--- title: EPF Cohort 4 - Week 1 Updates --- Hey there, I am Manav Darji and these are my updates for week 1 (17/07 - 23/07). The primary goal for this week was to read more about the project(s) I am interested to work on and gather as much context as possible with the respective teams. #### Updates - Verkle trees - Got in touch with Tanishq from Nethermind who is actively contributing to the Verkle tree project. - To narrow down, one of the projects I am considering to work on is verkle tree migration (using the overlay tree method) as it is yet to be implemented in Nethermind - Read a few docs around the same. - Moreover, I am also trying to understand Statelessness as a broad topic to get some more ideas/projects under it. - References - [Notes on Statelessness and state expiry](https://www.notion.so/State-Expiry-Statelessness-in-Review-8d531abcc2984babb9bf76a44459e611) - [State of Statelessness](https://hackmd.io/@augustradjoe/stateless) - Few articles/talks from [awesome-verkle](https://github.com/weiihann/awesome-verkle) repo. - [ETH CC talk on verkle trees by Guillaume Ballet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1Ne19Vew6w) - Consensus clients / research - In the past 2 years, I have worked with execution clients and I'd say I have good grip over navigating and understanding it. I have been reading more about progress on consensus research but never have been able to work at implementation level. As the topics are interesting to me, I believe the implementation would be more challenging and interesting and I'd like to attempt working on it. - Some of the topics I am considering are: - ePBS design, and prototype in Prysm client - I am very mildly familiar with PBS and hence I spent time reading articles about the same to understand the problem better. - Read a few [articles](https://barnabe.substack.com/p/pbs) by Barnabe. - [ePBS ETH research post](https://ethresear.ch/t/why-enshrine-proposer-builder-separation-a-viable-path-to-epbs/15710) - [State of research on PBS by Vitalik](https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/pbs_censorship_resistance) (to read) - [ETH research post on PBS](https://ethresear.ch/t/proposer-block-builder-separation-friendly-fee-market-designs/9725) - [Two-slot pbs](https://ethresear.ch/t/two-slot-proposer-builder-separation/10980) - [Payload timliness committee design for ePBS](https://ethresear.ch/t/payload-timeliness-committee-ptc-an-epbs-design/16054) - To read: [PBS censorship resistance alternatives](https://notes.ethereum.org/@fradamt/H1TsYRfJc#Secondary-auctions) and [Inclusion lists fro PBS](https://notes.ethereum.org/@fradamt/forward-inclusion-lists). - Single slot finality and research around it - I have read Casper before and hence I am pretty familiar with notions of current consensus design of ethereum. I find SSF pretty interesting improvement and hence would be interested in working on it. - [ETH research forum post](https://ethresear.ch/t/a-simple-single-slot-finality-protocol/14920) - [Resolving Availability-Finality Dilemma](https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2020-11-01-ebb-and-flow-protocols-a-resolution-of-the-availability-finality-dilemma/) - [Vitalik's post on path towards SSF](https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/single_slot_finality) - Papers to read: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11326 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12745. - Secret non-single leader election - Yet to explore more on it - [ETH research forum post](https://ethresear.ch/t/secret-non-single-leader-election/11789) #### Next steps Post gathering some more context about each of the projects mentioned above, I will be mostly moving forward with ePBS in Prysm. My plan next week is start going through the initial networking spec (proposed by Prysm team) and get some familiarity with Prysm codebase. [Back](https://hackmd.io/@manav2401/epf-project-updates)