Beacon Chain turns 2, Obol DVT launchpad live & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #499 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily refuel where you cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony sassano and today the 2nd of December 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so kicking off today we have a thread from Proto Lambda Lambda all about withdrawals and eip4844 and he starts off this thread by saying let's do some napkin math on withdrawals and eip4844 withdrawals are and always will be a top priority but we need some perspective now this is quite a lengthy thread so I'm not going to go through it all on the refuel I do want to go through some of his conclusions here but just a bit of background on who Proto Lambda is he is one half of Proto dank sharding so uh Proto obviously uh homage to his name there and dang shining obviously a

homage to uh Dan Craig Feist uh who's an ethereum Foundation researcher and Proto Lambda currently works at uh optimism so yeah just some background on him there so obviously he has a vested interest in seeing erp4844 which is Proto dank shining and going live but I don't think that he's trying to push it live you know instead of withdrawals or anything like that he says that he needs thread basically saying you know withdrawals should definitely come first but he's basically saying that he would love to see uh 4844 follow shortly after and not actually wait till like the end of next year or something like that and he bases this uh reasoning or this conclusion on the math around this so the tldr of his thread is basically that uh he says here

in summary uh combining withdrawals and 4844 and shipping in April can be a net positive uh realistically we should optimize for ARP 4844 ASAP after withdrawals by summer 23 that's uh northern hemisphere summer so I guess like mid to ish 2023 uh the cost gets higher than shipping withdrawals in March and the cost is basically based on both economic and social costs of when you enable these things so he argues that basically if you enable you know withdrawals uh uh and sorry if you wait to enable withdrawals there is a costs there both economic and social to stakers and then if you wait to enable 4844 there's a cost to people using layer 2 is because the more they go with

uh you know relatively expensive call data the more uh the cost is is kind of incurred by users and the worst it kind of gets for them over time especially as these things grow uh that's a very high level of his thread as I said I suggest giving his thread a read but I kind of I agree with his reasoning but maybe disagree with the conclusion I I if I could put it that way because I don't know if it's going to be possible to get like 4844 included very soon after withdrawals like within three months after withdrawals unless 4844 is ready by the time the withdrawal EIP goes live and by ready I mean it has gone through the test Nets has uh you know been successful has had the audits

had you know all the client teams have coded it up and basically have it ready then you could imagine within three months it could go live we don't know if that's going to be the case as I've said before you know 4844 devnets are spun up the kzg ceremony is making progress which I'm going to discuss in a little bit so it's not unlikely that this could happen it's not like it couldn't happen but it just depends on you know a bunch of different things here but I don't really like I should have said like I agree with the conclusion I don't disagree I don't really agree with the reasoning about the the costia and the social economic cost I think that there's a lot of hidden costs in delaying with not delaying withdrawals but like when withdrawals not going live as soon as possible like it is obviously going live

as soon as possible but if we were to delay withdrawals say to include 48 44 even by three months there is a big big cost there and I think the cost is greater for withdrawals than it would be for 48.44 whereas in this thread Proto goes through the reasoning uh but you know behind both of it like what is the cost actually incurred on both economic and social means for both of these things 448 44 withdrawals but anyway I definitely um recommend giving this uh this thread a radar Link in the YouTube description below I just thought it was worth highlighting but at the end of the day I think the way it's currently going to to work is that we should get withdrawals by March April and then if 4844 is basically all ready to go all done as I just described we could get it within

three months more you know it could like three within three months I'd probably give it up to a coin toss 36 months after withdrawals go live uh it probably seems more likely to me but it just depends and I think that uh I've explained this before but like as ethereum gets bigger as uh the network gets bigger in and not only a kind of value but also the people using it as the more entities get onboarded onto it not just the apps but also the infrastructure around it especially layer twos it becomes more difficult to uh and especially the amount of people in the governance process it becomes more difficult to affect change at a rapid pace and also there's a lot of client teams now there's not just the execution layer anymore there's also the

consensus layout they all have to work together they'll have to get this stuff done uh and there's a lot I mean there's a lot of overhead on the I guess like a social side of things so we'll have to see how that shapes out next year but it's still a great thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below and speaking of 48 44 we have super is here who said that the etheon foundation is hosting a kzg ceremony as part of the trusted setup for Erp 4844 they hope to get 10 000 participants who let their browser calculate for a few minutes let's blow past the goal we'll raise awareness now and go in January so just an awareness uh thing here any links to a consensus layer call as well I'm definitely going to be participating in this I hope you guys are too there will

