# EPF Cohort 5 - Week 0 Hi! I am Chirag Mahaveer Parmar and I have just started with exploring the basic building blocks of the core protocol. My interestes lean towards networking (libp2p), sharding and cryptography in general. I used to work with the core protocol a few years back but have ever since lost touch. Through EPF I wish to re-establish my competitive edge. ## Update For week 0, I dived into elliptic curve pairings, running my own node and pretty much level 0 of anything ethereum. I refreshed my understanding of the execution client by revising the yellow paper (not in its entereity though). Something interesting that I learned was how snap sync works at the crux of it. I plan on comprising my understanding into an article as a side quest for week 1. ## Next Steps For the first week of EPF, I plan on strengthening my basics of the core protocol and develop an understanding of the proposed projects. I also want to understand the details of the merge and other historical aspects of Ethereum. My main resource for week 1 is going to be the EPF wiki. Specifically, I'm curious about the following for week 1, 1. The workings of ephemery testnet. What changes are made to the protocol to accomodate for such a testnet? What are the advantages of having such a testnet? 2. PeerDAS, Sharding and Proposer-Builder Seperation 3. Why were traditional light nodes rendered useless after the merge? 4. Why do execution clients and consensus clients require authentication? What is the protocol overhead? What value does such a system design bring? 5. Why is syncing from genesis not secure and more importantly incompatible with data availability checks? 6. The anatomy of transactions, the new few mechanism(EIP-1559) and other buzzing new features of last few years. These are the ones on the top of my head. I will in due time collect all things I'm curious about and post it with my next weekly update. ### Side Quests 1. Write a programmatic article on snap sync. 2. Expose RPC over the onion network.