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

• Fee-Based Spam Prevention For Lightning
  • The article proposes enhanced spam prevention for Lightning Network payments by integrating upfront, hold, and success fees with cryptographic secrets and burn outputs. It addresses fee theft risks using hash preimages or discrete log-based proofs to ensure nodes are fairly compensated for routing costs. The protocols incentivize cooperation by requiring nodes to stake funds in burn outputs, refundable only upon successful payment resolution. These mechanisms aim to reduce spam, improve efficiency, and align economic incentives across payment paths.

Ethereum

• Liveness Analysis of the Beacon Chain
  • This analysis examines Ethereum’s Beacon Chain liveness from Genesis to February 2025, focusing on head attestation correctness (typically >88%) and missed slots. Key findings include 33 high-risk liveness periods linked to hard fork transitions (e.g., Capella/Deneb eras), with correlations between correctness drops (<50%) and slot-miss spikes (e.g., 26 missed slots/epoch). While the chain remains stable overall, proposer reliability and validator coordination during upgrades pose critical risks. Data sourced via GotEth tool highlights rare but severe anomalies.
• Transpiling a Halo2 circuit into CCS
  • The article introduces a transpiler converting Halo2 circuits (including those with lookups) into CCS/CCS+ format, addressing challenges like supporting multiple lookup tables and dynamic constraints. While CCS+ lacks native support for Halo2’s lookup constraints, the tool adapts by appending expression evaluations to the witness vector and constraining them via CCS. The transpiler optimizes witness size by removing unconstrained/padding cells and generalizes CCS+ for multi-table lookups. Benchmarks demonstrate practical efficiency improvements, though limitations remain in handling dynamic/private lookup tables present in other Halo2 forks.
• Enforceable Descriptive Operation Layer (against Bybit-like hacks)
  • The article proposes an Enforceable Descriptive Operation (EDO) layer to prevent malicious transactions by requiring human-readable operation descriptions (opDesc) to be signed and verified alongside transaction data (opData). It ensures only pre-approved actions execute by validating signed operations against contract logic, blocking unauthorized calls. This approach protects against phishing front-ends by displaying unambiguous operation risks on low-power devices during signing. EDO works without chain upgrades, supports EIP-712, and enforces transaction integrity by restricting execution to explicitly authorized effects.