Ethereum community opposition forces EOF delay to Fusaka uprade

Ethereum Foundation co-executive director Tomasz Stańczak has clarified that the EVM Object Format (EOF) will not be deployed with the Pectra upgrade scheduled for May 7. Instead, it will come with the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade, which is set to happen later in the year.

Stańczak disclosed this on X, noting that while debates are ongoing in the Ethereum forum about the EOF, it was never part of the community plan to include it in the Pectra upgrade.

He said:

“The current EOF discussion is NOT related to the upcoming Pectra upgrade, scheduled for May 7th. The Pectra upgrade does not include EOF, nor intended to include EOF. Everything on Pectra is going as planned for the May 7th release.”

The Ethereum Foundation executive added that the Fusaka upgrade has not been scheduled yet, but it is likely to happen between Q3 and Q4, with September or October being the target.

His statement comes amidst the ongoing debate about EOF on the Ethereum community on Twitter. While the Pectra upgrade is expected to improve Ethereum’s user experience in several ways, Fusaka comes with more technical and significant upgrades.

Beyond the EOF, other Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) scheduled for inclusion in Fusaka include scaling updates, including EIP-7594 Peer Data Availability Sampling and EIP-7892 Blob Parameters Only Hardfork. Fusaka is a fusion of Fulu and Osaka network upgrades.

What is EOF?

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the execution software for the Ethereum network, and the EOF is a series of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) that seek to make several changes to the EVM.

These proposed changes are expected to improve how EVM analyzes the Ethereum smart contracts and make transaction execution more efficient. According to pseudonymous Ethereum developer Logarithmic Rex in a 2023 post, the purpose of EOF is to ensure that EVM can analyze smart contracts before deploying them on-chain.

This ensures they meet all the parameters before being deployed instead of the current system, where each instruction in a smart contract is tested chronologically as they are being deployed.

He said:

“Once EOF has been built into the protocol, the EVM will have a map of what each smart contract will look like. It will know where the code is and can therefore check all of it beforehand and then we can stop checking after every single instruction.”

The developer added at the time that the EOF is important for Ethereum to achieve its goal of becoming a mature computing platform.

Strong opposition to EOF in the Ethereum community

However, many in the Ethereum community oppose the EOF, noting that it is too complex and does not have any obvious benefit to the network and its users. This has led to a series of debates between stakeholders pushing for it and those against it.

Several stakeholders who have opposed it include developer Pascal Caversaccio, who published an article saying its complexity outweighs the necessity, and Paradigm chief technical officer Georgios Kostantopoulos.

Even a former Ethereum developer, now at Solana, jokingly advised that Ethereum developers should focus heavily on the EOF so that they will have less time to compete with Solana on the things that actually matter.

This strong opposition is also reflected in a poll held on the subject on ETHPulse. The poll shows that 85% of voters are against the idea, while 98.3% of registered ETH votes also said “No” to it. For many of those opposing, ETH’s struggling price is evidence that this should not be a priority.

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