Core dev updates, Eclipse SVM L2 detailed and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #660 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the alleyway refuel where you kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 25th of September 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so I'm back uh so I'm back after a few days actually and there's a lot to get through as you can see from my tabs here I hope you guys didn't miss me too much there was a bunch of things that happened I guess over the last few days that I would consider to be like major announcements maybe there's definitely one big one which was the um the eclipse team coming out and saying they're building a layer two on ethereum uh based on Solana's virtual machine or Solana's technology which I'm going to talk about a little bit later in the episode uh and there were a few other things as well around that but

definitely going to be a layer two heavy episode today I can see all the tabs that I've got here there's a bunch of Layer Two updates but to start us off today we're going to go over some ethereum core updates so we've got a Blog here a blog post here from Christine Kim summarizing the latest ethereum all core developers consensus call now I've got some Bitter Sweet news here unfortunately I mean I don't think it's actually sweet I think it's probably just mostly better news unfortunately um but this is around timing of the Dan update now the core part of I guess this this post Christine uh kind of summarized in a Twitter thread here is that she says it is still up in the air what the timeline for dencoon testing will look like after devnet 9 is stabilized but one thing developers agreed to on the call is launching

dencoon on a public test net likely girly early to mid-november before the start of devconnect now this kind of confused me a little bit because I kind of felt like we were closer to test Nets than mid to late November I know that we're almost in October but I kind of felt like the first test net would have been forked in sometime in October I feel like early to mid-november is quite late um and I think with with the test Nets it doesn't necessarily matter if all the clients aren't ready for the first test net in my mind they can join later uh so I don't necessarily think that early to mid-november is is something that um uh uh how do I put this I think it's like a conservative kind of thing I feel like it could be done sooner but obviously

I'm not a client developer so I'm kind of just uh opining on this as like a backseat driver here but given that that was said on the call and if the if the first public test net to Fork is girly in early to mid November that would mean that it seems unlikely that dencoon would launch this year it seems more likely that it would be either in sometime in Jan maybe late Jan or Feb because as I said before there's no way it's going to launch uh in in mid to late December because that's the holiday period so if we do an early to mid November Fork on Gurley and then we Fork whole sky or sepolia after that um and then we announced a main net date we're already pretty much like into late December by that point uh in terms of

announcing the main net date and getting the um the network four weeks to upgrade it's not gonna work so maybe we get a date in like December where they basically say you know here's the date it'll be in January or maybe it'll be in February or something like that and that's when and that's when we'll know what the timing is but yeah given that the fir that that the core devs don't expect the first public test net to Fork to uh dencoon until early to mid-november it it's definitely very unlikely that we're going to get a mainnet uh kind of launch of dencoon this year so unfortunately that's the way it is I was wrong on my prediction that we'd get it in in November here but yeah this this kind of surprised me I think there may have been some issues with some clients getting onto devnet

nine some bugs that need to be ironed down I remember I warned about they're saying that if there were bugs that needed to be ironed out and depending on the clients and stuff like that it would push things out uh but yeah we'll have to kind of see how that evolves there it could like in saying that it could still theoretically happen this year but it would require the first test net to Fork like mid to late October probably and then the next one to fork in like early November and then you know I know there's going to be three test Nets running until girly shut down at the end of the year because whole Sky will launch which I'll talk about in a sec but essentially uh it would mean a very tight release schedule and it would probably mean like a mid-December release for uh for dencoon which I don't

think the core devs want to do it'd be better for them to leave breathing room until January because obviously people will take holidays and and over the holiday period things like that um and it's better for them just to leave it for January and I would I would also agree with that I wouldn't want them to launch it like mid-December I don't feel like that's a good time to launch a a major Network upgrade so I'd be fine with it happening in January even February as I said it's like two to three months different it really does not make a difference honestly I don't don't think anyone's kind of like clamoring for a 48 44 right now especially because our gas prices are relatively cheap on the L1 and I don't think two to three months is going to make much of a difference there I mean

given maybe the network heats up again and maybe things start going crazy but I don't know I doubt it as I said before I feel like crypto prices are dead for the rest of the year early next year we might we should start seeing some life come back into it you know that's just a prediction of mine it's not a certainty uh but by that point we're going to have Den Kun anyway so I think that's fine there but I'll keep you guys updated on how these things evolve maybe they will Fork a test net sooner than early to mid-november uh obviously the core devs want to get this out quickly as well but there's a kind of balance between getting it out quickly and also safety and they're always going to earn the side of of the safety uh kind of thing here which is which I agree with

definitely because at the end of the day we have to maintain uh ethereum's kind of uptime resilience rely reliability we can't uh kind of put a fork on mainnet when it's not ready uh just to save some time here and there especially if it's only going to save like a month or two 2 definitely not worth rushing it in there but speaking of test Nets we got a new launch time for the whole Sky test net so you remember that the whole Sky test net was meant to launch on September 15th but it failed to launch due to a silly configuration error uh which honestly it was so silly when I saw it that I was like come on like this shouldn't have happened and obviously mistakes are made here and there but I just felt it was so silly at the time but anyway the new date is September

