EPF-5 | Week 1

# EPF-5 | Week 1 I was not around prior to week 1, so this is my first update. I've spent my time investigating the project proposals, as well as reviewing those of the previous cohort. While I managed to dive into all the open proposals, I have not reviewed all the work of the previous cohort, as there is simply too much material and I found I had to read up on the relevant literature of various topics to get a firmer grasp of certain concepts first. ### Projects of Interest: After scrutinizing all the project proposals, here are the ideas that caught my interest, in no particular order: - **Prysm: Custom Golang Implementation of libp2p** This project seems quite feasible and offers an opportunity to understand libp2p better, especially the minimal requirements for the consensus client. Though it has been a while, I've worked with libp2p before, and given my preference for minimalism, getting to understand the minimal requirements of libp2p for the Ethereum stack would provide me insight into the p2p layer. - **PandaOps: Minimum Validator Participation** This project would presumably involve simulations to test hypotheses on improving resilience. In that vein, I've read the papers by Paulavičius to get an understanding of the landscape of blockchain simulators. Furthermore, I had a brief glance at the testnet testing tool [assertoor](https://github.com/ethpandaops/assertoor), which may also be leveraged, and I also found this [DAS Simulator](https://github.com/codex-storage/das-research) that could be of interest. - **RIG, ROP-12: Credible LLM Markets and AI-MEV** This involves AI, defining metrics for evaluation, and optimizing LLMs for routing and matching. It is well-suited for an agent system and aligns with my interest in AI and machine learning. Although it aligns well with my interests, it seems a bit removed from the Ethereum code stack. - **Grandine:** This is an ambitious undertaking with lots of possibility to contribute, ranging from simpler tasks such as improving the logging, allowing one to familiarize oneself with the codebase, to complex tasks such as improving PeerDAS. - **Ephemery:** The Ephemery Testnet aims to create an automatically resetting ephemeral Ethereum testnet to serve as a cross-client testing network, avoiding issues like state bloat and inactive validators. The network resets to the genesis after a set period, currently 7 days, making it suitable for short-term, intensive testing. Beyond the suggested proposal, I am particularly interested in exploring how ephemeral chains can be used for other applications. One simpler idea is to use these chains for L2 gaming chains, where permanence is not crucial. Another more interesting application is using ephemeral blockchains within autonomous multi-agent systems to reach consensus on intermediate (non-persistent) stages of computation before committing final results to a persistent chain (i.e. ETH mainnet). This would enable decentralized decision-making in complex, off-chain computations, providing an additional layer of fault tolerance as consensus over intermediate results would be required. ### Activities: - Attended part of ZuBerlin remotely, focusing on MEV day. - Made minor contributions to two wiki pages. Relevant material read - [Serenity Design Rationale](https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/serenity_design_rationale) - [Paulavičius et al., 2021. An Overview and Current Status of Blockchain Simulators](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9461114) - [Paulavičius et al., 2021. A systematic review and empirical analysis of blockchain simulators](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=9366733) - [ZuBerlin](https://streameth.org/zuberlin) - [Preconf](http://preconf.wtf/) - [Based Preconfirmations](https://thogiti.github.io/2024/04/07/Based-Preconfirmations.html) - [Why it's so important to go stateless](https://dankradfeist.de/ethereum/2021/02/14/why-stateless.html) - [Data Availability Sampling](https://blog.codex.storage/data-availability-sampling/) Next steps: - Read up on and study the [CL and EL specs](https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs) - Further investigate [previous cohorts' work](https://github.com/eth-protocol-fellows/cohort-four/tree/master/projects) - Work out draft proposals using the provided [template](https://github.com/eth-protocol-fellows/cohort-five/blob/main/projects/project-template.md) - Analyze [Grandine repository](https://github.com/grandinetech/grandine), and comparing and understanding it's relation to [Lighthouse](https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse) - Reaching out to: - Barnabé Monnot regarding ROP-12 - Mario Havel regarding the Ephemery Testnet - Saulius Grigaitis regarding Grandine