Core dev update, Nethermind release and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #579 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we cut the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and then it's asano and today's the 4th of may 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so we have an update from Paul Grove here who is the chief legal officer at coinbase now I discussed I think it was maybe a few days ago or last week that uh coinbase sued the SEC and basically said I said hey we want to reply to um uh to something they had kind of filed I think quite a while ago now maybe over a year ago now and well there is an update on this so Paul put out a tweet saying the third circuit just issued a text only order directing the SEC to file a response to our Amanda Miss petition within 10 days and gave us seven days

for a reply here's the text of the order uh at the direction of the court respondent is ordered to file an answer to the petition for rid of mandemus within 10 days of the date of this order position I may file or applied to the response within seven days of the date of filing of the response um this is pretty funny but because it's kind of like okay is the SEC actually going to reply Within These 10 days what are the consequences for not replying I don't know obviously because I'm not not a lawyer and uh the legal system is is quite quite complex here but uh this is a pretty short time frame so we'll know within 10 days if the SEC chooses to reply to this Randomness petition that coinbase has been trying to get them to reply to for as I said like quite a

while now I think over over a year at this stage and of course coinbase then has seven days to issue or reply to that which I'm sure they'll do in a speedy manner because they are the ones that want to move this along as fast as possible um now the actual details of what they asked for really it just speaks at the heart of everything that they've been asking for for a long time now more guidance uh on your regulatory front um uh more kind of like things put in place more uh easier to follow rules uh basically any kind of help that the SEC can give coinbase and other crypto companies to actually stay on the right side of regulations and the right side of the law especially when it comes through deeming assets to be Securities or not so love to see what this reply is

here look honestly if they do reply if the SEC does reply to this I expected to be some kind of canned reply I don't expect it to be anything substantial uh there is definitely going to be a lot of back and forth here and the most annoying bit is that the in the legal process that generally is this it's just back and forth slow moving especially when you are dealing with something like uh like the SEC where there's just full of bureaucracy uh and and especially the current SEC where they don't seem interested in actually changing anything for the you know on the positive side for crypto and they feel like just putting their I guess guard up the whole time uh and basically letting all the crypto companies leave the us as I've discussed a lot on the refill before but I'll keep you updated on the sec's

response here and we'll see if they actually do respond all right so Tim biker has published the latest all core devs update so he uh on hack MD so he used to publish these quite a lot uh now this is update 15. I haven't seen one in a little while I don't know how long it's been but uh but I assumed as timbiko said here it has been a while so in this update uh he talks about chappella going live uh and how they're in the final stages of planning the dencoon upgrade and I've talked about that a lot recently about how 4844 is the driver of the upgrade and there are a bunch of other erps that are passengers some that are already included some that are still considered for inclusion um but of course these things aren't 100 going to go in they could they could end

up being dropped uh we just have to see how that that kind of um that that uh plays out there and then he also uh kind of like announces him talking about ethereum governance at a few places in the summer with a full list below of that so it's quite a healthy update I highly recommend giving it a read of course and checking out the bottom here where uh Tim biker will be doing a bunch of remote talks around found ethereum governorship I think should be pretty interesting but yeah I mean I've said it before and I'll say it again the ethereum development machine right now at the core protocol is such a well well-oiled Machine it is moving at such an amazing pace and I actually am still in disbelief about how amazing of a pace it's moving in because we went straight from Chapala to dencoon like nothing had

really happened I mean it's kind of like there is no uh Meandering around there is no kind of like being lost in the woods just trying to figure out where to go next everyone kind of knows where to go Nest there is a defined road map there is a plan there is everyone is very very motivated to build this stuff out to get it onto mainnet and everyone really wants to stick to that six month or so Network upgrade Cadence which I think is just amazing because that means that we should get Den before the year is up uh you know if we go from April to six months from April May June July August September October right October November could be when we get Dan it's not going to happen in December I think obviously because of the holiday period you don't want to be