28th at 2PM Prague time there will be I believe a uh a kind of like live stream for this it's at the the bordell room that was uh that was kind of made famous around the merge so see I don't know what 2PM product time is uh for me uh to be honest I think that it's like eight hours behind me or something like that so it would be like 10 p.m my time maybe just before I record the refuel so it is and what is September 28th is it a weekend no it's Thursday so it's this this Thursday uh whole Sky will hopefully launch don't know when it's going to be forked to dencoon um as I was saying before about the test match they kind of mentioned girly first as the first testing at the fork but in saying that I feel like if host guy is

ready for it um then they could maybe do like a a dual kind of fork where they do it like within a week of each other where where girly goes first and then whole sky and then sapolia as like the final Fork to dencoon uh and then mainnet obviously but we'll have to see how that shakes out there but I'll keep you guys updated on whole Sky hopefully it does launch uh this week uh and we're all ready to go on September 28th there all right so speaking of ethereum upgrades Terence from prylabs here are put together a really really great blog post that I highly recommend reading called navigating ethereum's 2024 consensus landscape so these are all the major upgrades uh being worked on or at least a lot of the major upgrades not

all of them but a lot of the major upgrades being worked on for ethereum over the next you know I guess you could say 12 24 months and especially in 2024. now these upgrades include things like uh increasing the max effective balance of validators uh single secret single leader election or ssle that I've talked about before epbs as we're all very familiar with right now erp4844 plus dank sharding and so much more but as I said I highly recommend giving this post to read it's not very long but it gives you a great overview of what to look forward to after dencoon because as I've said before um you know dencoon is just one upgrade and a long list of upgrades coming to the network and I would actually say that 4844 is obviously the most exciting thing coming in dencoon but there are many other exciting upgrades coming uh

the next couple years for ethereum that aren't necessarily user facing so for example max effective balance increase that's user facing if you are a solo Staker uh because or a nerd operator like the rockapole or something like that because then you could obviously manage your validators yourself and increase your max effective balance per validator this obviously impact solar validators the most or solo stickers the most but it's not like an end user thing where the end users of the chain are going to feel that it's not for them same with inclusion lists which is censorship resistance stuff uh secret single leader election definitely nothing to do with end users uh Fork Choice improvements same thing epbs right all of this stuff except maybe 48 or except 48 44 plus and dank sharding

have nothing to do with the end user but they are very important for the network in order to basically increases the resiliency it's security it's energy resistance properties it's decentralization so that that can kind of run Downstream to users but in terms of like directly user facing no none of these things are except kind of dank shouting in 48-44 but again you could argue that 48 44 in dank sharding aren't actually directly user facing because they exist to scale layer twos which are the user-facing places so users will feel the lower fees because of these upgrades obviously but these upgrades are not directly user facing because it's it's being done for for layer twos and the the and things like blob transact blob uh the new blob transaction type and also dang shining

full dank shining are being done for layer twos rather than users but still as I said critically important to be across all these upgrades and uh and um improvements to the to the protocol if you're interested in that sort of stuff so I'll link this a blog post in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right another blog post for you to check out comes from night Mike new to here and he kind of share this on Twitter saying the discussion around enshrined proposal Builder separation or epbs if you think it used to evolve I wrote a short Doc presenting my view of the space and Others May differ of course um the open questions presented in section three of the other Crux of the discourse so I recommend giving this post to read if you're interested in anything or to do with PBS or proposal

