From EF to Argot: Solidity’s New Home - Lea Schmitt

Transcript

I'm a member of the Argo Collective and I will give you all a little bit of context on the new ORC structure of Solidity, the Argo Collective. Um, if I can. Yes, perfect. Um so following the subtraction philosophy of the EF um solidity led successfully the largest spin out of the AF together with five other teams that are focused on application infrastructure creating a independent nonprofit sister organization to the EF the Argo collective and that collective independently drives key Ethereum

infrastructure. So the top priority of this collective is to basically create the best environment for Ethereum applications. And to go in a little bit more detail, so what is the Argo Collective? The Argo Collective is a research and development group that independently is sustaining and maintaining um the primary programming languages and tooling infrastructure for Ethereum and most notably Solidity. What makes Argo really unique is that it combines a broad range of expertise. So it combines um compiler expertise um language design formal verification under one roof and that

allows us to um yeah really enable crosspollination and ultimately feed into solidity which yeah helps us make smart contract development but also app development on Ethereum simpler, safer and more resilient. And if we go into the overview, so I mentioned that um Solidity let the spin out, but it spun out with five other teams and you can so and together they're building sort of this integrated stack for smart contracts. The collective is um located at the tooling layer between application and core protocol layer and the core of the collective is solidity

and it as we all know it just recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary that was um basically the opportunity that the team also made use of to share where the language is headed. Um I in this overview I won't go too much into detail but we will have enough talks from the team that will do that for me. Um but the TLDDR is that the work on solidity will basically be split into two tracks. So we have classic solidity and core solidity. Classic being um the language that's supported by Soly today. Um we will still work on making the language more stable and adding a small set of new features. Then there is core solidity which is the revamp of the language. um with a new type system and

ultimately built to support new features more efficiently and we have a bunch of talks about this this morning. Um and then yeah then we also have fee um this is our more forward-looking um language research project. They are very close to shipping v2 and they will both target their backends will both um target you. So both core um solidity and fee will um target you. So they'll have a shared back end. Um if you move up a little bit in the development process, you have eat the bug which is a cross language um debugging standard which provides rich data, rich information that then

ultimately makes debugging um more efficient. We have Nick here um later this morning as well to give an uh he will give an update on what he has been working on. And to make your smart contracts safer, we have um our former verification teams starting with ACT. Um this is our uh formal verification and documentation tool for EVM smart contracts and going forward um the team might might also work on the specification for core solidity.

Then there's HVM, our um symbolic execution um tool and you can also use it for testing um smart contracts. It's actually yeah it it helps uncover edge cases and yeah uh enables rigorous analysis. The team is already using it um quite a lot for fuzzing for classic but also um for core solidity. And what's interesting here is that some of the team members actually already have slowly migrated have moved into um the core solidity team and now are working on that full-time.

And lastly, we have the sourcifi team which is uh um smart contract verification infrastructure. They're the ones that are all as they should are all heling holding us to a higher standard when it comes to source code verification. Khan will also give a talk about um the status of source code verification in the Ethereum ecosystem later today and he will also tell you why you should all care about that stuff and how sourcifi is supporting solidity already today is they are actually helping um uncover bugs in solidity. Um the team is already using the data um the the data set that they

provide for benchmarking and going forward solidity aims to work more systematically with the team to help uncover user patterns that ultimately ideally should inform development. So to sum up in um all in all for the course uh in the Argo collective it's six teams that have very uh very tight feedback loops and ultimately allow each other to um make each other better and ultimately make solidity better. And before or like when talking about how we wanted to set up Argo and like what we really wanted to emphasize is looking at solidity as a primary programming

language. It underpins more than 200 billions um of USD in DeFi alone. So when you have stakes this high, we really are of the opinion that key Ethereum infrastructure should should follow um a few principles. So we strongly believe it should be independent. It should be free from capture. It should um enable collaboration over um over control. Everything should be open source. Um it should be software that anybody can inspect, contribute and also use. Um everything should be rigorously engineered. And I know that sometimes we're not moving as quickly as the ecosystem would like us to, but

everything we do is um with developer safety in mind. And then also sustainable. Um I will talk about this a little bit more in the next slide but we really believe that we should um yeah hold this long-term stewardship um for solidity and for the other teams that are in the collective over short-term incentives. And to wrap up to just give you context um what has happened for the Argo Collective. So decentralization or you might also call it subtract subtraction doesn't matter but um this has been a goal or like a strategy for the uh for a

really long time solidity approached it proactively and the result of that is our go so that means that key infrastructure is now partially maintained out of outside the AF and over the I would say one and a half years past one and a half years the the member members set up everything. So, set up the structure and then also finally incorporated the legal entity as a nonprofit this summer and is now operating independently. And now we can focus on really making sure that we provide a long-term home for all of these projects. And yeah, but for that we are also working on funding. I mean, we all are aware that the F treasury is

not endless. We wish it was, but it's not. And therefore we're also sort of like a parallel track for us is to also talk to more ecosystem stakeholders to just like mobilize more people to contribute to public goods and this is we yeah this is a huge responsibility but we also view this as an opportunity. We are currently we were we managed to secure the first three to four years of funding and um now working like thanks to the F and now working towards um yeah extending it for the next 10 um and yeah going forward so we also um what Argo enables us to do is to that's

at least our goal is to work with the community more closely. So, Solidity Summit is part of it. Transparently and repeatedly communicating and sharing updates what we have been working on is part of it. So, we really want to yeah make use of opportunities like this today to come uh to have you come talk to us. So, if you're a builder, you want to contribute um talk to us. um we'll find ways and then also if you are a company that has a really healthy treasury you should come talk to me and you can consider making a donation and I think I'm running out of time but that's a wrap.

Thank you. If you have questions about the collective you can come talk to me I will be around all day. Thank you.