Hello everyone. My name is Oluwafemi Alofe. I am happy to be participating permissionless in the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. I have so much interest in understanding cryptography and distributed systems in general, and I am taking it as a challenge to take this opportunity to learn and also contribute to the growth of ethereum. From the onset, I have been interested in contributing to Verkle Trees. After researching the previous cohort, I find Ignacio's work (EPF3) impressive, and I've connected with him on Discord and plan to study his work and move it forward. I will be contributing to Nimbus client Verkle tree research during the program. At first, I was a little bit intimidated because I had just started writing Golang 18 months ago, and having to learn Nim again before contributing to Nimbus client seemed like it would be overwhelming; by that, I mean having to learn and research about an already complicated topic and having to learn a new language. After some research into the future of Ethereum, Stateless Ethereum is the end game, and Light clients will play a massive role in that. It interested me even more, and now, I am confident that I will be motivated to contribute to Nimbus Client Verkle tree research. I plan to work on the fellowship for at least 8 - 15 hours per week. My current job gives some flexibility, and I will put in more effort on weekends. Wish me Luck!! # Readings ### Ineveitable Ethereum https://inevitableeth.com/ - Consesus Update - Scaling Execution - Middleware - Proposer Builder Specification (PBS) - Light Clients - Optimism Rollups ## Design Rationale EThereum https://web.archive.org/web/20211121044757/https://ethereumbuilders.gitbooks.io/guide/content/en/design_rationale.html ### Optimistic Rollup - Technical Presentations https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLX_rXoLYCf5HqTWygUfoMfzRirGz5lekH ### Running OP Stack https://stack.optimism.io/docs/build/getting-started/#op-batcher - The Optimistic Approach to Scaling Ethereum - Karl Floersch: Optimistic Virtual Machine ### Crypto Economics http://cryptoeconomics.study/docs/en/sync/getting-started-welcome - http://cryptoeconomics.study/docs/en/sync/3.3-code-challenge https://brilliant.org/wiki/merkle-tree/ ### Ethereum Yellow Paper - https://github.com/benjaminion/YellowPaper_CheatSheet/blob/master/YPCheatSheet.pdf - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e84V1MxRlYs - https://ethervm.io/ ### Merkle Trees (Before getting into Verkle) - https://web.archive.org/web/20180726083552/https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Patricia-Tree - https://medium.com/@chiqing/merkle-patricia-trie-explained-ae3ac6a7e123 - https://medium.com/coinmonks/implementing-merkle-tree-and-patricia-trie-b8badd6d9591 - https://soliditydeveloper.com/merkle-tree ## Level DB - https://medium.com/coinmonks/data-structure-in-ethereum-episode-4-diving-by-examples-f6a4cbd8c329