AllCoreDevs updates, Google Cloud supports Ethereum - The Daily Gwei Refuel #477 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel weary cup the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Dan this assignments of the 28th of October 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so the all core devs call are the first one in a few weeks actually happened uh yesterday or today I should say and we have an update thread here from Tim baiko which of course I'll link in the YouTube description below but someone has already done my job job for me on Twitter here um kimono I think that's how you say that that name there but they basically summarize the call or at least like the um the main points of focus on the call so one of the obviously big points of focus was withdrawals and um as as noted here everyone everyone being the core devs is fully on board for withdrawals

to be included and for the release to be ASAP uh and then obviously the next biggest upgrade on the list was 4844's you know Proto dank shotting and for the first time we heard a core Dev make a prediction on the Shanghai hard Fork without 4844 Marius has speculated uh end of February which is exactly I guess like what I've been saying as well you know that first half of 2023 but maybe towards late q1 which March is basically getting into into Lake q1 there I end of Feb uh maybe considered still kind of like mid to late there but yeah I mean it just depends right like I've said it before uh a lot of times that 4844 he's being worked on but if it's not ready in time for like the test nets for example as noted here as well you know multiple

execution layer teams including Geth said that the amount of remaining work they have to do for 4844 is not that great but the consensus layer teams tend to be more non-committal uh because there's more work to do on that side for them uh in any event it was not intended to decide in or out on this call rather it just confirmed the informal consensus that has emerged in recent weeks for everybody to keep working on it full speed and maybe around end of the end of November it'll all be clear whether it will be ready in time to catch the train to Shanghai when it starts to leave the station in January so I guess in January we're expecting Shanghai Nets any 4844 isn't ready by then it's probably not going to end up in Shanghai we'll probably just end up having withdrawals and maybe a few other eips but probably

not 4844 so I'm still hopeful I'm still hopeful that we can get there in in time for January but it is a bit difficult to tell because obviously December and in January are holiday periods we don't know who's going to be on deck and who's not during that time and we shouldn't expect them you know the core devs to be on deck during the holiday period anyway they've got families they want to spend time with and all that stuff but generally yeah if we're 4844 isn't ready by uh January it's not going into a test now and as was noted here we'll probably know by end of November anyway because the core devs will have a good idea of whether they can get it ready in time uh for those test Nets that are going live but withdrawals definitely 100 going to be in Shanghai uh obviously every core

Dev wants that to happen and everyone in the community wants that to happen it is the next big milestone besides 4844 on the ethereum road map and it's funny that I say that because some other communities will make fun of ethereum saying you know withdrawals should have been mistaking from day one but in the context of how ethereum's proof of stake rollout has gone uh there's a very good reason withdrawals weren't there from day one right I mean we started off with just a standalone Beacon chain Network that was a one-way Bridge you weren't able to withdraw from that because it was a separate Network and then we merged and we wanted to keep that as simple as possible we didn't want to introduce anything that could break the merge and obviously that was a good decision because we had a pretty perfect merge right and now shortly after the

merge we are getting withdrawals in and you know at the end of the day no one's forced to stake and everyone knows like when you go through the staking process uh as a solo Staker um and you know actually sending ether the deposit contract you are warned that you aren't able to withdraw and even with the lsds uh I think a lot of them uh warn you and say that you won't be able to actually withdraw from the the beacon chain itself you have to actually um sell it on secondary market and you may not get the exact value as we've seen previously these LSD tokens can come from their you know True Value and and I think people are understand that so uh and the people who are sticking with the exchanges as I said they have ways to exit they can go through

