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All of us have lots to be pleased about this vacation season, from the primary birthday of the beacon chain, to the profitable upgrades over the previous 12 months and the unbelievable progress throughout your entire Ethereum ecosystem.
As a extremely productive 12 months attracts to an in depth, there are a number of last presents to ship within the type of updates from many (15+!!) EF-supported groups which are at all times working to enhance the community. And there is a lot of substantive materials right here, so take a while to kind by the desk of contents, and dig in!
As at all times, this roundup collection focuses on EF-supported groups whose members are working to develop and enhance Ethereum as a complete. Included on this version are updates from many groups highlighted in the previous report, and different new and rotating teams.
Take pleasure in! 🦄
Consensus R&D (aka EF Analysis Group)
Authored by Hsiao-Wei Wang
Within the second half of this 12 months, the milestones in Ethereum consensus R&D included:
To align with The Great Renaming, we shifted elements to “Consensus Layer” from “Eth2” for clearer communication in the long run.
In early 2022, our staff will deal with serving to to ship the “The Merge”, essentially the most vital consensus protocol improve ever. Fortuitously, now we have nice help from consumer groups, and others in the neighborhood working to make this a actuality! Within the meantime, we will probably be persevering with our analysis work on knowledge availability, L1 scaling, and the options of the “clear up” fork after The Merge.
Ecosystem Assist Program
Authored by ESP Group
We printed our Q2 Allocation Update with grants totalling $7,794,000 for the quarter – and Q3 is coming quickly! You may also take a look at latest month-to-month roundups here and here for extra detailed progress updates from a number of of our fabulous grantees.
Behind the scenes, we’re engaged on a significant web site overhaul which ought to make it simpler than ever to grasp ESP’s mission and priorities, and for eligible builders to use for funding or different help. We will’t wait to launch the brand new website in early 2022!
Ethereum.org
Authored by Sam Richards
To make our work extra accessible and to foster extra group collaboration, our staff publishes an outline of our quarterly roadmap targets. See our Q4 product roadmap here.
Joyful holidays to all from the ethereum.org staff 😀🎄 As at all times, our vision with ethereum.org is to create the very best portal for Ethereum’s rising group and to function the entrance door to Ethereum for thousands and thousands of latest guests every month.
Content material updates
Ethereum strikes quick! In addition to updating lots of of pages to make sure our content material stays updated and correct, we’ve additionally launched a bunch of latest content material:
Ethereum.org exists due to lots of of content material and code contributors from the group. In Q3/This autumn, we put emphasis on methods to extend contributions and acknowledge the group for the work they had been doing:
Some stats (Aug – Dec)
- Our GitHub contributors elevated by 57%, from 396 to 621 😲
- Our Discord community practically doubled, from 6,500 to 12,200 members 🎉
- We’ve hosted two community calls and began office-hours for contributors
- We added 3 new group guides (trusted members answering questions and moderating chat) 😎
- We launched tiered POAPs to gamify contributions for content material, code, and translations
Translation Program
Since hiring our new Translation Lead in July, the Translation Program has really ramped up!
Some stats:
- Between July and November, the group collectively translated 1,373,046 phrases for ethereum.org, over 10x the quantity of this similar interval final 12 months! To place this in perspective, that is equal to translating everything of just about 20 books 📚!
- We have obtained translation help from over 2,500 group contributors 🤯
- We’ve got 37 languages stay on ethereum.org 🌍
- We launched an initiative to higher acknowledge our translators, together with a leaderboard and translator certificates!
CLR funding
We’re supporting a clr.fund spherical on Layer 2! After over 6 months of contributing to clr.fund’s quadratic funding stack, we have merged our modifications to the upstream repo, which provides L2 community help and a wide range of net app enhancements.
clr.fund plans to deploy a funding spherical on Arbitrum One geared in the direction of the staking ecosystem in January, and the EF is happy to supply matching funds to the spherical. We hope you take part! Keep tuned for particulars. Yay public items!
We have been constructing on the shoulders of giants. Thanks to the clr.fund staff, the MACI staff & clr.fund’s group of contributors who proceed to push improvements within the ZKP & quadratic funding area.
What’s subsequent?
