Hey there, I am Manav Darji and these are my updates for week 2 (24/07 - 30/07).

As I was confused between 2 projects i.e. ePBS and Single slot finality, the primary goal for this week was analyse both the projects, their current situation and decide on what I really want to work on for the fellowship.

TL;DR - I have decided to work on the ePBS project with the Prysm team.

Moreover, based on that descision, carry on with further studies about the project.

Why ePBS

I spent good amount of time reading and wrapping my head around the need for ePBS through the design articles on eth research and various talks from past events and PBS day in Paris. I believe that this project is in a good pace and active discussion already and hence there's good motivation to follow it. Moreover, it touches on a lot of different sub-domains starting from mechanism design (game theory), consensus layer changes, networking, etc which I am generally interested in. Hence, I believe, I could learn a lot by contributing to this project.

A few points regarding the other projects - As mentioned above, I was also exploring verkle tree and SSF project. Re. verkle trees, I believe that the project has already reached pretty advanced stage (in terms of development) and hence I personally feel that I will be doing more of replica work (e.g. implementing the feature for a new client by referencing geth's implementation). I am not in any way trying to degrade the amount of work and complexity it will involve. Re. SSF, one of the problem statement I was trying to look at was the aggregation problem i.e. how practically feasible it is to build a signature aggregation mechanism for 1M+ validators? Again, super complex and interesting problem statement but there isn't much active discussion about it at this point in the community and it's a very narrowed down and specific problem statement. Hence, ePBS at this moment felt like an open project with lot of different aspects to look into and sounded more interesting to me. Post fellowship, I would definitely like to contribute to SSF project as in long run it sounds more important and interesting to me.

Coming back to PBS, Terrence and Potuz from the Prysm team have been very helpful in sharing some initial resources and also a rough spec containing lot of details of the whole pbs mechanism based on the PTC design they're moving ahead with. While going through the spec, I believe that there are lot of consensus terms which I am not fully aware of. As the PTC design touches lot of things in the CL, I am currently going through the old consensus specs and some reference material (like the eth2book).

Resources:

• Rough spec draft by Prysm team
• Flashbots session on PBS and discussion on different designs
• Mike Neuder on Ethereum PBS roadmap

Next steps

• Have a call with Prysm team next week for some initial braindump and discussion about the next steps. Really looking forward to that call.
• Continue reading the consensus specs to get idea of the sub-problem statements present in ePBS. Identify the kind of work required in each of them and try to help in finalising the spec with the team.

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