CBE thought I mean St obviously lighter's not an exchange but they've got ways to exit there but in terms of solo stickers withdrawing uh that just can't happen right uh right now and obviously that'll happen in a few months um and on top of that as well the block awards are not withdrawable either oh the only rewards that are withdrawable are the Mev uh rewards and the fee Revenue um because those are execution layer rewards but anything happening on the consensus layout such as rewards for a testing proposing blocks and being part of a sync committee that is going to be available when Beacon chain withdrawals are enabled as well as being able to withdraw that 32 week per validator principle that you have if you have a validator spun up and that brings to us to another concern that people will

often bring up is that oh you know when withdrawals are enabled how many people are actually going to withdraw eth you know unstake eth and sell it well I I think I've said this before on the refill but just to refresh you are I think we can be relatively certain that at least the rewards like not the principle not the 32 eighth principle but all the rewards uh that have um been accrued to this point or at least most of them that have been accrued till this point I think maybe 50 of them are at you know around 50 will probably be sold off for tax purposes because uh staking is taxable as income in a lot of places and obviously you haven't been able to uh get your eat out to sell it to cover that tax so maybe people have covered it on their own or haven't reported it yet

but they're gonna have to pay that tax so I can I can have Fields Fair certainty that around 50 of uh the of most of the rewards that have been accrued to date will probably be sold maybe anywhere from 30 to 50 um you know it's kind of hard to tell but there is going to be some portion now that's on the reward side of things what about the principal well I think it really depends what the price of eth is because if eth is what the price it is now and when and and the deposit contract went live when eath was around five six hundred dollars you know how many people are actually going to be wanting to take profits at that point and you you just up over 2x on your eighth you know if you've been in it for this long are you guys are you just

gonna sell when the price is you know at the price that it is now I don't know I don't think many people are going to do that and we've seen tons of people entering staking over the last year or so uh and how many of them are going to sell I mean a lot of them are probably underwater at this point are they going to sell I don't know it's it's very hard to tell there's a lot of speculation that goes into this but I think that I I think that's going to be a quite a fun event to see because people are going to assume that any eat withdrawn from staking is going to be sold and I don't think that's the case as I've discussed before I expect us to have this great reshuffling event where basically there's going to be actually withdrawn

from centralized exchanges and lsds and put into maybe you know decentralized providers like rockapool and stakewise V3 uh and also uh you know uh uh solo staking right so we're gonna have to say it's going to take months to play out because of the the exit queue as well I mean you can't just like not all the 8th can just exit at once there's a there's a queue and obviously that queue varies depending on how many validators are are staking uh so how many validators are online I should say but nonetheless it's going to be very interesting I'm looking forward to withdrawals even though it seems like such a minor upgrade I think if you really dig into it it's a huge upgrade it has huge implications for the network and not just on the I guess um of uh speculative side of things but

also on the censorship side of things too as I've been discussing a lot lately where I think that withdrawals are going to help with that and you know to play Devil's Advocate it could also make it worse it could be you know people could uh say oh well screw solo staking I'm gonna just put my eighth in coinbase or binance or or another centralized provider and stake with them I don't really think that's going to be the case I haven't seen any solo State because I haven't talked to any solid stickers that have ever even like eluded or hinted at that so I don't think that's going to be the case but at the same time we don't we can't know for sure until withdrawals actually happens but thankfully withdrawals are coming uh you know mid to late q1 maybe pushing into Q2 uh but they're definitely coming as

part of the Shanghai upgrade 4844 jury's still out but we'll know more I guess towards and November and I'll keep you guys updated on that one all right so a big piece of news out of Google over the last 24 hours so Google cloud has announced blockchain node Services starting with ethereum so basically you could spin up an ethereum node with relative ease using Google Cloud which I think is pretty cool uh I think you know some people say that this is just further centralizing ethereum but I don't actually agree with that I think it makes it uh more decentralized because right now A lot of people are running uh ethereum nodes on AWS for example now Google cloud is just another player in the game which means by definition it's making it more decentralized because people have more

options and more places to to stake Google Cloud does not run on AWS as far as I know uh it's there it's Google's own servers and Google and Amazon are separate companies so by the very definition that's more decentralized than just people running their um their notes on AWS or Amazon so I thought that was pretty cool and the block has a good coverage of this that you can check out in the YouTube description below but speaking of nodes and node distribution uh there is a couple of websites you can go to so there's node watch that I've highlighted before dot IO which tracks consensus layer nodes um but like because connect display and execution layer nodes both need to be run to have a full ethereum node uh you can have relative confidence that