- making a studying hub to permit non-technical customers to develop into proficient Ethereum customers
- constructing extra sources on operating nodes and staking to enhance accessibility
- additional automating our translation pipeline to launch translated content material out quicker
- increasing the Translation Program past ethereum.org
- updating content material to transition away from the Eth2 terminology because the merge approaches
How does that sound?
We respect suggestions on our roadmap. Our guiding ideas are primarily based on delivering essentially the most worth within the shortest time, so if there’s one thing you assume we must always work on, please tell us! We welcome concepts and contributions from anybody in the neighborhood.
Ipsilon
Authored by Alex Beregszaszi
We’ve got created a team website to offer a transparent explainer and to comprehensively listing our present and previous work.
It’s straightforward to inform from the next headers that within the second half of the 12 months the staff largely centered on the EVM. It’s additionally necessary to say that now we have teamed up with the Geth Group to enhance the efficiency of the EVM interpreter.
EVM Object Format (EOF)
Step one in the direction of this, EIP-3541, went stay with London and now we have conducted a survey throughout many testnets and EVM chains to discover a becoming prefix for EOF.
Continued clarifications had been made to EIP-3540 (together with the chosen prefix), and we additionally proposed additional work constructing on high of it:
- EIP-3670 to introduce code validation at deploy time
- EIP-3690 to exchange JUMPDEST opcodes with a JUMPDEST-table
- EIP-4200 to introduce two new opcodes, RJUMP and RJUMPI, facilitating static jumps
Throughout October we introduced EOF at Liscon (slides here, however the recording is just not out there) and on the Ethereum Meetup in Berlin (slides, recording).
Different EIPs
EIP-2681 (Restrict account nonce to 2^64-1)
One among our previous proposals, EIP-2681, was accepted throughout ACD#120. It codifies a restriction, which was already (partially) carried out in apply in most shoppers. After acceptance now we have prolonged the Ethereum State Checks suite and adjusted the geth implementation.
EIP-3855 (PUSH0 instruction)
EIP-3855 proposes to introduce a PUSH0 instruction which pushes 0 onto the stack. It is a incessantly used characteristic, largely achieved immediately through inefficient or repurposed directions.
Our evaluation discovered that substantial sources may have been saved with this opcode:
To place the “waste” into perspective, throughout current accounts 340,557,331 bytes are wasted on PUSH1 00 directions, which suggests 68,111,466,200 fuel was spent to deploy them.
EIP-3860 (Restrict and meter initcode)
EIP-3860 is a proposal to set a boundary and introduce metering for initcode. This is able to permit for extra optimised evaluation and execution, as a result of implementations would want to cope with much less unknowns.
geth
As a collaboration with the Geth Group, we began to work on measuring and enhancing the efficiency of the EVM interpreter in geth.
On the evaluation facet two reviews are noteworthy:
- Geth vs evmone compares the velocity of Geth and evmone utilizing the benchmarking suite in evmone.
- Geth & Go compiler explores the impact of the Go compiler model on the velocity of geth.
Based mostly on these preliminary outcomes, now we have appeared into profiling geth, and eventually contributing a number of enhancements to the codebase, most of which has been already merged. A non-comprehensive listing of related PRs: 23952, 23970, 23974, 23977, 24017, 24026, 24031, 24120.
Comply with this link to see each PR. We plan to proceed this work within the subsequent quarter.
evmone
Two bugfix releases of evmone had been made: 0.8.1 and 0.8.2.
ethash
The staff additionally maintains a C++ ethash/keccak256 library, which is utilized by evmone and Silkworm.
The most recent 0.8.0 release introduces a brand new methodology for verifying the ultimate Ethash hashes towards the block problem. That is each a usability and velocity enchancment. The strategy has been posted on Ethresear.ch.
Moreover, ProgPoW has been deprecated within the library.
Fizzy
The staff additionally participated within the Wasm in Web3 convention throughout September. We gave two shows:
- Fizzy — A deterministic interpreter (slides) gave a complete overview of what Fizzy is, the way it compares to different engines, and likewise explains the reasoning behind lots of the design selections we made.
- Weird quirks while testing WebAssembly reveals a wide variety of edge circumstances now we have encountered whereas creating Fizzy. The discuss additionally provides some potential options and explainers for these edge circumstances, in addition to how now we have prolonged the official WebAssembly take a look at suite to cowl them.