doing Network upgrades during that time but October November seems ripe there and then after that we'll go into the new year we may have another upgrade in April again right so it just depends obviously if things are ready and are not ready I think the next upgrade after uh after dencoon will be one that probably involves vertical trees or some kind of like uh some form of it uh I don't think PBS will be in that upgrade maybe Mev Boone is in that upgrade I don't know if any if the Mev burn design that they end up going with will require PBS it may require epbs which is like a modified version of it so there are a lot of open questions still but uh there are people working on that there are people working on the things that are coming after dencoon which is obviously

very promising but anyway you can check out Tim baiko's blog post for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so Frederick here from the ethereum foundation has published a blog post titled secured number five public vulnerability disclosures update so this is just an update for all of you I guess aspiring security research researchers out there who like to uh keep on tabs of top of these stuff but even if you want to just give it a read if you're curious with what's going on in the vulnerability disclosures world and then this is for you so there is a list here where the blog post says since the last vulnerability disclosure has been quite eventful with events such as the merge and the max Bounty uh reward increase to 250 000 the highest paid reward during

this period was fifty thousand dollars and this was awarded to a someone called Sayo for reporting an issue in which Lighthouse Beacon nerds crashed via malicious blocks by range messages containing an overly large count value and you can read more about the vulnerability here so there hasn't been any vulnerability that has been found that has paid the maximum Bounty yet which is uh 250 000 but if you can find a critical log in any of these client softwares that will justify that payment then you stand to make a quarter of a million dollars for finding that bug and the clients that are covered are Aragon Geth lodestar never mind Lighthouse prism techu best suit and Nimbus all the ones that we are obviously very familiar with and all the ones that are being used actively on the network so you can read this blog post for details on that

as well as details on vulnerabilities that have been uh disclosed up until now uh and you can learn more about all of that there now speaking of different clients on ethereum I did want to touch on client diversity again and I've got the client diversity kind of site up here as you can see on your screen so we have still kind of like stayed around the same when it comes to execution layer client diversity where Geth is about 63 of the network never mind is about 17 that kind of chops and changes uh you know every other day it can go from like 20 never mind 60 Geth and then back to 63 guess 17 never mind the data isn't 100 accurate it's definitely kind of more of a a kind of I don't know the percentage accuracy I would it's not 100

right so that's why things can move around but we can get a general idea of of what the the network looks like and it's looking quite healthy obviously Geth we would like guests to be uh lower than what it is right now but there is still a bunch of things that the other clients need to do to get it up to get standard and it's obviously just a time thing as well whereas on the consensus layer side of things uh things have stayed relatively healthy uh we remember quite a while ago now prism was uh was the majority of the network was like 70 or 80 of the network now it's under 40 Lighthouse is basically the same as prism at 37.3 prisms at 38 teku and Nimbus are at 17.4 and 6.3 respectively and load star is uh you know just went live a few months ago I think or not

even a few months ago but they have around 0.7 of the network right now I know I in an Ideal World we will also see teku and Nimbus and lodestar adoption higher than what it is but uh I think the current makeup of the consensus layer client diversity is not as good as we're going to get it but it is a pretty good like it's not something to cry about that's for sure whereas an execution layer side of things there is still work to be done and that's being done obviously and will continue to be done I don't see any cause for concern here I mean honestly the biggest concern is when any one client has over 66 of the uh the share because that means that we could potentially if there was a bug in that client finalize on the incorrect bug chain and would require a very messy

hard Fork to fix and this is like an unscheduled hard Fork this is not a network upgrade this would be something that would have to be done and coordinated uh at a moment's notice socially and it's it's very very messy so as long as it's below 66 percent it is obviously uh not not critical in saying that it is still not great because if get is at 63 right now for her to get the 66 is only a three percent growth in market share whereas if Geth was at 50 50 it would require a 16 growth in market share so obviously the lower it is the harder it is to get it back up to that danger zone that kind of critical threshold there so yeah we want to see that that kind of come down uh more from here uh which segues me perfectly into an update from another

