100 days since The Merge, Rocket Pool chat and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #513 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 26th of December 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so I hope you all had a great holiday period I mean I guess it's still the holiday period right you've had a great Christmas looking forward two new years I don't know if you guys do boxing day wherever you are in the world we do that in Australia it's kind of like a a sales event but it's not really that great it's kind of disappointing just another excuse to have I guess like people around and to have parties and stuff so yeah I mean who who isn't a fan of that but apologies for missing Friday's refuel I had uh Christmas Eve dinner at my place so I was setting up for that and I ran

out of time to record a refuel but back into it today and covering the last three days worth of updates so we're gonna start with a tweet from superfizz who highlighted that uh Christmas day was actually 100 days since the ethereum merge and he says yeah 100 days ago the ethereum network became a positive contributor to Global Health by turning off energy intensive mining we didn't have to do this we could have stuck our heads in the sanding created narratives to justify ourselves but instead we just did the right thing so obviously taking shots at uh Bitcoin is there but I think you know 100 days since the merge it's kind of Gone by pretty quick at this point like the mergers in September obviously uh and it's been a hundred days since then but the network has just kept chugging like there hasn't been any

issues at all I've I've personally continued to spin up more each validators uh and there's been a lot of people that have been spinning up validators they're kind of trickling in over time uh and we have withdrawals on the horizon and yeah it just seems like a very bright future ahead for ethereum post merge she has I've been talking about obviously over the past three months I mean since the merge right um but I think the biggest thing about the merge for me is still the fact that it was just such a big event but not really you know what I mean like it was a huge event a huge Monumental achievement for ethereum but the network itself just kept doing what it was doing like users didn't end users didn't feel any different um the stake is obviously dead because they were getting execution layer

rewards but other than that work just kept chugging which I I mean I know it might be I might sound like a broken record because I say that a lot but I think it's still worth uh I guess reminding ourselves of just how amazing the merge went uh and just how amazing the entire core development and research team is to get us to that point there but uh but yeah anyway as I mentioned uh withdrawals so there's a couple of updates here about withdrawals so you've got marekia from nevermind uh putting out a tweet saying last Shanghai news before Christmas from the nethermine team so this was put out on the 24th of December withdrawals Hive test results there is no room for mistakes when uh Mario who's another uh when Mario is writing tests I think I don't know if

Mario is part of nevermind but he does uh testing at the ethereum foundation here uh and you can see here all the 24 tests that they have for withdrawals have been passed now for those of you who don't know what this means it's basically a series of tests uh on on code on on code that I guess um for in this case for withdrawals that uh should be passed in order to have relative certainty that withdrawals are working the way you want them to be working and these are tests built for nevermind itself not for the other execution layer clients but it usually translates quite well there but yeah that's that's really great to see and then we also had another update here from uh gujinder Singh who said uh sinking erp4844 blobs on devnet 3 with lodestar and Geth so a lot of stuff happening on the ethereum

core development front of course withdrawals I mean you know I've been saying March April given how much work has been put into withdrawals already given how the tests are passing we will probably have a test net you know spun up in January we'll probably do the hard Forks on the test Nets in February much I I I put my money on March at this point right like I feel like late March definitely uh if not push it into early April but it seems like it's just ready to go and it's just coordinating it just getting all the um all the validators and nodes to upgrade sorry all the nodes to upgrade to support it which is now this will be our first hard fork in a proof of stake weld as well but stickers are usually pretty good with updating here uh but yeah then we'll have

withdrawals and then we'll finally complete that Loop that I've been talking about uh with ethereum proof of stake and I've been talking about that great reshuffling event I I really can't wait for to see what that kind of um what happens there because we have no precedent to go on for this like ethereum is the only Network that has gone from proof of work to proof of stake and it's the only Network that has had a period of time where withdrawals haven't been enabled right even for all the way from December 1st 2020 when the beacon chain first went live that's how long withdrawals haven't been enabled for and it's just a very unique situation that ethereum finds itself in now I did say on the episode of Rocket uh fuel or I guess um The Rock the um the guest series that whack Whack Attack

