Client diversity, Avocado Multisig and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #583 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel Murray cup latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Ian this designer in today's 11th of May 2023 alright everyone let's get into it so we have an update here from Josh Davis all about the third uh ethereum protocol Fellowship cohort recap so I've talked about the fellowship um this kind of program that the ethereum foundation runs for ethereum protocol and how there's been you know obviously two previous cohorts and now this is the third cohort that uh will be uh that has been concluded and then there is going to be a fourth one that is currently being prepared so the applications for the fourth one will open soon and there's a link here in the blog post for you to sign up to get notified when they open so the third

cohort is kind of detailed here there were I believe 20 after there were over 600 applications uh and 23 participants were selected to join the cohort um the cohort ended with a total of 36 contributors because it was a permissionless program and you can see here the the the projects that each of the kind of people and teams worked on are ranging from core Dev stuff like consensus layer infrastructure Mev stuff data availability sampling all that good stuff there so basically everything got to do with the author ethereum ethereum ethereum core protocol itself is what these cohorts focus on and you can see the picture here which you may have seen on Twitter I believe I think this came out a few weeks ago so this is the third cohort ER and there's a few familiar

faces obviously you'll you'll recognize here like Danny Ryan front and center of course is probably the most recognizable I think out of everyone in this picture but there are others here that I recognize just quickly you know Terence here from from pry Labs or off chain Labs now and a few others there as well and the next cohort as I said is starting soon so if this is something that is interesting to you to work on ethereum core protocol stuff but you're not you know you're not an official quote-unquote ethereum core developer and researcher but you want to get involved with that well this is something that you should be signing up to so as I said the fourth cohort applications are going to be opening soon soon if you want to sign up to get notified there is a link at the top of

the blog post which of course will be linked in the YouTube description below for you to check out and you know I talk a lot about how far ethereum core development and research has come over the years and I think that this program is obviously one pillar of why it has come so far right there has been obviously a lot of work being done on funding with things like protocol Guild and Bitcoin and lithium Foundation managing their funding I think better than they have previously especially with things like grants and things like that and obviously selling eth at the right time a lot of the time uh and kind of locking in those Fiat profits so they don't have to be at the whims of its volatility of course uh but there's been a lot of that happening but as I said like one of the um one of the the core

pillars is this new protocol Fellowship that has been done where essentially you get in all these smart people who are both motivated and interested in contributing to core protocol uh development and research but may need uh guidance on that because at the end of the day coming in as like a fresh new newbie into core development and research is quite daunting right you may be like the smartest guy around the smartest person around you may know everything there is to know about uh you know uh research and development in the field that you've chosen maybe you are an expert at designing uh and building clients right consider Slayer client execution layer client maybe you consider yourself to be an expert there but even if you're the smartest person in the room it still can be quite daunting because you are fresh right you're new it's it's like like starting

any new thing you are you are new to the to the um to the space new to the team new to the uh the whole kind of uh I guess like Vibe of of what's going on so you obviously want to get some guidance there and you want to be able to get someone or a group of people helping you along the way and showing you the ropes of how things are done because you can be the smartest person in the room but there's a lot more to I guess just generally to to working on something than being smart about that thing right there are plenty of smart people who go and work for companies where it's just not a great fit for them the culture doesn't work for them them the people that they're working with don't work for them and they leave and they go

somewhere else that's totally normal but within ethereum called protocol development what we want to do is Foster as many of those intelligent smart motivated people as possible to get involved with uh core protocol development and research in order to make it so that the current crop of core developers and researchers aren't just I guess like set in stone forever right because I mean and obviously we want to keep the you know the the best people but at the end of the day it's a centralization vector to have only uh you know a handful of people working on this sorts of stuff and at the end of the day people uh I get interested in different things they maybe move on maybe there's other work that they want to be doing they don't want to be a core developer or researcher for their whole