Builder separation Epps all that good stuff there but essentially this is what it's like when you do research on things you essentially go through many iterations of research and you eventually come to a point where you have like a list of questions like yeah like these open questions that you answer one by one when designing a spec for something to be built around in this instance epbs which can be implemented by clients and then eventually be uh hard forked into the network as part of an ethereum Network upgrade that's that's kind of like the mini life cycle of what these things well I guess like a mini overview of the life cycle of what these things go through and yeah PBS as a whole has gone through many many many different uh research and design iterations over the years uh there are constantly debates and discussions about

the best way to do it you know how to basically do it in a way that increases ethereum's decentralization censorship resistance um and and security without compromising on other kind of uh I guess like aspects of the of the core protocol and that's always a hard thing to do because it's really just a trade-off space right where every solution has trade-offs and you just have to choose the trade-offs that you're comfortable making in order for that solution to go live on the network and we've seen this play out with basically everything and that's why it takes so long for these upgrades to come to mainnet by the time epbs hits mainnet maybe it's not till 2025 and by the time that happens it would have been what three years four years since we started kind of talking about this and

researching this because if it happens in 2025 we had Mev boost start getting researched I believe in 2021 I was uh with with flashbots and even before then when um uh uh what was his name I forgetting his name right now but he wrote a research paper alongside some other authors called Flash Boys 2.0 and that that kind of got this discussion started in a big way but they're obviously parts of this discussion that got started even earlier but if you want to talk about the core of it if it goes live in 2025 epbs it would it would cover at least three to four years worth of discussions and and proposals and research and and all that that entails before it actually got live on Main app so that's it's huge undertaking but a lot of people are working on it right now and a lot of

people are involved in getting this to the point where a spec can actually be made and then eventually clients can implement it and it can be put into the network so I'll I'll link this in the YouTube description as well for you to check out all right so I just wanted to give this tweet from avado a quick shout out here so they tweeted this is all you need to become a solo Staker and keep ethereum decentralized liquid sticking is possible too with rocketpool and stator Labs here so I mean I've talked about this before you really don't need a powerful machine to stake on ethereum whether that's as a solo Staker or running a rock-a-pull mini pool for example or sticking with stator or any really kind of staking provider that allows you to stake um allows you to become a nerd operator I should say

because it's very very lightweight to run a validator to run an ethereum full node of course on the flip side of things the hardware may be lightweight but the capital requirements isn't right now especially for a solid stack obviously you have that 32 8th Capital requirement then for Rocket pool it's lower it's like 8e plus you know 10 worth of RPL as as collateral which is I think I think a thing of fierce debate within the rocker pool and wider ethereum Community around that but that's getting lowered over time as well and and I think stata has has an even lower threshold here and other Solutions coming online or coming online will also have a lower threshold but it's still going to be like a few eighth or something like that which you know these price right now is 1600 or something

like that and then we obviously expect the each price to continue growing over time so you're always chasing that in terms of dollar terms but in terms of Hardware requirements it is very low still which is great because it would be crappy if it was like both a huge Capital requirement and also a huge Hardware requirement it wouldn't really make sense for it to be like that because then you essentially get I guess like what a lot of these layer one chains are where they're basically just uh run by by beefy kind of like data centers or beefy hardware and data centers and stuff like that so I I and and that's especially true for things like full nodes not just validators which obviously isn't the ideal outcome here so yeah you can go check out this tweet from Movado we'll link it in the

YouTube description below for you to do so all right so some I guess like sad news for developers out there who have used the Truffle Suite so truffle sweet has been around for a very long time it's a set of developer tools that has been around I don't know since probably 2015 or 2016 lived under the consensus umbrella for quite a while now um but yeah they're sunsetting their products so you can see here the Truffle Suite will be sun setting over the next 90 days uh unfortunately I think because it just hasn't been it just kind of like has reached the end of its life cycle and has basically been replaced by other tools and Frameworks out there such as hard hat um and a bunch of other developers tools the names are eluding

me right now I think that um there's hard hats uh there is uh what what what actually what other ones are there there's hard hat and then there's um Foundry I think um out of the Paradigm have built Foundry and a few others out there but essentially yeah I think travel has been Sunset because there are already a lot of great developer tools that have kind of been birthed over the years that essentially maybe make truffle kind of obsolete at this point uh but yeah still a very sad day for developers that have used truffle for a very long time I know a lot of ethereum developers got their start using truffle but as I said there are better and more maintained Solutions available today that you can use but you can check out the blog post that Chapel put out for a full description of what's

