@ethereumjs/tx@5.0.0-rc.1
Pre-releaseThis 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.
API Validation Methods Clean-Up
We have cleaned up and unified the validation methods in the Tx
library, see PR #2792.
The Tx.validate()
method (so: for all tx types), previously overloaded with different return types depending on the input, has been split up into:
Tx.isValid(): boolean
Tx.getValidationErrors(): string[] // If you are interested in the errors, can also be used for validation by checking return array length
The overloaded method Tx.getMessageToSign()
has been split up into two methods:
getMessageToSign(): Uint8Array | Uint8Array[] // For the unhashed message
getHashedMessageToSign(): Uint8Array // For the hashed message
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.
Simple Blob Constructor Parameter
We have added a new blobsData
parameter to BlobEIP4844TxData
which allows for an easier Tx initialization with arbitrary blob data, see PR #2755.
You can simply pass any arbitrary data to this new data parameter, and separate blobs are automatically extracted and kzgCommitments
and versionedHashes
computed for you 🤯:
import { BlobEIP4844Transaction } from '@ethereumjs/tx'
const simpleBlobTx = BlobEIP4844Transaction.fromTxData(
{
blobsData: ['hello world'],
maxFeePerDataGas: 100000000n,
gasLimit: 0xffffffn,
to: 0x1122334455667788991011121314151617181920,
},
{ common }
)
Library Changes
The following changes are included:
- Update blob tx type to 0x03, PR #2363
- Fix the deserialization of blob txs and add no empty blobs validation, PR #2640
- Update eip4844 blocks/txs to decoupled blobs spec, PR #2567
- Update c-kzg to big endian implementation (versioned hashes), PR #2746
- Update the kzg validation and replace trusted setup with latest (devnet6), PR #2756
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:
// All tx types (Transaction is placeholder for specific type class, e.g. FeeMarketEIP1559Transaction)
TransactionFactory.fromTxData() // data field
Transaction.fromValuesArray() // whole array
Transaction.fromSerializedTx()
Transaction.accessList: AccessListBytes // property
Transaction.raw()
Transaction.serialize(): Uint8Array
Transaction.getMessageToSign(), Transaction.getHashedMessageToSign() // Generally refactored
Transaction.hash(): Uint8Array
Transaction.getMessageToVerifySignature(): Uint8Array
Transaction.getSenderPublicKey(): Uint8Array
Transaction.sign(privateKey: Uint8Array): TransactionObject
// TransactionFactory
TransactionFactory.fromTxData()
TransactionFactory.fromSerializedData()
TransactionFactory.fromBlockBodyData()
// 2930 transactions
TransactionFactory.fromTxData() // accessList
// 1559 transactions
// All 2930 changes + ...
FeeMarketEIP1559Transaction.maxFeePerGas // property
FeeMarketEIP1559Transaction.maxPriorityFeePerGas // property
// 4844 transactions
// All 1559 changes + ...
BlobEIP4844Transaction.fromTxData() // versionedHashes, blobs, kzgCommitments, kzgProof
BlobEIP4844Transaction.versionedHashes: Uint8Array[] // property
BlobEIP4844Transaction.blobs?: Uint8Array[] // optional property
BlobEIP4844Transaction.kzgCommitments?: Uint8Array[] // optional property
BlobEIP4844Transaction.aggregateKzgProof?: Uint8Array // optional property
BlobEIP4844Transaction.fromSerializedBlobTxNetworkWrapper()
BlobEIP4844Transaction.serializeNetworkWrapper()
BlobEIP4844Transaction.unsignedHash(): Uint8Array
// Types
type AccessListBytesItem // old: AccessListBufferItem
type AccessListBytes // old: AccessListBuffer
isAccessListBytes() // old: isAccessListBuffer()
isAccessList()
type TxData
// util
AccessLists.getAccessListData()
AccessLists.verifyAccessList()
AccessLists.getAccessListJSON()
AccessLists.getDataFeeEIP2930()
// blobHelpers
getBlobs()
blobsToCommitments()
commitmentsToVersionedHashes()
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 you 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 generalfromJsonRpcProvider()
constructor, removeEthers
dependency, PR #2663 - EIP-4844: De-sszify 4844 blob transaction, PR #2708
- Normalize
toJSON()
for different tx types, PR #2707 - Remove
@chainsafe/ssz
dependency, PR #2717