EPF Dev Update #1

Hello everyone

It's been just over a month since the Ethereum mainnet merged, and I'm already excited about the next phase of Ethereum development!

This is my first development update for the first week of participating in the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship program.

First Steps

My plan for the first week of the program is:

• Get myself familiar with the protocol by going through some of the EPF Suggested Reading.
• Catch up on some interesting talks from Devcon Bogota
• Start project research, exploration and ideation
• Connect with other EPF participants and mentors

Area of Interest

At the moment, I am most interested in the following topics, and will probably be deep diving into one or two of these areas:

• Scaling Ethereum through EIP-4844: Proto-Danksharding
• Account Abstraction

In the next two weeks, I plan to familiarize myself with work currently being done and come up with a project proposal that helps development in these areas, either in client code, testing and/or tooling.

EIP-4844: Proto-Danksharding, KZG Ceremony

The EIP-4844 website is a great place to get started with EIP-4844. It has links to most of the relevant resources, and a guide to join the devnet and start testing using blob-utils to upload blobs.

EIP-4844 reduces layer 2 (L2) gas fees significantly by introduceing a new transaction type to allow L2s to publish transactions to L1 "blob space" instead of using block space. The difference is that the blob data is only stored temporarily in the L1 consensus layer (hence cheaper), it only has to store the data long enough for L2s to retrieve and verify.

In the last EIP-4844 breakout call, one of the community tasks that I was interested in was to develop an explorer to visualize blobs - however since the last call Blobscan Explorer was built at the Devcon hackathon. Amazing work! Their Live demo site can be found here at blobscan.com. I will probably look into helping with client implementations / testing instead.

The KZG Ceremony is another topic that I've been keeping myself up to date with, although I have limited cryptography knowledge. It is a requirement for proto-danksharding and requires a large number of participants to help create randomness, I found this the video to be a really good intro: The KZG Ceremony - or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Trusted Setups

Some other good reads

• Argent's recent thread is a great explainer on Account abstraction
  https://twitter.com/argentHQ/status/1582742559470014464
• Ethereum Foundation 🛠 Account abstraction: building an ERC-4337 wallet - Yoav Weiss, Dror Tirosh

Next steps

• Look into existing work being done on EIP-4844 and connect with other participants and mentors.
• Continue to learn about Ethereum basics and EIP-4844.

That's it for now. See you soon in the next one