Happening Here I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so eth Global New York have announced their finalists so there are 13 finalists here across a broad spectrum of different kind of uh categories of applications here so you've got like uh nft staff zero knowledge stuff of course you've got a bunch of other things here that I haven't gotten a chance to check out yet because I haven't had time because I have obviously been away the last a few days but you can go check this out I'll link the Tweet thread in the YouTube description below for you to do so but as I always say with these 8th Global finalists these are where the most bleeding edge or Cutting Edge kind of products get developed and even if those these things don't ever kind of become

real products and real sustainable products and they don't get funding or anything like that to build it out to become user facing a lot of the ideas that get birthed out of these hackathons get taken on by other projects out there because their ideas that maybe haven't been explored before they're things that maybe haven't been implemented before that people want to want to test and people want to uh kind of I guess like experiment with at scale and that's exactly why I love following along with these things because that's essentially what um what what the most valuable things are that come out of these hackathons so yeah as I said we'll link this tweet thread in the YouTube description below for you to go check out all right so I I mentioned earlier in the episode this announcement out of the

eclipse team here that they're building what they're calling ethereum's fastest layer 2 powered by this line of virtual machine or the svm here now this is an interesting announcement for a few different reasons I'm going to spend a time a bit of time thinking uh talking about this and giving my my take on this now exactly what are they building here well you can see here that they've tweeted out saying eclipse mainnet leverages the best pieces of the modular stack ethereum will be for settlements Solana VM or the svm will be for execution and Celestia will be used for data availability uh and and data availability sampling here now of course because Eclipse SPM is going to be storing data off chain it does not make the eclipse l2a roll-up out right it

makes it a validium construction where data is not posted to ethereum R1 it is posted off chain in this instance to Celestia so because of this kind of like modularization here and different Technologies being used the question arose on Twitter and I followed along with these with these discussions on Twitter but I didn't give my opinion on there because I wanted to save it for the refuel but the discussion arose like who benefits most from this right is it the Solana ecosystem is it the Celestia ecosystem is it the ethereum ecosystem who actually benefits the most here and I think this conversation is multifaceted because there are good arguments on all sides of this spectrum and I want to start with maybe the spectrum of data availability I've said for a long time that I think data

availability is is commoditized it it is not something that is going to accrue a lot of value because you're going to have data availability with Celestia you have well not polygon Avail but you have a veil which spine out a polygon we have eigen da you obviously have ethereum data availability as well which is going to get better and better with 4844 and improvements there and obviously dang shining as a whole so is there really much value in that and I don't think there is I don't think that there's much value in data availability I feel like it's going to be commoditized very quickly um and it pretty much has already been commoditized I think because there's other data availability layers out there like off-chain da that is made up of like a small kind of Council of of I guess like groups that that secure the

data so when you look at it like that I don't necessarily think Celestia or any data availability layer benefits too much from this and by benefit I mean more of like a valuable cruel thing in terms of ecosystem benefits in terms of uh I guess like getting usage of Celestia and getting people aware of that and acting as like a marketing tool sure it does but in terms of value accrual and long-term especially long-term sustainable value accrual I don't really see it okay all right so that's the data availability site what about the execution side well of course the eclipse svm is using um the svm right Solana's virtual machine it's using the technology that was originally developed for the Solana layer 1 ecosystem okay so does Solana benefit

from this does the soul token accrue value because of this again I don't necessarily think so because I've talked about this before about how there's been a lot of I guess like Forks of the evm right and and not layer two forks um I'm I'm talking about layer one Forks like binance smart chain and Tron uh and Phantom and a bunch of these and like Avalanche C chairman a bunch of these evm chains they argue it's very hard to argue that they drove value to eth right because a lot of these things have their own token right so uh Avalanche has its own token Phantom has its own token Tron and Binet smart chain have their own tokens um where the value accrued because when binance smart chain launched what token

pumped it was B and B right it wasn't eth I mean eth was already pumping because it was a bull market but there was a very clear kind of I guess um delineation there made by the market and it also plays out in Tron because TRX is actually accrued a quite a bit of value based on its usage if you actually do a a disk uh a cost analysis or analysis of like fear Revenue versus the value of a token on Tron it's pretty much one of the only tokens that actually Maps pretty cleanly to the feed generation it has on its Network it doesn't really have a monetary premium or a story value premium so you'd be hard-pressed to argue that these Forks of the evm actually drove value to it to eighth as an asset did it drive value to the ethereum virtual machine ecosystem to

the ethereum ecosystem because more people got exposed to the EVN they learned solidity they learned how to program in the evm and then that is basically ported over to Layer Two yes I would say it definitely did right it definitely did benefit the ethereum developer Community it definitely did benefit the evm ecosystem I just don't necessarily think the value flowed to eth because of that it definitely leaked out to these other tokens out there so bringing it back to the svm here does that mean that Seoul is going to accrue value now because eclipse is using the svm I I would make that same argument I don't think so right I don't think that Soul accrues value from this I think that it may be a net benefit for the Solana ecosystem because developers can build on the svm L2 and then also deploy

