FCR is coming!! Our views on Hegotá and Native AA. Ethlabs Week 8.
I used to think that life at a nonprofit must be pretty chill. No customers, no investors, no pressure, right? Wrong. This past week at Ethlabs felt like my busiest week in years (and it's only my second week here!!), and judging from all the slack messages past midnight it's probably true for my colleagues too.
The reason for the busyness is threefold:
- Hegotá's proposal window is closed, and clients are now officially deliberating on which EIPs to accept into the upgrade. At Ethlabs, we want Ethereum to ship EIPs that make real impact for builders and users, so we are working hard to communicate our opinions to the client teams and the community at large.
- We've received a very exciting update about the Fast Confirmation Rule (FCR) — a major bridging company is deploying FCR to production!! As a shepherd of FCR, Ethlabs is working closely with the company to ensure a successful rollout.
- Frame Transactions aka native AA, the most contentious topic in Hegotá, is on ACD's discussion agenda again, and Ethlabs is playing a major role in bringing stakeholders together to work towards a consensus.
And we have a bonus update at the end!
#Hegotá views
Caspar, Ansgar, and Francesco spent all week reviewing every single EIP in Hegotá — and there are 66 of them!! Having personally contributed opinions to 7 AA-related EIPs, I can only imagine the efforts it took to go through all of them.
The result is Ethlabs's first long-form essay — our view on Hegotá. The article will go out tomorrow, but to sum up our main points:
- Fast Ethereum: Making the L1 faster is one of the most important things we can do for Ethereum. It will make bridges faster, transactions settle sooner, and interop generally better across the ecosystem. Ethlabs and Barnabe specifically are championing Quick Slots as the first major step towards a faster Ethereum.
- Scaling: Despite claims that Ethereum block space is underused, we believe scaling must continue because there are many applications that don't even attempt to run on Ethereum due to its scaling limits, so scaling will open up the market for more types of applications on the L1. In fact, our very own NFT drop caused mainnet gas to heavily spike. We are pushing a number of scaling-related EIPs to further increase Ethereum’s gas limit.
- AA: We love Frames and think it's the best native AA proposal for the L1, but it needs substantial work before it can work well for L2s, which is very important because people want their accounts to work across chains. We are working closely with EF and client teams to incorporate feedback from L2s into Frames.
- CR: Censorship resistence (or “openness” as I prefer to call it) is one of the core value props of Ethereum, and we must continue improving it instead of just paying lip service. FOCIL is a great step towards increasing CR, so we are fully supportive of it.
#FCR is coming to mainnet!!
Julian has been working on GTM for FCR since he was at the EF, and the work naturally carried over to Ethlabs. Since starting at Ethlabs last week, I too have been working on FCR; will have more to share on that soon.
Anyways, this week we received the super exciting update that a MAJOR bridging company is going to roll out FCR in just a few months! This means that any routes originating from an L1 or an L2 will see their latency dropping from 14 minutes (roughly how long finality takes) to as little as 12 seconds (!!!).
Since receiving the news, we've been working hard on our GTM strategy for FCR. Our goal is not only to help the company roll out FCR successfully, but also to use that as a successful case study to motivate all bridges, L2s, and exchanges to adopt FCR. A faster Ethereum is a better one!!
#Native AA
At this point, working on native AA is almost like a spiritual experience — you can't describe it in such mundane terms as being enjoyable or unenjoyable. Rather, it's like a dream (or a nightmare) that never quite ends, and every once in a while you think the journey is finally over because people seem to be finally agreeing with each other, only to be snapped back into reality a moment later realizing that another client/L2/wallet just dissented again, and now we are in another ACD/breakout meeting going over the same arguments.
Anyways, with Hegotá proposal window closing, ACD is restarting discussions on native AA, specifically to decide whether to formally approve Frame Transactions (EIP-8141). While the client teams are mostly in favor, major L2s including Base and Arbitrum spoke up to express their concerns, and ACD sensibly decided to defer the decision to a later AA breakout meeting.
This sequence of events has made Ethlabs (and me specifically) very busy because we are taking on the burden of bridging the communication gap between L1 and L2s, brainstorming with both sides to see how we can find common ground. Thankfully the back-and-forth has been fruitful — we now have a number of updates for Frame Transactions in the pipeline that will hopefully address L2s's concerns (e.g. performance) without changing what makes Frames great for the L1 in the first place (e.g. first-class support for privacy protocols and PQ aggregation).
#Bonus: The Future is Born
Ethlabs is where the future is born, literally. This week Josh welcomed his second baby, Otis, to the world! We respect Otis's privacy so won't be posting his pic here, but here's Otis and his doll in anime style ;)
#Conclusion
This has been a great week for Ethlabs and Ethereum — FCR is coming to mainnet soon, native AA is making key progress, and Hegotá is shaping up to be an awesome upgrade. We hope you enjoyed this week's update, and if anything caught your eye (wanna use FCR in prod?), don't hesitate to reach out!