does on his uh rocker fuel Channel I did say last week or we both talked about this great reshuffling event and really it's not just going to happen right like it's not like the withdrawals are going to be enabled and all of a sudden all this easy is going to get reshuffled around and we're going to have a much better and more decentralized Beacon chain because of it I think it is really going to take a push from the community to get to make people aware that hey you know withdrawals are enabled now so if you have 16 eth go set up a rockable mini pool if you have 32 why not try solo staking and we have to not just encourage people to do it but we have to help them with that as well we need to make sure that our guides are up to

stuff which I think they are as someone who's gone through a lot of the guides recently they're they're pretty good and obviously they could be more Noob friendly but there is a kind of balance there because if you're trying to be like a fully self-sovereign soloist they could do it all from scratching or not not by a adapt node or anything like that or not installed that no I literally do it from a fresh kind of Ubuntu box like I did it's not going to be I guess like totally Noob friendly if you follow the guide you can definitely get it done you just have to copy paste things and you might run into some issues here and there but there are communities to help you with that like eat steak up but it's not and obviously on rockapool side there's a rockapole community that helps you out but it's

not going to be like people think it's going to be like one click and the one click staking that we have is centralized exchanges right or buying an LSD such as arreath or steth I don't know if we're ever going to get to a point just inherently to that point of like one click solo staking simply because it's that it's an involved process you need to make sure that you have a consensus laying execution layer node live you need to make sure that you've backed up your a seed phrase and and your password that you've used for your validated because you need to make sure your validated keys are stored in the right place and all this sort of stuff like that a lot of it can be automated dapno does a good job of this and so does The Rocker pool uh I guess

smart note stack but there are still things you have to be aware of you have to monitor for you have to wait for like rather than I guess like buying an LSD token you don't have to do anything you literally just have to buy the token and that's it right and then it's taking you on a centralized exchange they handle the infrastructure for you so there's not going to be a world where solo stacking or even sticking with rocket pool is going to get to a point uh besides buying the LSD I meant like spinning up a mini pool is going to get to the point that it's as easy as a centralized exchange but in saying that it's still going to be uh it's still going to be quite easy uh still sorry still very easy today and it's going to get easier over time so we do have to

push people towards these sorts of things and in February as long as everything goes well with all the I think it's it's being audited right now but that LE B upgrade that's coming to Rocket pool all their people to stake with eight instead of 16 each spin up mini pools so as say with eight eight instead of 16 8 and then hopefully four eighth we can keep getting that down and then if we get solo staking uh down from 32 to something else which is probably going to take quite a while I'll be honest like it's not going to happen anytime soon but that's going to help in the future too but generally uh I I mean I I might have uh maybe when I was talking about the great reshuffling set this expectation that all of a sudden you know all the stakes just going to

move itself around no it's not gonna happen like that there will be some of that of course uh there'll be people who stay decentralized exchanges that now have the necessary stake to go with rocker pool or solo staking but on for I think for the most part we're gonna need to just make a lot of noise about it and we've proven before that we can make a lot of noise about something in effect real network-wide change like with the client diversity thing that we did last year that uh not last year so earlier this year that super fees led the charge for uh We've proven that we can do this and we can do that across the entire network not just soil stickers but also centralized exchanges and lsds and all that stuff there and we've also proven that we can do it on the Mev

boost site as well where we've really kind of made sure that we've got a bunch of ways to resist censorship and and basically make it so that we can have new relays spun up that are non-censoring and all that sort of stuff there so that as as I've said like plenty of times on the refuel that social air that ethereum has is incredibly powerful and there are certain things that we should use it for and and and use it for it at its fullest and this is one of them like as soon as withdrawals are approaching and coming around I would love to see the community come together band together and make a massive drive an awareness drive for people to spin up many pools as part of Rocket pool you know spin up solo staking validators if they can if they have the necessary necessary um eat for

it because that's really the biggest barrier to entry right and making sure that we see that great reshuffling but not only that because with Lido as I've explained before they have around 30 Network share the only way their Network share goes down is if they if other network if other network participants share goes up right now because there's no withdrawals but once that closes I would love to see people withdrawing from Lido and getting that down to you know as much as much as we can because we don't want anyone operator having that much heat State and this goes for people who maybe these people uh don't have you know maybe they only have a few eight only two three eight or something like that still withdrawing from from Lido and going with someone else it would be would be worth it right if you

