ethereum/EIPs

Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs)

ATTENTION: The EIPs repository has recently undergone a separation of ERCs and EIPs. ERCs are now accessible at https://github.com/ethereum/ercs. All new ERCs and updates to existing ones must be directed at this new repository. The editors apologize for this inconvenience.

The goal of the EIP project is to standardize and provide high-quality documentation for Ethereum itself and conventions built upon it. This repository tracks past and ongoing improvements to Ethereum in the form of Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). EIP-1 governs how EIPs are published.

The status page tracks and lists EIPs, which can be divided into the following categories:

• Core EIPs are improvements to the Ethereum consensus protocol.
• Networking EIPs specify the peer-to-peer networking layer of Ethereum.
• Interface EIPs standardize interfaces to Ethereum, which determine how users and applications interact with the blockchain.
• ERCs specify application layer standards, which determine how applications running on Ethereum can interact with each other.
• Meta EIPs are miscellaneous improvements that nonetheless require some sort of consensus.
• Informational EIPs are non-standard improvements that do not require any form of consensus.

Before you write an EIP, ideas MUST be thoroughly discussed on Ethereum Magicians or Ethereum Research. Once consensus is reached, thoroughly read and review EIP-1, which describes the EIP process.

Please note that this repository is for documenting standards and not for help implementing them. These types of inquiries should be directed to the Ethereum Stack Exchange. For specific questions and concerns regarding EIPs, it's best to comment on the relevant discussion thread of the EIP denoted by the discussions-to tag in the EIP's preamble.

If you would like to become an EIP Editor, please read EIP-5069.

Preferred Citation Format

The canonical URL for an EIP that has achieved draft status at any point is at https://eips.ethereum.org/. For example, the canonical URL for EIP-1 is https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-1.

Consider any document not published at https://eips.ethereum.org/ as a working paper. Additionally, consider published EIPs with a status of "draft", "review", or "last call" to be incomplete drafts, and note that their specification is likely to be subject to change.

Validation and Automerging

All pull requests in this repository must pass automated checks before they can be automatically merged:

• eip-review-bot determines when PRs can be automatically merged ¹
• EIP-1 rules are enforced using eipw²
• HTML formatting and broken links are enforced using HTMLProofer²
• Spelling is enforced with CodeSpell²
  • False positives sometimes occur. When this happens, please submit a PR editing .codespell-whitelist and ONLY .codespell-whitelist
• Markdown best practices are checked using markdownlint²

It is possible to run the EIP validator locally:

Make sure to add cargo's bin directory to your environment (typically $HOME/.cargo/bin in your PATH environment variable)

cargo install eipw
eipw --config ./config/eipw.toml <INPUT FILE / DIRECTORY>

Build the status page locally

Install prerequisites

1. Open Terminal.

2. Check whether you have Ruby 3.1.4 installed. Later versions are not supported.

   ruby --version
   

3. If you don't have Ruby installed, install Ruby 3.1.4.

4. Install Bundler:

   gem install bundler
   

5. Install dependencies:

   bundle install
   

Build your local Jekyll site

1. Bundle assets and start the server:

   bundle exec jekyll serve
   

2. Preview your local Jekyll site in your web browser at http://localhost:4000.

More information on Jekyll and GitHub Pages here.