they're that they're around the same here and and I'll bring up ethernodes.org as well because this tracks execution layer nodes so there's about 8 000 on ether nodes uh of full ethereum nodes that's including obviously the consensus and execution layer clients uh and you can see here there's 13 600 on node watch but that is not synced so you can see there's only a percentage that he's synced which is 66 now if I do my quick math yeah it should get us to around the same number uh 8976 yeah so it's off by around 900 as opposed to ethernodes.org uh but these numbers are only uh I guess like best guesses or guesstimates they're not totally accurate they're not going to show 100 a view of the network uh they definitely only estimates but let's just

take ethanos.org at 8 000 here so so we can say that Geth is obviously a large part of that's 80 of it and then you've got the other ones Aragon never mind Basu which are minority clients uh which are less there then you know we're not interested in client diversity for the sake of what I'm talking about here we're interested in where these and nodes are actually hosted now I don't believe ethernodes.org has that they have the country uh a kind of a metric here which shows you where which countries they're hosted in so 45 are in the United States 12 in Germany five percent in Singapore and so on and so forth whereas node watch does so node watch will show you uh where these uh these are hosted or unhosted nodes and I believe where is where is uh hosted a

here we go so percentage of hosted nodes and percentage of non-hosted nodes so there's 26 hosted and 74 non-hosted again take these numbers with a grain of salt I've seen them higher from other estimates I think the highest I may have seen them is like 40 or maybe even 50 and hosted just means on one of these services such as Google cloud or AWS right but still like there's a few there's actually two major things to consider here one uh I don't think people using are these hosting services for nodes actually is a big deal I don't think it like has a huge influence on the decentralization of the network because for example if 50 let's just say 50 of full nodes was hosted on AWS and Amazon said one day well screw you guys

we're kicking you off right the 50 of full nodes on the ethereum network would be kicked off well that does that prevent anyone from spitting up their full node on their own Hardware no and you can do that because ethereum has prioritized uh the ease of spinning up a full node on consumer Hardware that's the whole point of why ethereum is so limited at the base layer so I don't think it's a huge deal and I think people making it out to be a huge deal uh aren't looking at the Nuance here but also on on top of that I think that uh when looking at the different services that are available they're also based in different countries uh there isn't just like AWS and Google Cloud but there are a bunch of other hosting services that you can use as well obviously you know

given a lot of nodes are hosted in the United States a lot of them are going to be hosted on AWS and and and potentially Google Cloud as well or any other us-based Cloud providers but again it goes back to my argument where I said that even if 50 was shut down uh it doesn't really matter because you could just resync your full node using the other 50 of the network on your consumer hardware and you could even go with even more crazy numbers you could say that even if 90 of full nodes were were offline it wouldn't even be at that big of a deal obviously you know the higher you go the more impact it has but generally I think that it's overblown because it's not like a validator right it's not like we're for example if Amazon wanted to they could take control

of all the validators list that are hosted on AWS and actually have influence on the network a full node uh you know is really just there for you to verify the state of the network yourself and to obviously relay your transactions of and use your node as an IPC for example but it doesn't actually have uh validator it's not a validator right it's not the same thing it doesn't have influence to a test and propose blocks whereas for example if um AWS hosted you know what whatever it is so 67 if you want to go in the extreme case of validators which it doesn't but let's go to the extreme case it doesn't even have anywhere close to that Amazon could take those over and then uh basically take over the entire ethereum network but I don't think that people are going to do

that because of the fact of the matter is that running a validator is more intensive it probably especially if you're running that many validators on there and there are uh there are definitely incentives not to do that because you could as I said like if you if Amazon had that much of the um the the network they could in theory take over the network but they're only taking over the network on the technical side of things the community could still Fork them out so you could imagine it'd be messy and I'm getting into like really um weird territory right now but it would get messy but you could imagine an event where all those validators were hosted on on AWS they get slashed right because the community comes together and says hey like that's not the real chain this is the real ethereum chain uh and