have a thousand people doing that it starts adding up so we're gonna have to see how that all shakes out but yeah definitely don't expect it all to happen on its own we're gonna need as to push it as a community I believe all right so Trend fan apps here shared a new ethereum repo that dropped over the weekend which is basically a nice little explanation of the evolution of the ethereum proof of stake consensus protocol over time so I've talked about this a bit on the recoil before about where I guess like ethereum proven State came from uh you know the work that was scrapped to basically create the beacon chain uh and and basically uh get to where we are today with the beacon chain being live and obviously it's going to keep evolving into the future as well with things like ssle and a bunch of

other upgrades coming to it uh in the future but you should definitely give this a read I mean it does get quite Technical and there are equations and stuff in here but it does have a a bunch of really nice history behind it too that shows like where we kind of came from and how the how it evolved over time and it's written here by Lucas andolini who I believe I works at the ethereum foundation uh yes he's a researcher at ethereum Foundation I think I've talked about him before but I just wanted to highlight this for you guys go give it a read as I said it is technical there are equations in here but still worth it if you if you just skim over the equations and the um and the technical aspects of it there is some meat in here for you to get some

knowledge out of so definitely go give that one a check out all right so Sam Richards here from the ethereum of uh dot org team put out a tweet over the weekend where he said my proudest etherium.org statistic over the past year non-english page views have doubled from 14 to 28 of total page views thank you to the 2000 over 2000 translators who helped translate ethereum.org in 2022 in case you missed it the site is available in 51 languages I've talked about this before on the refuel about how ethereum.org is really committed to making sure that the website is translated into as many languages as possible now obviously translating it is one thing but getting people to to come to the website and understand that they can view the

website natively in their own language is another thing and to see here that non-english page views have doubled from 14 to 28 is amazing imagine if we get to 50 right over 50 or or more at first so 50 or more of the total page views are in different languages other than English because I've said it before and I'll say it again ethereum is a Global Network it's not just a network that appeals to English speaking uh uh kind of countries or areas such as obviously the us but a lot of parts of Europe and um South America as well and and where I'm in Australia and New Zealand uh but there are plenty of other places with billions of people in them that do not speak English or English is not their first language right you have India for

example you have China you have the Middle East you have a lot of actually a lot of Asia right that doesn't that doesn't speak um English as their first language and a lot of South America too uh I mean obviously Canada speaks English I always forget about Canada they like the snow Americans right as they're called there uh or snow it's no Mexican people have called them before which is funny to me um anyway I'm going off on a tangent there um but uh but yeah I I think um when looking at this and looking at the translation efforts looking at the fact that the page views have actually gone up with it is really great to see because it means that they're not just translating this for nothing there are people engaging with it there are people viewing the film.org website in languages other than English which is

great for ethereum's I guess claim of being a Global Network as a Global Network in terms of being distributed uh technically at a global scale is all well and good but having people in every country on the planet being able to view their ethereum.org website uh in their own native language is a huge achievement a huge body of work of course but a huge achievement and making sure that we can have everyone from around the world participate in ethereum and not just English-speaking countries and I've always been a big proponent of this I wish more of the D5 front ends did this or more of the I guess General app front ends did this but translating especially natively without just putting it through Google Translate is quite difficult because if you put it through Google translate there's always stuff that kind of messes it up and if it

looks unprofessional people are less likely to trust it and all that stuff there but I think just having a theorem the theorem.org website which is an absolutely amazing resource having that translated is very very important so a good work of the ethereum.org team here great to see the adoption on this here now speaking of websites the Geth team has a new website that they've launched over the weekend here which you can go give a um go give a look I'll link it in the YouTube description I love this website it really does kind of work with the whole guest theme right of being in ethereum execution layer clients uh it looks really cool they have a little mascot here I just love it honestly I I think it it is a really nice website really nicely laid out there's a dark mode of course which looks really

awesome and a light mode here you have a link to downloads downloading the clients and documentation of course to get started here as well uh and yeah I just thought it was a really really great website that I wanted to highlight for you guys because um they obviously put a lot of love and work into this website and there's guides on how sorry they link to guides like on running in ethereum not as well on the ethereum.org website so there's a lot of love being shared here as well but yeah you can go check out this website for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so a Xerox uh not gonna make it here from the uh defy llama team uh put out a tweet uh yesterday or today saying by the way at D5 llama we've