Formal Verification
Authored by Leo Alt
Within the second half of the 12 months the FV staff continued to deal with our current instruments:
Act:
- We lastly launched Act 0.1! You possibly can learn the wonderful tutorial at https://fv.ethereum.org/2021/08/31/act-0.1/ to verify what’s potential presently and easy methods to use it.
- We’re presently refactoring error dealing with to enhance usability.
Hevm:
SMTChecker:
- Monitor the balances of contracts exactly, together with msg.worth despatched to and from the analyzed contracts.
- Additionally help the low-level name perform as an unsafe exterior name.
- Enhance counterexamples by reporting block.*, msg.* and tx.* values which are necessary for failed verification targets.
- Report contract and reentrancy inductive invariants again to the person.
Geth
Authored by Felix Lange
Within the second half of 2021, we printed 9 geth releases. As ordinary, our time has been cut up between EIP evaluate/implementation, consumer optimization/upkeep and reviewing code modifications proposed by the group.
In July, the London onerous fork, which included EIP-1559, was activated. The brand new fuel pricing scheme outlined by this EIP required many modifications throughout all subsystems of geth. We’re nonetheless discovering and fixing corner-case points associated to EIP-1559 now, six months after its introduction.
Two safety vulnerabilities had been found previously six months. For each of them, we adopted our safety advisory coverage: we instantly assigned a CVE quantity to the problem and printed a hotfix launch. Technical particulars in regards to the vulnerability had been printed 6-8 weeks later.
Within the final quarter of 2021, our work has largely shifted in the direction of implementation and testing of The Merge. We’re on monitor to show geth into the ‘execution layer consumer’ of the merged execution+consensus (fmr. “eth1+eth2”) layers. In preparation for The Merge, now we have re-written a lot of the sync code to function underneath management of the consensus layer. Geth additionally participates in Merge testnets.
Moreover, the geth staff has been engaged on a number of long-term tasks, comparable to implementation of Verkle Timber, a beacon chain gentle consumer, and a brand new database storage scheme for the Ethereum state.
Javascript Group
Authored by Holger Drewes
Within the final two quarters of 2021, preparations for “the massive transitions” on the Ethereum community was a robust focus of our work. We participated within the Merge Interop in Greece and launched the primary Merge-testnet prepared variations of our consumer, VM and associated libraries (see e.g. the EthereumJS consumer v0.2 launch). We additionally began on an thrilling experiment with the Go-Ethereum Verkle/Stateless staff to natively take a look at stateless block execution primarily based on a verkle proof served alongside a modified block header through devp2p inside our consumer. If you’re you’ll be able to see the next tracking issue to observe our progress.
A bit extra relevant for the top person proper now: the help of our libraries for the rising L2 networks like Polygon, Arbitrum or Optimism has been improved. These and another networks can now straight be referenced to e.g. ship a transaction to a sure L2 community. See e.g. the Widespread v2.6.0 launch for the newest Optimism L2 community integration.
And final however not least: there’s a VM ArrowGlacier launch available and on the Ethers.js entrance. Richard has simply posted an thrilling overview on the upcoming Ethers.js v6 library modifications and updates on his blog.
Privateness & Scaling Explorations
Authored by Thore Hildebrandt
The Privateness & Scaling Explorations staff works to bridge the hole between cutting-edge analysis in zero-knowledge proofs, and utility growth on Ethereum.
zkEVM
The objective of zkEVM is to run good contracts in a zk-rollup. Sadly, the EVM was not designed to run in a zk circuit which makes it a problem. We need to implement the complete set of EVM opcodes straight into the zk circuits so a wise contract operating on L1 may be deployed to L2 with minimal modifications. This can permit full compatibility with current tooling and allow us to leverage data of the EVM that the ecosystem has constructed up over the previous years. We’re making good progress on specification of the opcodes and implementation of the circuits, and now we have early benchmarks and an necessary objective going ahead to convey prover time down.
ZKOPRU
ZKOPRU (zk-optimistic-rollup) is a layer-2 scaling answer for personal transactions utilizing zk-SNARK and optimistic rollup. It helps non-public transfers and personal atomic swaps throughout the layer-2 community between ETH, ERC20 and ERC721. It additionally supplies instantaneous withdrawal with pay-in-advance options and compliance compatibility utilizing spending key and viewing keys. ZKOPRU has recently launched on testnet – go forward and test it out. We’re engaged on enhancing sync-times and on a personal trade characteristic.
