Weekly update 2021-02-12

[artob]

Weekly update 2021-02-12

The weekly update on the forum is at:
https://gov.near.org/t/2021-02-12-evm-update/631

The recording is available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbYe6LQ2BOQ&list=PL9tzQn_TEuFV2O7twBM-41lCDq5nr8nLm

Summary

• This week, we hired and onboarded an additional developer, made great progress on a new EVM stress-testing tool, got started on implementing nETH as the base token, and continued work on the architectural changes and EVM upgrade begun last week.
• Next week, we are planning to publish an EVM protocol upgrade proposal, work on prototypes for the nETH contract and the EVM stress-testing tool, and validate the planned architectural EVM changes using the Balancer test suite.

Agenda

• Current goal
• This week
• Discussion
  • Welcome Joshua
  • EVM upgrade
  • EVM contract nETH support
  • EVM contract upgradability
  • EVM contract performance
• Next week

Current goal

• TestNet release by the end of Q1.
• Protocol upgrade and bug bounty prep ongoing.

This week

Alex

• Worked on rebranding the joint EVM/Bridge solution.

Arto

• Hired one more person for the EVM team. Welcome, Joshua!
• Continued work on the EVM contract, debugging the Balancer tests.
• Attempted to contact the SputnikVM upstream authors.
• Added the RIPEMD-160 and Blake2b functions to nearcore's Math API. (#3954)
• Working on adding ECRecover support to nearcore's Math API. (#3954)
• Synced with Eugene regarding alt_bn128, waiting on him. (#2842)
• Joined the Contract Runtime meeting to discuss performance questions.
• Worked with marketing on rebranding the EVM and Bridge.

Evgeny

• Created pull request to fix docs issues re: NEP-21.
• Investigated the current state of NEP-141/21.
• Working on a running sample contract for the new standard.
• Preparing to add NEP-141 support to the EVM contract.

Frank

• Building a stress-testing tool called EVM Bully. (near/evm-bully)
• Set up development server, synced all Eth1 testnets.
• Implementing EVM Bully in Go, depending on Geth's code base.
• Finished code for reading blocks/transactions from genesis onwards.
• Preparing to start writing transactions via our Web3 RPC endpoint.
• Still need support for migrating genesis state prior to runs.

Joshua

• Worked through onboarding documentation.
• Got a development environment set up, got set up with wallet.
• Read a bunch of tutorials, documentation, papers.

Illia

• Passed over EVM contract dev to Arto.

Discussion

• Welcome Joshua

  • Co-creator of Blackcoin, the first PoS chain
  • Mining project in very remote regions
  • Godfather of PoS

• EVM upgrade

  • Needs some input from Illia

• EVM contract nETH support

  • Eugene et al working on the NEP-141 FT examples
  • Next week reference implementation of an FT
  • No need NEP-21, let's get back to NEP-141
  • Evgeny has everything from standards/examples
  • Illia: optimize for the 80%+ case
  • Decision: unified token/VM in the same contract
  • Deposit/withdraw signatures change, to accommodate bridging
  • Kirill: V1 coming at the beginning of week, hope to finalize interface and proof-of-concept next week

• EVM contract upgradability

  • Illia: configure on deploy, add owner account
  • Bridge plan will be available soon
    • Initially PoA, with full access key retained
    • Prover needs to be passed on init
  • Kirill: unstructured storage, proxy

• NEP-106: add the EVM interface to the spec (Arto)

• EVM contract performance

  • Whitelist EVM, retain in memory, optimizing compiler
  • Illia: 100 Tgas use remains a question (Arto/Bo)

Next week

• Alex: publish an EVM protocol upgrade proposal
• Arto: add ECRecover to nearcore's Math API, validate the planned architectural EVM changes using the Balancer test suite.
• Evgeny: prototype of the NEP-141 contract for nETH.
• Frank: prototype of the EVM stress-testing tool.