Ethereum foundation fellowship - weeks 3 & 4

These 2 weeks were in the middle of the summer so i was on vacation all the time but managed to do some work too.

I reached out to verkle trie discord channel and PSE discord and shared my ideas about project that I'm interested working on and got some feedback.

Here's the doc:
https://hackmd.io/l2XvogKoQOCH748T1rdWZw

Also had a call with Verkle implementers for Standalone Java lib. I helped onboarding 2 new devs for that project.

My plan is to work on these 2 projects during my fellowship:

• Verkle Trie crypto primitives in-circuit (probably halo2)
• Standalone Verkle Trie Java library for Besu execution client

Also I have continued reading about pedersen commitment, still trying to realize what is pedersen hash and what is pedersen commitment, and how are they used in verkle trie data structure.

For next week I have few goals:

• finish the project proposal for verkle trie crypto primitives in-circuit
• start with first implementation (maybe bandersnatch eliptic curve using axioms framework https://github.com/axiom-crypto/halo2-lib/tree/community-edition/halo2-ecc)
• make contributions to Verkle in Java, at least one contribution - it can be related to leaf nodes or testing current code
• continune reading about cryptography. "Pairings for beginners" book.

Since the topic is really complex, these 4 goals should be enough for the week.