mine so another mine has released their client version at 1.18.0 today and you can check out what's new at uh the GitHub repository here but the the major thing and I've discussed this on the review before is a significant memory usage in production or RAM usage reduction here you can see it in the chart that I've also showed on the refuel recently about what this looks like so if you are running the current version a 1.17.4 and you upgrade to 1.18.0 you will see here that the memory reduction is pretty massive uh it is a two to four times reduction I believe uh in in uh with with uh four four thousand megabytes of memory budget and a four to

seven times reduction with 8 000 megabytes and with diminishing returns above 16 000 megabytes here so or 16 gigabytes right so if you are running never mind and you uh even if you're not on a resource constrained system uh you should still consider upgrading here and and you should still consider operating especially if you're on a resource constrained system because it means that you'll be able to uh kind of uh bring that usage down uh by a substantial amount here so that's very cool there's also a bunch of important stability fixes improving on sync time and block processing and progress towards the next hard Forks so and then there's also a bunch of new features such as disk saving as space savings for non-validator nodes configurable startup disk space check pass through rocksdbs

options additional metrics output and some experimental features a full change list can be found on the GitHub for you to check out but amazing to see such a substantial upgrade live for never mind today and this goes hand in hand with what I was talking about before with client diversity about how these clients the clients other than guessing I mean even Geth they're getting better all the time right and the more stable they become more resilient they become the more secure they become uh the more adoption they will get now obviously we would like to see I mean nevermind has already got has already got like a a nice healthy chunk of adoption we would like to see nevermind Aragon and Basu growing at a at a kind of like similar pace and get going down uh because of that but even if we had the same

situation that we have on the consensus layer side where both get the Netherlands are around the same percentage just under 40 percent and Aragon and base to uh all right what they are today that would be a lot better than what we can only have which which would obviously still be very very awesome there and uh not to say that Aragon and Basu are bad clients but uh you know when looking at the way that it's played on the consensus layer you can kind of see that it probably it's probably going to play out in a similar way on the execution layer once the other clients kind of get to the point where people feel comfortable running them instead of Geth which is obviously very very nice to see so yeah you can go check out neverminds post for yourself on the full change list I'll link it in

the YouTube description below all right moving on so etherfi the decentralized and non-custodial ethereum staking protocol has announced the phase one mainnet launch today now there's a blog post here which is a little bit confusing to me because they said that their phase one main net launch is coming Tuesday May 2nd and will consist of delegated staking but the Tweet was put out May 4th uh let's just say the blog post the blog post was also put out May 4th so I don't know if they're live right now I think they are they may have just forgotten to kind of change this to that they have already launched um they're doing a gradual roll out of an abundance of caution and will deploy uh their own funds first and then allow largest takers to participate and then smaller stakers they are unfortunately

going to restrict U.S persons from participating in the protocol directly and you but U.S persons who are who are accredited investors will be able to participate legally through their eth fund here now they did mention here that they have an audit that's currently under review I don't think that's live yet but you can check out the details about that in the blog post as well but great just great to see another state baking protocol live on the ethereum mainnet here as I've said before there is a huge Market opportunity here that Lido proved out very early on and obviously rockapool has also proved it out that lsds are here to stay and they're the thing that everyone wants now Lido has a pretty large market share that is just ripe for disruption there's no way that people and entrepreneurs are looking at that market share and being

like Oh well I'm going to let Lido eat all of that up when uh there is no a good reason for them to actually eat all of that up so that's why you're seeing more and more competition come online obviously rocketpool has been around for a while but you also have swell that just went live you have ethify you have uh steak wise there are others that I'm forgetting right now but there there are plenty out there and there are going to be more and more coming online now of course they're not all going to succeed right and they're not all going to get large chunks of the network but enough of them coming online and some of them doing things like vampire attacking which is definitely going to happen and for those of you who don't know vampire attacking is basically when one protocol

