KIC 9832227

Release

v1.1.0-beta.5 -- KIC 9832227 -- is a minor release in preparation for initial Merge interop 🏺. Although we still expect much refinement and testing of specifications in the coming months, Merge specs have matured so that client teams now have a stable target.

Huge shoutout to @mkalinin and the many other contributors that have worked so hard getting the Merge specs into clean place for the next wave of engineering 🙏

Altair specifications remain entirely stable and are slated for a mainnet release in the coming days.

PR showing full diff can be found here: #2624

Merge

• Verify terminal PoW block after call to state_transition (#2595)
• Add extra_data field to the execution payload (#2606)
• [bugfix] Fix random validation (#2609)
• Set the value of the random field to the previous slot randao_mix (#2581)
• Hardcode terminal total difficulty (#2605)
• Update execution engine calls to match EIP and engine API where possible (#2613)
• Remove extraneous merge gossip validation conditions (#2621)

Sharding

• Remove beacon_block_root field from ShardBlob (#2615)

Testing, repo, etc

• Fix merkle proof test for mainnet (#2619)
• Grammar, typos, formatting, etc (#2596, #2597, #2601, #2602, #2616, #2620, #2627)
• Cleanup imports (#2622)