Ethereum Cat Herders Update #25

Published in

Ethereum Cat Herders

4 min readJul 13, 2020

Account abstraction, network health, EIP-1559, Ethereum 1.x, Eth2.0, ecosystem update, and more.

The Ethereum Cat Herders are back with another edition of community update to bring you up to the speed since the previous ECH update.

Ethereum All Core Developers meeting

Account Abstraction Updates

Based on Account abstraction MVP, a playground implementation is published for anyone interested to play around with it.

Introduction — EIP-2711

This is a new general transaction type proposal that is going to add a lot of functionality that people have requested in the past. Three main features that proposers are looking to add to this transaction type are — sponsored transactions, batched transactions, and expiring transactions. There is an Eth research post shared a few weeks ago, comparing some of the different approaches to the protocol by the transactions which kind of addressing the first feature of this transaction.

Network health

The discussion on Ethereum network health continued from the previous ACD meeting. Three collective learning of the session are -

possible restructuring of the teams in such a way that some people have a more holistic understanding and these people are going to have the necessary experience to propose protocol changes.
There is some potential for structuring a good specification of the protocol and what is required in such a way that people could specialize.
A discussion on the reusable components required for client diversity.

Additional resources:

Applying the “Five Whys” to the Client Diversity problem by Piper Merriam

AlexeyAkhunov started an Eth Magician thread Measuring Ethereum critical installations for the community to participate. It is highly recommended to watch the recording of the meeting. Interested people can participate in the discussion on the Eth R&DDiscord at the client-development channel.

EIP-1559

The research team started working on a 1559 testnet between Geth and Besu nodes. Good progress with that. It should be up in public in the next week or so.
In parallel, a formal analysis of the mechanism/design of the EIP is also planned to prove its goal.
The next 1559 Implementers call will be in the next couple of weeks.

Ethereum 1.x research

Polynomial Commitments for Witness Compression for Ethereum 1.x by Raghavendra Ramesh
Metering by counting cycles — A proposal to auto-meter precompiles for crypto bottlenecks, along with precise and accurate metering where metering is done by counting cycles on open hardware.

Ethereum 2.0

Eth 2.0 Implementers meeting#43: agenda, video, Ben’s notes.
AMA with the EF’s Eth 2.0 Research Team (Pt. 4) – 10 July 2020
What’s New in Eth2 — 10 July 2020, Edition 46 by Ben Edgington
Audit of Gossipsub v1.1 Protocol Design + Implementation for Protocol Labs
IPFS — A comprehensive Evaluation of GossipSub-v1.1
Sigma Prime- Beacon Fuzz — Update #06
Packetology: Validator Privacy — TXRX research team
Herumi mcl and bls libraries: request for proposals

Hackathon and events

Ethereum Cat Herders is a community partner for Ethereum Summer Camp organized by ETHPlanet.
Ethereum Summer Camp — Deep Dive into Eth 2.0 with Vitalik Buterin, Danny Ryan, and Karl Floersch.
HackFS — The EF is sponsoring 3 prizes ($5K, $3K, and $2K) at HackFS for the top three eth2+libp2p related projects. Twitter thread.