Motivation This document is about a discussion between the Ethereum team and AA wallet teams that were initiated by Vitalik. The AA team highlighted several issues they were currently facing. I have collected the topics and content of our discussions for internal review and learning (especially for zkEVM rollup-related parts). Critical Issues Multichain implementation The design goal of multichain AA wallet is to achieve address consistency and state (e.g. signing key, settings) consistency across multichain. 1. Address consistency across multichain

Gratitude to Chee, Kim, Chen Wen Kang, Jason, Haichen, Andy, Mason, Aiko, Chris, Anthony, Cathy, Vitalik, and every incredible person encountered on this journey! Over the past year, I've embarked on a journey across various countries for work-related reasons and to satisfy my innate curiosity. While some might refer to this lifestyle as that of a "digital nomad" or "world citizen," I prefer a more understated term - "homeless." This inspired the title of today's article, in which I will discuss my experiences living without a fixed abode. My travels took me to three continents and six countries, each exciting and enlightening adventure. I shared some of these journeys with friends, while others I undertook alone, constantly forging connections with locals. These unique experiences gave me fresh perspectives and allowed me to witness people and places I would never have encountered. These extraordinary moments broadened my horizons and revealed our world's boundless diversity and possibilities. I am eager to share these experiences in this article, which also marks the beginning of my next great adventure. Starting from Vietnam ETH Vietnam

The background I was inspired to write this article by two people, CC and Vitalik. They agreed that the best way to learn Ethereum is to watch all core dev meetings and read the relevant meeting notes, hackmd docs, issues & PRs, and EIPs until you are clear on Ethereum's current roadmap, what are the concerns and worries of core devs, what is the role of each upgrade/EIP, etc. Besides that, I was inspired by the community. Ethereum has an excellent open source culture, you can see all the meeting videos on EF YouTube, and the agenda for future discussions in ethereum/pm (more, Tim and Kim's notes). The ethereum developers are doing their best to make the community understand the current upgrades and improvements to ethereum. So I think writing articles like this is valuable to the community!

What is Consensus Background The Byzantine Generals ProblemBackgroundBasic idea: abstract The background of consensus knowledge In a 1982 paper, Leslie Lamport What is it The army are divided into several generals Generals communicate only through messenger

Special thanks to Alex Stokes, Danny Ryan, and Vitalik Buterin for their invaluable assistance and insightful feedback during the review process. What is beacon chain withdrawal With "the merge", the consensus of Ethereum is changed from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. PoS Ethereum requires you to stake 32 ETH to become a validator, which can be randomly assigned as a proposer (responsible for producing blocks) or an attester (responsible for submitting attestations), then validators will be rewarded according to their workload. And the architecture of Ethereum has also changed from a monolithic chain to a modular blockchain with two layers: the consensus layer and the execution layer, which communicate through the engine API. <Center>A modular blockchain with two layers</Center> Previously, the validator could only send funds to the beacon chain via a deposit contract, and these funds would be locked in the consensus layer because there was no mechanism to withdraw the fund.

=== Motivation The motivation R&D updates Execution Layer #155 (2023/2/16) Consensus Layer #102 (2023/2/9) Execution Layer #154 (2023/2/2) Execution Layer #153 (2023/1/19)

When learning the blockchain consensus mechanism, there is an inescapable concept, which is the "Byzantine Generals Problem" Around this problem, many solutions were born, some of which were abandoned, others were feasible (and inspired Nakamoto PoW and Ethereum PoS) Byzantine Generals Problem In the blockchain world, the consensus mechanism is to require all individual nodes (generally the number of nodes will be very large) to agree on a single fact (this single fact is the transaction history) So in simple terms, the consensus is about reaching an agreement Also, a situation makes it more difficult for nodes to reach a consensus, which Leslie Lamport proposed in his 1982 paper👇

We are gradually achieving effective "Proof of Humanity" PoH is actively used by many projects as a Sybil-Resistance mechanism (e.g. Gitcoin, Worldcoin, Proof of humanity, etc.). While they still have many unsolved issues, innovation is going The problem We want blockchain not only to be a toy for the rich and geeks but to go mainstream. This requires efforts from all sides Rollup and L2s make Ethereum cheaper Account abstraction makes Ethereum simpler PoH makes Ethereum a neutral democratic platform