built a new tool for risk teams at D5 protocols it shows you how much liquidity there is on chain for any token EG showing how much would need to be dumped to drive price down 20 sorry 10 20 Etc it's currently in beta access and you could you can dm0x not going to make it four axis here but you can see the liquidity chart for uni so you guys know that there's only a certain amount of liquidity in like amm pools like on unisub for example there's only a certain amount of liquidity for each pair and obviously the more you sell the more slippage you incur and the less uh kind of bang for your buck you get now you can see here on uni this is just a preview of the of the uni token if you were to sell I don't know 10 million

dollars worth of uni uh you would probably incur about 18 to 20 percent of slippage then let's go up to 100 million dollars of uni you're incurring uh Aid what 90 slippage here and then over that if you if you go much higher than that it starts getting uh you know starts getting pretty bad but you can see the curve here get like it's basically a curve that really slopes up really really quickly after about what uh well basically after 10 million dollars it starts sloping up extremely quickly here and that's because this is how those those amm pools work and univ3 changes this as well because there's Rangers but in V2 I think this is aggregating them but in V2 there wasn't Rangers so the liquidity would just sit as as deep as it could go uh based on how much was in

there but with V3 it can be it can vary wildly from token to token sorry token pair token power liquidity pull it to liquidity pool because of the fact that there could be a lot of liquidity in one defined range and then outside of it and I think this chart is actually showing that as well um I don't know if they actually stipulated if this was V2 V3 or a amalgamation of both um but probably is like an amalgamation of both here or a rejoining of both but uh generally you know I what I like about amms and things like uni Swap and other amms is that they're really good for the long tail of assets and they're also really good for just small users right when like Wales for example they're gonna have to use centralized exchanges and maybe a mix between

centralized exchanges and on-chain liquidity but at the same time like when you get to the 10 million dollar Mark I mean even on centralized exchanges scaling in and out of that position depending on the on the token that you're trying to to buy or sell is going to affect the market to an extent I mean you can have resting orders on the order books say you you want to buy 10 million dollars worth of eighth you have a resting order on the books to do that you'd probably have to DCA over time anyway you wouldn't get the same price you know you wouldn't be able to buy 10 million dollars worth of ether at a thousand dollars probably uh just on the book because because people would see that the market makers would say that they'll probably keep putting the price up Chase it up sort of thing right

um but that's why there's stuff like OTC that exists as well but that tends to play out in the market too like the funny thing about like thinking about liquidity and trading and and a size positioning on different things is that uh if you're taking a trade so you want to buy 10 million dollars of eighth at a thousand bucks because you think eth's gonna go up but then what ends up happening is that if you buy at OTC and then the OTC market makers like well I'm gonna go and try and some instant profit out of this and with a maybe once they're done the price dips below and then you have to exit that position you have to worry about it again it just gets kind of crazy this is obviously things that just really majority of the time whales have to worry about smaller

users and I'm talking users that I mean this isn't really that small a million dollars or less right on uni doesn't have that much slippage at all uh but if you're talking about like between ten thousand and a hundred thousand relatively small kind of Trades here and even below that it's really good for those users and that's what I've always loved about amms is that it's really good for that long tail liquidity and really good for the those um those small uses and that's why things like Unison are so popular with retail investors because a lot of retail investors especially during bull markets they don't actually come with that much money to play around with right they put play around with anything from uh tens of of dollars to hundreds to thousands there are obviously people that go higher than that but from what I've seen and a lot

of the retail investors or first-time investors that I talk to they don't want to put too much in they always want to get their feet wet and if they're doing stuff on chain they're definitely getting their feet wet with like not not very much money here right and obviously gasps complain to this too but it's great to see charts like this I think this is going to be really good for as Xerox not going to make it here for risk teams at D5 protocols so for example if you're a a money market that wants to onboard a token you want to be sure that that token has sufficient liquidity so that when a big position gets liquidated you're able to actually sell that into the market to make sure that you don't incur any bad debt and as I've seen before there is bad debt that can be