that takes liquidity from another protocol usually through the use of token incentives and this was done very often during D5 summer in 2020 most famously it was done by Sushi swap a vampire attacking uni swap it didn't work out long term for sushi swap but there is no reason why it can't work out long term for staking protocols or the staking services but we'll have to see how that plays out and but it's also going to be a slower process for staking Pro protocols because of that deposit withdrawal queue for for e-staked and for validators but there are ways around that as well and I'm curious to see what people come up with on that front uh but yeah just great to see as I said another staking protocol live today and you can check out the blog Pros for full details on that one

all right so I just realized before while I was getting the content ready for this episode that I hadn't spoken about Napoleon in quite a while on the review I used to talk about them all the time they had a really large effect on my thinking around uh particularly things like layer twos and how uh the modular um modular design for blockchains is the one that is going to win over the monolithic design while they're out with a really interesting new blog post today titled ethereum L1 ZK evm which touches on two things the first thing is uh that uh eth as an asset is being exported to all of the crypto ecosystem as as a money and as a store of value and the second thing is about how ethereum layer one is scaling just because ethereum l2s

are scaling and we have a roll-up Centric roadmap doesn't mean eth L1 isn't scaling as well so I want to speak to both points and I think that it will start at the beginning right so Paulina makes makes the point that no matter where eth is bridge to whether it's an L2 or a side chain or another L1 ethereum is exporting its monetary asset known as eth right to these other ecosystems now why that's good for eat even if it's not an L2 even if it's another L1 is that it reinforces the liquidity liquidity effect and also its Network effect and it reinforces eth as a money and a store of value so it's a net positive even if it is bridged to other um completely separate l1s and not even the evm compatible l1s even other ones

like Solana that aren't evm compatible right or aren't just Forks of ethereum uh it still reinforces its monetary properties and it's uh its money-ness and its story value-ness so I thought that was just a really Salient point but that was not the point of the article the main point of their article was that they were talking about the concept of enshrined roll-off specifically and incredible enshrined ZK evm at layer one now this isn't the only way ethereum L1 is is potentially scaling right ethereum L1 is scaling via different means um vertical trees are scaling if you're um L1 raising the gas limit because of improvements that can be done at L1 is scaling yet there's a bunch of other things on the roadmap that could potentially scale it as well so just because the three Mega system has gone

all in on l2s doesn't mean that we've left L1 for dead L1 is still scaling albeit at a slowest Pace than the l2s are but a lot of the L1 scale like such as 4844 is going to improve the layer 2 scale and all just feeds up the chain here now probably not talk mostly about this concept of an enshrined ZK evm now what this means is basically having the zkevm at layer one uh but still offering the scalability that a layer 2 would and this comes with certain trade-offs that I think are mostly untenable for for for pretty much like everything maybe like it but most of the l2s I should say here because the major trade-off is that if you are enshrined at layer 1 it means

you have to go through the layer 1 governance process if you want to change anything about that roll up and no one team team would own that roll up it's not like it'd be the arbitrim ZK VM or the polygon ZK VM or whatever it is it would be an ethereum ZK VM it would literally be part of the core protocol it would not build be built on top it would be enshrined as part of the core protocol now because of that it would mean that the thing belongs to the ethereum community right but all the governance decisions have to be made by the same governance process that the ethereum core protocol goes through which adds obviously a lot of overhead to the the core developers and researchers and a lot of overhead to the governance uh side of things and also limits the speed at which that ZK VM or

or or or enshrined roll-up can innovate can change uh and and honestly it's not a not a great thing from that perspective the benefits of this though are that it really makes it so that if the L1 ZK VM uh or I guess like L1 roll object and try and roll up generally gets a lot of traction it can't just pick up and leave to and go to another ecosystem because it is part of the ethereum called protocol now I don't think that risk is actually something to be worried about to be honest I honestly don't think it's actually easy for an L2 to change where they're settling on I don't think for example arbitrine one could just one day say okay well we're no longer settling on ethereum we're gonna go settle on another L1 uh because there is a lot of considerations there