According to MW, more than 60% of blocks are OFAC compliant. They will avoid the TC txs and any txs that OFAC has banned Does this mean that Ethereum is being censored, will the neutrality and decentralization of Ethereum be gone, and will Ethereum become a "US chain"? These are issues of great concern to the Ethereum community and it is easy to mislead the community What is "censorship" When we talk about "censorship", we seem to be talking about some mysterious power spying on us But it's not true. "Censorship" can be clearly defined and solved through technical means. It's not that mysterious and powerful

I haven't looked into Hermez's zkevm solution in-depth But it's an interesting topic, comparing Scroll_ZKP and 0xPolygonHermez's zkevm is a very good perspective to help everyone understand the zkVM and zkEVM Two Solutions Basically, Scroll_ZKP/ @PrivacyScaling's zkEVM solution does EVM equivalence by "re-implementing" the entire EVM All operations of EVM are defined in zkevm-circuits, which require a lot of steps (constraints) to prove Hermez's zkEVM solution is different

As we all know, the consensus protocol of PoS Ethereum is “Gasper”, which is constructed by applying the Casper FFG (a finality gadget) on top of LMD-GHOST (fork-choice rule) So if you want to figure out the full Ethereum consensus protocol, it’s necessary to understand these two Ingredients (Casper + Ghost). Besides, these designs are really fun I plan to sort out the background and evolution of these two protocols, as well as their simple workflow (which is very interesting!), and I will introduce Gasper in another article in the future PoS consensus algorithm There are three major schools of PoS consensus algorithm👇 Nakamoto-inspired (Peercoin)

In this thread, I want to clarify my misunderstanding of consensus mechanisms and clarify their definitions PoW, PoS, and PoA are not consensus protocols PoW, PoS, and PoA are essentially Sybil resistance mechanisms Consensus protocol and consensus mechanism are not equal For PoW-based Ethereum, Nakamoto is its consensus protocol And for PoS-based Ethereum, Gasper is its consensus protocol Proof-of-work and Proof-of-stake Proof of work and Proof of stake are not consensus protocols in themselves, people calling them consensus protocols is a lazy way of saying

The next big goal of Ethereum after the merge is sharding (Danksharding) And because merge and sharding (including other upgrades of Ethereum) work in parallel, sharding has made a lot of progress Danksharding Danksharding is a new sharding design proposed by @dankrad that focuses on data availability rather than code execution This is a long-term upgrade goal of Ethereum, and its purpose is to further reduce the cost of Ethereum as a data settlement layer Rollups as a mid/long-term scaling solution for Ethereum, the cost will be further reduced after Danksharding

My thinking about layer 3 comes from application-specific blockchains Similar to @dYdX, there are many dApps (existing and future) that need to be a blockchain instead of a contract (such as 100% on-chain games like @darkforest_eth and @topology_gg) App-chain solutions A dApp that wants to become a blockchain has the following options: First, you can develop a rollup (ZK or OP), the advantage is that you can inherit the security and ecosystem/users of Ethereum, but the trade-off is that the development cost is very high for the dApp team The second option is that you can use Cosmos, Polkadot, or Avalanche. Development costs will be much lower (dYdX chose Cosmos), but the trade-off is that you would give up the security and ecosystem/users of Ethereum In the worst case, you develop a Layer 1 blockchain, which has the highest cost (because you need to design your own decentralization mechanism to ensure a sufficient number of nodes without sacrificing execution efficiency), but such sovereignty also the highest

Merge (PoW → PoS) does not have much impact on EVM and zkEVM The essence of “the merge” is to replace the PoW consensus mechanism of Ethereum with PoS (PoS is a type of consensus mechanism, and Ethereum uses Gasper, which is Casper FFG + LMD-GHOST) Compared to the previous monolithic structure, Ethereum now has two parallel chains handling the logic of the consensus layer and the execution layer at the same time While merge only affects the consensus layer and has almost no effect on the execution layer (EVM), the only change is to replace the DIFFICULTY opcode with PREVRANDAO (refer to EIP-4399) After the merge, all DIFFICULTY will always return 0, so this field is discarded. Therefore, the merge is actually backward compatible. If there are smart contracts that contain PoW logic, it may be affected to a certain extent Except for the DIFFICULTY opcode, the EVM continues to process transactions and execute smart contract code, nothing has changed