the ecosystem maybe goes with that but it would be extremely messy because that those 67 percent of valid is on and at AWS obviously belong to a lot of different people there'd be a lot of eth lost it'd be really bad and that's why it's encouraged not to have these validators on on any of these you know services and centralize around them but uh but yeah anyway that's a few tangents there but great to see that Google cloud is supporting uh ethereum as its first blockchain node service here all right so speaking of decentralizing ethereum staking uh stakewise V3 or stakewise put out a blog post around uh the migration to stakewise V3 and as I say inside you will find the full scope of changes that are coming to the exit to the existing product as we transition to stakewise V3 now you can check out

this blog post it's about an eight minute read but it basically as I said describes the transition from stakewise V2 to V3 now the reason why I I highlight this is because stakewise V3 as I explained a few weeks ago is trying to become more like a rocker pool and less like a lighter for example right if they're trying to be more decentralized basically uh and they're going to be taking advantage of DVT or distributed validated technology um from from what I uh from what I know uh yeah here we go you've got it here so stakewise V2 currently acts as a as like this right there is a stakewise pool it goes to a bunch of different operators in stakewise V3 there is going to be a Genesis Vault then they're going to be public operators with opal or SSV for DVT no collateral slashing cover and uh

these are going to be different vaults right then the volts are going to have different scores so there'll be risks or scores attached to them so very very cool uh you can read the full blog post I'll link it in the YouTube description below I I recommend reading it because it's just great to see that another staking provider is making moves towards being more decentralized alright so consensus has announced the launch of the metamask of Grants Dao today which is an employee-led consensus funding program that issues grants to the developers building impactful experience within the metamask ecosystem now for those of you who don't know consensus actually owns metamask as uh I mean as an app basically it came out of consensus it's been with consensus since day one and they still own it uh and they still fund it and everything like

that obviously now uh you can build with these grants uh basically you'll be able to get involved if you're a developer if you want to build something in the metamask ecosystem and uh there'll be I think 600 000 per quarter up for grabs that's a huge act I hadn't read that yet that's actually a huge allocation uh for just minimize grants right that's uh 2.4 million dollars if I'm doing math correctly uh a year there uh for to find meaningful projects so yeah if you are interested in building something in the metamask ecosystem this is an absolutely amazing opportunity honestly that's a lot of my as I said like I didn't expect it to be that High usually these grants programs are quite small but uh I I guess like consensus recently raised as well so they've got some money to to

Splash around here and obviously metamask is incredibly important to the ethereum ecosystem and actually beyond the ethereum ecosystem as well because metamask Powers all the evm uh change you can use all of them you can change your network you know we've all done that uh before but yeah very very cool to see such a large amount of money allocated to this so yeah go check out this blog post for a breakdown of what this is and how you can get involved uh it's one for the developers out there all right a couple of optimism updates to get through uh Quicks the optimism nft Marketplace has announced that they've teamed up with layer 3 to launch an nft bridging Quest and reward users for Bridging the eighth their eighth nfts to optimism now I remember I spoke about this a little while ago that uh Quicks now has a bridge so you can

Bridge your ethereum layer 1 nfts to optimism in order to take advantage of those cheaper fees and faster transactions well now they've teamed up with layer 3 to make this much easier for for you so you can see here that users who Bridge an nft can earn up to 400 XP on layer 3 and those who Bridge an nft from one of our pre-approved collection will receive an additional 25 op tokens per nft bridged from that collection and you can see the full list of pre-approved collections at this um at this kind of notion site here now I'm loading it up uh it's going to it the Quick Picks are things like crypto covers chain Runners uh robotos pudgy penguins and a few others there uh some trending on ethereum as well well um and