life and also people age you know if we're talking about ethereum as an ecosystem and as a network surviving and thriving for decades if not centuries well there's no way we can have the same crop of core protocol developers and researchers for that entire time even I think over like a 10-year period it would be interesting to see how many core devs and researchers uh are still doing as much work as they were doing on on you know when they first joined for example I don't believe there's actually many left there are some of the top of my head that I can think of like Peter from Geth who's been around since basically day one and there's a few others out there but in terms of people who have come and gone there's been a lot right there's been a lot of churn there but that's healthy Churn it is not

churn because no one wants to work on this stuff or you know it's a toxic place to work or anything like that I don't think so I think it's a healthy churn where essentially people come they contribute what they can and then they feel like maybe okay well I've contributed all I can here and this is no longer something that I want to be using uh or doing with my time I'll go I'll go join this Temple or go work on this and that's totally healthy but in order to keep keep it healthy and and not and for it to not turn into something toxic we need to be putting in the effort to train and to embrace the next cohorts right of core protocol researchers and developers which is exactly what this program does so hopefully that gives you a bit more context around core development and

research and as I said the link to sign up to get notified when the fourth cohort applications go live will be in the YouTube description below all right so speaking of core development it's really great to see when people from competing teams or competing projects uh basically complement their competitors so you can see here Terence put out a tweet today saying congrats to Sigma Prime which are the team which is the team that builds the lighthouse clients uh because they actually overtook prism as the dominant consensus layer client on the beacon chance you can see here this screenshot is from the client diversity website that I show a lot on the refuel while Lighthouse is now at 38.26 of the network whereas prism is at 37.87 and

this is crazy to me for a number of different reasons as Taryn says here ethereum uh client diversity has come a long way and it has prism used to Beast I I think it was like 70 or 80 of the network and it wasn't that long ago it's like 12 to 18 months ago or something like that where they were the majority and there was a massive push in the community to get people to switch over from Prism to another client and the prilabs team in particular took the this very very well and actually encouraged it as well because they are not monopolists right they are not people who just want to see prison being the dominant client and every other client just not getting any market share they understand that ethereum as a network thrives and and the Community Values uh client diversity and they push for that

as well and now it's gone to the point where they are actually second place they were first place for very good reason for a long time actually they put a lot of effort into um into making sure that their client was as easy to use as possible uh and that's why they were kind of and they did a lot of marketing as well I mean I wouldn't call it Marketing in in the traditional sense but they were very very visible compared to the other uh clients out there but since then obviously the ecosystem has evolved greatly and now Lighthouse is ahead with taku Nimbus and lodestar with a smaller market share here but you know techu isn't that far behind for a client that really has no marketing from what I've seen I mean they do obviously put out tweets and things like that but if you

were to ask someone you know what are the consensus layer clients on ethereum you know they're probably going to start by rattling off Lighthouse prism and then go down the list from there and I think most people are really just aware of of Lighthouse and prism at this point except if you're if you're a Staker right if you're an active Staker you probably know about all of them but it's actually pretty cool to see teku up uh at 17 here and uh Nimbus is at six percent as well and load stars is relatively new at 0.79 uh but yeah it just goes to show that there is no lock in here like the the the I guess like client diversity can be Canon will be changed over time clients will flip other clients and that's totally healthy and totally okay and I've talked in the

context of client diversity a lot around execution layer client diversity which is kind of like the next Frontier I think because we haven't I mean using the term solved here might not be right but we've kind of like solved consensus layer client diversity where obviously the ideal case would be that no client has like over 33 uh market share but we don't live in an ideal world we live in like the the the best that we can get something to world right and I think this is maybe not the best that we can get it to but pretty close and I am actually very happy with how this looks uh and how the consensus layer um client diversity looks here whereas on the execution layer side of things there's obviously uh a lot to be desired here but in saying that and actually funny enough is

more even than the consensus layer side because as you can see here Geth obviously is number one at 61 but never mind Aragon and bassu are actually much closer than prism teku Nimbus and lodestar are just based on a percentage uh a basis so if never mind Aragon and bass who keep growing at a same kind of similar steady pace and guess dominance obviously keeps falling because of that then the execution layer side will actually or could actually end up looking a lot healthier than the consensus layer side just from a pure kind of distribution perspective which is actually pretty cool but right now obviously it's not healthier because Geth is still too much of the network but with all the improvements that are happening on the other clients especially nevermind who has been doing

a lot of improvements around making it easier to run the client you know lowering memory usage and things like that I do believe that uh that Geth is going to come down here and I know that I've been hearing and talking to people about an initiative that's going to be happening around this as well so the community is going to be pushing an initiative of getting people to switch from Geth to a minority client so I'm not concerned here about getting this uh this kind of Um this can this execution layer client diversity uh fixed basically but yeah very great to see this and kudos to tarents are from the prilabs team and the whole prilabs team really for being so positive about this as I said they are not monopolists I don't think anyone in the ethereum client space on that since this layer

side or the execution layer side are monopolists they care first and foremost about the health of the ethereum network and a healthier ethereum network is a client diverse ethereum Network as I've explained plenty of times on the refuel so I won't rehash why there uh but yeah just wanted to hide that for you guys there all right Aditya from the ethereum foundation has shared a new ethereum a research post uh titled removing unnecessary stress from ethereum's P2P Network or peer-to-peer Network so basically what I did show describes here is he says ethereum is currently processing two times the number of messages then are required validator spent half of their bandwidth aggregating messages created by just a few participants the fix allow large

stickers to consolidate their stake into fewer validators so essentially what this would mean is that right now you can you can see the problem is that the ethereum network exists uh as the cloud here there's individual attestations and all stakers will equally uh attest uh and cause that overhead right but then you have then there are I guess like the problem appears when a large Staker controls multiple validators so what's Staker here is is a staking entity so for example uh if you go to raider.network and the website I've shown a bunch on the refuel before there are large staking entities that control a lot of validators you know coinbase has what is it 12 13 of validate is that they directly control I I don't mention Lido because Lido validators are

actually distributed out uh with a 29 or 30 different entities controlling it so it's not like Lido as one entity controlling the validators so it's better to use the coinbase example where there is a massive validator on the network oh sorry a massive entity on the network controlling 13 of validators well it would be good to consolidate that so that they didn't have to actually publish all of these um messages and they could consolidate them and that's what aditya's uh a kind of eighth research post is about here and it gives a few different ways or that this could be done and discusses them and there's a couple of replies here that you can read as well so this is just something I guess is more of uh I mean it's not a user-facing upgrade right it's more of a kind of thing that just makes the uh Network healthier this

is what I this is what I mean when I talk about Network Health generally this this this here would just make the network a lot healthier it would mean that uh validators uh can potentially be more uh more stable it means that it removes unnecessary strain on the validators uh especially obviously for these bigger stakers and it's not just for uh I guess like big stakers like coinbase it's for any uh any entity that controls a large amount of validates you know if you control one two three validators that's not really going to be uh you know something like this wouldn't actually mean much for you but if you're controlling hundreds thousand and thousands tens of thousands of validators well that starts to get very um uh you know that starts to put a lot of stress on the hardware that you're running them on and you don't want to

put unnecessary stress on that Hardware from things that you don't need to be doing so that's what I did too is is uh proposing here so you can go give this a read for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so I spoke yesterday about this new EIP for a execution layer exiting of validators now super fears has expanded on this by putting it in the context of the three kinds of exits that exist for ethereum solar validator so the first one is a voluntary exit that solar validators can exit by signing a transaction this is a normal exit you know if you're a validator you go on and you want to exit the uh the active staking pool you basically say okay well I want to exit my validator signing this transaction and then you go into the execute then second up would be

the forced exit by the execution layer which is the EIP that I mentioned yesterday so stakers who stake for a service could be forcefully exited and then third is a forced exit by slashing which is a penalty for Breaking the Chain rules and that forced exit happens when you are slashed and it's not just that you lose eth for being uh from being slashed you actually get kicked out of the active validator set you go into the exit queue and then once you're exited you'll have to re-enter uh to become a validator again using that Ethan you may only have you know 38th instead of 32 8th so you will have to top it up in order to enter and be a validator again on the uh on on the beacon chain so a cool thing about the in the future having a forced exit on

the execution layer is that it it kind of uh reduces the risks around stake centralization as uh as kind of is alluded to Here by degeneralization uh which is a Twitter account that replied to superfizz um so and then they continue by saying because thanks to irresponsible actions of an unknown unnamed service that rhymes with Fido something like that is badly needed and then Super fears continued in his tweet by saying um even though this isn't available yet it won't carry a penalty from the chain but the state could provider May issue a penalty if they use it against a contracted State guard so this is pretty cool I think this is something that's obviously solely needed and is needed from these taking providers uh and something that just needs to be I guess like put into uh any sorry uh not even it's been put

into an Erp but something that needs to be put live on the network before it is possible here but it doesn't seem like this would be something controversial or anything like that it seems like something that people actually really want not just the providers themselves but obviously ethereum community members because they know that it will lead to a healthier ethereum network but yeah just some extra context there for you uh and I'll link the tweet in the YouTube description below for you to check out if you want to all right so instadap has announced something called the avocado multi-sig which is a secure and user-friendly multi-sig which they're claiming is the ultimate solution for individuals teams and institutions alike so you can see that this is the landing page or I guess like the interface for the avocado multi-sig here and they're detailing

their features uh uh on here uh in the Twitter thread so the first major feature is that there's a same address for all change the avocado multi-seek enables the same address to be used across all chains providing an eoa or externally owned account like experience for multi-sig users this is a pretty big deal because there have been issues in the past where essentially you'd have to redeploy the multi-sig to the edge other chain that you want to use such as an L2 in order to actually use it and not lose funds I believe there was a fun there was actually a fund uh loss that ended up happening around the op token with a market maker because of this issue uh the second major feature is gas abstraction so this simplifies

the trend transaction flow for all signers users only need to sign while one person adds the usdc gas one gas balance for all your needs on any chain Network abstraction so the avocado multi-sig maintains the same network abstraction capabilities as the current avocado uh and security uh multi-signature technology offers the highest level of security for managing digital asset assets ensuring optimal protection of your assets and they continue on here with a couple more more tweets uh this is huge I think not for a few different reasons one it gives some competition to the safe multi-sig which is being used by the majority I think of people at this point and and they have a lot of TV out I believe it's like uh I

don't know how I think it's maybe 50 billion dollars of TBL or something like that or or total value in there that's uh that's being secured by safe and also competition is always good for a number of different reasons because I don't know if safe actually um does something like this with the same address for all chains and I don't think they do the gas obstruction yet they do the thing way if you sign the um the transaction you don't have only one person has to pay the gas you don't have to pay gas for signing the old safe version required you to pay gas for uh everyone to pay gas to to sign a transaction which was uh which was not great uh but the new one doesn't but I don't think they abstracted away like uh like avocado multi-sig does here so yeah

just great to see more competition in the multi-sig space uh you can read the thread for the full details here and there's also a video I believe linked at the end of the thread for you to check out and I believe that uh you'll be able to check this out soon I don't think the avocado multisig is live yet uh but it will be live as part of the insta dap avocado Suite uh soon uh rather than later all right so I mentioned my tweet yesterday that I put out about the ultrasound money website and how people have become confused about this Supply change number at the top of the ultrasound money website and then the kind of burn and issuance numbers well uh I guess thanks to my tweets uh and feedback that I passed on to the ultrasound Money Team they have updated

this to make it more clear so you can see here on the on the top of the ultrasound money website under the supply chain uh I guess like uh box here they've actually got the words issued and burned next to the uh the right hand side here where it's got the like water droplet and the fire Emoji now you may think that this is redundant or you may think that this is silly because it should be pretty self-explanatory what uh what these things are but I actually don't think that's the case because the water droplet doesn't really translate to issuance for most people I think unless you're like in the know it doesn't really like for example the the fire Emoji everyone knows that that is a burn right everyone would be able to install certainly tell that that is

eighth burned but the water droplet I don't think does so it actually makes sense to put the the issued uh I guess like terminology here and then put bird next year so it doesn't look look silly even though everyone knows what that is so that's a great little Quality of Life Update there which I think is pretty cool um I I do think that it it's good and it's a great update it may not be enough to avoid some confusion because I I think that what ended up happening was that people look at this number the supply change number and they immediately think oh that must be the amount of eighth burned in the in the time frame that I've selected just for whatever reason I think it's become a kind of thing where it's it's basically like I don't even think about it they look at it and they think

okay that's the amount of teeth burn so it may be worth just putting something more obvious here I don't know what it is I'm really bad at UI ux design generally um but I I think Alexia from the ultrasound Money Team actually mentioned that uh breaking the site so the top section can have a large Supply label um and another idea would be to use different colors entirely for Supply Delta versus simple burn I think things like that can work colors and color coding things are obviously a pretty great from a UI ux perspective but generally there's only so much you can do if people are going to you know keep making the same mistake or I guess like not making the same mistake but having the same misconception then it may need a kind of entire rework here or maybe just more explanation where essentially

maybe you have like a box here and instead of having all this information on the right hand side you would have an explanation about what this actually is and how it's calculated and all that it's always a delicate balance between overloading the the people watching the side or looking at the site uh and and scaring them off or educating them as best as you can so I think this is just a great little addition here so far I just wanted to highlight for you guys that was there uh but but there'll probably be more coming as time goes on that all right so I haven't spoken about the mevwatch.info website in a while now and there is a good reason for that because no news in this case is good news so the good news is that the ofak compliance stopped going up and went down uh the no

news is that the offer compliance has stopped going down as well so we're at around 30 enforced ofac compliance across all relayers at this point in time and it has been that way for quite a while now so you can go down here and see how long this has actually been the case so 30 compliance started at about March 19th so we're almost two months where it really hasn't moved much it's kind of I mean it's kind of like uh uh uh um what's the what's the term I'm looking for it's uh there's a word that describes what what this does it's kind of like um uh hung around the 30 Mark basically and gone between 28 and 32 I think and there was like a a normal Spike here in uh in mid to late April I

think that was due to some uh some crazy gas fees on the network or some spike that resulted in that and there was also a spike down here as well I mean but generally if you average it out it's at about 30 which is very positive obviously and you can see here what what the current um relay landscape looks like so flashbots is uh went from 90 to now 28 and ultrasound money is at 40 so they are the biggest relayer right now so an ultrasound money is the biggest not only is the biggest non-censoring relayer but it is the biggest relayer uh period and then agnostic boost is set is at second place with 17.7 and block shot Max profit is at seven point three percent now the only censoring relayer that's bigger than than the than the top I believe like four uh the top four top

three sorry uh non-censoring relayers is flashbots the next biggest censoring relayer is block native with 3.3 percent and then blocks were out regulated with under one percent so just amazing uh how fast this landscape change like relatively faster change since the the sanctions obviously came out uh and it's great that we've actually kind of plateaued here I I think that it's fine that we're at 30 obviously in an Ideal World it will be at zero and maybe it will one day when we get like in protocol PBS and things like that but 30 is is great because when you think about it uh that means that you have a pretty good chance of getting your uh sanctions in this case tornado cash transaction included in a block uh within one or two

blocks basically you have you have a an almost 100 chance within within three blocks I believe and I don't know the exact method on my head but you really don't have to wait long that's that's under a minute right that's like 30 seconds or something like that uh 30 2012 24 36 seconds uh is three blocks there so all three slots technically uh so yeah I just wanted to hide that that no news is good news in this case just really awesome to see how the ethereum community came together to solve this issue well I mean I don't think I'd call it solved but like mitigate this issue as much as possible and there are still a lot of research there's still a lot of research going on to solve this issue and a lot of development going on to make Mev or at least the toxic

externalities of Mev a thing of the past and obviously censorship is one big toxic externality of Mev and there are a lot of people working on making sure that uh goes uh that that definitely gets mitigated there so anyway you can go uh check this out for yourself at the Mev watch dot info a website there but I think that's going to be it for today a bit of a short episode today uh but hopefully you enjoyed it nonetheless 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 tomorrow thanks everyone