# EPF Cohort 6 Updates – Week 2

This week, I continued to make progress on the projects I shortlisted in Week 1. I focused on deepening my understanding of the relevant specifications, exploring codebases, and getting hands-on with benchmarking and implementation tasks. After a detailed research I was able to filter out the project ideas and these are the three projects I am left with. It's difficult to work on 3 projects altogether therefore I'll deep diving into one project in a day or two and present my project idea in Office Hours #3.

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## Ream Client – A Beam Client in Rust: Benchmark zkVM Performance on Ream's Beacon State Transition Functions
This will probably be the project I'll be working during the Cohort. I had a talk with Dimitrios and we'll be working on this together on different zkVms.

**This week’s focus:**
Continued Benchmarking with Jolt however I am currently at a dead-end since Jolt has some limitations with input size. More about this [here](https://github.com/a16z/jolt/issues/732)
I explored around Zisk, but macOS proving is not supported right now so shifted my focus to Pico for now

**Links:**
- Repo: https://github.com/x-senpai-x/consenJolt

## Grandine: Exploring Distributed Validator Technology (DVT) Compatibility
Upon discussing with Saulius, Grandine is inclined towards checking compatibility with [SSV]( https://ssv.network/). [Obol](https://github.com/ObolNetwork/charon/issues/3670) has already worked on this using Grandine as Beacon Node and a separate validator client. I have gone through the ethereum specs for dvt

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## Grandine: Additional BLS Backend Support
zkCrypto, blst and arkworks have already been added as bls backend, however testing needs to be done with Arkworks.Mcl and constantine needs to be added to the backend list.
There is currently an issue that the entire Grandine code base compiles with warnings because of multiple BLS backends support, we should find a way to eliminate those warnings.
Meanwhile I was familiarizing myself with Grandine, particularly the Block Processing,Sync Committee Operations,Signature Verification and Core BLS implementation

## Next Week's Goals

- [ ] I'll be going through all the zkVms in depth and create a comparison table.
- [ ] Setup the benchmarking codebase with atleast one zkVM.
- [ ] Start working on eliminating warnings for BLS backend.
- [ ] Go through SSV extensively and work on checking its compatability

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