EPF - Week 4 updates

During Week 4, I acheived the following:

  1. Wrote a couple of articles related to Ethereum censorship, proposer builder seperation and EIP-4844
  2. Worked on a PR in prysm which I still need to close as I got more feedback on it
  3. Studied about my new project and wrote down a project proposal which was approved by all my mentors!!

Writings

I wrote the following articles during my studies last week:

  1. Thoughts on Seperation of blobs from payload : I wrote this articles when I was studying more about my initial project of Seperation of blobs from payload. Through these studies, I discovered that the initial problem statement we set out to solve was not actually a problem now. That was because the initial problem statement was to seperate out blobs from payloads because home stakers wouldn't be able to compute KZG commitments and proofs of blobs on time to propose a block. But in future versions of KZG, the burden of computation of commitments and proofs have been shifted to the sender of the blob txs. Post this article, I had to pivot my project to a new project.
  2. Studying Ethereum Censorship : When I was working on seperation of blobs from payload project, I got really interested in Ethereum censorship! I started reading a lot more articles and wrote my learnings and thoughts into this article. I studied about PEPC through this article which is the main theme of the project I m working on!
  3. Unbundling Eth Blocks : I am currently working on an article related to segmenting Ethereum blocks into TOB and ROB and studying MEV centralization through it.

PRs

I need to close this PR https://github.com/prysmaticlabs/prysm/pull/12675. Couldn't get to it as I was busy working on my project proposals!

Project Proposal

I initially became very interested in working on Decoupling Blobs from Payload project. The idea of the project was to defer specifically blob payload construction to external builders while the proposer builds the execution txs part of the block. The idea of this project was to reduce the burden on homestakers to compute the KZG commitments and proofs of individual blobs. We then realised that in future versions of EIP-4844, the burden of computing the KZG commitment and proofs is on the sender of the blob txs. This made the problem statement not worth pursuing.
But this project got me interested in censorship in Ethereum which got me connected to Barnabe Monnot. We explored some ideas in PEPC and based on his suggestion, I decided to work on a POC of PEPC-Boost. PEPC-boost is a proposal out of protocol implementation of PEPC(Protocol Enforced Proposer Commitments). PEPC is a generalization of PBS, where a proposer can enter into various commitments with the protocol such as:

  1. Partake a full block auction with a builder (Which is essentially PBS)
  2. Partake into a parallel block auction with multiple builders
  3. Partake into a partial block auction where the block must include the transactions specfied by the proposer(Inclusion lists)

More details in the project proposal!
I wrote down my project proposal and got good feedback from my mentors!

Stuff I read

Following are articles/codebases I read

  1. https://efdn.notion.site/PEPC-FAQ-0787ba2f77e14efba771ff2d903d67e4#a2d2d17abe90414e88d667ad10d91afe
  2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.19150.pdf
  3. https://ethresear.ch/t/relays-in-a-post-epbs-world/16278
  4. https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/02/14/why-stateless.html
  5. https://bertcmiller.com/2021/09/05/mev-synthetix.html
  6. https://ethresear.ch/t/unbundling-pbs-towards-protocol-enforced-proposer-commitments-pepc/13879?u=barnabe
  7. https://ethresear.ch/t/unbundling-pbs-towards-protocol-enforced-proposer-commitments-pepc/13879?u=barnabe
  8. https://github.com/flashbots/relay-specs/tree/main
  9. https://github.com/flashbots/go-boost-utils
  10. https://github.com/attestantio/go-builder-client
  11. https://github.com/ethereum/builder-specs

Whats next?

I have already kickstarted my project work! I aim to continue my project work and close my open PRs in Prysm. I also want to continue writing more articles and publish them! I will also look for more opportunities to make more open source contributions related to my project work and other places.

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