accrued very quickly depending on the token depending on how much liquidity there is and the thing is as well is that what what makes this this quite quite um quite interesting is that liquidity can be removed within the same block so if for example there is a big liquidity provider and they see that all the added and removed and they see that uh there is going to be a big liquidation maybe they add liquidity in there because they want to eat the feast from that and they can probably make a fee so that's and that's why those defined ranges are really powerful as well on V3 for for that and you can do that all atomically in the same block which is very very powerful but anyway I got on a little bit of a rant there but great to see this uh from uh Xerox not

going to make it from the D5 llama team game I thought it was very cool all right so a big thank you here just a shout out to the popeathon community for designing a pull-up to celebrate me joining the rocketpool oh down now you could mint these there was a hundred of them but unfortunately they're all gone these are the options that uh that people were able to choose from and I we went with option 10. so you can see option 10 the bottom right here is uh my little uh penguin designed by um uh crypto wife uh quite a while ago I'm a little penguin Avatar uh sitting on top of a rocket which I thought was very very cute but yeah there was only 100 of them and the funds uh were that that were raised by this pipe went straight to the purpathon community so just to

support their work here on this but this is really cool uh for those of you who don't know uh uh po apathon or popathon I guess there's different ways of saying it uh they basically create pop-ups for you uh and and do do it by design contest and people come together and and design uh parts for different people here uh and they're really good at it they're really great at coming up with a bunch of designs you can choose from uh charge I I don't know if it's a flat fee for things but uh I think 250 dollars went from this mint to them uh but you should definitely check them out if you want to get designs for your next pop-up and dance I just wanted to give a shout out there now I have a few tweets here about rockapool uh that I want to

highlight so one is a nice thread slash uh lengthy blog post from a jazz bar talking about re flipping steth so this is basically Jasper's thesis on rockapool beating out uh Lido in terms of an LSD market share it's quite long as you can see here there are eight different sections that you can read through it is a lengthy read I haven't gotten around to reading it yet there is a summary thread that you can read and in the summary threads 25 tweets still but you can give it a read but uh Jasper is probably the biggest RPL bull that I know of uh in terms of just being uh on there all the time talking about rockapool talking about the RPL token

talking about how it can accrue value and doing actual hardcore analysis this on it right I mean this is a 50 page analysis so that's why I like highlighting his stuff which you should definitely go check out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but as I said before when it comes to the great reshuffling it is a thing that I believe is going to happen but we need to kind of will it into existence and this is one way that it's going to be done I think the rocketbook community is actually going to be quite loud here because they stand to benefit a lot from this they stand to benefit a lot because they are only account for 2.1 percent ish of the market share of of all staking market share right now so if they can get to the point where they get

to like 10 for example that is a lot of RPL uh locked up a lot of RPL collateralized a lot of RPL demand just natural demand from people talking about rocket poor rocker pool growing as a as an ecosystem uh and the cool thing about rockapole is that they've already promised as a community to self-limit their stake I believe it was a 17 was the amount that they would limit themselves to so they wouldn't grow to you know Bill above 17 there but like let's focus on obviously getting to five percent ten percent and then we're worry about that later but they've already committed to that which I obviously uh really care about as a um as someone who cares about the health of the beacon chain and honestly like I don't hate light or anything like that I think lighter is in that positive for ethereum

that might be a controversial opinion but I still have that opinion but at 30 of the network they're not a net positive I don't believe that I believe later as a service is fine and cool when needed but I don't think that they should have 30 Maxi I don't think anyone should have 30 market share uh not even rocker pool right so if we can get Lido especially down to 20 or below that'll be a Monumental achievement I'd love to see that and I'd love to see a lot of those that Lido market share going to rockapool because obviously they the market share wants to be in in the LSD space it doesn't maybe a lot of it doesn't want to go to solo staking or centralized exchange taking they want to stay in the uh on-chan LSD space well go from Lido to rockapool like convert over