and a bunch of others as well here so these are the pre-approved collections right now I I assume that's going to keep growing but yeah if you're really into nfts and uh you want to try this out definitely do so I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out uh and the second optimism update is that optimism has launched an OP craft Creator contest so you can create content around build structures in and hack on opcraft for up to 31 000 in op bounties now I talked about opcraft last week or the week before that's that game running on a op stack chain fully on chain it's basically a Minecraft clone and I played around with it on the readfield I'm sure you guys remember it uh but yeah this is really cool so for more info on this including submission instructions uh it can be

found at the opcraft dash contest channel on the optimism Discord which you can join here with the link that I'll link in the YouTube description below but yeah just more op tokens up for grabs if you've been involved with opcraft lately you've been playing it a lot more than I have probably then definitely go check these out to potentially earn some rewards here all right so uniswap Labs has posted a blog post all around all about unisop V3 t-wop Oracles in a proof of stake world now I've talked about t-wop oracles before on the refuel to op basically stands for time weighted average price and the reason why UNICEF V3 is such a great uh t-wop Oracle is because it is fully on chain there's no need to rely on any external data you basically just

take the price of say eth from uni swap using the pools there you average it out over time as two op suggests and then that's the Oracle price that gets fed into whatever you want to feed it into now with the Advent of proof of stake on ethereum uh with the merge this has become not very secure because of the fact that uh or the risk of the implications of multi-block Mev uh why and and other such attacks now a refresher here for those who don't remember with ethereum proof of stake the um the next proposer for basically the entire epic is no known uh for sorry each proposal for the entire epic is known which basically means you know

which validator is going to propose a block ahead of time now because of this it leads itself to what's called multi-block Mev where basically if you know that you're going to propose uh these blocks you can do some funky stuff around Mev and maximize your your um your uh I guess like profits from that and that could have a risks for two op oracles because you could potentially manipulate them if you were able to control various transactions within blocks if you knew that you're going to be a proposer now there are obviously solutions for this coming down the pipeline like uh ssle which I've talked about before um a lot on the refill actually and I think I went through it last week before the telecat a blog post about it uh but yeah unisop Labs has put out their own

blog post on this explaining all of this and more and it's quite lengthy actually uh I I I managed to skim through it today I haven't read it just yet but I highly recommend giving it a read if you're interested in learning about this stuff I'll link it in the YouTube description option below alright a tweet from vitalikia that I wanted to talk a little bit about where he says my concern with VR is similar to some anti-crypto people's concerns about crypto a feeling that people are quote in love with the idea of it end quote in a way that far out Pace's actual applications just like with crypto I do think important apps exist but VR for the sake of VR won't work now I want to say I I kind of like agree with vitalik yeah and disagree with him so I agree with him on the part of there

is definitely a feeling within I think the crypto community in general that they're in love with the idea of crypto they're in love with what crypto can enable and what and and their benefits and positivity that crypto can bring to the world but the fact that the matter is up until this point a lot of the activity within crypto if not most of it has been speculative casino games ponzis you know it hasn't like if you look at the amount of value generated uh it's basically come from from that those things and those things aren't necessarily bad but if you're in love with the idea of crypto like I am to be like a decentralization maximalist and to you know better people's lives and to enable more freedom for people and you look at those sorts of things especially during bull markets you kind of look at it and

like what are we even doing sometimes I'm sure you've all had this feeling during a bull market you look at it you look at all this stupidity you're like what are we even doing here right and I think photographs drawing a parallel here with with VR uh is that it's it's very similar to cryptos where people have this utopian vision of VR where we're all going to be living in uh this VR world that uh that is perfect and everything's sorted out for us and we're having fun lots of fun in it uh and everything's you know great whereas I don't think that's actually going to be the case personally um I don't think that VR is going to be like this Utopia I actually think VR is just going to be like the internet is today except in a virtual world right the internet is a quote unquote virtual

world but it's not one that we really interact with like we do with VR now I'm not saying that VR games uh are bad or anything like that I've played plenty of them before and I love them but I'm talking about very specifically the idea of a VR world like an MMO for example it's basically free-for-all basically the idea of Ready Player one if you've seen that movie or read the book right so that like if I look at the internet and just like transpile that to VR I feel like we're just gonna like recreate the internet in VR and it's actually not going to be that fun for people because it's just going to be the same we have on the internet in VR and it's not going to be that Utopia that people want it to be um and then things like questions of

