The STEEL Team (Specifications and Testing for the Ethereum Execution Layer) is an Ethereum Foundation team in Protocol that is responsible for maintaining Ethereum’s Execution Layer specifications, consensus tests and EVM benchmark tests.

Our main focus is ensuring accurate specifications and comprehensive testing coverage for the next Ethereum hard fork. Alongside this work, we aim to accelerate Ethereum development by supporting researchers to implement specifications and tests proposed for subsequent forks and contribute to the effort to Scale the L1 by providing computational- and state-intensive test cases that help client teams prepare for pathological scenarios and support Ethereum safely raise the block gas limit.

As such, our work is a deeply collaborative effort with many other teams in EF Protocol (such as Prototyping, ethPandaOps, Geth, Stateless Consensus, zkEVM and Security), the Mainnet Execution Layer client teams (e.g., Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth) and other independent Ethereum researchers.

One of our major goals is to empower these Ethereum core developers to expedite Ethereum development. We aim to enable:

• Researchers by providing the best tooling to quickly prototype and verify specifications, facilitating the EIP inclusion process for future forks and enabling parallel development.
• Client Developers by providing new test formats and frameworks in order to quickly verify client functionality and easily debug problems when they arise.

We maintain the ethereum/execution-specs and ethereum/execution-spec-tests repositories. You can learn more about our work on the responsibilities page or from our previous presentations.