Unirep & Unirep Social
UniRep is a personal and non-repudiable fame system. Customers can obtain optimistic and adverse fame from attesters, and voluntarily show that they’ve at the very least a specific amount of fame with out revealing the precise quantity. Furthermore, customers can’t refuse to obtain fame from an attester. We’re utilizing Unirep to construct Unirep Social: a Reddit-like platform that permits customers to privately accumulate karma. Constructing the Unirep Social web site was our focus previously months. Proofs in Unirep at the moment are listed in order that they are often referred many occasions and stop one proof from being submitted twice. Unirep can now deal with an preliminary fame airdrop and person state transition airdrop. We’re additionally enhancing the effectivity in producing person state and Unirep state.
Primary capabilities, frontend design, frontend and backend of Unirep Social are full, and we’re planning a closed pre-alpha launch. Try this blogpost if you wish to be taught extra.
CLR.fund for Everybody
The objective of the challenge is to make it straightforward for any group to run their very own CLR spherical with clr.fund. This challenge has been very busy. Now you can deploy your individual quadratic funding utility with the clr.fund Deployer. Empower your group to decide on and fund its personal future, in a completely decentralized method. Try our Subgraph and Documentation.
InterRep
Fame is the important thing to belief. Individuals spend years build up their fame on centralized social platforms, however they’ve to begin from nothing at any time when they begin utilizing a brand new app. InterRep goals to make fame moveable to broaden the compounding advantages of trusted human interactions throughout the online. Check out this blogpost for the preliminary announcement and the repo. Up to now quarter now we have expanded the vary of social proof sources, to POAP and e-mail and have curated teams: on-chain, and off-chain through a Telegram bot. We’re doing a UI redesign, enhancing interplay with consumer functions and making ready for a stay launch.
Semaphore / ZK-Keeper
Semaphore is a zero-knowledge gadget which permits customers to show their membership of a set with out revealing their unique id. On the similar time, it permits customers to sign their endorsement of an arbitrary string. It’s designed to be a easy and generic privateness layer for Ethereum dApps. Use circumstances embrace non-public voting, whistleblowing, mixers, and nameless authentication. With ZK-Keeper we’re focussing on protecting Semaphore updated with the newest zk instruments and integrating it with different tasks like InterRep. We’ve got new libs for dealing with semaphore proofs and identities. Implementation is now accomplished on high of Halo2 and we’re getting it prepared for use within the browser.
RLN
RLN (Price Limiting Nullifier) is a assemble primarily based on zero-knowledge proofs that allows spam prevention for decentralized, nameless environments. In nameless environments, the id of the entities is unknown. We’ve got lately printed an explanatory blog post to get extra folks excited in regards to the thought. We’ve got completed analysis round “Feasibility evaluation for ETH2 Validator privateness utilizing RLN”. We’re engaged on productionalizing the “Non-public instantaneous chat app utilizing RLN and Interrep” challenge. We’re additionally serving to to combine the ZK-Keeper plugin into the RLN tasks.
Protocol Assist
Authored by Tim Beiko
The Protocol Assist (PS) staff was fashioned in 2021 to develop the variety of methods by which the groups constructing or interacting with the Ethereum base layer are supported. The staff’s major focus is enabling core builders to ship community upgrades on Ethereum’s execution layer.
To this impact, Berlin, London and Arrow Glacier had been deployed this 12 months. Past these, PS spent vital efforts working in the direction of The Merge, first with Rayonism, then the Amphora workshop and now the Kintsugi Devnet!
This accelerating tempo and scope of change has required extra outreach to the Ethereum group, which led our staff to arrange frequent Neighborhood Calls. Throughout these, utility, infrastructure and tooling builders had been invited to debate easy methods to finest help protocol upgrades and supply a easy transition for his or her customers. Alongside these calls, the staff has given a number of talks and printed a number of posts in regards to the altering Ethereum roadmap, comparable to this recent all core devs update, this piece in Bankless and this recent post on the Merge and the application layer in the EF Blog.