their app to Solana R1 but then that becomes a question of okay will this svm L2 out compete Solana L1 for for usage you know will it will it even make sense for you to deploy your app onto Solana L1 if you're you've launched it on the eclipse svm and it's getting usage there and you just want to focus it on that maybe you launch it on Solana L1 it doesn't get usage right that's actually even worse outcome for Solana so I think that it does definitely uh benefit the Solana ecosystem in terms of getting more people to use the svm get familiar with it um you know build smart contracts for it all that good stuff there which could have a downstream effect for Solana R1 but again that is an ecosystem question it depends on what people choose to use

what uh what what what where users gravitate towards and we won't know that for probably a couple of years at this point we're going to have to actually see these things in the wild to actually get a conclusion there but does it actually drive long-term value to to Seoul I don't think so because no one using the eclipse svm is going to be uh driving value back to Seoul there are no fees paid to Solana for example right um maybe there's some narrative benefit here uh but that's arguable because there's no real kind of like objective way to measure that so again it remains to be seen but I don't really think so okay now finally we get to the settlement layer here which is obviously ethereum L1 does this drive value to eat as an asset well here is when you can

actually start to to map things right where you can actually start to map value accrual here so it by posting it's kind of like proof to ethereum L1 it's not posting its data there at least right now maybe in the future it does but it's not it's not posting its data there right now but by posting a they're calling it a commitment here to ethereum they have to use eth as gas obviously to do that and it's going to be very cheap to do that it's not going to be expensive so is only going to be a little bit of value flowing there but then Celestia is also going to be posting a Merkel route or relaying a Merkel route to ethereum as well which it it again is part of the settlement of ethereum L1 here but again that's probably going to be relatively cheap

for them to do and it's not going to fundamentally drive that much value to eth right in in in in in terms of like measurable value capture but where eth really shines here is in the fact that eth is used as a money as a collateral asset as the kind of shelling Point token for the entire ethereum ecosystem and this eclipse svm is part of the ethereum ecosystem so essentially what ethereum does is it exports eth to this eclipse svm and then eth will de facto become the money of the eclipse svm because I I can't remember if it was the detailed yet uh yeah it is they say here eth will be used as the gas token for Eclipse svm so it just automatically by

default becomes the money of that ecosystem not only because if it uses a gas token but because it's the easiest thing for people to bridge across to to here to get started um using the eclipse svm with so there are actual direct links you can draw here for eighth to accrue value because of this whereas with um you know the execution and data availability portions here for Celestia and Solana it's much harder to see where the valuable crew comes from and we don't actually know what Celestia is at least I haven't seen um what that we know how much last year is going to be charging just all this data on its Network here like how much is um the eclipse svm going to be paying to Celestia versus paying to ethereum we don't know that yet but as I said before

data availability is going to become so commoditized that it's going to be so so cheap to post data and then really what you're choosing your data availability layer based on I think it really would come down to security reliability decentralization all that same stuff there and as I've argued before I think something like eigen data availability will be probably this the next best thing to ethereum obviously ethereum data availability is the gold standard but I think eigenda will be the next best thing because of the fact that it's using restaked eth and and as its security right rather than a new token that hasn't that like for example a new token with um with the Celestia token in order to secure itself here and ether's a lot more valuable and you could

probably have a much easier time bootstrapping a relatively diverse and distributed and decentralized set a validated set for Inda than you could for something like Celestia which is obviously a brand new network it hasn't been around for very long isn't even live on mainnet yet so that's where the valuable crew becomes more arguable there but if I had the rank in terms of of wins here in terms of what ecosystem wins the most from this to the least I would say ethereum Celestia Solana in that order to be honest and based on all the arguments that I've just given and no people are going to disagree with me I know people are going to accuse me of being biased towards ethereum but now because obviously I you know I I I I can't hide that I'm biased towards ethereum obviously because I I spend all

my time covering ethereum but I think based on all the arguments that I just gave over the last few minutes you can see how I reached these conclusions uh based on the available facts and data that we have today while also uh noting that there are a lot of open questions here as well so this could change maybe I'm completely wrong maybe Celestia accused a lot of value from this because the eclipse svm is uh paying a lot to store its data on Celestia right but then it then begs the question for me it's like okay if they're paying a lot to Celestia but then eigen Da comes along and it's much cheaper to store your data there and you get better security guarantees then why wouldn't they start using eigen da right and then what if ethereum that availability with 4844 plus and dank sharding and all that

