Farcaster Devs

Can a hub use Helios for its Eth/OP RPC? https://github.com/a16z/helios
@sanjay?

Dad, geek, conversation liquidity provider. vrypan.net (home), /weatherxm (work), @l--o--l (fun). Also https://paragraph.xyz/@purplesubmarine

It should be feasible, as it can listen on a port and act as a verifying proxy. So it would just be a matter of running it that way, and pointing the Hub at it as the chain RPC endpoint. Haven't tried it in practice though.

Wannabe contributor for /walletbeat.

Censorship resistance requires privacy.

I couldn't find the min hw specs to run Helios. Do you know what they are?

It's pretty modest. You can run light clients in your browser against Ethereum L1 + OP Mainnet + Base all at once in a tab using the following page. My browser measures it as using ~300 MiB for all three networks combined. Probably more efficient if run headlessly.

It's pretty modest. You can run light clients in your browser against Ethereum L1 + OP Mainnet + Base all at once in a tab using the following page. My browser measures it as using ~300 MiB for all three networks combined. Probably more efficient if run headlessly.

https://helios.a16zcrypto.com/demo

Once it's synced, does it still need a third party RPC? So, it's not replacing the RPC, just provides a trusted one?

building open source public goods @a16zcrypto

Correct, it still needs a persistent connection to the remote RPC provider to keep up with the chain head, or to fetch chain data when requested by the client, etc. The only thing it does is to turn an untrusted RPC endpoint into a trusted one.
cc @ncitron.eth

I believe light clients are it, so long as you want the be able to trust the RPC endpoint. Helios is the only mature implementation I know of, and for least overhead you can link against it as a library directly in your codebase. Examples here:
https://github.com/a16z/helios/tree/master/examples

Also noteworthy is the Portal Network. This is a separate effort from the EF to create "light nodes" which act as a sort of CDN layer for serving data to light clients. Probably heavier than light clients (haven't tried), but still meant to be relatively lightweight.
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/networking-layer/portal-network/

Another very lightweight but not cryptographically secure technique I've seen some client libraries do is to let the user specify a set of RPC endpoints, and to randomly sample responses from multiple of them as a way to verify the consistency of the answer across multiple sources.
Lighter than a real light client, but assumes a honest minority among the configured RPC providers.

Do you know what's the lightest possible version of a stand alone Eth client, that does not need to post transactions to the chain?