Past protocol upgrades, the PS staff has taken on two main initiatives to make sure shoppers groups are effectively supported. First, a Client Incentive Program was introduced to provide groups Ethereum-aligned long-term incentives. This system supplies consumer groups with a set of 144 validators that they have to run utilizing their software program. Assuming groups hold assembly sure efficiency benchmarks on mainnet, these validators are step by step vested to the groups, that are free to both liquidate them or hold them operating to gather rewards and costs. This program aligns groups with Ethereum, ensures they’re “dogfooding” their shoppers on mainnet, and that they hold delivering performant software program.
Second, a Core Developer Apprenticeship Program was launched. This program supplied stipends and mentorship to self-directed people who wished to dive deep into protocol growth. CDAP was launched as an experiment which proved to be extremely profitable! Two cohorts had been run, with over 25 contributors. Of those, at the very least 5 at the moment are working full time within the ecosystem. These preliminary cohorts have taught us lots about what was good and what could possibly be improved with this system. Count on a revamped CDAP in 2022!
Lastly, the staff experimented with offering infrastructure to the consumer groups and broader group. To that finish, crawler.ethereum.org was shipped and open-sourced. We hope that having a further crawler operating and out there for the group to enhance, modify or fork helps present higher views of the community’s topology.
Remix
Authored by Rob Stupay
Over the previous 6 months, the Remix staff has unscrewed the again of our app to do some intensive rewiring. First amongst these modifications was continued work on shifting our code to React. We additionally expanded our attain by dialing in some efficient channels to new communities, and onboarding new customers with a primary product “tour” of our IDE. We’ve plugged in tasks into our “expertise”, integrating Slither, and Hardhat, in addition to updating the Remix VSCode extension.
And, if that’s not sufficient, we jammed on some instruments for collaborative coding, enhancing Decentralized GIT and integrating Github. Final however not least, we’ve up to date our current plugins. In brief, we’ve maxed it out to 11.
See more details in our article.
Strong Incentives Group
Authored by Barnabe Monnot
The RIG (Strong Incentives Group) welcomed new staff members and took part in lots of necessary milestones for the Ethereum protocol. For a fast refresher on what the RIG is and what we care about, you’ll be able to take a look at Protocol cryptoeconomics with the RIG, introduced by Barnabé at EthCC in July.
On the Proof-of-Stake consensus facet, Caspar, who joined us as full-time analysis scientist earlier this 12 months, discovered a problem with the present fork selection, written up as Three attacks on Proof-of-Stake Ethereum. Fortuitously, there’s a sturdy candidate repair that was recently merged within the consensus specs, after many productive discussions with Stanford’s Tse Lab, who co-authored the “Three assaults” paper. Caspar and others additionally proposed a special mitigation (“proposer view merge“), that’s nonetheless underneath analysis. Try Caspar at Liscon presenting his outcomes!
Shyam, who joined us first as analysis intern final summer season and is now a analysis assistant on the RIG, launched a series of notebooks exploring the beacon chain statistics from many distinctive angles, together with oceanic games and inequality. Shyam has additionally been engaged on an extension to our Beacon runner PoS simulation engine that features reinforcement studying. Try his talk at EDCON!
Block 12,965,000, August fifth, 12:33:42 PM UTC, was an necessary date for us: the London onerous fork activated, and with it, EIP-1559. During the last 12 months, we have launched a collection of notebooks presenting various simulations of the brand new charge market mechanism, which set the stage for additional evaluation after launch. Barnabé reported some outcomes early after, and with co-authors (together with Shyam) wrote up a longer-form paper, Transaction Fees on a Honeymoon: Ethereum’s EIP-1559 One Month Later. The paper is motivated by the behaviour of the 1559 replace rule in the true world, and opens new analysis instructions for enhancements to the rule.
The RIG was additionally carefully working with the cadCAD Edu staff in making ready an online masterclass in validator economics, supported by a completely extensible model of Ethereum economics (in Python).
Snake Charmers [Python Ecosystem]
Authored by Keri Clowes
Within the second half of 2021, the Snake Charmers staff accomplished the modifications wanted throughout the ecosystem to help the London onerous fork. This concerned wide-ranging, basic modifications all through our stack, particularly in Py-EVM, Ethereum Tester, Web3.py, and eth-account. There have been additionally two bug bounties submitted for Py-EVM which have been mounted. We’ve ramped up efforts to generate instructional content material, and positioned a much bigger emphasis on developer relations. And as at all times, there’s ongoing group help, situation triage, and bug squashing throughout our Python instruments.
