80 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
80 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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eip: 5219
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title: Contract Resource Requests
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description: Allows the requesting of resources from contracts
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author: Gavin John (@Pandapip1)
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discussions-to: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/pr-5219-discussion-contract-rest/9907
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status: Final
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type: Standards Track
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category: ERC
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created: 2022-07-10
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---
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## Abstract
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This EIP standardizes an interface to make resource requests to smart contracts and to receive HTTP-like responses.
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## Motivation
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Ethereum is the most-established blockchain for building decentralized applications (referred to as `DApp`s). Due to this, the Ethereum DApp ecosystem is very diverse. However, one issue that plagues DApps is the fact that they are not fully decentralized. Specifically, to interface a "decentralized" application, one first needs to access a *centralized* website containing the DApp's front-end code, presenting a few issues. The following are some risks associated with using centralized websites to interface with decentralized applications:
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- Trust Minimization: An unnecessarily large number of entities need to be trusted
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- Censorship: A centralized website is not resistant to being censored
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- Permanence: The interface may not have a mechanism that permits it to be permanently stored
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- Interoperability: Smart Contracts cannot directly interact with DApp interfaces
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## Specification
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The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
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### Name Resolution
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EIPs that propose a name resolution mechanism MAY reference this EIP and MAY recommend that clients support their mechanism. Clients MAY also support regular DNS, as defined in RFC 1034 and RFC 1035.
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### Separation of Concerns
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It is RECOMMENDED to separate the application logic from the front-end logic (the contract implementing the interface defined in [Contract Interface](#contract-interface)).
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### Contract Interface
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DApp contracts MUST implement the interface defined in the following file: [Contract Interface](../assets/eip-5219/IDecentralizedApp.sol).
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### Note to Implementers
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To save gas costs, it is recommended to use the `message/external-body` MIME-type, which allows you to point to data that the smart contract might not have access to. For example, the following response would tell a client to fetch the data off of IPFS:
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```yaml
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statusCode: 200
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body: THIS IS NOT REALLY THE BODY!
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headers:
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- key: Content-type
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value: message/external-body; access-type=URL; URL="ipfs://11148a173fd3e32c0fa78b90fe42d305f202244e2739"
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```
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## Rationale
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The `request` method was chosen to be readonly because all data should be sent to the contract from the parsed DApp. Here are some reasons why:
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- Submitting a transaction to send a request would be costly and would require waiting for the transaction to be mined, resulting in bad user experience.
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- Complicated front-end logic should not be stored in the smart contract, as it would be costly to deploy and would be better run on the end-user's machine.
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- Separation of Concerns: the front-end contract shouldn't have to worry about interacting with the back-end smart contract.
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- Other EIPs can be used to request state changing operations in conjunction with a `307 Temporary Redirect` status code.
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Instead of mimicking a full HTTP request, a highly slimmed version was chosen for the following reasons:
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- The only particularly relevant HTTP method is `GET`
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- Query parameters can be encoded in the resource.
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- Request headers are, for the most part, unnecessary for `GET` requests.
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## Backwards Compatibility
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This EIP is backwards compatible with all standards listed in the [Name Resolution](#name-resolution) section.
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## Security Considerations
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The normal security considerations of accessing normal URLs apply here, such as potential privacy leakage by following `3XX` redirects.
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## Copyright
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Copyright and related rights waived via [CC0](../LICENSE.md).
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