NEAR EVM Working Group Update [2021-01-29]

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   to the evm working groups weekly public updates uh today uh looks like we're gonna have not too many people wait wait wait wait a bit it's i'm not sure that we have started it looks like okay started started yeah sorry okay all right well let's do that again so hello everyone welcome to the evm working groups weekly update um today we are not going to have a very long call i think we don't have too many too many people

2. 0:31

   joining us today um let me share my screen uh you need to give me the permissions for that yeah second okay let's see okay okay i trust everybody can see hackmd okay um right so we had planned a bigger agenda for today but many many people had conflicts and personal matters to attend to so this will be a short call so today let's go over the current goal the updates and i don't think we have too much discussion with just us today

3. 1:27

   and here we need to add one more thing roadmap okay so our current goal is that we are working the overarching objective is that we are working towards a distinct release by the end of q1 and to that end we are onboarding the new team members we had two team members join us last week and i hope we will have one more join us next week um and and we are we have finished the the robot planning with with alex and are now tasking out the things that need to be done

4. 2:09

   let's talk about those in a bit um so team updates effects you can begin muted yeah so uh in general i was working the main the main thing that i was working during this week was the roadmap uh these were the roadmap for both uh bridge and evm project and this is something that uh arthur is going to share with uh in in in some time and there were also some organizational work sorry some organizational work connected to the

5. 2:54

   to the governance forum so not big of that uh some comments some reading uh going a little bit different in some some of the discussions a little bit of the organization of their the categories and stuff like that um uh yeah and uh still a bit of hiring i was spending uh some some time but mostly for this was this is related for the bridge um uh yeah some some calls with the partners with potential partners

6. 3:25

   uh things like that yeah okay so no not not that much to report but lots of small tasks that just needed to to be done yeah the same same thing here um this this week has has not been any coding so i miss coding by now recruiting took up the most of my time this week and and i think we have some good results on that to announce soon um additionally additionally the the project management

7. 4:01

   and uh and planning took a lot of time so we have created the roadmap for for the evm and indeed and bridge um yep again yes uh from my side uh i read a lot of documentation and uh specifically i started reading uh an er protocol documentation and and deep dive into it and i investigate that a lot of recommendations probably ought to be related and uh some page is not exist but uh it's okay because i did dive into uh

8. 4:42

   near core uh quad and i look into uh structures and i understand how currently probably it's work and i want to say that for me it's really interesting and uh i really excited how it works uh and additionally i want to say that currently properly i understand more deeply how blockchain and runtime are working i'm not sure that that understanding is completed but from my side i want to uh in my free time reading the

9. 5:14

   documentation because for me it's a really interesting addition i want to say that uh i spent time to play with tutorials and from my side i started to test validation knob currently i investigate the process because for me it's interesting too and how it works us how specifically work service network so on uh i look into our videos and the tutorials additional uh about in your protocol and after that i tried some examples

10. 5:54

    and building some applications not a lot but i tried yes okay great um yeah let's let's um talk about if you're ready to take on some tasks next week how do you feel about that i think it's a good idea okay so let's let's discuss after the call um some some tests that can be good to start with uh thank you and frank is not able to join us today because of personal reasons but his updates are that he finished um well he has a draft pull request for

11. 6:32

    for benchmarks esp721 benchmarks um relating to the cryptos on this contract and the there is an issue still before we can merge it he's getting an unexpected revert from the evm which he can't reproduce um outside of our evm so that's something to investigate um i will i will add the link there later i'm investigating and ilia has a lot of updates but i think we better let him speak about those um

12. 7:14

    in case he joins so these are let's call them architectural experiments uh kirill yeah uh so this week's uh i would say i'm still on boarding stage and i'm getting myself familiarized within the whole new ecosystem itself and exploring the forum articles discussions uh about the near about the base talking for the bridge etc and i'm also exploring the videos and for anyone who is interested in here i

13. 7:53

    can definitely recommend to take a look at the lunch and learn series that is that are also mentioned in our own boarding guides and the near overview by maxine this series i believe is very very awesome and it's absolutely recommended for everybody who wants to deep dive in here for more and i'm still haven't finished all of them yet so i will continue with this as well this week i

14. 8:25

    also passed through some tutorials that were on boarding guides and still continue this because quite a lot of them there and i also started exploring the and near smart contract on the solid data side and researching the possibilities uh for the upgradability for this contract and reviewing the possible solutions for that including the open zeppelin one that we have just recently discussed to be

