ConsensusR&D (aka EF Research Team)

Authored by Danny Ryan and Hsiao-Wei Wang.

This was an extraordinary year. With the magic of client teams, DevOps wizards, testers, stakers, and the community at large, we successfully merged! THANK YOU ALL for contributing to The Merge, massively reducing energy consumption, and making Ethereum a more secure and sustainable protocol.

Switching Ethereum mainnet consensus mechanism to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) was a significant milestone the ConsensusR&D team has been working on for many years -- but this is not the full story!

Additionally, the ConsensusR&D team has been tackling emergent problems in the MEV domain (e.g. proposer builder separation (PBS), MEV smoothing/burning), pondering security improvements to the beacon chain (e.g. single slot finality (SSF), single secret leader election (SSLE)), and a whole host of other consensus research – multi-dimensional EIP-1559, better aggregation techniques, optimized applied cryptography, and more.

Next year, our team will continue working on, but not limited to, the following:

- Scheduled and tentative protocol upgrades - Continued refinement of the EIP-4844 consensus-layer specs. At the same time, we are collaborating with developer teams on the CL EL clients interoperability and devnets. - To use KZG polynomial commitments in EIP-4844, we need to generate the "trusted setups" via KZG Ceremony with public participants. You can find more progress updates in the recent KZG Ceremony Grant Round RfP blog post. - Withdrawals functionality: this feature will enable stakers to withdraw their balances from the beacon chain to their execution layer accounts. The consensus-layer core specs are nearing completion, and client teams are actively implementing and testing the functionality. - EIP-4844 aka proto-danksharding - Other post-merge research topics, e.g., proposer/builder separation (PBS), Verkle trie/statelessness, single slot finality (SSF), data availability sampling (DAS), fee market refinement, single secret leader election (SSLE), and more.

Cryptography Research

Authored by Dankrad Feist.

The cryptography team has taken an initiative to make Ethereum secure against quantum computers. Our team members have contributed to a post-quantum signature scheme that is to be standardized by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). We continue to work in this direction and build a signature scheme that scales better via aggregations. Further down the road, we may improve the scalability via better aggregation techniques, or via different hardness assumptions.

Fe-lang

Authored by Grant Wuerker.

The Fe team aims to provide the Ethereum community with a safe and effective smart contract programming language. The team is responsible for the design of Fe-lang and the development of its core components, including the compiler, standard library, and tooling.

Over the past year, the team has been focused on adding language features and preparing for our first beta release. Below are the highlights from 2022:

Notable language features:

- Low-level intrinsic functions (0.12.0) - Nested structs in memory (0.13.0) - Std library with EVM and context modules (0.14.0) - Nested structs in storage (0.14.0) - Const folding (0.14.0) - Function argument labels (0.15.0) - Nested structs can be returned and passed into functions (0.19.1) - Braces! (0.19.1) - Traits and generic function parameters (0.19.1) - Enums and match statements (0.20.0) - Mut keyword (0.20.0)

Please see the releases page for a complete list of changes.

Tooling:

- @zjhmale developed a Hardhat plugin - A couple contributors developed VSCode plugins:

- @vuvoth's - @zjhmale's

Community:

- Hosted Fe Day, presented at Solidity Summit, and sat in a languages panel at Secureum TrustX in Amsterdam for Devconnect 2022. - Participated in the Language Tug of War panel in Bogotá for Devcon 2022. - Launched Bountiful and got hacked by @plotchy. - Received contributions from a total of 12 contributors.

Other:

- Yoshi has been working on a compiler backend specialized for smart contracts named Sonatina. - A few simple contracts were verified using K.

Our top priorities moving into 2023 are: first beta release (see: Fe's path to production), better generic support, better constant support, and improvements to the standard library. We are especially excited about future Bountiful challenges.

Formal Verification

Authored by FV team

hevm

We've spent most of this year rewriting the symbolic execution engine in hevm