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Here I summarize my activities during this week. In order to get started in the program, I have planned the following reading list for week 0.

Reading list for Week 0

  1. Ethereum white paper.
  2. Ethereum yellow paper.
  3. Theory of KCG commitments.
  4. Patricia Tries (link 1 and link 2).

The Ethereum white paper is the original presentation of the Ethereum protocol. Eventhough Ethereum has evolved since its conception, the original white paper is important for historical reasons. It is also a good simplified reference of the entire protocol.

At the moment of this writing, I haven't started yet with the yellow paper, but I'm planning to finish it before the kick-off meeeting. After skimming through the yellow paper, it can be noted that it is written using and academic style and it presents a formalization of the entire Ethereum protocol.

At the current moment I am considering to do a project related to Verkle trees and one of the key components is the KCG commitment scheme. Although I've been told that inner product arguments based on Pedersen commitments are being currently considered for the implementation of Verkle trees, the KCG paper is a good start on polynomial commitments. KCG is a (relatively) old paper on how to commit to a polynomial where a verifier can ask a prover on the evaluation of the polynomial on random points. One of the main tricks in the paper is the heavy use of pairings.

Finally, Patricia tries are a well-know type of prefix tree. Their cryptographic version, known as the Merkle-Patricia trie, is the way that Ethereum organizes the transactions in each block. Esentially, a Merkle-Patricia tree is a prefix tree of transactions in a block where each pointer of a node is kept together with its hash.

For next week my plan is to go deeper into the cryptography related to Verkle trees. I would also like to start exploring some repositories about the work that is currently being done on the subject.

Potential reading list for Week 1

  1. Verkle Trees (link 1, link 2 and link3).
  2. Inner product arguments.
  3. PCS multiproofs using random evaluation.
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Marcos Villagra
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Final Dev Update

Precompile contracts

Nov 6, 2023
Week 14 Update 14.1

This is the first week since the start of the program that I slowed down a bit. I spent the week rereading the yellow paper to make a proposal of the gas cost of a potential Poseidon precompile.

Oct 23, 2023
Week 13 Update 13.1

During this week I completed all the benchmarks I was planning to do. I found some errors in the previous benchmark I coded using criterion and I spent time this week correcting those errors and running the new benchmarks.

Oct 16, 2023
Week 12 Update 12.1

This week I got prelimanry results on the benchmarks of the Poseidon hash function. These results can be accessed here:

Oct 9, 2023
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