The L1 Weekly Report is published every Friday, focusing on the development of Layer 1 blockchains. If you have any suggestions, feel free to contact [email protected].

Bitcoin

• Multi-Party Eltoo with bounded settlement
  • This post presents a multi-party Eltoo scheme aiming for bounded settlement and penalizing dishonesty. It limits each party to one update, using generations of transactions. With issues found, it may not survive fixes. It relies on certain opcodes and constructs. Computation complexity grows exponentially with parties, practical for around 10 - 20 parties. It also discusses further work like integrating with watchtowers and using musig.
• Deterministic tx selection for censorship resistance
  • The post discusses the issue of transaction selection centralization in Bitcoin. It proposes a deterministic algorithm for tx selection based on a committed mempool with consensus in decentralized mining pools like P2Pool or Braidpool. This aims to increase decentralization by involving more miners in tx selection. However, it also raises concerns about potential new problems such as miners manipulating the share chain. There is a debate on the feasibility and implications of this approach, including considerations about fee structures and tx acceptance rules.
• Fastest-possible PoW via Simple DAG
  • This post presents a novel Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm for Braidpool using a simple Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). It aims for the fastest consensus by setting difficulty based on DAG width, which is determined by counting parents. The optimal number of parents is found to be around 2. The algorithm’s performance is analyzed and compared to others, and solutions like considering grandparents for difficulty adjustment and using alternative methods to handle latency are proposed. The challenges in an adversarial environment and with different latency scenarios are also discussed.
• Contract-level Relative Timelocks
  • This post discusses contract-level relative timelocks (CLRT) for Eltoo. It aims to address the issue of funds lockup in ln-symmetry. The proposed solution involves a new transaction type “kickoff” with a CLRT output. The post also explores how CLRT ancestry proof could work, both with and without TXID stability. It further mentions Chia’s coinid and the concept of singletons as potential solutions, along with related techniques and constructions.

Ethereum

• Discussion on Pay with USSD
  • In scenarios with limited or unreliable internet access, traditional digital payment methods may not be feasible. Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) provides a vital solution by enabling offline transactions like payments, transfers, and balance inquiries without requiring internet connectivity. Its simplicity and broad compatibility with basic mobile devices and Electronic Draft Capture (EDC) device make USSD an essential tool for mobile payments, particularly in underserved areas, supporting financial inclusion and broader access to digital financial services.
• d/acc: one year later
  • The article “d/acc: one year later” by Vitalik Buterin discusses the concept of decentralized and democratic differential defensive acceleration (d/acc). It emphasizes building technologies that shift the offense/defense balance toward defense without relying on centralized authorities. It covers various aspects such as examples of d/acc in different fields, the relationship between survival and thriving technologies, AI safety regulations (including liability and hardware pause strategies), the role of crypto in d/acc, public goods funding, and future challenges and opportunities.
• ERC-7857: An NFT Standard for AI Agents with Private Metadata
  • A standard interface for NFTs specifically designed for AI agents, where the metadata represents agent capabilities and requires privacy protection. Unlike traditional NFT standards that focus on static metadata, this standard introduces mechanisms for verifiable data ownership and secure transfer. By defining a unified interface for different verification methods (e.g., TEE, ZKP), it enables secure management of valuable agent metadata such as models, memory, and character definitions, while maintaining confidentiality and verifiability.
• Yolc - a safe, expressive, fun language for Ethereum
  • The Yolc project has launched a technical preview. It can generate partial ERC20 code for Ethereum, integrating with foundry and being embedded in Haskell. It aims for parity with Solidity and has advanced features. The Superfluid protocol v3 prototype will use it. See the blog post and follow its progress.
• Expirable NFT/SBT
  • Introduces an extension for ERC-721 1 Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Soulbound Tokens (SBTs), Through this extension, tokens have a predetermined validity period, after which they become invalid and cannot be used in the smart contract that checks their validity. This functionality is essential for various applications where token expiration is necessary such as access and authentication, contracts, governance, licenses, and policies.
• Exploring Sophisticated Execution Proposers for Ethereum
  • This post explores splitting the execution proposer role from other validator duties in Ethereum. It discusses reasons like preventing centralization and value extraction. It analyzes what’s expected from execution proposers and presents methods like overloading MEV-Boost and Attester-Proposer Separation for selecting them, aiming to prompt community discussion.
• Faster block/blob propagation in Ethereum
  • This post proposes using random linear network coding (RLNC) for block/blob propagation in Ethereum’s P2P network. It shows that RLNC can reduce bandwidth consumption and latency compared to the current gossipsub implementation. The paper details the protocol, including proposer, receiving and sending peers’ operations, benchmarks CPU overhead, and mentions optimizations and privacy considerations. Simulations demonstrate significant improvements in propagation time and bandwidth usage with RLNC.