HackMD
This is my Week 1 update. I have decided to completely double down on the project to decouple blobs from execution payloads. The reasons why I am super excited to work on this is that:
- This contributes to the vision of a highly scalable ethereum blockchain.
- This touches a lot of aspects of ethereum core development from CL, EL, Mev relayers and Mev builders.
This week mainly went into more research, making my first contribution to prysm and starting a design board around the project.
Research
As part of my research, I delved into more topics of Ethereum core to get a deeper understanding of them. I tried to understand the same topic from different perspectives by reading about it in different contexts. For e.g, I initially learnt about Fork choice from Ben Edignton's book But I also spent time reading the post of the April MeV boost relay incident which gave me a different insight about block timeliness and fork choice. The liveness isue in MeV relayers also gave me a different perspective on skipped slots. Also read about equivocation attacks in MeV boost to gain more understanding on the block proposal mechanisms.
I spent time studying MeV relayer and builder architecture from the flashbots documentation and the MeV boost and MeV boost relay codebase. I have yet to touch upon the codebase of the MeV boost builder. I studied the architecture from https://ethresear.ch/t/mev-boost-merge-ready-flashbots-architecture/11177. I also learnt about relay monitoring from here.
I enhanced my knowledge on EIP-4844 by studying the following articles:
https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/blob_transactions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lyb02wZQQ4
https://notes.ethereum.org/RLOGb1hYQ0aWt3hcVgzhgQ?view
I also took a lot of notes related to my learning here
Code Contributions
I also submitted my first Prysm PR. This PR added support for a prometheus metric which would inform if a validator would be part of the upcoming sync commitee. It also fixes a bug with the existing metric which reports if a validator is in the sync commitee.
Design Work
I started the design work for my project in this Miro board. I prefer using Miro for initial design work as it allows me to think in a non-linear manner.
I started listing down the questions I had and the different points of the design where we would have to make a decision related to my project.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed my time spent in research. I feel much prepared now to tackle problems related to my project going ahead. I aim to complete as much as my design board before a call with my mentors next week to enable all of us to kickstart on the problem.
