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mratsim / constantine

Constantine: modular, high-performance, zero-dependency cryptography stack for verifiable computation, proof systems and blockchain protocols.
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Protocol: Verkle Trees #182

Open mratsim opened 2 years ago

mratsim commented 2 years ago

The Ethereum state will likely replace Merkle Trees by Verkle Trees for storage in the future.

Simple Summary

Introduce a new Verkle state tree alongside the existing hexary Patricia tree. After the hard fork, the Verkle tree stores all edits to state and a copy of all accessed state, and the hexary Patricia tree can no longer be modified. This is a first step in a multi-phase transition to Ethereum exclusively relying on Verkle trees to store execution state.

Motivation

Verkle trees solve the key problem standing in the way of Ethereum being stateless-client-friendly: witness sizes. A witness accessing an account in today’s hexary Patricia tree is, in the average case, close to 3 kB, and in the worst case it may be three times larger. Assuming a worst case of 6000 accesses per block (15m gas / 2500 gas per access), this corresponds to a witness size of ~18 MB, which is too large to safely broadcast through a p2p network within a 12-second slot. Verkle trees reduce witness sizes to ~200 bytes per account in the average case, allowing stateless client witnesses to be acceptably small.

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Prerequisite:

mratsim commented 2 years ago

New developments Inner Product Argument instead of KZG: