# Ethereum Protocol Fellowship - The Third Cohort (Update 1)

This is the first update for Ethereum Protocol Fellowship - The Third Cohort.

The first week's goal was to dive deep into the different topics/areas of Ethereum R&D and become familiar with the current status of the developments and open problems (and missing features).

## Update

Due to still deciding what to work on, I checked the following topics (the ones I was not very familiar with in-depth): danksharding, proto-danksharding, statelessness, Verkle trees, account abstraction (ERC 4337, bundlers, BLS), proof-of-stake (BLS, slots, committees), pairing-friendly curves, Kate commitments, and client diversity. Reading about different topics helped paint a clearer picture and understading of the Ethereum technical roadmap.

Reading/watching material:
* [Yellow Paper](https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf) - refreshment.
* Sharding
* [119 - Dive into Danksharding | Vitalik, Dankrad, Protolambda, Tim Beiko](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5p0TB77flM) by Bankless (video).
* [Guide to the Ethereum Roadmap | Jon Charbonneau of Delphi Digital](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuLyZaty9iI) by Bankless (video).
* [New sharding design with tight beacon and shard block integration](https://notes.ethereum.org/@dankrad/new_sharding) by Dankrad.
* Statelessness
* [The 1.x Files: The State of Stateless Ethereum](https://blog.ethereum.org/2019/12/30/eth1x-files-state-of-stateless-ethereum) - by EF blog.
* [Modified Merkle Patricia Trie](https://medium.com/codechain/modified-merkle-patricia-trie-how-ethereum-saves-a-state-e6d7555078dd) by CodeChain.
* [Verkle trees](https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html) by Vitalik.
* Cryptography
* [Elliptic Curve Pairing 1](https://blog.statebox.org/elliptic-curve-pairings-213131769fac) by Joshua Fitzgerald.
* [Elliptic Curve Pairing 2](https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/exploring-elliptic-curve-pairings-c73c1864e627) by Vitalik.
* [BLS Signatures](https://eth2book.info/altair/part2/building_blocks/signatures/#bls-signatures) by eth2book.
* [BLS Signature Aggregation: Under the Hood](https://mirror.xyz/0x6afeB3d9E380787e7D0a17Fc3CA764Bb885014FA/D3g-4UPRLkAnug-p6AZYfjgXWo-psaTulyu3SaL35vg) by stu.
* [Kate commitments in ETH](https://hackmd.io/yqfI6OPlRZizv9yPaD-8IQ?view) by g11tech.
* Account abstraction (AA)
* [EIP-4337: Account Abstraction using alt mempool](https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337).
* [The road to account abstraction](https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/account_abstraction_roadmap) by Vitalik.
* [Devcon account abstraction](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oBU9XhMPAMADw5I0G7AChE_NhanA0tKAlq7EtaLHkZU/edit#slide=id.g15d585859fb_0_91) by Dror, Yoav, and Liraz.
* [Talk | ERC 4337: Account Abstraction via Alternative Mempool](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyT6WzJmWyc&list=LL&index=5) by Yoav (video).
* Clients
* [Client Diversity](https://clientdiversity.org/) by Ether Alpha.
* [The Portal Network](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0stc9jnQLXA&list=LL&index=5) by Piper (video).
* Bunch of GitHub repos ...

## Next steps

My plan is to tackle the chosen problem from a research and development perspective (research the problem/topic and produce a working demo).

Here is a short list of the things I am most interested in:
* ERC-4337 compatible wallet/browser extension. I would love to support BLS signatures (signature aggregation), compression and try the standard with L2s (in discussion on how to collaborate with another fellow),
* implement bundler for AA in one of the execution clients. It's already implemented in Nethermind; I'm looking into Akula (Rust). Thought: could support for AA Bundlers help with client diversity of execution clients (short term)?
* ... (list is not final; I am still looking into some stuff).

I will probably finalize the project definition within a week or two. Looking forward to the kickoff meeting. :)