# EPF5 Week 0 Updates Hello, my name is Ghilia and this is my week 0 updates for the fifth cohort of the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship. I'm curious about serialization schemes in Ethereum, mainly RLP encoding/decoding, for a few reasons: - There's enough articles and documentation about *what* RLP is, but none on *why* RLP is defined the way it is. - In fact, there doesn't seem to be easily accesible material on *principled* approaches to designing serialization schemes. I'm finding a lot of ad-hoc approaches that work efficiently for specific use cases. - Good serialization is crucial, because without it your system pays an invisible tax over time in terms of encoding/decoding latency. It's hard to even quantify this loss without another (better) scheme to evaluate against. - Right now, we know RLP works well, but we don't know how good it could be. - I'm interested in evaluating RLP and understanding how it came to be, and possibly designing a better serialization scheme. - Importantly, a better scheme today would ideally be backwards compatible with RLP or it risks being DOA and never getting adopted. - I want to become the kind of dev that cares about low level stuff like serialization schemes, and I think the EPF is the perfect opportunity and space to become that kind of developer. However, I'm unsure about taking on this project in the event that I cannot come up with a better scheme. I want to be able to have meaningful deliverables for this fellowship, and so I will brainstorm possible deliverables or focus my efforts elsewhere. ### This week's links - https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/data-structures-and-encoding/rlp/ - https://ethereum.github.io/yellowpaper/paper.pdf#page=19 - https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/data-structures-and-encoding/ssz/#:~:text=Simple%20serialize%20(SSZ)%20is%20the,except%20the%20peer%20discovery%20protocol. - https://sourcegraph.com/blog/go/creating-a-custom-serialization-format - https://github.com/yasammez/nachricht - https://github.com/khonsulabs/pot - https://medium.com/@shipshoper986/optimizing-data-serialization-faster-alternatives-to-json-a3685d210088 - https://msgpack.org - https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack/blob/master/spec.md - https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6383 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.07001