uh chief of those considerations are the assets and the assets bridged across because those assets are bridged a bridge into arbition one from ethereum so you would have to do a lot of groundwork and uh and a lot of migrations and just just to kind of Port it over and then what would you be porting over for well does this L1 have anywhere close to the activity of ethereum probably not because none of them really do right so I just don't consider it a big risk there but that that is a major benefit where it's basically because it's enshrined as part of the core protocol it it basically means that uh uh it's at like no risk of uh of kind of like fleeing from the ecosystem because it literally can't right because it's part of the core protocol it's not just something that

can change where it settles another big benefit would be that uh it allows for I I think just more compatibility with with the chain and and true kind of like type one ZK AVM like fully equivalent to ethereum which can still be done at at normal l2s so yeah as I said there are trade-offs there are pros and cons yeah but you definitely recommend pulling uh recommend reading Pauline house post which I'll link in the YouTube description below but on top of that as well I think the reason why I think in Shrine Roll-Ups are a cool idea but honestly we'll probably cater to a niche market is because with the normal l2s with the normal Roll-Ups what we get is a very expressive development ecosystem

where we don't just have one Community focusing on one thing where it's limited by uh you know one thing like ethereum protocol we have many communities many teams many projects focusing on many things which gives us a lot of innovation and Paulina actually makes the note that without all the L2 Innovation that we've had an enshrined rollout wouldn't even be possible because we wouldn't even have the concept of an extra of a roll-up to begin with so and innovating at the l2s can be done a lot faster they can move a lot faster yeah yes they're not like truly decentralized from day one yes they have to work at that that's another very big positive of an enshrined roll-up where they basically just automatically inherit everything that the um the layer one already has that I

don't have to design for it it's basically part of the design from day one it's out of the box but again like I don't think that's that big of a deal I don't think that's something that's actually going to move the needle and and get people using the enshrined roll up instead of these l2s and I don't think it's a positive thing about an ecosystem or an L1 only has an enshrined Rob and doesn't have an expressive set of diverse Altus building on top of it I much prefer the the latter option of of diverse l2s than an enshrined Rob not to say that I don't want to see an enshrined roll-up come to Market or even like a hybrid of it where you could essentially have the the um the L1 doing sequencing for uh the L2 roll up uh so that it has descent like truly

decentralized and sensitive resistant sequencing uh without having to use a token to do that that could be something that that gets done in the future but but generally I just much prefer the expressive L2 uh kind of like a Cambrian explosion approach which of course I'll link the blog post in the YouTube description below so you can learn more about this but that's just my general view on things and we'll have to see how things evolve from there all right finally here I just want to announce that uh this new fund launched by Victor boonan and uh Lisa Boone in here uh called credibly neutral has gone live now the reason I'm talking about a new fun launching on the refuel uh which I don't usually talk about these sorts of stuff but the reason I am is because I am an LP or a limited partner in this

fund now uh someone asked the other day or got confused about what the term LP meant so normally when you use the term LP when talking about kind of like ethereum or crypto uh you mean like liquidity provider right like you provide liquidity on uni shop or something like that whereas in the VC World LP means limited partner and it basically means you're a liquidity provider because you're just investing in the fund you're investing your own capital in the fund and that's exactly what I have done incredibly neutral now this is the first and probably only fund I mean maybe I wouldn't say only fun but it is definitely the first uh fun um that I've lp'd with uh on bankless aside and bankers VC I'm only an advisor I'm not also an LP with them but I am an LP with credibly neutral and the reason is

is mainly because Victor has been a good friend of mine for a very long time I know how he operates uh both on you know as an investor as a community member within kind of the crypto ecosystem as someone who's who's worked on a lot of things like before he was at coinbase working as a protocol specialist he was working at bison Trails doing the same thing and I've had a lot of conversations with him and we align on a lot of different things I've met him a bunch of times um I don't think I've ever met Lisa but I have definitely spoken to her her a few times as well and she and she's great and she actually also works at Aztec um as the as the Chief Operating Officer there but um the reason why I kind of like gave them my Capital to to

