Hey all, I’m the cofounder of Goldfinch. I wanted to share a potential use case that I think could be used to really open up the smart contract architectural design space, but which I don’t think I see in the EIP. I apologize if this has been discussed above.
The case I’m envisioning is a group of smart contracts that make up an on-chain app being able to work together more seamlessly, by storing certain user or transaction level data up front, and then downstream contracts being able to access it, knowing it’s correct. Sort of like a global request object might be used in a traditional web app. This pattern could allow for key data to be shared across an app’s network of smart contracts, allowing for the modularity and limitless size of the diamond pattern, but without needing any solidity tricks or complexities, as well as better permissioning across contracts
For example, imagine contract A is called, and msg.sender = 0xABC. Then contract A calls out to contract B in order to do some calculation. Contract B may need to verify that the original msg.sender is in fact 0xABC. But there’s no good way to do this in current Solidity. You could use tx.origin, but that has security issues from phishing, and is therefore frowned upon now. You could pass msg.sender to every single downstream function or contract, but that is pretty gross and complicates your functions.
The other option is to create a global config contract that all your other contracts have access to. Indeed, we tried this for a while with our smart contracts. The issue with this approach though is that all of your functions now require a storage slot to be written, and thus you can’t really have view functions. Which breaks a lot of things, and loses your ability to make those guarantees to others.
What I’m hoping is that if Transient Storage is guaranteed to be thrown away at the end of a transaction, then the compiler could still deem such a function to be a view function. Is that the case with the transient storage? I did not see any direct discussion of how transient storage would interact with view functions either here or in the EIP. What is the story there?
Thanks! - Blake