stuff later down the line maybe the next two to three years comes along uh and starts offering even cheaper da than anywhere else and it's obviously much more secure you know does does that change there so really when I look at it holistically I I really can only say The Ether Cruise value from this I don't think that Celestial Cruise value from this or this Celestia token and I don't think the sole token increases value from this at least fundamentally there's there's narrative value to be had as well but that also applies to eat because again eth is getting a narrative benefit for yahi uh by basically saying well we told you that everything would become an L2 on ethereum and here it is playing out here we're taking uh some really good technology the svm and making it an L2 on ethereum where it

could potentially be more used than Solana because one key differentiation here was that the evm forks were never more used than ethereum L1 in terms it depends on how you want to measure this but they never came close to being more used in terms of fear for new right in terms of accruing value to the actual tokens here and then obviously layer twos have taken the reins and and they're evm compatible too and they're obviously net positive for ethereum because they're built on ethereum they settle down to ethereum all that good stuff that I've talked about plenty of times on the refill before so if I'm taking a longer term outlook here then it really just is bullish for for ethereum and eth in my mind but we'll have to see how it plays out as I said lots of open questions but that's my

general thoughts on this uh you can go read the full announcement for yourself to see exactly what they're building here how they plan to scale this thing and uh why are they building it all that good stuff I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so guys do you remember arbitrim Odyssey that of uh kind of like initiative that the arbitrim ecosystem was running I think it was was last year and they paused it because the network just became clogged because there was so much demand for it well guess what next week next week being this week the arbitrim Odyssey is actually returning so yeah it's been a while since it's been around I think it's been quite a while actually but it is actually returning this week sometime maybe they've already announced it because I'm

recording this at like 10 p.m my time uh no I don't think I don't think they've announced it yet but yeah this is uh relaunching this week no other details so far I don't think there's just a bit of a teaser video here oh no here it is of the date here September 26th it was buried in the video so yeah September 26 that's that's tomorrow yeah so tomorrow arbitrim Odyssey is returning uh and they say here reignited so I'm looking forward to the announcement tomorrow to see exactly what they're doing here with Odyssey what they've changed and how this will kind of play out but I think that as I said that there was that governance uh I guess like votes for approving 40 million ARB to be distributed to the arbitrum ecosystem out of the the the Dow out of the treasury in order to bolster arbitrim's

growth and I think the arbitrim Odyssey will probably play a part in that as well so I'll keep tabs on this and keep you guys updated on it all right so Aztec announced uh last week that uh they're building something called or I guess like they've released something called as the Aztec sandbox which they're saying is a fully decentralized privacy preserving L2 so the Aztec sandbox is a local developed by testnet for privacy first applications and uh if you're a developer you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but great to see that Aztec have launched their first kind of test net here for their new L2 that they're launching as I've said before they're working on a non-evm so uh not that it's not going to be evm compatible or

anything like that it's not an evm chain but a non-evm layer 2 that is fully decentralized from day one and privacy preserving slash encrypted uh and this has been the goal of Aztec obviously for a very long time now they recently had their um aztec.money thing that they shut down which is their kind of proof of concept and then they they've been fully working on this with I guess like their main net launching hopefully over the next few months or something like that but if you're a developer you can go check out this new Aztec sandbox which as I said is a liquid local developer test net for privacy first applications all right Matt feinstone from the Taiko team here wrote an extended definition of ethereum equivalence so he titled this post extending the ethereum equivalence definition and you can go

check this out for yourself it is a bit of a long post here but well worth the read it talks about exactly what ethereum equivalence means not just from a technical perspective but also from a social perspective as you can see here that you've got like a pyramid I don't know if pyramid is the right kind of thing that should have been used here because pyramids often get meme to be like pyramid schemes but anyway there's a pyramid here with evm equivalents technical evm equivalents at the bottom you've got ethereum equivalent above that as the architecture and then above that you've got permissionless and decentralized equip equivalents and then philosophically aligned sitting at the top which obviously falls into the social layer side of things yeah but I'm not gonna go over the whole post obviously because it's quite long here I