and I know I've become a bit of a I don't know if I'd call it a rocketball shield lately but honestly I I've been so impressed by rockapool just setting up my mini pool tools get being part of the oh down everything like that I'm not getting paid for any of this you guys know that all my Ozark rewards are going to public goods but I really want to support the team here the rocketpool teaming Community because they've been doing this for so long they've created a a a um service that they didn't have to create they could have gone the easy path like other lsds did but they've stuck to their guns have stuck to the the tenants of decentralization and now they just need the market share to match that so I would love to see rocketpool grow as much as possible before

withdrawals and especially Pro post withdrawals but anyway definitely check out this uh this research post from Jasper will be linked in the YouTube description below now two more tweets about rockable so our first one here is a quote tweet of uh of superfizz highlighting Joe from the rockapool teams a little setup here so superfizz said uh Joe is an engineer at rockapool when his power went out he ran an extension cord from his Chevy bolt to his home staking red rig he's taking on a custom piece of Hardware that he calls the Proteus based on the Rock 5B board probably going to offer to sell them at some point which he is and I'll highlight that in a sec but look at this like I quoted this and I said this is decentralization at its finest his

power went out and he's like oh well I'm just going to use a battery and I'm going to be able to use a battery because I've got a low powered device as my uh that running that runs my validators here and this is just so awesome like honestly this is to me this is decentralization because it means that even if your power goes off even if the grid Cuts you off or for whatever reason it goes off you can keep your validators online obviously you have to have these batteries available obviously you have to have a car that you're gonna hook into and all the relevant equipment and probably the relevant experience but the fact that you can do this is what's what the true meaning of decentralization is right the ability to do this and I've always talked about this how the ability to do these things

is what decentralization means the ability to run a full node on Low End Hardware is decentralization it doesn't matter I mean you don't have to run a full node if you don't want to but the fact that the ability is always there for you to do so is the meaning of decentralization the ability of being able to run validated clients on really low end Hardware is what's what decentralization means and I think that uh when you really break it down that that should make a lot of sense and it should resonate with people but that's my view on it anyway and speaking of uh his little setup here Joe's little setup here he is selling these now so he put out a tweet later on where he said well my power's back on so it's time to share this with the world after months of

heads down development I'm thrilled to announce the pr that the Proteus low power ethereum homesicking box is now open for reservations now the wave one reservations have filled out but he's taking reservations ongoing so you'll be in wave two or wave three and you'll get yours a bit later but basically he's building these Rock 5B little staking boxes and selling them to people and making it so that people can just easily get started with staking on either rocket pool or I believe solo second I believe you'll have uh have have two options here so yeah it comes pre-assembled with uh Debian 11 installed the rockable smart note stack is already set up just configure it with your clients of choice and you're ready to go so that's very very cool and there's also different options like fan cooling or or sorry active calling with

fan or passive cooling this is the stuff that we need actually people creating these boxes for people I mean obviously we have something like a stuff like avado and there's nox as well you can buy but having stuff pre-installed for people and and ready to go especially from trusted community members so you can be so you can trust or have relative certainty that there's nothing dodgy going on here uh is incredibly powerful so definitely go check this out there's a video here and there's also the thread that you can check out as well and possibly sign up for a reservation I already signed up for mine I'm probably going to be part of Wave 2 at this stage but I do have a rock 5B board on order now they're out of stock right now actually because of um they're trying to supply chain issues but once I get mine

I'll definitely kind of highlight my process of setting up I want to put uh one of my validators on it actually so I'll highlight my process of setting that up for you guys but definitely go check this out we'll link it in the YouTube description below right finally here we have an update from l2b2 said happy to list ZK sync 2.0 as after many months of development they launched on mainnet the current baby Alpha version is for internal tests only but we believe it's a huge milestone we're looking forward to the ZK sync team removing the whitelist restriction so yeah ZK sync 2.0 is now being tracked on the l2b website which you can go check out maybe I can load up the website here just to see what it looks like right now yeah you can see here ZK sync is in seventh place with about 54

million dollars worth of TBL actually is that ZK sync 2.0 uh no is it guessing 2.0 is down the bottom here that's just normal ZK sync but 2.0 doesn't really have any tvl in it right now because as I said it is in baby Alpha which means it's not open to the public or anything like that um but they are going to be doing opening that over time so very cool to see them list on an L2 beat along with a bunch of other l2s here of course you can go check that out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description but on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow

thanks everyone