EPF Cohort 6 - Week 0 Update
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As the cohort approaches its start, I’ve been reviewing the wiki and catching up on the study group videos I missed. I’m especially interested in lower-level languages, leaning towards C++ but also open to Rust. I’m also hoping to work on something that will help me become much more familiar with Ethereum’s overall structure.

As I was going through the study group videos and reviewing resources, I came across the consensus layer specs and the beam roadmap, which introduced me to Ream and the general architecture of Ethereum.

I ultimately decided to work on Ream and their Validator Client since it seemed like a good opportunity to familiarize myself with the details of the consensus layer, while also working with lower-level languages.

Week 0
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At the start, I went through the Ethereum consensus specs to get a better sense of how things work. I noticed pretty early on that a lot of the validator client’s tasks revolve around keystores, so one of the first things I did was look into EIP-2335. I used that to build keystore decryption, which lets validators import their keys from the staking CLI tool. After that, I started working on different validator duties like proposing and attesting. Lately, I’ve been focused on sync committee duties—getting selection proofs working, handling aggregator roles, and making the right calls to the beacon API. It’s also helped me get more comfortable with the cryptography and the overall validator workflow in Ethereum.

Additionally, I ended up adding BLS signature aggregation for Ream, which would be necessary for future tasks.

Resources
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- [Beacon API Docs](https://ethereum.github.io/beacon-APIs)
- [Beam Road Map](https://beamroadmap.org/)
- [Consensus Specs](https://ethereum.github.io/consensus-specs/)
- [EIP-2335](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2335)