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 pgnodexyz@gmail.com.

Bitcoin

• ZK-gossip for lightning channel announcements
  • A proposal extends the taproot gossip with Utreexo and zero - knowledge proofs to hide the channel outpoint link, using a new channel_announcement_zk message, but raises issues about channel closures, privacy, and the choice of cryptographic methods.
• Emulating OP_RAND
  • Propose a method of emulation of OP_RAND opcode on Bitcoin through a trustless interactive game between transaction counterparties. The game result is probabilistic and doesn’t allow any party to cheat and increase their chance to win on any protocol step. The protocol can be organized in a way unrecognizable to any external party and doesn’t require some specific scripts or Bitcoin protocol updates. We will show how the protocol works on the simple Thimbles Game and provide some initial thoughts about approaches and applications that can use the mentioned approach.
• Full Disclosure: Replacement Cycling Attacks on Bitcoin Miners Block Templates
  • Replacement cycling attacks enabling to censor transaction traffic from miners block template and as such for an attacker to achieve a dominant strategy in the distribution of the bitcoin fee reward for the generation of blocks in the longuest valid chain among all honest mining nodes.

Ethereum

• Impact of Consensus Issuance Yield Curve Changes on Competitive Dynamics in the Ethereum Validator Ecosystem
  • This study reveals key dynamics in Ethereum’s validator ecosystem. Findings highlight the need to balance execution rewards and staking yields across validator segments. Implementing MEV-Burn with gradual issuance adjustments could promote a decentralized, diverse validator set.
• Dynamic ERC1155 with Asset Creation and Swapping
  • An extension to ERC1155 enabling dynamic token creation, token swapping, and metadata support.
• ERC-7868: Verifiable Cross Rollup Links
  • Interoperability between Ethereum rollups should be secured by the L1. This means that cross rollup transactions need to be verifiable at settlement time.
• ERC-7866: Decentralised Profile Standard
  • This EIP proposes a standard for decentralised, interoperable user profiles known as Decentralised Profiles. Profiles are implemented as Soul Bound Tokens (SBTs) that are immutable, non-transferable, and tied to unique identifiers across multiple blockchain networks. The standard provides a unified structure for user metadata, including dApp-specific customisation, default profiles, and seamless cross-chain compatibility. Profiles can be leveraged for identity management, reputation systems, and personalised dApp experiences.
• Hardware and Bandwidth Recommendations for Full Nodes and Validators
  • This proposal specifies hardware and bandwidth recommendations for full nodes and validators. Validators are split into attesters and proposers. The resource-intensive aspect of block proposal lies in creating the block and broadcasting the data required for attesters to validate it. We use the term “local block builder” to further emphasize this separation.
• Gas Fee Schedule update proposal
  • Based on the current research, propose a new gas cost schedule for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The current gas schedule is based on the original yellow paper and has rarely been updated since the launch of the Ethereum mainnet. The current gas schedule has several issues that have been identified in the research. The proposed gas schedules aim to address these issues and provide a more accurate representation of the computational cost of EVM operations.
• Consolidation incentives in Orbit/Vorbit SSF
  • A key proposition of Orbit SSF 1 is that validators rotate based on size, such that those with larger balances are active more frequently, while still giving all validators roughly equal yield. Active validators can be slashed, so large validators will therefore assume greater risk than small validators. Setting aside mass slashing events, a staking pool might prefer to run smaller validators so that a faulty setup can be caught early and affect only a small fraction of its total stake. Yet it is desirable that stakers consolidate when possible—consolidation level will directly influence the economic security that the protocol can offer, ceteris paribus. Therefore, Orbit SSF should provide individual consolidation incentives. These can be combined with collective consolidation incentives that benefit everyone equally upon consolidation.