like you know who moderates the VR world like is it just a free-for-all can anyone just do anything they want in the VR world can they say whatever they want can they harass whoever they want you can imagine this like if you want to create the recreate the real world in VR but just like add things like uh like you know space travel and flying cars and all the stuff that we don't have in real life okay that's fine but what about the social side of it can I as a person in VR go up to someone and just constantly stalk them right and constantly harass them and annoy them with no moderation with no one stopping me from doing that uh is there going to be like a police department in uh you know in in the VR world is there going to be a um a lot of uh uh laws and and

are they going to be Representatives that run the world so to speak or is it all just going to be run in code like I don't know what that's actually going to look like obviously there are companies like meta which is uh Facebook taking big bets on on this Vision but you know that's still gonna be there's still going to be a lot of control there so I think it's just going to end up looking like the current Internet in in the way it kind of works um but where I kind of disagree with vitalik a little bit here is that the parallels they make sense but not in the same not not not totally right I think that crypto it tends to attract the very specific set of people at least the people who stick around not just the people who come for bull

markets but the people who are in it for that like idea of crypto I think those people are definitely on the on the most an anti-government or at least anti-big government um they're definitely obviously Freedom maximalist they're definitely uh people who are you know really care about decentralization and care about things like credible neutrality whereas with VR I don't think there's a lot of people like that I think I don't think there's really any people like that I think with VR it's people just wanting to escape reality uh whereas people in crypto want to make reality better by providing better tools to people but if you want this VR Utopia where you're living in a virtual world and and you believe it's going to be awesome because you can escape reality well I don't think it's

going to end up like that uh and and I think that video games in general have actually trended towards uh uh going away from that Vision especially with things like pay to win and in-app purchases it's just making people feel like they're not escaping reality as they they used to be and I get that like I'm take I'm I'm painting the uh maybe the cynical view of things here but I think that if we're not careful that's how it's going to end up and I don't think a decentralized like a fully decentralized free-for-all VR world would actually work very well because it after all the problems I just mentioned plus all the ones I haven't mentioned there has to be some kind of moderation and some kind of rules baked in now can those rules be fully baked in within code I don't believe so because there

are certain things you can't just bake into code and then and then okay if it's decentralized there's code running it and people are running the code like okay what what if you want to change something is it Go does it go through a governance process like what we go through with ethereum uh and then what if people object to that you know how much power do people have uh to change things within the game does the game start sorry the VR world does the VR World start blurring with the real world in that you do stuff in VR you earn money and then you can use you know you earn money in the real world and vice versa there's all these questions there's all these things and you know I I would love to live in in in kind of like a virtual uh world where everything

was was Dandy and everything was fine but I don't think that's the way it's going to play out um but yeah anyway I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it actually if you want to say it in the YouTube comments on the um daily Discord Channel because this is something that I've thought about quite a bit because as you guys know I I've been a massive gamer up until pretty much I got into ethereum I was a pretty big gamer and I loved the escapism of it but these days a lot of gaming feels like a chore to be honest and from everything that I've seen of VR worlds uh as Aziz today and and just like The Logical conclusion of them I don't think they're going to be the Utopia people want them to be just like how crypto is not the Utopia that

we all are trying like we all uh think it's going to be or we're in love with the idea of it a lot of crypto is right a lot of crypto is just scams and ponzis and stuff that we don't want to see but that's what comes with uh I guess like the free-for-all territory of decentralization and credible neutrality you can't have the good without the bad and you know unfortunately the bad right now now or at least in Bull markets is more pronounced than the good but over a long enough time frame I think the good will outweigh the bad but again that's me being in love with the idea of crypto and that's not reality just yet but I I'm I I do think that it's going to be reality eventually but it's just not it today but anyway I'm going to end it on

that note so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone