In Foresight News news, Matter Labs Developer Relations Engineer Antonio has indicated in Github that important changes are being made to the way block.timestamp, block.number and blockhash behave on zkSync Era. Currently block.timestamp, block.number, and blockhash return the timestamp, number, and hash of the L1 batch, respectively, and when this update is complete, they will return the timestamp, number, and hash of the L2 block, respectively.

Many applications require higher time fidelity, which can be achieved by referencing the L1 batch," Antonio said. With these changes, contracts will be able to time at the L2 block level (generated approximately every few seconds), information that is already available on the API, but with the new changes, developers will be able to access it directly in the smart contract. We are currently developing this change and will be testing the update process internally before moving to the test network and eventually the main network."