15. 8:58

    like a good idea to look for and i will continue with this part on the next week and probably test some use cases and comparing some of the approaches for that upgradability and um also uh yesterday we discussed with uh alex chuchenko my probably first starts so for the following week and i'm also started on this today and working the first one will be to work to work over the randall bridge documentation and check if if everything is correct

16. 9:38

    is is everything is launchable do we have any issues with this in if we have to correct this and then i will start to move more refactoring on changing some some parts of the bridge related contracts these are the following tasks so i will start with them after finishing the first one but i believe this is a good start and looks for operative good process as for my side okay thank you um and mike mike can't join us today he has a scheduling conflict

17. 10:17

    but i think he he didn't have any any updates for this week um okay let me actually change the agenda a little bit uh since we've been asked to to provide um also the concept for the next week um let's make our channel like this so we we discussed the current goal this week today specifically we'll talk about the road map and then um the high level tasking for next week already a little bit touched on uh so roadmap um

18. 10:51

    so we have uh we have here a a roadmap assume i shared my screen not the tab so you guys can see the roadmap right somebody can confirm yeah okay so we we have a a roadmap roughly outlined this is not maybe the best way to look at it i need to copy i'll copy the the chronological bullet points points into here soonish but let's have a look at it in a different way i'm gonna share another window here

19. 11:34

    where are we there we are okay so i've been uh doing a little bit diagramming with alex um in terms of how the um task dependencies for milestone dependencies work look like and this this is the result we also have one for the bridge but that's for that's alex to to present on the next call um okay uh so here our our objective this quarter is the destination release followed followed by the beginning of

20. 12:12

    the bug bounty for the distance so everything everything feeds into into this and this is achievable this quarter although we we are pretty much at the limit i think we we can't we can't have too many curveballs thrown at us if we're going to make this objective right now there's a bit of a curveball in terms of the potential architectural changes that ilia would like to make which we need to discuss latest on next week's call and settle

21. 12:44

    but we have a lot of things we can we can proceed on in any case now the critical path uh as indeed the most critical path through this diagram looks like this we have a bug bounty that we need to start in a month for the beta nets and uh about three weeks after that we need to take a decision for whether we are going to in terms of what the bug bounty result is they're going to have to take a decision can we go to testnet uh if we can um well the

22. 13:15

    bug bounty program will run in any case a little bit longer it will run to the end of the month and the testament release would immediately follow in the last days of march or or soon soon thereafter in order to to be able to begin the bug bounty program we need a number of things indeed almost almost all the things so let's look here for one thing we need to finish the upgrade of open ethereum to a version which is

23. 13:47

    incorporating the berlin hard fork properly that version doesn't exist as yet it's a in the works branch but it will exist soon and we need to get onboard that branch and the reason we need this for the bug bounty program is that otherwise we are we are testing with a fundamentally different virtual machine as in the the difference between what we are using right now and open ethereum 32 is

24. 14:12

    vast so we we better get on to this branch as soon as possible for this bug bounty to be meaningful now secondary nobody can really work on this bug bounty or few people can work on this bug bounty if we haven't properly documented how to use the bitternet now mike's already done a great job on that we have a ton of ton of material on it but we need we need a little bit more still

25. 14:41

    so that's that's largely for documentation and tooling this task over here on the other hand there's no sense in launching the debug bounty if you haven't already completed the switch switch over to f balances in the evm so that's that's also a dependency um now what we don't need for the bug bounty we don't need esc 20 bridging uh by the way is everybody able to see the text in screen sharing it can be a little bit small

26. 15:11

    i'm gonna zoom in um so zooming in a little so we we don't need for the bug bound to the esc 20 bridging that's a separate matter that fits into the eventual destiny release a shared call with the bridge team um what we do need most likely this this is not necessarily a given uh we probably need the s connector so that we can move over liquidity in some form from let's say an ethereum testnet to

27. 15:43

    to debug bounty this is not a hard dependency because we could we could conceive of other ways to give people balances but at the very least we need we need the upgrade and we need documentation on how to how to work with it now towards the towards the um quarterly objective the test net release there are other things we need some are not very hard dependencies so for example we will ask at the end of the quarter

28. 16:16

    the partners who have played with the better net evm how they feel about it if they if they feel it's ready or not uh to go to disneyland on the other hand this is not a hard dependency because feedback is fussy and it can potentially be addressed after the test net release but in any case uh it's it's it's there um things we we definitely need in order to do the desktop release we need more information for the sra team or the infrastructure team on on how to