be instructions on exactly how to participate in this as we get closer to the ceremony itself I believe they're spinning up a whole dedicated website for it I think it was live but it wasn't working it was just like in in a kind of staging testing environments um but yeah if you are able to if you're able to lend uh your I guess like browser to the ceremony for for a few minutes you can be part of History here and I'm sure there's going to be a pop-up for being a part of this and all that good stuff as well and I'm definitely looking forward to this but I've explained the kcg ceremony to you guys before it's a requirement to get the ip4844 implemented in ethereum and it only requires one honest participant as part of it so one out of ten thousand as long as one is honest and even even

if the rest did not dishonest it is secure and as I've explained before the beautiful thing is you only need to trust yourself in that scenario so if you know that you're honest then it's fine you can actually trust the system that's how cool it is like if you participate and you know that you've been honest um at least this is from my understanding you can trust that uh the kzg ceremony uh was done properly and you can trust that it's secure because you you you're trusting yourself obviously so it's it's really cool when you think about it like that I I've always loved that frame of thinking um but yeah just another reminder here about that and I'll definitely keep reminding you guys as we get closer to the uh ceremony that's going to happen hopefully relatively soon all right Tim baiko put out a tweet

today saying with the merge done I'd like ethereum to move to a better upgrade naming scheme it would be nice if upgrades had a high level name that Maps well to sub-components for El CL releases uh posted some initial suggestions on even magicians feedback welcome so you can kind of uh see how his little post here about naming uh I guess like standards um around uh Network upgrades or hard Forks uh I think uh uh Paulina here on the Twitter thread basically uh suggesting you know how about something fun for for a change let's say from the World of Sports music games fashion Etc that non-computer nerds actually care about um and then Tim says you know non-computer nerds don't care about the name of the upgrade anyways more useful for people within the community that

said I'm very open to your fun suggestions and then he says Chapala is pretty fun I'm like and someone says no I should probably sounds like a funny name but yeah just something that you guys might figure uh would be something that's worth your time to add a reply to on the 8th magicians Forum here uh there's been a bunch of good replies something my favorite reply is someone saying that we should name them after uh planets and and moons and and just like celestial objects I think that'd be really really cool um because I love space so personally like I'd love to see everything just can you just had been named after celestial objects but maybe we have a mix as well like you know you have the celestial objects you have major rivers and cities on Earth and then you can split up the

celestial objects into star systems and planets and largest moons and all that stuff there but but yeah you can go give these uh replies a read for yourself I'll link this in the YouTube description but just something that you can also get involved with as well all right so opal Labs put out a tweet thread yesterday saying or today I should say on the second anniversary of the beacon chain launch which I will discuss in a bit because it is the second anniversary uh that brought the first gen of ethereum validators we have some big news today we launch our distributed validator launch pad to help bring the next gen of Eve staking now I've talked about opal as before and how they are enabling a DVT or distributed validator technology uh and the technology that they're using to do that so with the opal DV launch pad it

provides an easy and secure way for anyone to launch a distributed validator cluster with their peers with a UI for setting up a cluster configuration coordinating with operators generating key shares via a dkg and verifying that a new cluster is live and you can kind of see a screenshot of the interface here it looks pretty straightforward looks pretty uh pretty simple nothing too technical or fancy there which is great to see and then they're continuing this thread with a bit more uh I guess information but also a link to uh getting uh access to the beta as I say yesterday we're launching the DVD launch pad in public beta and we'll be ensuring its ease of use and quality in our in our next major test net our buyer early q1 2023 if if you're interested in dvtl staking we want you to join us and then

you can kind of register on this form below but just great to see this live I've discussed before how DVT can help us a lot with decentralization of the beacon chain but not only that also redundancy uh and also just general security uh benefits and obel's is at the Forefront of it for sure and I should disclose here I'm an angel investor in Opel I've been supporting them for a very long time now it's funny one of the founders I uh almost worked for them uh Once Upon a Time back in like 2019 I think it was um before I joined uh Set uh back then so just a little fun fact but yeah I just thought I'd disclose that there uh but yeah I'll link this in the YouTube description you can go check it out for yourself but on this topic it is the

second birthday of the ethereum beacon chain so the beacon chain went live on the 1st of uh December 2022 so obviously the birthday was yesterday but I didn't cover it yesterday because I forgot to be honest and then I noticed that I'm like oh my God it actually is the second birthday and I I did put it out before midnight so it was still technically the first of December um but yeah I mean it's already been two years and so where is the beacon chain today well I think the biggest milestone for the beacon chain is that it was merged into uh the ethereum network we all knew a lot uh new and loved back in September 15th of of this year but not only that if you go to uh Beacon chain here one of my favorite websites for tracking everything got to do with the

beacon chain we were almost at 500 000 validators we with almost 15.5 million each staked this is crazy this is just absolutely amazing how much growth has happened within those two years and withdrawals still aren't enabled right like this is a one-way Street for for that eth I know lsd's kind of changed the dynamic there but still like that eighth is just sitting there staking part of those validators uh so obviously very very awesome um but yeah a bunch of other stats around this as well is just about the amount of lsds that are live at the amount of just taking providers that are live the amount of people that are Solo staking uh obviously the decentralized lsds like rocket pool continuing to grow all that good stuff there uh the big and

chain has had an amazing two years and I mean it's still so early right it's funny because like for most of the big and chains life it wasn't actually doing much it was only coming to consensus on itself it wasn't coming to consensus on the execution layer aka the normal transactions that you and I do every day or you know depending on how I am often usual transaction but I think that for you know since September 15th which wasn't that long ago now right like it's why it's been almost three months now uh this month it'll be it'll be three months so on December 15th there uh the beginning chain has actually been doing work for the X cushion layer and he's been doing it flawlessly there has been no issues and the merge went through flawlessly as we all know and it's just such a Monumental achievement that this

has kind of happened and the big and chain is still so young and and it's just it's doing its job and more people are comfortable staking with it and we have withdrawals coming very soon where we can basically finally say that the eat staking uh I guess road map has been delivered uh there are other things coming but that improve ethereum staking but I think in terms of like just delivering proof of stake we aren't there yet like we're at like 95 I think that last five percent is withdrawals and it's very very it's a very important five percent don't get me wrong but I don't think we can I guess like accurately say that ethereum proof of mistake is fully live until withdrawals are enabled there but still Monumental achievements over the last two years before the beacon chain and obviously we want to continue to see the beacon chain

Thrive into the future all right so Dino eggs on Twitter had a great little a blog post that I came across yesterday called easier framing for a blockchain nodes in this article a dino eggs outlines the different types of blockchain nodes explain their functions and suggests an alternative framework now we all know that there are different names given to different nodes and validator types and you know there's a full node there's an archive node and like client all these sorts of stuff and the nomenclature can get quite confusing right and the terminology can get quite confusing and here a uh dino X wants to basically uh reframe these essentially right so the current framing is that we have uh blockchain nodes that are thought of as

validators full nodes and like clients and yes of course there are other types of nodes such as archive nodes but these are the main three and you can see them in this little diagram here which I actually thought is a pretty cool diagram uh which is from chain link God's uh article uh where you can see block producers uh full nodes and light nodes right so basically the block producers would be the I guess the validators in this case and then you've got full nodes that sit in the middle and light nodes that sit off of that with the block producers uh sitting off all the validity sitting off of that as well and then uh and then you know Dino X talks about what validators are what full nodes are what like clients are and then you know what's the problem here to solve well terminology alternative

framing around it and then he goes on to explain uh what the terminology and framing could be here so I just wanted to highlight this blog post it's something that I recommend giving a read especially if you're confused about these terminology and these kind of like terms that you hear me talk about a lot you hear a lot of other people talk about I think it's worth giving this blog post a read I'll link it in the YouTube description for you to do so and also subscribe if you haven't yet to this newsletter I've come across a couple of Dino eggs posts before and they've been quite informative so just another way of thinking about uh full nodes and you know archive nodes and all the terminology around that all right so if uh there we go that wasn't loading for a second there so

tries.eth or I guess like trees.eath on uh on Twitter today announced something called interface.fyi which interface automatically generates UI for most smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain no ABI required this includes contracts that that aren't verified and this is obviously one for the developers out there but just another tool that I figured I'd put on your radar because it seems a lot of developers are getting excited about this and it seems like something that will help them in their workflow so not much else to say about this one just wanted to put it on the radar you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so here we come to the meaty part of today's episode which was a tweet thread put out by by a coinbase wallet uh basically started off by

saying you might have noticed you can't send nfts on coinbase while at iOS anymore this is because Apple blocked our last app release until we disabled the feature and the coinbase wallet 3 continues Apple's claim is that the gas fees required to send nfts need to be paid through their in-app purchase system so that they can collect 30 of the gas fee and then they continue by saying for anyone who understands how nfts and blockchains works this is clearly not possible Apple's proprietary in-app purchase system does not support crypto so he couldn't comply even if we tried now the obvious reason here as to why this doesn't work is because coinbase wallet isn't taking the gas fees for themselves that's going to the ethereum network so they can't take 30 from that because then that what they

