46-VER

Simple Summary

Provide an alternative proposal compared with EIP-1702 / ECIP-1040 / EIP-1707, with the following advantages:

• We don’t need to modify existing account state format.
• We don’t need to modify how precompiled contracts are invoked.
• The version bytes cannot be forged.

The basic idea is that we use a contract address’ storage to store an account’s version bytes. Note that it is also possible to extend this scheme to store other information about an account.

Specification

Define VERSION_CONTRACT_ADDR at location 0x0000..00f1.

After FORK_BLOCK, set nonce of VERSION_CONTRACT_ADDR to 1.

Define two new opcodes VCREATE and VCREATE2 at 0xf6 and 0xf7 respectively.

VCREATE takes 4 stack arguments (version, value, input offset, input size), and VCREATE2 takes 5 stack arguments (version, endowment, memory_start, memory_length, salt). Note that except the stack item version, other arguments are the same as CREATE and CREATE2.

The two new opcodes behave identically to CREATE and CREATE2, except that:

• Gas cost is CREATE or CREATE2’s gas cost plus 20000.
• Before writing the contract code resulted from VCREATE and VCREATE2, check the following conditions. If any following conditions does not meet or operation fails, return out-of-gas.
  • The version provided is supported version bytes.
  • Invoke additional checks (if any) required by the specific version bytes.
  • If the above two checks are successful
    • Let address be the to-be-deployed contract address.
    • Set storage of VERSION_CONTRACT_ADDR where key is address (prefixed with 0 so that it’s 256 bits), and value is version.

Before invoking a contract, either by a transaction, CALL, STATICCALL, CALLCODE or DELEGATECALL:

• Check whether the storage of VERSION_CONTRACT_ADDR has non-zero value with key address (I_a in yellow paper, prefixed with 0 so that it’s 256 bits).
  • If so, invoke the VM version defined by value.
  • Otherwise, invoke the default (legacy) VM version.

When self-destruct a contract:

• Set storage value of VERSION_CONTRACT_ADDR where key is address (prefixed with 0 so that it’s 256 bits) to zero.

Contract creation transaction always uses the default (legacy) VM version.