This is a guidebook of links for research topics in the Ethereum R&D Discord, which follows the existing channel structure.
Ethereum Protocol Fellowship Program (EPF) is an effort to onboard more contributors to Ethereum Core Development.
- EPF repositories - Updated frequently
- Announcement Blog Post - August 2022
The Consensus Layer (Beacon Chain) is defined by an executable python implementation of Ethereum that prioritizes readability and simplicity. There is a project underway to do the same for the Execution Layer.
- Consensus Specs - Work Ongoing
- Execution Specs - Work Ongoing
The Merge united the Execution and Consensus layers of Ethereum into a single unified system. At the transition, Proof of Work consensus was hot-swapped with the Proof of Stake Beacon Chain consensus, resulting in a more scalable, secure, and sustainable network
- Amphora Interop Milestone tracker - Oct 2021
- Merge Interop Spec - Oct 2021
- EIP-3675: Upgrade consensus to Proof-of-Stake - July 2021
EIP-1559 changed Ethereum's fee market to use elastic blocksizes and burnt Ether to smooth congestion and improve transaction inclusion UX.
- EIP-1559 Resources 🔥 - Tim Beiko, others
- PEEPanEIP #37: EIP-1559: Fee market change with Tim Beiko, Barnabe Monnot, Micah Zoltu - Ethereum Cat Herders
- Cheatsheet: 1559 for Wallets & Users - Trent Van Epps, Tim Beiko
- EIP-4396: Time-Aware Base Fee Calculation - October 2021
- Make EIP-1559 more like an AMM curve - April 2021
- Multidimensional EIP-1559 - January 2022
Account abstraction (AA) allows a contract to be the top-level account that pays fees and starts transaction execution. Sometimes used as a general catchall term for delegated transaction validation.
- Account Abstraction Link Tree: 2015 - 2020
- Proposal for account abstraction via alternative mempool - June 2021
🅰️ 🅰️ Account Abstraction Beyond EIP-2938 🧵🎉 - Nov 2020- Account Abstraction (EIP-2938): Why & What - Nov 2020
- EIP-2938: Account Abstraction - Magician's Discussion - Sept 2020
(Summary needed)
- Ethereum Wire Protocol (ETH) - Ongoing
- The State of Client Diversity in Ethereum - August 2020
"The Ethereum state size is growing quickly... In order to maintain the scalability and sustainability of Ethereum, we need some solutions."
- Ethereum Statelessness Resource Page - Oct 2021
- Review tying state expiry, witnesses, verkle trees & the portal network - June 2021
- State Expiry EIP - June 2021
- A state expiry and statelessness roadmap - June 2021
- Verkle tree EIP - June 2021
- A theory of state size management - February 2021
- A few paths to statelessness and state expiry - February 2021
- Resurrection-conflict-minimized state bounding - February 2021
- Proposed Verkle tree scheme for Ethereum state - March 2021
- ReGenesis - Explication of Alexey Akhunov’s proposal, can be described as a form of state expiry + history expiry - June 2020
- ASE (Address Space Extension) with Translation Map - June 2020
- Increasing address size from 20 to 32 bytes - March 2020
- The Stateless Client Concept, original ethresear.ch post - 2017
- State rent (precursor to state expiry), original proposal - 2015
- Presentation on bounding witness sizes - Jan 2021
Research and initiatives related to improving the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)
- Everything about the EVM Object Format (EOF) - June 2021
- Memory Copying in Contracts Deployed on Ethereum - June 2021
- EOF Status Update 2023-10-12
(Summary needed)
- Kate polynomial commitments - June 2020
- PCS multiproofs using random evaluation - June 2021
- Fast Amortized Kate Proofs - March 2020
- Understanding PLONK - Sep 2019
- Ethresear.ch posts on kate - Ongoing
- KZG Commitments in C - Ongoing
- KZG Trusted Setup Ceremony specifications - Ongoing
(Summary Needed)
- Ethereum Witness Protocol (wit) - February 2021
- The Formal Witness Spec: An Illustrated Primer - October 2020
- Block Witness Formal Specification - April 2020
An ongoing project to "Introduce a new Verkle state tree alongside the existing hexary Patricia tree. After the hard fork, the Verkle tree stores all edits to state and a copy of all accessed state, and the hexary Patricia tree can no longer be modified." This effort often considered a prerequisite for some degrees of Statelessness.
- Verkle Tree Update - Aug 2023
- Ethereum statelessness roadmap - Oct 2021
- Verkle Tree EIP Draft - Oct 2021
- Verkle Tree EIP Notes - September 2021
- Verkle Trees - June 2021
- Verkle Tree for Eth1 State - June 2021
- Verkle Trees Paper - 2018
(Summary Needed)
- SSZ and Typed Transactions - January 2021
- Typed Transactions - December 2020
- EIP-2976: Typed Transactions over Gossip - September 2020
(Summary needed)
- EIP-2718: Typed Transaction Envelope - June 2020
(Summary Needed)
- LINK 1
- LINK 2
(Summary Needed)
- Responding to 51% attacks in Casper FFG - October 2019
- LINK 2
(Summary Needed)
- LINK 1
- LINK 2
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) represents a centralization vector around block builder. Separating the responsibility of building blocks from proposing blocks helps mitigate centralization concerns and democratize access to the extractable value.
- PBS-friendly fee market designs - June 2021
- Two-slot PBS - October 2021
- Committee-driven MEV smoothing - August 2021
- State of research on censorship resistance under PBS - January 2022
- Current crList proposal - February 2022
- Study on the SSZification Impact on existing applications/protocol
- Presentation on the SSZification Impact on existing applications/protocol
(Summary Needed)
(Summary Needed)
- Sharding FAQs - Ongoing
- Consensus Specs - Sharding - Ongoing
- Why Sharding is Great: demystifying the technical properties - April 2021
- An explanation of the sharding and DAS proposal - January 2021
- ETH2 Shard Chain Simplification Proposal - October 2019
- Dankrad's data sharding design - December 2021
- "Dude, what’s the Danksharding situation?" Workshop - February 2022
- EIP-4844: Shard Blob Transactions ("Proto-Danksharding") - February 2022
- Proto-Danksharding FAQ - March 2022
- Secret Single Leader Election (SSLE) in Eth2 - September 2022
- Provable Single Secret Leader Election - September 2020
- Secret non-single leader election - January 2022
- Whisk: A practical shuffle-based SSLE protocol for Ethereum - January 2022
- Simplified SSLE - April 2022
- LINK 1
- LINK 2
- LINK 1
- LINK 2
(Summary Needed)
- Preventing Eth2 Validator Failure - October 2020
(Summary Needed)
- Formal Verification Blog - Ongoing