29. 16:51

    how to handle any any problems that might arise now you might think this would also be good uh before the beta net bounty when everybody's trying to break up bit on it and yes you will be correct but it's not a hard dependency there it is a hard dependency for a test net release we also have have to involve the community of course we can't just willy-nilly upgrade this net ourselves

30. 17:14

    anything that goes to this net is slated for maintenance and we need to have a proper conversation about it so about two weeks from now we should put up a proposal in the governance forum and and get start to get some some uh discussion and ultimately approval from stakeholders we can't uh we can schedule the upgrade without that uh we also have concerns about uh performance um so right now the evm is entirely unbenchmarked now there's no no huge reason to believe that we will have a

31. 17:51

    performance issue there on bottleneck but we better better test it with some significant volume and to that end we have a plan to develop a a replayer as in take take the transaction feed from for example initially one of the ethereum pistons and just replay it on bit on it and then eventually test it um so that's that's pretty much the the let's see all the milestones we also have

32. 18:24

    we also have other things that are needed for this to be usable um on testnet such as the the rainbow bridge uh front end i think alex actually this is probably out of date we discussed we don't necessarily need the front end we just need the connector to work right yeah that's correct so depending on well probably the test net is not something that is going to be widely used by the end users obviously it would be a good thing for them to be able to do this but still

33. 18:55

    and we expect that the developers that are going to try deploy the contracts try how they are working they would be able to go step by step uh with the connectors from from command line interface and schedule in some like and and simple scripts right uh so this is the preliminary program there are there are many things that are implicit here um for example in terms of the feature completeness

34. 19:27

    that's not really explicitly addressed here except in terms of let's say the upgrade to open ethereum we have more we have more things we could add here but this is this is the general outline of how we're going to get to a testament to release this will be published later today in uh in the forum on the evm category on the forum and i believe alex plans to do the same for the bridge uh for the bridge roadmap um and then

35. 19:56

    then we will we will be able to share this with the marketing department and and others who have an interest in it including all external stakeholders so let's talk about this a little bit do do people have any any questions comments at this at this stage i take the rationale um okay now in terms of the near-term near-term priorities we have um we have a few things that should be done pretty much immediately so alex is alex is working on the on the back bounty

36. 20:40

    arranging the bug bounty we still have a little bit of time to that but not too much pretty much needs to be organized soon he's also working on the bug bounty for for the bridge team which will run concurrently as in also beginning on march 1st however a difference between the two teams is uh or the black bounties is that uh the evm is for bug bounties for the bigger net and the bridge teams uh bug bounties for

37. 21:10

    the distance something we'll have to try and make clearing in our communications on that um i am going to tackle the upgrade to open ethereum as of next week even though it is not a final branch yet we we better get on to that branch and handle handling issues that come up as soon as including communication with the upstream i'm i'm hoping every tuesday on on calls with the open ethereum team they have a community call where they can give feedback um

38. 21:45

    and what's not on this road map because it it kind of um came extempora are the architectural changes that ilia is experimenting with and proposing and we will have to work through decision points on those next week in order for any of this to be feasible so i hope i hope we can have a good conversation about those decisions next week or friday um so you're gonna what i would propose

39. 22:23

    that um you could tackle um now you remember we had discussed that you and kirill would tackle the the bridge f connector from sort of both sides of the of the team dividers in kiro from the bridge side and you from the evm side um and that probably makes uh makes sense although the timeline is pretty short and and i know you guys are only half time currently so but what we'll probably have to do here is that um we'll split up this work a little bit so again these are not tasks these are

40. 23:02

    milestones uh so we'll split up the the task in here a little bit and um let's let's get you get you on to this um in in whatever form you're comfortable with uh we'll discuss that on the on the monday call latest um for for curio i think uh you already had your tasks from alex uh and for frank we're gonna have to pull frank off benchmarking now we we still need frank on performance but we're gonna have to pull him to the replayer as of next week

41. 23:36

    so frank will will work on the on the current pull request that he opened today the work in progress now let's see what was the name of that right so his pull request is three eight six six and uh he needs to finish that uh he has to the thing has to has to troubleshoot with that which could take some time but after that uh we need to pull him to the replayer so that we can deploy it a month from

42. 24:07

    now um given that he's also half time currently so those are the the immediate priorities plus the whole question with with ilia max and arus regarding not breaking protocol consensus and having having a good architecture for the evm so that means let's go back to the agenda here agenda agenda there we go and i'll add the diagram and information here um for for next week though that means that

43. 24:54

    let me consult my notes here right so frank frank on the replayer uh for evgeny we would need to to to figure out um in terms of the onboarding guide have you have you set up already the the local setup there was the local setup for the pet shop which is actually a lot of work it can take hours and hours do you already have all of that set up now for for pet shop i am not analyzed bachelorette i'm sorry