just wanted to put it on your radar in order for you to read it so I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to go do that all right so base have introduced something called pessimism which is an open source monitoring system designed to enhance security of bass as well as the broader op stack and ethereal ecosystem by quickly detecting and responding to a myriad of protocol threats pessimism is a monitoring system crafted to help support the security of all op stack and evm compatible chains the system has overseen and monitored base mainnet since launch and they've open sourced this tool as free software so it consists of three subsystems which is the ETL which is responsible for passing and transforming real time data the risk engine which is actively assessing that data and alerting which

propagates alerts Downstream so this tool is actually going to be really really good for as I said as I mentioned not just the op stack but all evm chains because it allows them to monitor their systems for things like uh the the segments are going down the validated going down the Gas fees not being uh kind of like topped up on chain in order to pay for the proofs and and data to be posted to uh for the batches to be posted to layer one and these are all things that we've actually seen play out obviously bass had a period of time where they weren't posting uh batches to layer one I believe arbitrim has done this before I think even op Mainland at one point had done it before but this is this is the thing right these things are

expected to happen and and probably keep happening for the next few years because these are very early stage projects very early stage protocols so having a system to monitor this in place is is obviously very very important and base basically open sourcing this and giving it away for free is awesome I mean they built this at coinbase and basically said you know what we're giving this away for free to free for free to the community here which is goes back to my I guess like discussion around how layer twos not only benefit ethereum technically but socially as well because this is a social layer play as much as as it is a technical layer play where essentially they've built this technical tool but because bass is socially aligned with optimism which is socially aligned with ethereum then they basically said well we're going to away to the entire

ethereum ecosystem for free because that's what we do in ethereum we value open source we value giving back we value public goods and bass has taken this upon themselves uh with this pessimism release yeah so yeah you can go check out their tweet thread and um and uh and uh blog post TR I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to learn more about this all right so a couple of updates out of the L2 beats ecosystem here so there's a here with recent updates to our website we've standardized naming and descriptions across all project pages and updated our FAQ to address key questions the update includes answers to questions like are validiums and optimums l2s what exactly are l2s why does the main table contain projects that are not trust minimized l2s yet how

exactly do we calculate metrics like tvl and what do the value in a t tvl TBR breakdown mean so you can see the answers to all these questions uh in this website here on this FAQ page here which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh for you for you to do so but I think that um you know this question here is something that I I kind of wanted to just go over because it's something that I maybe disagree with but the question is are validiums and Opti optimums l2s and they say here validiums and optimums are not l2s by not publishing data on L1 they introduce additional trust assumption on top of it if the data is it to construct the state is not made available by The Operators of the off solution funds are at risk so the reason I disagree with this CR to an

extent is because the Leia tour L2 definition is to me an umbrella definition that is fine being used to describe things like validiums and optimums things that store data off chain because we actually have another descriptive term for things that store data on chain and that is roll-up right anything that is a roll up has to post its data and its proof on the same settlement layer in this instance ethereum L1 but the term Layer Two I think should be broadened to include things that store data off-chain as well and obviously from a strictly technical perspective and based on maybe some historical definitions not everyone is going to agree with that and obviously l2b doesn't agree with that that here

but I'm going to keep using the layer 2 term to refer to these things as that because even though L2 beat lists this yeah there are plenty of L2 researchers and developers that disagree with this as well so it's it's a bit of a semantics issue maybe at the end of the day but I think that using the L2 term to still describe something that you know may probably should say data off chain but has proofs on chain um I think is fine but as I said this is something that is I guess like a subject of disagreements between researchers developers Community all that good stuff there but yeah anyway you can check out the rest of this FAQ I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so and the second update from l2beat was that they have a new way to measure tvl

so they've got a new tvl framework here where they say we've adapted our methodology to account for L2 tokens that do not originate from ethereum some are bridged from other chains some are native to l2s and I've talked about this before about how not every uh piece of tvl has come from the Native bridge on ethereum it also comes from other chains and you can actually see here in the table what this looks like so they've got a total TBL so for arbitrary month for example it's 5.6 billion dollars canonical meaning bridged in from L1 ethereum is 3.8 billion and external meaning not bridged in from uh from ethereum is 26 million and then you've got native PR so these the way that just described native is that these tokens are using L2 as their Ledger and then

minted directly on the L2 so that's 1.6 billion here and this is things like native usdc for example uh ARB obviously was minted on the L2 and that's why they're broken at these things into these different categories which I strongly agree with by the way because I've said before that tvl is such a imperfect metric but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad metric but we need to qualify tvl with things like this we need to actually explain that not all TBR was created equal there are different types of TBR especially when it comes to L2 and that's exactly what L2 beat has done here so you can go check this out for yourself we'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so uh swagtimist here put out a tweet uh that I strongly agree with