Ethereum is an innovation at the level of human civilization, just like language and writing But in the development process of Ethereum, it has also undergone several major changes. To understand Ethereum and participate in it, you need to know its history and evolution I will sort out the evolution of Ethereum in this thread, as well as the latest roadmap Given that Ethereum is a very complex economic system, I've only picked out the main components (so there may be some omissions) The Background Ethereum was proposed by VitalikButerin in 2013, VitalikButerin directly borrowed the design of bitcoin, so decentralized and secure are the DNA of Ethereum from the beginning (this is why I like it)

It feels like magic when I was learning zk-proof zkp not only has the mathematical beauty but also (as a powerful tool) allows us to build all kinds of zk-apps I am deeply attracted by zkp. I would like to briefly sort out the history and evolution of zk-proof in this thread, and find out the key points for in-depth exploration Disruptive innovation There are two types of innovation, one is to improve efficiency and make things can do better; The second is disruptive innovation, which can achieve what was completely impossible before, and this type of innovation will open a new door for everyone The practical zk-proving system is evolving into a disruptive innovation after bitcoin (distributed ledger) and ethereum (distributed computer)

zkEVM has been the holy grail of layer2 and Ethereum scaling and is at the forefront of the blockchain && ethereum There's a lot of zkp and engineering innovation here, bringing together all the most talented people in the Ethereum ecosystem This is a very interesting and well-worth research topic, in this thread I will dive into zkEVM and explain the native zkEVM architecture of EF and @Scroll_ZKP Three levels of zkEVM First of all not all zkVM is equivalent to zkEVM, even for zkEVM itself it is divided into three levels (thanks to Justin Ðrake for the research) Language-Level

I've been reading "Stop, Mr. Feynman" recently. Richard Feynman is a very charming man, and this book is like a biography of Feynman's life (the title is also said to be chosen by Feynman), compiled from recorded conversations between Feynman and his drumming friends. As a theoretical physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project (the development of the atomic bomb) and won the Nobel Prize in Physics, much of the book is devoted to Feynman's interesting "experiments" and "pranks" (especially the pranks) from childhood to adulthood, and Feynman's pride in Feynman's pride in these pranks far exceeds that of winning the Nobel Prize. Feynman was a very funny man, who maintained a very strong curiosity throughout his life, lived an interesting life with no limits, and was always a maverick with a reputation for irresponsibility, a physicist I really liked. We can see this book because of his drummer friend Ralph: Feynman once went to a good friend's house for dinner, and then his friend's son ran over and asked him if he wanted to play drums together, and Feynman joined them. After that, every time he played the drums, Feynman started talking about his story, and Ralph called him "chief" and recorded him and encouraged him to tell it, and finally someone compiled the recorded material and published this interesting book (thanks Ralph).

These two days I took apart the code of zksync and read it carefully (matter-labs/zksync), as one of the mainstream zk-rollup projects on the market (and StarkWareLtd, loopringorg and Scroll_ZKP, etc.), zksync is considered one of the most open source, code The most complete project, so it can be a good study as zk-rollup quality learning materials. Early rollup The founder of zksync is @gluk64, he is a Ukrainian developer, I can see his figure frequently in many early rollup projects/forums. For example, in barry whitehat's roll_up (which can be considered the earliest rollup implementation) gitter forum, the first people to discover the project and come in to discuss it were @PhABCD, @gakonst (paradigm CTO) and @gluk64. And because I was curious about the historical evolution of rollup, I went to the ethereum research forum and searched for the people who first proposed rollup (before 2019). At that time, only PhABCD, barry whitehat and gluk64 mentioned rollup in their replies to vitalik, and all three posts were well worth reading.