Ethereum Cat Herders Update #28

A proposal on gas cost, EVM 384, Medalla testnet, Ethereum client diversity, Peep an EIP, and more community updates.

Welcome to another edition of the Ethereum Cat Herders community update to bring you up to the speed since the last update.

Ethereum All Core Developers meeting

EIP-1057: ProgPoW, a Programmatic Proof-of-Work

Greg Colvin provided updates on the progress:

• reviewing since April,
• working on a new reference implementation right now.

He further added that he’d like to discuss 1057 on the testnet on the next call and later shared links for the ongoing work.

• EIP-1057 PR for review — Incorporates Andrea Lanfranchi’s implementation of the Kik exploit fix. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/2894
• The reference implementation is on @ifdefelse’s repo at https://github.com/ifdefelse/ProgPOW
• The Magician’s thread is at https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip-progpow-a-programmatic-proof-of-work/272

New Proposals

EVM 384 — Can we do Fast Crypto in EVM?

Before the all core dev meeting, Alex B. shared write-up on EVM-384 which was further discussed in the meeting. The goal here is to support operations of BLS-12381 (the Eth2 curve), so this would be an alternative to other EIPs which proposed the curve as a precompile. He further explained that one of the motivations for this is to reduce consensus complexity. Vitalik added If we can make this close to native efficiency, probably, we can get away with not adding any more precompiles in the future. If interested, you can participate in the discussion at EthMagician.

A proposal — Short-term gas cost increases for storage-accessing operations

This was a proposal by Vitalik to increase the gas cost of opcodes that touch storage (SLOAD, all the EXT calls). He explained that these increases would provide a security improvement for the chain. Martin S. said that the change is technically simple but may break things, and the community will push back against this like EIP-1884 that broke contracts and there was pushback. Hudson recommended moving this forward will require a proper write up about the pros and cons, explaining why this is needed, with a proper EIP. And Vitalik agreed. Good technical discussion took place on the call, highly recommends watching the recording.

Yolo testnet and Berlin

• Besu added to the mix of clients being Fuzzed. Few vulnerabilities were discovered, not specific to BLS.
• Done fuzzing for BLS, Subroutines. Nethermind, Geth all synced, a little bit of ex-Parity (OpenEthereum) too. ex-Parity (OpenEthereum) also implemented Static call precompiles.
• Still finding bugs, but getting better.

Discussing clarity on pre-Berlin testnet EIPs, Tim mentioned that considering, EVM 384, gas cost change implementation is simple, it is important to understand what we want to get on the testnet before spinning.

EIP-2666: Precompiles and Keccak256 repricing

• Benchmark for EIP 2666

New EIP process status

Core-EIP process

The EIPIP working group came up with a revised process flow for EIP and introduced new terms added to the process. The goal is to separate the hard fork coordination from the EIP statuses themselves.

• ACD meeting#94: agenda, video, live-tweet by Tim Beiko. Next meeting is scheduled on Friday, September 04, 2020, at 14:00 UTC
• AllCoreDevs Gitter has moved to Discord.

Stateless Ethereum (Eth 1x)

• The Stateless Tech Tree: reGenesis Edition by Griffin Ichiba Hotchkiss
• Stateless Ethereum Call #8 digest

Ethereum 2.0

• Eth 2.0 Implementers meeting#46: Agenda, Video, Ben’s quick notes, and ECH’s detailed notes.
• Validated, staking on eth2: #5 — Why client diversity matters
• What’s New in Eth2 # 50 by Ben Edgington
• Eth2 Medalla Testnet Incident by Prysmatic Labs
• Medalla Testnet incident does not inherently affect the launch date. While the launch date has not been set, the Prysmatic team believes the expected launch target of 2 to 3 months from Medalla genesis is still an ideal timeline.
• Sigma Prime Beacon Fuzz — Update #07
• The Eth2 Studymaster program — earn a POAP for demonstrating knowledge of Eth2.

EIPIP working group

• A new EIP validator was integrated. The EIP validator makes sure the EIP is syntactically valid. The new EIP statuses won’t be added to the EIP validator until after receiving final approval from the All Core Devs. It was proposed in the meeting last Friday and seem to have a consensus.
• EIPIP meeting 14: agenda, video, notes. The next EIPIP meeting is proposed on Wednesday, August 12, 2020, at 1500 UTC. Agenda.
• Lightclient opened a PR on the EIPs repo to transition the site from Jekyll to Zola: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/2890. He thinks that removing all the ruby from the CI pipeline will significantly improve confidence in builds and deployments. The new toml the frontmatter format will also be much better to work within eipv and mergebot.

Ethereum Cat Herders

Peep an EIP

In the last Cat Herders meeting, I proposed an EIP focused series to create awareness and provide educational videos for a better understanding of proposed proposals to the Ethereum community and help consensus building on EIPs for a network upgrade.

The recording of the first episode on ‘Writing an EIP’ with Matt Garnett (lightclient) is available now.

In this and the coming weeks, we’re going to discuss

• EIP-2537: BLS12–381 curve operations with Alexander Vlasov on Tuesday, Aug 25, 2020, at 2:30–3:15 pm EST
• EIP-1571: EthereumStratum/2.0.0 with Andrea Lanfranchi on Wednesday, Aug 26, 2020, at 02:30–03:00 pm EST
• EIP-2666 with Alexander Vlasov on Tuesday, Sept 01, 2020, at 2:30–3:15 pm EST.

You can follow which EIP is scheduled next at ECH GitHub. If you have any questions related to an EIP, or you want to join the session, reach me on Twitter.

The state of client diversity in Ethereum

The Cat Herders conducted an Ethereum Critical Installation survey on miners, wallets, exchange, and other node operators to collect data on client diversity. A summary of discussions and data received from the survey is published as a blog. We thank everyone who participated in the survey.

• ECH call#40: agenda, video, notes. The next meeting is proposed on September 01, 2020, at 14:00 UTC

1559: Fees market change

• An Update on EIP-1559 — The Daily Gwei #57 by Anthony Sassano
• 1559 Implementers call #4 is proposed on Friday, Aug 28th at 15:00 UTC. Agenda.

Other Community Updates

• ConsenSys Acquires J.P. Morgan’s Quorum to Advance Enterprise Blockchain Adoption. Goodbye PegaSys | Hello ConsenSys Quorum!
• Gnosis safe crossed the $1 billion mark!
• Metamask updates license for the Next Wave of MetaMask Users
• 1INCH token and liquidity mining announcement
• Calculating ETH supply from the plain state by Alexey Aukhunov
• ESP: Beyond Grants
• Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs)
• Randomness Summit

Support the Ethereum Cat Herders

• We’re moving to Discord as the main communication channel. Join us at ECH Discord.
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Share your question, comments, and suggestions with me on Twitter. Thank you for reading 🙏.

— The Ethereum Cat Herders