would have to do if they needed to pay that 30 would be to add an additional fee on top of the gas fee but the thing is is that the way it is currently uh designed by Apple is that you can't do that either because they would charge 30 on that 30 and then 30 on the gas fees as well which is obviously insane right doesn't make any sense now Apple has been coming under Fire for this very predatory practice of forcing everyone who has in-app purchases to go um to go through paying 30 percent on it even if it makes no sense to do so and it's pushed a lot of things off the iOS platform it's pushed a lot of functionality off the platform like I don't even think Amazon can sell ebooks

on there because it's it applies to in-app purchases so software doesn't apply to to um physical things but there's also exception exceptions for things like uh Banks I believe um I'm not totally sure on that and I think it depends on the country you're in and maybe the bank that you're part of but generally Apple takes this massive 30 cut from every in-app purchase and it's obviously extremely profitable profitable for them because in-app purchases in general are profitable and as I said this is not unique to crypto there have been lawsuits against Apple for this I kind of feel like it's heading to a thing where apple is going to face uh some some I guess regulations from the government there might be an Anti-Trust case brought against them and they might be forced to remove this from certain I

guess activities that happen on the platform uh and the the reason why it's so egregious is because Apple holds a duopoly on the mobile market with Android right Android you can get around things a lot easier because you can side load apps and Android is you know there's the Play Store but then there's also other app stores you can install and and there are various ways of doing things whereas with iOS unless you jailbreak the phone which most people don't do these days you're locked into Apple's ecosystem completely there is no way to install a different app store there is no way to side load apps uh you can't do anything you're completely locked down and the thing is is that that's still very popular Apple the iPhone is still the most popular uh mobile device uh sorry I should say one

of the most popular mobile devices in the world uh obviously Android is more popular as a software platform but iOS is much more profitable from what I've seen and because that's a duopoly and because there has been many failures in the past of competing with this duopoly it becomes higher and harder because apple and I mean I think Samsung owns the Android market in terms of Hardware uh they just Dominate and we've had you know Windows phone there's been attempts from Blackberry there's been attempts from other ones at building different software uh Hardware is even harder like people uh brought up you know this brought up today oh this is why uh people are building the Solana the Solana phone or the Solana phone fixes this I'm like no it doesn't because as far as I know the Solana phone is just running the modified version of Android

and at the same time if they're trying to build their own Hardware that is incredibly hard to do for those of you who don't know the Solana phone is actually uh Solana Labs acquiring a hardware manufacturer that failed to build that phone for them the reason why that manufacturer failed is because to be a profitable phone manufacturer you have to sell at least I think 500 000 units that might not seem like much but it is because the smartphone market is already extremely competitive it's already dominated by Apple and Samsung the hardware side of things and then you have all the the other vendors out there the big the ones that I'm the bigger than Solana right so and and I think the Solana phone maybe had like not that

many pre-orders nowhere near 500 000 pre-orders uh and then on top of that you have to offer a compelling experience as part of your modified I guess like Android stack to get people to want to switch and like no one who owns an iPhone and is happy with their iPhone is going to switch to an Android device let alone the Solana phone let alone an ethereum phone I'm not even I'm not even advocating for that so for this duopoly to be broken will probably require government intervention because it's just it's impossible to compete I mean like bigger companies at much bigger companies than Salon I have tried I mean Microsoft has tried and they couldn't succeed they have some of their own devices these days they've got like the Microsoft Duo which is like this uh very Niche kind of um dual screen phone I think they had some other things but

they tried to do Windows phone that failed uh and there's been other manufacturers that have come and gone as time has gone on it's just very very hard thing to to do so from that perspective I don't think making a new phone and making a modified operating system and thinking people are going to switch over is the solution here the solution is to basically Force Apple to stop doing this anti-competitive stuff and yes I know that revolves government intervention and Regulation and that might not be something that you agree with but I think that my general view on these things is that I'm happy for the free market to do what it needs to do on the most part but there are certain scenarios where the government needs to step in because capitalism tends to monopolize over time especially for very specialized Industries I mean look at

the chip manufacturer industry it's very centralized uh so centralized in fact that it became a national security issue for the US to build uh chips on Shore instead of relying on Taiwan because of all the stuff with China um and then because it's so it's so specialized and so hard to do it's very hard to compete and government needs to subsidize that right so I think for Industries where it's extremely hard to compete because of the specialization and because of the the pure economies of scale leading to the competitors being able to to just just destroy their competition uh there needs to be government help and intervention and regulation there um which I think is fine and and you know I know I've said in the past that I'm really not a big fan of regulations in general but I think for me that applies mostly to the financial side of

