---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Ethereum Protocol Fellowship 4: Update 2'
tags: [EthereumProtocolFellowship]

---

During the last week, I spent my time researching the areas of interest I mentioned in the [previous update](https://hackmd.io/@teri-b/HJwjlwFqh). The one I liked the most was the research of **SSLE** and its security. I find cryptography concepts very interesting, so I gave it some time and went through a few articles, some I read in detail and some I just quickly went through. I will link them for future reference:
### SSLE and SnSLE resources
* [General overview of the problematic on Ethereum.org](https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/secret-leader-election/)
* [Secret non-single leader election proposal by Vitalik](https://ethresear.ch/t/secret-non-single-leader-election/11789)
* [Whisk: A practical shuffle-based SSLE protocol for Ethereum](https://hackmd.io/@asn-d6/HyD3Yjp2Y)
* [Whisk code on GitHub](https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/pull/2800)
* [Efficient and Universally Composable
Single Secret Leader Election from Pairings (paper)](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-31368-4_17)
* [Secret Single Leader Election (SSLE) in Eth2 (code) by Vitalik](https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/HJNJDTaVw)
* [Simplified SSLE by Vitalik](https://ethresear.ch/t/simplified-ssle/12315)
* [Analysis of Swap-or-Not SSLE proposal by Dmitry Khovratovich](https://ethresear.ch/t/analysis-of-swap-or-not-ssle-proposal/12700)

I've discussed my interest with dapplion and found out that the focus is currently on ensuring the safety of SSLE and SnSLE implementations. Although I've read and understood most of the articles, I'm not really sure if I'm knowledgable enough in this area to be able to contribute meaningfully in this area, because I've never done cryptography research before and security is an area that really needs to be done right. I have not yet made a final decision, but I think I will try and research this challenging project later out of the EPF scope and will find a different official project, probably more implementation focused and a bit more doable in the time window.

I think the next thing I find the most interesting would be working on the **Ephemery** testnet. I like that there are a lot of areas to possibly work on (and a lot of various languages to implement stuff in), the contributors communicate on Matrix, the specification seems to be clear and the [roadmap and tasks](https://github.com/ephemery-testnet/ephemery-resources/issues/1) are stated on GitHub. That's a big advantage and makes everything much easier for contributors new to the Ethereum development. I will spend the next few days further researching the testnet, deciding and trying to draft a possible project proposal.