Fe-lang
Authored by Grant Wuerker
Over the previous 6 months, the Fe staff has reduce the next releases:
0.11.0-alpha “Karlite” (2021-12-02)
- multi-file help
- perform definitions on structs
v0.10.0-alpha “Jade” (2021-10-32)
- module-level constants and capabilities
- unsafe help
v0.9.0-alpha “Iridium” (2021-9-29)
- self declarations in perform signatures
v0.8.0-alpha “Haxonite” (2021-8-31)
- query-based evaluation utilizing Salsa
0.7.0-alpha “Galaxite” (2021-07-27)
- Solidity ABI decoding checks
0.6.0-alpha “Feldspar” (2021-06-10)
If you want to know extra about our progress over the past 6 months, you’ll be able to checkout the next sources:
Portal
Authored by Piper Merriam
This 12 months has been a giant 12 months for the Portal Network. We began this 12 months with an thought and solely a free plan for easy methods to construct a peer-to-peer community that might ship light-weight entry to the Ethereum protocol. We now have three impartial groups and implementations and are effectively underway to launching the preliminary testnet which ought to evolve into a completely useful community by the top of 2022.
The EF Portal staff has been working onerous on Trin, a portal consumer written in Rust. The EF Javascript staff has additionally been engaged on Ultralight, a portal consumer written in Typescript geared toward being runnable within the browser. The staff from Status.im has additionally been engaged on Fluffy, a portal consumer supposed for integration with the Standing ethereum consumer and pockets options.
Throughout this 12 months now we have solved the beforehand unsolved drawback of easy methods to distribute the present Ethereum State in a way that’s conducive to environment friendly storage and retrieval. We established the Portal Wire Protocol, an extensible base protocol that’s the basis of the entire networks making up the Portal Community. We additionally had the pleasure of working with a number of contributors of the Core Developer Apprenticeship Program who used the Portal Community tasks as a leaping off level for moving into Core Protocol growth.
Safety [Security / Consensus Tests]
Authored by Safety (Safety / Consensus Checks) Group
On the safety and testing facet, a variety of consideration has been given to the London improve and the upcoming merge. We’ve made updates on tooling for take a look at authoring and continued to enhance the reference checks.
Solidity
Authored by Franziska Heintel
Within the second half of this 12 months, we launched Solidity variations 0.8.8, 0.8.9, 0.8.10 and 0.8.11:
- Solidity 0.8.8 brings you user defined value types as a significant new characteristic. It additionally improves overriding interface capabilities, studying from immutables, and extra.
- Solidity 0.8.9 is a pure bugfix launch and fixes two necessary, however low severity, bugs:
- Solidity 0.8.10 incorporates exterior perform name optimizations, allows the brand new EVM code generator for pure Yul mode and might report contract invariants and reentrancy properties by the SMTChecker.
- Solidity 0.8.11 provides a primary implementation of a Language Server and permits a safer option to carry out ABI-encoding.
Furthermore, a number of Solidity staff members introduced at ETHGlobal’s Developer Device Summit:
The Solidity documentation bought a number of upgrades, most notably, we…
- up to date the resources section with normal sources, Ethereum IDEs, editor integrations, Solidity instruments, Solidity parsers and grammars.
- added the performance to open code examples within the documentation straight in Remix.
Lastly, we launched our yearly Solidity Developer Survey. If you’re a Solidity developer, please take 10 minutes to share your suggestions and participate within the survey here. The survey will probably be open till thirty first of December 2021.
Oh and we’re hiring! Take a look at our C++ Engineer Solidity opening.
ZoKrates
Authored by Thibaut Schaeffer
Within the second half of 2021, ZoKrates superior on totally different fronts:
Language
- Kind aliasing, in addition to the power to make perform calls in fixed definitions
- Assist for the ternary expression syntax
- Allow fixed generics on structs
Proof methods
- Discount of the deployment value for some Solidity verifiers
- Expose recursive verification in the usual library
- Add help for Groth16 MPC ceremonies (coming quickly)
Compiler efficiency
- In depth work on lowering reminiscence and time necessities of the compiler (coming quickly with metrics!)
For a full listing of the modifications, take a look at the changelog
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