Hey, I'm Anshal and I'm based out of India. Before EPF, I was pursuing my bachleors degree and have experience working on execution clients. This list will give you a rough picture about my progress, things I've done till now and things I'm currently working on as a part of the fellowship. Updates: Week 1 (17/7-23/7) Week 2 (24/7-30/7) Week 3 (31/7-06/8) Week 4 (07/8-13/8) Week 5 (14/8-20/8) Week 6 (21/8-27/8)

While doing literature review there used to be substantial updates every week but currently I am focussing more on understanding the codebase and working on POC so will be merging my two weeks updates into one. Updates: Worked on the proposal and presented it in office hours meet along with Manav and Ella. Continued reviewing the CL specs by Potuz. Had an introductory call with other fellows working on ePBS to discuss the areas each fellow is working on so there is no conflict. This is a separate call in which mentors were not present. Read the engine API specs and EL implementation PR. Started going through the Prysm codebase.

Updates: Read about the multiple IL approaches and the associated free DA problem. Vitalik's proposal of new IL that addresses the free DA probelm, I had some trouble understanding the approach but thanks to Manav for helping me understand it. Started going through the consensus specs again as Potuz had made substantial changes on it during the week's span I had to do some catching up for the previous week so read through the Prysm EPF discord channel Watched the previous week catchup video, thanks to terence for recording it. Weekly catchup for this week was cancelled as multiple people were busy with other commitments. Resources:

Updates: Started with the proposal as I have good understanding about the project and clarity about the sections that I can work during the fellowship. It was partly also triggered as the following week is the last week to submit the proposal. Got stuck with fork choice rules while reading the consensus specs by Potuz. Skimmed through the p2p specs as well. Started looking into Prysm codebase as I plan to start contribution on CL side of IL while Manav is working on IL side. Resources: https://github.com/potuz/consensus-specs/blob/470b1f4ba80e78eddb981d38e55029600746df48/specs/_features/epbs/design.md https://github.com/terencechain/consensus-specs/pull/1/files

I was sick during the week so could work much. I had also skipped the weekly catchup call with the Prysm team.

My literature review surrouding the Ethereum architecture ended during this week as I got a good understanding about the Beacon chain, LMD-GHOST consensus and how various attacks vectors framed lead to its current form. Update: Good Understanding of intracacies of Ethereum atchitecture, ex-ante reorgs, proposer boosting, block-slot voting and subslots within the blocks. Learned about the fork choice stuff as well just to be more informed about the space. Had another session with the Prysm team and discussed in detail about the holes in fork choice and P2P specs. Resources: https://eth2book.info

This week was the most productive one since the start of the fellowship. I got the hang of the PTC design of ePBS apart from that had a great discussion with Potuz, Terence and other other fellows on the call. Updates: Continued reading Eth2 Book Read about IL, slots, attestations, committes and overall design scheme of PTC based implementation of PBS Read the draft specs by Potuz and Terence Gone through the discussion that have happened on the Prysm discord for better understanding Resources:

During this week I finalised upon the project and got a good understanding about the various components of the Beacon Chain, thanks to the Eth2 book. There are a bunch of reason for me selecting the ePBS project proposed by the Prysm team. Why ePBS? As I've already mentioned in the past that I have some experience working on the execution clients but no experience working on the consensus clients. So my goal of this fellowship is to have a deeper understanding of consensus clients and understand the interactions between the CL & EL. I had initially approached Barnabe to query about the PBS project listed on the RIG website and he pointed me out to Prysm project as the RIG project was already taken up by a grantee. But why PBS? The project touches upon various components and subdomains like MEV Economics, Consensus and Networking contributing to which will help me understand the broader picture of the Ethereum.

I spent most of my time reading about architecture of Eth2 (Beacon Chain) and about things that lie in the intersection of PBS. I also watched a bunch of videos of previous DevCon on related topics. Updates: Started reading Eth2 Book. Read majorly about the PBS and payload separation from execution clientz projects proposed by the Prysm. Finalised upon working on ePBS project by Prysm as it touches upon various components of the Ethereum architecture which will help me gain a practical knowledge of multpiple components. Read more about MEV to get a better understanding of PBS, saw a bunch of videos around these topics. Refered to notes and articles by various EF rresearchers on these topics

So during the first week, I spent most of my time going through the projects list and read a little about the ones I found interesting. My updates look like these: Updates: Read about the topics mentioned in the reading list and also read documentation of Ethereum. Got in touch with mentors of various projects, joined their discord channel. I am mostly interested in consensus research projects as I've in the past worked on execution clients and want to have some hands on experience working on consensus clients as well.