and actually goes into everything that I've been saying about l2s where he said the beauty of ethereum is that it's a technology absorbing black hole evm l2's optimistic roll-up Z keral up snark stocks svm it doesn't matter everything ends up in ethereum eventually ethereum's culture and draw is just too strong and once you're caught in there's in it there's no going back so what I find funny about this tweet is that this used to be a Bitcoin a talking point where they basically said that every other network was a test net for Bitcoin and eventually Bitcoin would absorb all of the Technologies from these other networks into the Bitcoin Network that didn't pan out that never materialized and Bitcoin is way behind when it comes to technology whereas in the ethereum ecosystem it has materialized we actually have done all

of these things we've taken the best ideas from all these other ecosystems and brought them into ethereum right whether it's as swagner says here whether it's at the l2s whether it's optimistic or ZK Roll-Ups whether it's using starts snarks or snarks and then even the svm as I was explaining with the eclipse uh kind of layer 2 that's using the Solana virtual machine which obviously comes from the Solana ecosystem to power its layer 2 on top of ethereum and I'm actually aware of other l2s out there that are building using uh uh using move which is what Aptos is trying to do and there's another L2 that I mentioned recently layer n that's directly competing with it's either sui or say one of the other our ones out there so really ethereum is that black hole it just kind of sucks everything

into it and then once you're in there's very little incentive to go out really if you look at the amount of projects that have come into the ethereum ecosystem the amount of l1s that have pivoted to L2 so far the amount of projects that have decided to build an L2 and 7 L1 the amount of projects that have come from other ecosystems to ethereum because they want to access ethereum's user base on net it's much more than projects that have left ethereum and people will say okay well you know a project like dydx is building their own app chain using Cosmos technology now they're not going to build they're abandoning their L2 and they made that decision but as I've said before around DIY DX I think that their decision is extremely wrong to be honest like very very wrong I believe that they should have just improved their L2 and

their L2 is still live right and I do believe they're going to actually probably pivot back to being an L2 eventually I don't really I'm not very bullish on their Cosmos chain at all I would say I'm bearish on it to be honest right but on net much more things have come into the ethereum ecosystem that that have gone out and the things that have gone out usually have failed right because it you just can't escape ethereum's kind of black Hulk yeah you can try and try by going to another ecosystem but ethereum just has everything happening in it it has all the liquidity or has not all of it but most of the liquidity has most of the users has the the strong social layout has all the marketing has all the awareness right so really it's very hard to kind of leave it here

um but you know in saying that at the end of the day without these other ecosystems kind of developing on their own ethereum wouldn't have benefited from those things either so ethereum stands to benefit from all of these sorts of things even if they're not immediately net positive uh for ethereum so I just thought that was a great little tweet from swacmacy that I wanted to highlight for you guys all right so rainbow has introduced their extension that is now uh uh that is now available for everyone so they said yeah available today for Chrome Arc Edge and brave with support for Safari and Firefox coming later this year so you can download this extension uh right now if you're using the rainbow mobile app this definitely pairs well with that but you can see here that a few other unique features are things like rainbow

uh extension comes with something called the magic menu which is a smart Search Command bar that brings new on-chain powers to your finger pit their finger tips you can open the magic menu from any screen and into your commands and you can spend less time clicking around and more time having fun and making money and there's a bunch of other features that are all detailed here with support from obviously all the different layer 2 networks that you know and love so you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right last up here I just want to shout out that if you have a pop-up from one of these 2023 ethereum events whether it's being East Denver East Global Tokyo East Global Waterloo or ethcc you can now sign up immediately and get a free year of forecaster so all

you have to do is go to this tweet which I'll link in the YouTube description below scan the QR code and then it'll check the eligibility in your wallets and if you have any of these pop-ups you get a free invite to firecast Star uh for a year so essentially you get to be on board of the firecaster and then it's free for ya and then after a year it goes to just being five dollars a year which honestly as I've discussed before is very very cheap for what you're getting out of fire Caster here so you can go check this out I believe that they're actually that Dan uh I mentioned that he's actually going to be adding more pull-ups to this uh eventually uh so that you'll be eligible so more people are eligible so definitely keep an eye on Dan's Twitter account for that

but yeah as I said we'll link this tweet in the YouTube description below for you to go check out but I think on that note that's going to 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 newsletter join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone