soispoke.eth

If we ship FOCIL (EIP-7805), Frame Transactions (EIP-8141), Keyed Nonces (EIP-8250) and Recent Roots (EIP-8272) in Hegota, we get native, trustless, censorship resistant private transactions on Ethereum next year.

Private communication is a precondition for a free society. Any measure that scans everyone's messages by default is mass surveillance, regardless of what it is built to find.

Native UTXOs on Ethereum. Payments should be one-shot objects, not permanent state. Bitcoin got this right. Ethereum can bring the same idea to payments: prove existence from history, keep only a spent bit in state, and reduce permanent state by ~99.8%. Check out the blog post for details. ethresear.ch/t/native-utxos…

@ShutterNetwork @VitalikButerin @nero_eth @drakefjustin @fradamt here's a very good reference for why shipping PQ secure encrypted mempools without the reveal optionality prolem is hard: ethresear.ch/t/a-criticism-…

Hey @VitalikButerin, @nero_eth, @soispoke, @drakefjustin, @fradamt You state that you're prioritizing privacy, security & credible neutrality on Ethereum, but EMs have been pushed back to "longer term" in the Strawmap That seems contradictory, can share your thinking here?

ACDE presentation: youtube.com/watch?t=2651&v… slides: docs.google.com/presentation/d…

Keyed Nonces (EIP-8250) and Recent Roots (EIP-8272) are now officially proposed for Hegota! Links below for the video and slides that explain how to get to trustless, censorship resistant privacy protocol transactions 🔗

@fede_intern @VitalikButerin Lean fork for L*

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April. The updated strawmap is at strawmap.org, and I attached a picture of it to this post. My own high-level takeaways: * "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced: - Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol - Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives - Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today - Multidimensional gas - State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available - Changes to client architecture ... At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again. * H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another. * Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?" * Formal verification of everything for security. * FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM. * Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months) * Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount. eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state) Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees. Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration. * In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area. * Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V. My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away. * Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes. Ethereum is CROPS. Ethereum is scaling. Ethereum is reinventing itself. Onward.

Thursday on ACDE I'll propose Keyed Nonces (EIP-8250) and Recent Roots (EIP-8272) for Hegota. These two EIPs, sitting on top of frame transactions, are very important primitives to ensure privacy dApp transactions become censorship resistant and trustless!

1/ Announcing Ethereum Institutional An independent non-profit dedicated to accelerating the institutional adoption of Ethereum, its L2s, applications and overall ecosystem.

What if you could have a local wallet that's: - AI native - Privacy first - Secure - Fully local - Open source Coming soon, from your beloved @ethereumfndn dAI team.

Full numbers vs Binius64 / Hashcaster / Plonky3 + scaling analysis: soispoke.github.io/flock-bench/ Benchmark suit used to do the analysis and generate results: github.com/succinctlabs/f…

⚡️⚡️ For anyone interested, here are Flock benchmarks on an M5 Max, sitting at around ~820K BLAKE3 compressions/sec at peak! ⚡️⚡️ 👇

Introducing Flock: a new SNARK for proving batches of standard hash functions at just 250× the cost of computing them natively. Developed by @benediktbuenz from @EspressoSys, @ronrothblum, and NYU's William Wang, Flock puts Ethereum's Post Quantum target in reach.

@Vicks_vic @aerugoettinea We have moved from privacy and scaling "explorations" to privacy and scaling "execution". The number of people working on something ZKP-related is probably as high as ever, it's just working on integrating these things directly into the Protocol and Access layer.

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year. Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world. Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring. Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list): * The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals. * PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer * Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate. * Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds. * EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale. These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play. In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin. The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive. firefly.social/post/x/2069408…

@Philastru yes, definitely it will continue to be a living document

@soispoke Will the strawmap in future be updated regularly as things evolve (up to the minute?). I want to use this document as a go to regularly.

Updated strawmap dropped, excited to join the architecture team🫡 I'll be fully focused on shipping the strongest possible censorship resistance and privacy guarantees into the protocol.

Today, the EF is changing shape, concluding a months-long process of reorganization as part of the implementation of the Mandate and the Treasury Management Policy. We come out of this process with the structure, activities, and people necessary for execution on the critical tasks ahead of us, but also with 54 fewer colleagues, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom will be finding ways to contribute to Ethereum from outside the EF in the coming weeks. Find a brief introduction to the new structure, and learn more about how we are supporting the people who are leaving in the full post below:

Bullish Ethlabs, congrats @adietrichs @casparschwa @barnabemonnot @_julianma and @rudolf6_ !