things not really to things like this where obviously you know if if no one else can break up the duopoly you're going to need the government to come in and do that now I don't know what that would look like I don't know if that would look like apple and the US government for example coming to a a kind of a conclusion together of okay well Apple won't apply this 30 cut to things that it just doesn't make sense to apply it to uh these you know these are the exceptions and and apple would it will adhere to that I think that's common sense to be honest I think that in the long run apple is hurt is probably hurting themselves by doing this uh just I guess like depending on how a bunch of things play out but because they're motivated by profit they

don't have any reason to stop doing this because it is not in their best interest to stop doing this at least as far as their concerned and so that's another reason why you would need government intervention here to to do this but yeah anyway but now that I've given the context and background and all of that the main thing here is like how this affects crypto wallets generally and how this makes crypto mobile wallets very limited and you know I think it affects crypto wallets the most because a lot of the stuff that we do in a mobile wallet is through an app and if you remember coinbase wallet actually had to remove the uh I think they had to remove the bookmarks to defy apps or like native Integrations with D5 apps in their in their app uh because of the fact that Apple couldn't take that cut and they

reviewed and basically said no because you're getting around that and you're you know you're selling like a I guess they're defining it as an in-app purchase and we can't take a cut from that you're not allowed to have that functionality in your app which is obviously very predatory very crap before uh for crypto in general uh and definitely something needs to be done there but there are other attempts here as well not just the attempts of creating new phones and creating new phone software but also attempts even funny enough out of this liner ecosystem is something called xnft um or backpack uh that's being built in the ecosystem there they also want to build it for ethereum but it's the concept of making every app sorry every um every app like every ethereum or Solana app into its own xnft where you

don't have to go through the App Store to use it you use it on your phone as like a it's like an app that you create via a bookmark as far as I understand it on iOS and I'm not totally sure how it works on Android but the J I guess like the gist of what I'm trying to say is that there is other attempts out there of getting around this but at the end of the day uh it's just shitty that we can't have these apps with their full functionality in the app store because apple is just adamant on having this 30 percent in-app purchase on things even if it's on things like gas fees which makes no sense because the gas fee is not paid to coinbase at all it is not something they're taking money making money from it's going to the network and

you can't charge 30 on on that uh because of the fact of the matter is that uh all of it needs to go to the network network is charging you you for that I mean you guys know how gas fees work and why this is why this is insane but yeah anyway I'm going to leave that one that you can read coinbase's uh thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right another big announcement today this one out of the web 2 ecosystem you can see here that stripe has announced a customizable and embeddable Fiat to crypto on-ramp so as far as I understand people that use stripe will be able to embed this or use this as part of their e-commerce Suite you can see here there's just a simple simple uh script that people can can add to their site

and basically uh you can see that who's actually using this on-ramp right now so uh in the web free ecosystem so Audi s is using it magic Eden is using it and Argent is using it uh so you can go quickly from Fiat to to crypto uh sign it and you can sign up or log in uh via a link here very easily with stripe and then away you go I mean you can watch the GIF in front of me that's what I'm kind of talking to right now and this is really cool I mean just another way to very quickly onboard from Fiat to crypto but directly integrated with all the apps that we no one love on both web 2 and web3 so say for example you know you want to pay with crypto on a website but you don't have any crypto on you but you've got fit on you

well you can transfer that into fear and then pay with crypto obviously I mean I don't know how many people are going to want to do that but there is a use case for that or say that you don't have any crypto and you want to use the functionality of a website that requires you to have crypto obviously that applies to the web 3 side of things well this widget will allow you to quickly do that and this isn't the first one that's come out there's been others of course and there's actually plenty of others but stripe has a massive brand they have a massive Network a massive network of developers and e-commerce providers um and people that use them so that's the magic here for them and that's how they're going to get the adoption because they already have the network effect I mean that's pretty

self-explanatory I think but yeah very cool to see stripe doing this and cool to say that they are actually supporting crypto instead of bucking it which some web 2 companies still are I think you know what I would actually say the majority aren't bucking it majority aren't really doing much with it yet but I think they're interested in doing stuff Within and looking into it I mean the prime example here is obviously Facebook rebranding is meta and going all in on the metaverse but we've all seen how that's played out so far hasn't been very successful yet but remains to be seeing what happens there but I like this trend I mean and also they uh they integrated uh nfts with Instagram and polygon and things like that so they are getting more involved um but it remains to be seen like how many of these web 2 companies uh early

adopters and how many are going to just like follow the trend so to speak as as the years go on but we'll see uh maybe it happens in the next bull market I don't know we're all uh we're all just guessing around here right but anyway on that note I'm going to leave it at that for today so thank 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 the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone