I spent most of this week finalizing the area that I wanted to work on. While I initially considered a few topics (below), I settled on single-slot finality because of its infancy, the amount of opportunities to contribute, and the impact it would have on the protocol. Additionally, the topic is large enough that I can dive deep and have several different avenues with which I can explore it for my Master’s thesis. And most importantly, I find the topic fun! I’ve gotten lost in researching and can easily see myself getting absorbed in its issues over the coming weeks. Something about mechanisms for facilitating human coordination in a trustless and distributed manner resonates with me on a deep level.
I have a call with Francesco D’Amato, the author of “A Simple Single Slot Finality Protocol for Ethereum” among other insightful and relevant papers, on Monday. In this call I hope to get a better understanding of where I can contribute within SSF and create a coherent path forward, eventually leading to making my project proposal before the end of the week.
I started using Obsidian for note-taking specific to EPF, and am excited to see the graph of knowledge grow as I dive deeper into some of these topics.
Look at danksharding and evaluate different network parameters (number of shards, etc.)
Evaluate different quantum-resistant cryptographic techniques and their impact on scalability?
Predicting Ethereum scaling after danksharding + EIP-4844
Benefits of proposer-builder separation or working with client team to implement ePBS?
Verkle Trees
Single-slot finality
Account abstraction
Statelessness