Hey everyone!
The program's being ongoing for a bit more than two weeks now, and it's been extremely interesting so far.
I spent most of the first week getting up to date with Ethereum's basic concepts, which I knew very little about beyond what a blockchain was and what it could roughly be used for.
In particular, I went through the materials proposed in Stage 0, including the Ethereum yellowpaper. You can find all my notes on these things here.
Next, I decided to dig a little bit deeper regarding the issues surrounding state management in Ethereum. There seems to be so many distinct but interconnected concerns that I thought it was important to disentangle things a bit. This led to the creation of this review document, which I highly encourage you to read if you're interested in Ethereum state!
State Expiry & Statelessness in Review
Finally, to avoid only reading 100% of the time, I started coding a simple model for the EVM (or more properly, this is like an Ethereum client without any networking):
This is very early stage, only RLP is implemented so far, with transaction signing in the works.
State management seems an interesting direction to work in, and a logical first step would be to implement and integrate Verkle trees in an Ethereum client (or build upon an existing implementations). There are a few clients that currently do not have such implementation (including Nethermind and Erigon), so that could be a first project.
I want to be sure to understand what I'm doing first, so my goal will be to first implement the tree in nanoeth. In particular, here are the steps I'm thinking of taking:
We'll see how it goes. See you next time! 👋