A quick look at the 8 finalists for Scaling Ethereum 2024

Original title: "A quick look at the 8 finalists of Scaling Ethereum 2024"

Original source: Deep Tide TechFlow

From April 5th to 26th, Ethglobal held a hackathon called Scaling Ethereum 2024.

The event brought together some of the top thinkers and experts in the Ethereum ecosystem, enabling teams to do great things in a little over two weeks by providing rich Web3 resources such as mentors, partners, and software.

Here are the 8 finalists.

Monadic DNA: Privacy protection of personal genetic data

Monadic DNA is an illustrative example of what a new paradigm of privacy-respecting personal genomic services might look like.

We envision a future where people own their genomic data without revealing it to any provider, and can still enjoy the benefits of this rapidly growing field.

Once someone obtains a raw DNA file from a provider, the Monadic DNA portal allows them to upload their data and receive a DNA passport.

In the background, the raw data is processed (and then discarded), with portions of it stored as secrets on the Nillion network. The actual DNA passport returned to the user contains an identifier, some useful hashes, and metadata about the secrets stored on the Nillion network.

On-chain proofs based on off-chain computation provide an open, scalable paradigm for medicine that respects anonymity and privacy.

SignKaleidoscope: Visualize signature paths with dynamic graphs

SignKaleidscope is a Sign Protocol explorer with interactive graph visualizations.

Explore accounts, schemas, and attestations by clicking on nodes and edges in the graph, using the search field, or navigating links in the detail overlay. Drag to pan the graph and scroll to zoom in and out. As new entities are discovered, nodes and edges automatically appear and connect in the graph.

EthereumL10nService: A decentralized translation network with AI and human proofs

In order for Ethereum to reach the next billions of users, we need to break down language barriers. Only 16% of the population speaks English, while more than 60% of content is in English.

Therefore, the project is building an incentivized network for AI translation agents and human provers.

In the project demo, it translates a video from the Pragama Denver Playlist on Youtube. It leverages OpenAI Whisper for ASR to ASR on the original English transcript, and then prompts OpenAI LLM to provide the final translation (Traditional Chinese) file in vtt format.

Vtt subtitle files are uploaded to IPFS for processing and execution by decentralized AI; then through the Chrome extension, we can see the translated subtitles and end users can give feedback by voting up/down just like StackOverflow. These votes will create cryptographically based proofs using the user's wallet and sent back to our servers.

This way we are able to avoid abuse and further calculate incentive distribution based on contribution.

TxFusion: Execute Multiple Transactions in One Call and Signature

TxFusion is a platform designed to simplify and improve the user experience of managing multiple DEFI transactions. It leverages the new EIP5792 standard and introduces a new wallet method called wallet_sendCalls. This method enables users to create batch transactions, allowing them to perform multiple operations with a single call and signature.

DeFi users often face the complexity of managing large volumes of transactions across various protocols such as Uniswap, Compound, and Aave. This process can be time-consuming and cumbersome, resulting in a less than ideal user experience. Users also need to pay more gas fees to execute multiple transactions.

The project addresses this challenge by providing a unified platform to simplify the execution of multiple DeFi transactions.

forge flamegraphs: Solidity development optimization tool

When we have some solid code and want to optimize it, there are currently limited tools that can help. There is no open source Solidity Profiler that is actively maintained and works with Foundry or Hardhat. This makes the gas optimization process very time-consuming and of course requires a lot of skills.

For these reasons, only experienced Solidity developers are good at gas optimization, because they are better at guessing and drilling which part will generate more gas.

flamegraphs are used to analyze system software and find performance bottlenecks. We built a foundry plugin that can parse low-level debug traces to generate collapsed stack traces to generate graphs, which more clearly show where should be optimized, thereby lowering the development threshold.

CreateToolBelt: Smoother Deployment of Smart Contracts

CreateToolBelt is a comprehensive toolkit designed to address multiple challenges developers face when deploying contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.

The suite consists of three main components: Create2Deployer, Create2SafeDeployer, and Create3Deployer.

Create2Deployer allows deterministic contract deployment using the CREATE2 opcode, enabling developers to deploy contracts at predictable addresses. We enhance this with Create2SafeDeployer, which takes a novel approach to preventing front-running by leveraging a salt linked to the first 20 bytes of msg.sender, ensuring that only the deployer can execute in the expected manner. Finally, Create3Deployer extends these capabilities to multiple blockchains, allowing deployment to the same address on different chains using only the deployer address and salt, which is a groundbreaking step for developers working with interdependent contracts across multiple platforms.

ChainSweep: Full-chain version of the blockchain "minesweeper" game

The game is an on-chain implementation similar to the famous "minesweeper" game.

In the block realm, you must verify blocks and avoid blocks that contain errors. When you click on a defective block, you lose. When you verify that all blocks are error-free, you win.

The game runs entirely on-chain (Arbitrum Stylus testnet). Every move you make is a separate transaction.

The important information in the game is the exact location of the bug (the field that shouldn't be clicked). If the smart contract chooses these locations and stores them on-chain, it would be trivial to win the game by finding where the bug is using a block explorer or other tools. To avoid this, the contract only stores the fields that have been exposed so far. When a player makes a new move, the smart contract regenerates the potential bug assignment on the field consistent with the moves made so far. This makes the game still unpredictable.

BlobFusion: Making blob space more affordable for everyone

A month ago, Dencun went live and brought us EIP-4844 and blobs.

The problem is: you always have to submit a full 128KB blob. If you have less data, then you still need to commit 128KB. This takes up unnecessary space and costs a lot of money.

BlobFusion enables you to share blobs with others by packing smaller blobs into one common blob. This is to maximize blobspace efficiency (=good for the network) and cost (=good for the user).

How does it work?

1. User sends some ETH to the Arbitrum smart contract

2. Server indexes transactions and allows users to submit blobs

3. User sends the server a blob with a signature and the fee they are willing to pay

4. Server saves the blob to the database

5. The server periodically tries to build a blob that satisfies all conditions (e.g. shared cost of the blob < sum of all bids, etc.)