invest is because I I just think that they're two awesome people and that they know and they align with a lot of my a lot of my values and a lot of what I care to see uh kind of uh are funded and built in this ecosystem so the fund itself is a early stage Venture fund investing 50 to 250 000 in protocols infrastructure and crypto saaas or software as a service Solutions here and there's a thread here from Victor that you can read I'll link in the YouTube description below um and the total announcements to date I think is about six so they really are targeted with their Investments they're not just trying to be like spray and pray investing everything they really want to invest in things that they have high conviction on which is another reason why I kind of became an LP with

them uh because I just aligned on that as well I really want to just kind of invest in things that I can see actually uh being value add especially to the ethereum ecosystem but also crypto more more broadly um which is exactly what Victor and Lisa are doing with their credibly unusual fund here so congrats to them on launching the fund very proud to be an LP in them but I just wanted to talk about that a little bit but because it obviously I'm involved with that but also the massive disclaimer and disclosure that everything that um that credible neutral invests in I have exposure to so that's just uh something that I'll be disclosing going forward as well uh but also I I have spoken about that website with all my disclosures on it so many times at this point that I just need to put it live um I I think I

need to at this point because it's going to be hard for me to keep track of everything that bankless is investing in and everything that credible neutral is investing in and I I want to disclose those things for you guys because I don't want you guys ever feeling like I'm Shilling you something or trying to sell you something or trying to kind of like pump and dump bags or anything like that that is not what I'm here to do uh and that's why I always disclose these things to you guys so you can make your own informed decisions on that front now finally here before I move on for today just a quick thing that I wanted to talk about how about those gas fees guys this is insane right like we've actually sustained over like what 30 40 gray for for many weeks now and I was actually

looking at the ultrasound money website the other day actually I probably was looking at it today because I love this website but if you scroll down a little bit if you change this time frame here to 30 days we have been above the ultrasound barrier for 30 straight days this has never happened before guys now what is the ultrasound barrier well right now it is sitting at 17.4 gray what this is is basically saying that as long long as the gas phase are above that amount we are net deflationary so we have been net deflationary for 30 straight days now if you go 231 days and and this is since the merge and you can see kind of like that would have been uh Above This ultrasound barrier for quite a while right and at times we've been above it a lot we don't they're only

dipping below it very briefly now what has this resulted in well over the last 30 days we have burnt let me just do this here we have burnt 70 oh no sorry we have uh changed the supply by 71 000 each so it's gone down by 71 000 eighth we have burnt a total of 126 800 Heath which is equal to 243 million dollars this is just crazy to me guys the amount of eat that's being burned here and and the fact that esupply has kind of peaked since the merge because since the merge the supply has gone down by almost 150 000 athia um which is equal to uh what is it equal in US Dollars almost a billion US dollars at the East price that was measured out there which is just insane but yeah these high gas prices on layer

one are not nice I did one about this a few months ago I said enjoy the low gas prices while they last guys like I think we're a sub 10 way for a little while but I did say enjoy these low prices because they are not lasting very long and you you know hopefully you took the opportunity to do what you needed to do on L1 get onto the l2s you don't have to go through L1 to get to these l2s anymore you can go through the centralized exchanges like binance and coinbase and stuff like that so it's less of a concern these days at the fees are this high but still it's kind of crazy and what's been driving it particularly over the last seven days actually has been a few different things you can see here that uh uh The Usual Suspects are in the top list but Zen

crypto has been a big burner of eth um unisop obviously is a big burner but there's also these meme coins that have been trading a lot on these on things like uni swap so those things have been driving it but man we're at 75 gray right now we've actually been like if you go over the last seven days uh since the 30th of April so about for five days now we've been above 30 gray without actually being like as high as pretty much like 50 to 70 gray for that entire time period of the last five days which is pretty crazy but yeah I just wanted to kind of talk about that for a little bit because everyone's been talking about the gas fees lately but I figured it was something interesting worth talking about and just amazing to see how much eth is being burnt yeah but on

that note that's gonna be it for today 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 the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone