From Research to Reality: An EIP’s Journey

Transcript

[music] So today we are going to have conversation for EIPs right from beginning till the end. How we deploy it on the mainet that's why I have called it [music] from research to reality. It's a journey of EIP that we are going to see here today. We recently celebrated 10 years of building 10 years of Ethereum working non-stop and this 10 years have provided us a lot of things. We have over thousand standards in Ethereum repository. Those are for protocol level, application

level, layer 2, so on so forth. But it's a great contribution of all the people who are trying to help support Ethereum grow. We have including Genesis 19 upgrades so far. Currently running two layers. We moved from proof of work to proof stake. It was a big deal. And celebration of 10 years is also very very big deal. We have deployed over 74 EIPs with network upgrade. Of course, there are some EIPs which goes outside network upgrade. With network upgrade, we did deploy 74 EIPs.

As you can see here in the bottom of the chart, we are increasing the number of proposals every upgrade and this upgrade that we are expecting in the first week of December. It's going to be even bigger. So I would like to take a moment to thanks everyone right from authors, editors and implementers testers contributors everybody who has contributed to Ethereum improvement proposals providing us such a great repository here. Today in EIP summit we have a great lineup of speakers and they would be talking about how a proposal starts what they do in order to like make sure that

it goes as state-of-the-art proposal. There are testing team involved, there are specs team involved, there are client team involved and there are authors who would like to share their journey. So I hope by the end of this event you should have a very good picture of the Ethereum community and the ethics that is being followed here and maybe it can inspire you to be one of the contributors as well. I would like to see Ethereum upgrade Ethereum journey as a musical concern.

So just imagine for a minute like Ethereum is is a band, okay? And the upgrade that we have is a live concert and people are working hard to make sure that everything goes right. I would also like to consider an EIP as a song like one song that can be played in the concert. So I want to provide this highle picture of what Ethereum improvement proposal is, how we work towards network upgrade and how we are celebrating our success in this ecosystem. Let's begin this musical journey.

So every EIP if we consider that as a song then it has to be first conceived, written, composed, rehearsed and there are so much of finetuning that happens to finally get a state-of-the-art music that can be selected for an for a concert that can be played in the concert that means that can be deployed on the Ethereum main network. So keeping this high level concept in mind, we are just moving forward to uh just see how we are reaching there to network upgrade.

So our journey begins from research to reality. [laughter] Everything starts with one simple question. What if? What if we can do this? What if we can do that? And in world of blockchain, Ethereum or any other blockchain, the very basic questions are what if transactions could be cheaper? What if we can have a staking be more decentralized and things like that. Of course, I have put very simple questions on the board, but you can think about how we can use AI, how we can go uh make use of Zen, how we can be more private and like privacy is a big thing here in the blockchain ecosystem. So um there there are questions and these questions come up maybe in your daily work you are thinking about it. You can you can be in

a conference and come up with a question. Oh what if like here in dev connect a few days earlier I read about what if we have a better coffee here right? So people were complaining about coffee. So someone has to say a word and then people start working towards it. So we do have a better coffee machine here right now in dev connect. So yeah, everything starts with one simple question. What if with what if there are some people who come forward and try to start thinking about it and try to document that a proposal yeah not a like complete spec and everything but something that can uh lead people to take it forward and that is documented at ETH research. It's

basically a concept. It's not code yet. the concept is added then people start taking a look at it they want to come and say okay fine this is feasible this is not physible I would like to have this this thing added to this proposal and it will make everybody's life even more simpler and useful and that's the beginning of the upgrade symphony an EIP is a simple idea that is picked up by an author from ETH research forum it has to be documented using EIP template and that is added to EIP GitHub repository where it is assigned a number by an EIP editor and that's how we take it forward.

This EIP is being discussed at multiple places. There are two different layers. So there are two different kinds of meeting that happens is all codev exe all code execution all codev consensus but now we also have a group who are dedicately uh spending their time to test it. So we also have all core codev testing meetings where these proposals are being discussed. Of course we have a very good forum called fellowship of ethereum magician where anybody can come and add their thoughts add their ideas with this we are trying to go forward with the upgrade symphony. You can uh consider that as an example like okay fine uh let's consider author to be um who who who writes the song here and

then client teams who are the singers and it has to be performed in harmony. So we we go through different processes around here we do have regress conversation regress testing and it goes back and forth it's kind of loop until we reach to the place where we feel that this is very safe and we can deploy it on the main network. So this is the place where research meet realities and we we think that we have received another melody that can be played in the live concert at the live upgrade. It takes a lot of hard work to coordinate because there are so many teams. There are so many people working behind the scene. So I really want to thank everyone involved in here. This is

a glimpse of the process from past and present. So earlier in the days it was very simple like uh in my slidesh in the beginning if you have noticed there are one proposal two proposal getting into the upgrades but now we are going in with 10 plus proposals. So so many songs to be played so many uh rehearsals are required so many teams involved. So earlier like uh back in the days it was just like you draft you think of an idea draft a proposal put it to last call if it is accepted by the client team it will go to the final and it will be deployed on the network upgrade very simple but now we have added some ideas around how to make it even better the process we are working towards improving the process because we are getting like

hundreds of proposals for consideration. So for these proposals and for people to keep track of like okay what is going in the next upgrade there are different terms and that is explained in this uh EIP where we say okay this is proposed for inclusion that means people can propose that then we go ahead with like okay fine we want to consider it for inclusion then schedule for inclusion and finally it is included. If for any chance a proposal is proposed but cannot be included in that upgrade that is kind of deferred and for that upgrade it could be declined but it can be resurfaced in the next upgrade and we can consider it unless the idea has been superseded by something else.

So what do we learn here? We learn here that every EIP is a story of the collaboration the concept and the the consensus that we comes around through this regress process. I would like to end up my presentation by stating that Ethereum is not a final product. It's a living process and everyone has a role to play in and in next few minutes you're going to meet all those people who are engaged in this process. We were supposed to joined by an editor who has contributed a lot in uh making sure that the proposals are good. The proposals are um are ready to be

included in the upgrade. Uh we could not have him here today, but we do have a message from him. >> Welcome to the EIP summit. If you don't already know me, my name is Sam and I'm an EIP ERC editor. I'm the biggest hurdle you have to overcome to get your proposals published. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to Argentina this year, but I've been asked to make a quick video for you all instead. For authors, the most important things you need to do to ensure a smooth experience are reading EIP1. It explains our process and a lot of our rules. Read the error messages that our tools spit out, like EPW. It also provides documentation links, so please read those, too. You need to open pull requests. The process is entirely author-driven, so when you believe your proposal is ready, it's your job to move it forwards. We also

host weekly office hour calls. You can come chat with us about your proposals. You can find the schedule on the Ethereum/PM's GitHub repository. Our role as editors is to faithfully preserve changes to the Ethereum ecosystem and not just that, the reasoning behind them. The biggest annoyances in the process like preventing external links are to try and accomplish that goal. If you'd like to learn more or participate in the EIP process, please take a look at EIP 5069 and consider coming out to our monthly governance calls. We're always looking for new contributors. If you're confident in your English, you can start reviewing poll requests. And if you're aligned with us, you can eventually become an editor, too. If you're a Rust developer, hit me up. I have a tooling rewrite I've been putting off for over a year. Thank you all for coming out, and I really look forward to hearing about

what you've all discussed. Take care for this beautiful message. As you mentioned, if you are aligned, you can be one of us. You can be one who can support the process.