44. 25:28

    okay i know another computer all right so i would say that the the first uh focus there would be to to work through the ethereum compatibility tutorials so we we need you to understand all of that material to be able to work on this um and those are all currently written up to taurus we don't have any any video on that and they are all from mike so in case of any feedback talk to mike directly for the pet shop

45. 26:00

    the new pet shop on evm example which i think is the most useful one to try to fully understand um there's two two ways you can run that you can you can use it on bayonet which is super simple it only takes a few minutes to get started if you have a better wallet and that's good to work through but uh ultimately you need the local setup and the local setup is open in the ass it's no question about it um it will take some some hours to figure out now you you had to set up everything in your dev

46. 26:30

    environment with docker that might or might not be reasonable um try to have a look at the instructions see see how much work that would be to do in docker versus a local virtual machine it can be that the local virtualbox or something like this could be a lot faster than figuring out how to how to get that dockerized so in any case let's talk about those on the monday call latest

47. 26:55

    um now um curiel alex has guided and on on my my side i'll work on the open ethereum change to begin with and then then deal with the base token with uh in coordination with ilya and alex uh maybe you want to speak yourself what your plan was for next week yeah so my plan yeah unfortunately this week i was not able to do to do a deep dive into zen hub this is something that is already a long-standing thing to do so i'm going to do that and yeah i'm going to go straight into

48. 27:28

    the the governance questions um because like there are two points two things the governance of the bridge and the the the rollout of the evm which both of these things should be prepared pretty quick and i think that is in parallel with this is the preparation of the bug bounty programs so like multiple things here i'm going to to see what what is going to move faster yeah and still uh have um a bit of coordination of the

49. 28:07

    of the beta testing community on the bridge side so this also can take some time okay okay sounds about right and from mike in case is uh available we will try to um figure out what needs to be done for the bug bounty in terms of documentation and tooling and then actually task that's those things out um and yeah of course uh alex we both have to to get a little bit more organized with zen hub okay

50. 28:40

    all right so i think that's pretty much the the our required agenda we managed to fit into half an hour um do we have anything to discuss with the set of people here i would generally prefer we would have more people for discussion but can we discuss anything useful we have some people joined actually um i would like to bring uh to to attention of the of the whole evm team uh the discussion that is happening right now uh with regards to the accounting for

51. 29:10

    the storage and i believe our inputs here will be pretty important so the idea is that currently storage takes quite a lot of near tokens uh to be locked uh and for example for the two to fa for the smart for the for the accounts of of the users it takes around 36 year which is a current price is is ridiculous so there is an idea to to lower this down yeah and the reason for uh for such high cost uh was that it was just the model for it was

52. 29:51

    calculated uh some some time ago since then the the price changed and also like there are some kind of changes in in the amount of uh what in the places in the in the storage requirements of the smart contracts stuff like that so this needs to be reconsidered and this is something that is happening at the moment uh this is extremely important because the current model for for evm team because the current model that nir is using

53. 30:23

    is orthogonal to ethereum approached where people are just paying doing a one-time payment in gas for for the storage obviously if the storage is uh um is free then uh people are getting some gas back but this is something that is not widely used at the moment and potentially which we can just like skip that type of functionality so there is an idea of bringing these two worlds yeah and obviously uh this means that accounting for storage should be in case we are keeping things

54. 31:03

    as is in in near and in in evm this means that accounting for storage are different in these runtimes so so that's the problem so it's not uniform across the the chain um yeah so i i'm i'm like uh encouraging everyone to go uh well especially from the tech team to go a little bit deeper into into the discussion express uh his own opinion on this yeah so this this this this is something that is from a point of view pretty important to us

55. 31:41

    plus we have the question that um if if we are going to implement elias proposed architectural changes uh then that does muddy the borders a little bit with regards to the storage accounting um as in that that moves back to the normal native web assembly contract side which then might make it too expensive um yeah so there's certainly some things to work through there um anything else to discuss today

56. 32:22

    okay well with that we can have the the shortest meeting ever i like that there are discussions that need to be had but looks like we're having them next week when we have more people available so um let's see here we let's let's check for questions on on youtube as well no questions there okay kirill you wanted to say something no no no nothing at the moment yeah okay okay well then then i wish everybody

57. 33:03

    a happy weekend and um we have some busy weeks ahead of us let's uh soon come monday on what we're actually going to do and how okay bye-bye thank you