHeader.cliqueExtraVanity(): Uint8Array // clique PoA only
BlockHeader.cliqueExtraSeal(): Uint8Array // clique PoA only
BlockHeader.serialize(): Uint8Array

// block
Block.fromBlockData(blockData: BlockData = {}, opts?: BlockOptions)
Block.fromRLPSerializedBlock(serialized: Uint8Array, opts?: BlockOptions)
Block.fromValuesArray(values: BlockBytes, opts?: BlockOptions)
new Block() // deprecated
Block.raw(): BlockBytes
Block.hash(): Uint8Array
Block.serialize(): Uint8Array

We have converted existing Buffer conversion methods to Uint8Array conversion methods in the @ethereumjs/util bytes module, see the respective README section for guidance.

Prefixed Hex Strings as Default

The mixed usage of prefixed and unprefixed hex strings is a constant source of errors in byte-handling code bases.

We have therefore decided to go "prefixed" by default, see PR #2830 and #2845.

The hexToBytes and bytesToHex methods, also similar methods like intToHex, now take 0x-prefixed hex strings as input and output prefixed strings. The corresponding unprefixed methods are marked as deprecated and usage should be avoided.

Please therefore check your code base on updating and ensure that values you are passing to constructors and methods are prefixed with a 0x.

Other Changes

• Support for Node.js 16 has been removed (minimal version: Node.js 18), PR #2859
• Migrate fromEthersProvider() to more general fromJsonRpcProvider() constructor, remove Ethers dependency, PR #2663
• Breaking: Block._common property has been renamed to Block.common, PR #2857
• While the main new Block() constructor should generally not be used (use the static constructor methods instead) just to mention: withdrawals and opts constructor arguments have been swapped, PR #2715