Ethereum Light Client Helios: Achieving Trustless Blockchain Access

A cryptocurrency investment company recently launched a light client for Ethereum named Helios. This client, developed in the Rust programming language, aims to provide completely trustless access to Ethereum.

One of the main reasons for using Blockchain is to achieve trustless operations, allowing users to have full control over their wealth and data. Blockchains like Ethereum have largely fulfilled this promise, ensuring that users have true ownership of their assets.

However, in pursuit of convenience, users often make some compromises. One of them is using centralized RPC( remote call) servers. Typically, users access the Ethereum network through centralized service providers. These companies run high-performance nodes on cloud servers, providing users with convenient on-chain data access services. When wallets query token balances or check transaction statuses, they almost always rely on these centralized providers.

The current issue with the system is that users need to trust these providers and cannot independently verify the accuracy of the query results.

Helios, as an Ethereum light client based on Rust, provides completely trustless access to Ethereum. It utilizes the light client protocol implemented after Ethereum's transition to PoS, which can convert data from untrusted centralized RPC providers into securely verifiable local RPC. By combining centralized RPC, Helios can verify the authenticity of the data without running a full node.

This client addresses the common pain point of balancing convenience and decentralization. It can complete synchronization in about two seconds and does not require storage, allowing users to securely access on-chain data from any device, including mobile phones and browser plugins.

Centralized infrastructure poses potential risks. Theoretically, malicious RPC providers could mislead users by providing inaccurate decentralized exchange smart contract quotes. This could result in users signing exchange transactions with lower minimum output parameters, or even directly sending transactions to malicious RPC providers. Providers could privately withhold the transaction and send it directly to certain services to profit from it.

To solve this problem, experienced users often choose to run their own Ethereum nodes. However, this requires a significant amount of time and resources, making it still a daunting task for most users, especially those on mobile devices.

The working principle of Helios is to tightly couple the execution layer and the consensus layer. Users only need to install and run a single piece of software. Its consensus layer uses known beacon chain block hashes and connects to an untrusted RPC to verifiably sync to the current block. The execution layer then combines these verified beacon chain blocks with an untrusted execution layer RPC to verify various information about the on-chain state.

In this way, Helios provides users with a completely trustless RPC without the need to run a full node. This will enable more people to securely access Ethereum data from any device, regardless of hardware limitations. Users can use Helios as an RPC provider in certain wallets to achieve trustless access to various decentralized applications.

In addition, Rust's support for WebAssembly allows application developers to easily embed Helios into JavaScript applications. These integrations will enhance the security of Ethereum and reduce reliance on centralized infrastructure.

The development prospects of Helios are broad, and the community can contribute in various ways, such as supporting the direct retrieval of light client data from the P2P network, deploying missing RPC methods, building a version that can be compiled to WebAssembly, and directly integrating it into wallet software, among others. These efforts will further promote the decentralization and security of the Ethereum ecosystem.