EPF Dev Update #9

I noticed that my weekly updates were getting too short, so I decided to turn them into bi-weekly updates. This update contains my work done on weeks 9 and 10 of the EPF (2023-09-04 to 2023-09-24).

tl;dr:

• Presented my new project proposal.
• Dived into the Engine API.
• Published my Kademlia article on the portal network website.

New project proposal presentation

I presented my new project in week 9. You can see my slides here and the recording here (I presented last, since it was my second time).

Engine API dive

After my research on the Flashbots architecture, I realized that it doesn't make a lot of sense to continue on that road without having a better understanding of the Engine API.

I started my dive on the specs. Specifically:

• Shanghai engine API spec.
• Shanghai execution spec.
• Capella consensus spec.

I quickly realized that I wasn't going to get to the point where I wanted by reading the spec. So I started reading the Lighthouse codebase.

To be more specific, I started reading what the procedure was to start a Beacon Node, focusing on how the execution engine was represented and how the interactions with it worked. (Similar to Jimmy's article, but with a different focus.)

Learning about the Engine API this way has been great. I feel like I have a much better understanding of how everything fits together. The downside is that this is taking me much longer than I expected, but I think this would be the case no matter what approach I take.

I'm working on an article that goes deeply into the most important Engine API flows, including the beacon node startup process. This article will contain a series of sequence diagrams to help understand the flows better. I mention the diagrams because it's something that can be specially useful to some people, and there has been some discussion on them already: 1, 2, 3.

The article is not finished yet, but in the future you'll be able to find it here.

Published author

I opened a pull request to the new portal network website that adds the article I wrote about Kademlia several weeks ago. It got accepted, and I just think it's cool that one of my writings was useful enough to be added to the main docs of a project

.

You can read it here.