Sharding Roadmap

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
  • https://github.com/ethereum/py-evm/issues/191
• The account access list restriction; see also https://ethresear.ch/t/account-read-write-lists/285
  • https://github.com/ethereum/py-evm/issues/192
• Account Abstraction
  • https://github.com/ethereum/py-evm/issues/203
• New transaction format, as in https://ethresear.ch/t/new-transaction-formats-for-sharding/265/1
  • https://github.com/ethereum/py-evm/issues/194
  • depending on #191, #192, #203

Refactoring

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

Sharding mechanism

• Shard Manager for watching multiple shards - #196
• VMC utils #197
• Set Sharding configuration #246
  • Related to #198
• VMC Optimization
  • https://github.com/ethereum/sharding/issues/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.

[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

[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