Sharding Roadmap

[pipermerriam]

What it is?

As part of the sharding implementation, we need to implement the following high-level tasks. Each should probably be given its own individual ticket, and each of those tickets may be suitable to be broken down further into granular tasks when possible.

Specification: https://github.com/ethereum/sharding/blob/develop/docs/doc.md

Protocol changes

• Ability to swap out underlying trie implementation with binary trie
  • https://github.com/ethereum/research/tree/master/trie_research
  • this will happen in the ethereum/py-trie repository.
• Account redesign
  • Account redesign #191
• The account access list restriction; see also https://ethresear.ch/t/account-read-write-lists/285
  • STUB: Account access restriction #192
• Account Abstraction
  • Account Abstraction #203
• New transaction format, as in https://ethresear.ch/t/new-transaction-formats-for-sharding/265/1
  • STUB: New transaction format #194
  • depending on Account redesign #191, STUB: Account access restriction #192, Account Abstraction #203

Refactoring

• The whole stateless / pure functional redesign
  • Stateless/pure transaction processing #195 Stateless/pure transaction processing
  • Implement State object #236 Implement State object
• Remove EVM logic from blocks. Make them dumb data containers.

Sharding mechanism

• Shard Manager for watching multiple shards - Shard Manager for watching multiple shards #196
• VMC utils Validator manager contract utils #197
• Set Sharding configuration Set sharding protocol constants and configuration #246
  • Related to Decide where to store config and chain data #198
• VMC Optimization
  • VMC Optimization sharding#37
• Collation object
• Collation validation
• Implement shuffling procedure
• Sharded fork choice rule

How can it be fixed

Fill this in if you know how to fix it.

[hwwhww]

For people who are interested in the concept of basic sharding and stateless client, here's an overview introduction slide.

[hwwhww]

Sharding doc: https://github.com/ethereum/sharding/blob/develop/docs/doc.md

[mhchia]

@pipermerriam
Just want to confirm. Are we also going to implement a full node in py-evm recently?
If we are, is there anything which is currently not in pyevm and is needed to be implemented? and how should we start?
Thank you!

[pipermerriam]

cc @gsalgado

I believe that @gsalgado has started work on that, or is going to start work on it next.

[gsalgado]

Yep, I've started implementing the ETH protocol in https://github.com/gsalgado/py-evm/tree/eth63 and https://github.com/gsalgado/py-trie/tree/trie-sync has some trie-related code we're going to need to download the state as part of a fast-sync

[mhchia]

That's great! Then I think I can work on the other parts.
Thank you for the information:)
Just think it's cool that the urls seemed to be processed as UTF-8 instead of ASCII and so they are not working.

[gsalgado]

Looks like the URLs ended up with some non-printable trailing characters when I originally pasted them; I've removed that and they work now

[pipermerriam]

@gsalgado I found this recently in hypothesis for doing deterministic randomness generation for tests using the standard lib random module. Might be a good standard to adopt so that when we are using randomeness in tests like the utility function you're using in your py-trie branch for generating a random trie, we can reproduce failures.

https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/data.html#hypothesis.strategies.random_module

[hwwhww]

Deprecated. :'( Will add a new one.