This is the week 1 update for me, Agnish. This week went pretty hectic, as I mostly spent my time balancing out my day job and my EPF cohort work. So let's get straight to what I went through and learnt this week.

18th July, 2023

Just got off with the EPF meeting, and I decided that now I need to go through individual projects and need to really set my mind to it. I started with Ephemery Testnet by Mario Havel. At first I was a bit unsure of the terms ForkChoice and ForkDigest, then I realized that these were pretty essential concepts when it came to Consensus Layer of Ethereum. On further realisation, I understood that I pretty much had to dive deeper in order to understand how Proof of Stake really worked.

19th July, 2023

Verkle Trees in the Nimbus Execution Client was also another major project that I had shortlisted lately, and wanted to contribute. So I watched some further videos on Verkle Trees, the recent one hosted at ETHCC'23. For some further reading and deep dive I went through Paritosh's Notes on Verkle Transition. To finish it off I checked out some of the recent code implementations of Verkle Trees, the notable ones that I found were the one in Rust, and found another one from Weihan's notes, the one in Golang.

20th July, 2023

Did further reading through Eth2book, started with the preliminary concepts like Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

Needed some more clarity, so I went further with Aditya's notes. Coming to specs soon after, I went through the Ethereum Beacon API Specs codebase, only to understand the API params. Soon after, I went through the issues, and this issue https://github.com/ethereum/beacon-APIs/issues/333, seemed doable to me. Although I needed some more insight into Ethereum's SSZ, hence I went through this doc link SSZ.

21st July, 2023

As I explored more through Consensus Clients, I found out a similar SSZ issue in Lighthouse, hence, I cloned the repo and spent quite some time reading through and understanding the codebase thoroughly. I did some further reading by going through the Lighthouse official documentation. I did some further for Ethereum's Consensus from another one of Aditya's blogs, this was primarily regarding the confirmation rules wrt epochs in Ethereum's consensus approach.

22nd July, 2023

Wanted to do a deeper dive into LMD Ghost, so I did code readthrough of Protolambda's repo of LMD Ghost and another note by Aditya, this one. With all this in mind, I got a much clearer idea into how Votes and Attestations happen in LMD GHOST.

Along with this I wanted to do a side hobby project too, in order to sharpen my grasp over the EVM, so I was working on a lightweight EVM implementation on Rust.

23rd July, 2023

Went through Casper FFG and Gasper, although there was no resource available for Gasper in the Eth2book, so I had to go through the official docs and the research paper, just to get what's going on. Along with this I read about Dapplion's Secret non-single leader election, so that I proceed with this at Lodestar, if possible. Read about 3 Pos attacks on Ethereum, and went through the codebase of Ephemery-testnet by Mario.

Ended the day by having a good discussion on the REST Wrapper Telegram channel, where I went through the Ethereum Execution APIs and started the work on migrate to Docusaurus issue/431, went through the docs of Metamask Docusaurus.

Finally narrowing down my projects

• Ephemery Testnet (automatic reset of epochs feature, rn it's manual)
• Nimbus Client Verkle Trees
• Consensus Client Issues, mainly SSZ (https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/issues/4531), (https://github.com/ethereum/beacon-APIs/issues/333) and Secret Non-single leader
• Migrate to Docusaurus Execution API Issue/431