2026-11-04 –, Lotus Stage 1
A single contract interaction quietly trusts half a dozen remote services: an RPC, an explorer's "verified" badge, a served ABI, a simulation API, a wallet's decoder. Using a working open-source prototype, this talk shows you how every one of those layers can be verified locally on your device instead, and what still runs on trust.
Using a contract today means trusting a stack of services: an RPC for chain state, an explorer database for "verified" sources and the ABI it serves, a simulation API for effects, a decoding service for human readability, the same explorer for what happened. None of it is proof.
We split the pipeline into layers and show each made verifiable on the user's device:
- Chain state through an embedded light client
- Sources by local recompilation matched against proven bytecode
- Simulation from a local EVM that reads only proven state
- Decoding via ERC-7730 descriptors with attestations verified locally
- Post-mining re-verification of what you signed vs. what actually happened
The proof is an open prototype, called Onay, that brings existing local verification tools together into one app. We close with what limits local verification, and with what still runs on trust: the screen-to-device gap, the light client checkpoint, compiler binaries, ERC-7730 attesters, and the device itself.
Manuel is a member of Argot Collective, an Ethereum Foundation spin-out working on compilers and developer tooling, where he builds source-code verification infrastructure for the Sourcify project. Most recently his focus has been Onay, a local signing companion that verifies transactions on your own device, and the Ethereum Foundation’s Clear Signing Initiative, where he co-maintains the open descriptor registry and develops an ERC-7730 decoding library. He has worked in the Ethereum ecosystem since 2018, on open-source projects such as Raiden Network and Beamer Bridge.