Core Dev updates, Ether Guild introduced & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #833 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the de refuel wake up the latest news the ecosystem I'm your host Dan to 17th of March 2025 all right everyone let's get into it so as you know I was away from the last week uh I was at a conference last week in Sydney so this is the first refu since last Monday not a lot happened over the last week it seems to be relatively quiet but there are a bunch of updates to get through but before I do that I do want to just talk about my experience last week in Sydney it was quite good uh it was quite chill it was quite different to guess like the online Arena of crypto which is always full of drama there was a lot of great conversations with a lot of great people talking about pretty much like all things ethereum and it was

interesting because a lot of the discussions focused on where to from here and I think I'm going to touch on this at the end of today's episode around where the ecosystem is today and where I see it going into the future but the main theme of where to from here was that we know that basically the world is going to come on chain we don't know the timeline of that we do know that institutions and traditional Finance are extremely interested in crypto uh but on the flip side it seems like a lot of the retail kind of crowd has either been tapped out at this point because they usually just come in for the speculative side of things or are just not interested and I think honestly that tracks a lot uh for for a number of different reasons I think the the major

reason is that how interested are people generally in financial infrastructure right uh not not very I mean if you actually were to just ask ask 100 random people questions around Finance most of them would not know what they're talking about uh and and most of them would just be not not be interested in it it's just not something that people really spend too much time on they usually Outsource their I guess like um financial decisions to Banks to uh to kind of mortgage brokers to funds stuff like that right they don't necessarily do the work themselves because it seems very complex from the outside which to be fair it is and it's kind of been constructed that way in that it's a lot more complex than it needs to be but if you're talking about what the average

person cares about when it comes to crypto historically it's been uh essentially the speculative side of things the the get-rich quick side the gambling casino side and that's only natural obviously crypto goes beyond Defi and goes beyond the financial use cases but I really do think that the financial use cases uh defi more specifically is the biggest thing by far like I don't think anything else is going to come close to matching def's kind of total addressable uh total addressable Market uh and Beyond from there so yeah as I said most of the conversations focused around institutional onboarding traditional finance onboarding and they're onboarding into D guys they're not based you know most of them are not doing well almost all of them are not doing anything outside of D maybe they will in the future uh and maybe there are

pockets of projects and Pilots happening here and there and things that aren't defi but for the most part they're very interested obviously in defi there so that that was basically most of the conversations I had last week got to meet a few people who listen and watch the refuel religiously which is really great to see actually got a sneak peek of a new tool coming I don't know how much I can say about this but a new tool coming that will allow you to essentially uh compound your stake uh post pectra uh with Max EB so it's basically a nice little interface that you can use to do this if you are running uh multiple validators so that was really cool to see and it's actually like uh not not out yet not live yet but uh obviously because pectra is not live yet but it was just uh it was really

polished honestly and I really liked getting that preview there but keep an eye out for that I'll definitely mention it when it goes live here and lastly just wanted to mention that there won't be an episode on Wednesday of this week unfortunately I just don't have time on Wednesday to do an episode like the whole day pretty much I can't even do it earlier um so yeah no episode on Wednesday there should be an episode Friday I'm not going to promise there will be an episode on Friday but there should be one on Friday but anyway with all of that out of the way let's get into the news over the last week so I think the biggest piece of news was probably around the test Nets so as you guys know both the seoa and heski test Nets had issues with the Petra Fork not with Petra itself but

with the deposit contract and H H eski went through this whole drama and eventually began finalizing again uh and it was a heroic effort to save it but it seems now the plan is to Sunset heski and create a new test net called hoodi or hoodie it's spelled h o di I'm just going to call it hoodie hoodie and that's going live today basically it's probably already live and I'm just uh late to the news here on the refill by the time you're watching this so that's going live today that is going to be uh forked I believe um uh soon after it goes live I believe on Friday to Petra if everything goes well there um and then the fusaka scope is also going to be finalized by uh March 31st I believe uh sorry no April 10th the faka scope

will be frozen or at least that is the goal uh and there are deadlines around when to get the final eips for inclusion uh put Bo that's March 24th um and March 31st and then April 10th for for the scope freeze there so some big things on the cordev side uh I think that in terms of Petra timing because that's definitely on everyone's mind at this point look given that we're spinning up another test net and given that uh things aren't as I guess like didn't go as smoothly as we would have hoped I think we could probably say at this point the main net Petra Fork will happen in may not in April I know I did say that there shouldn't be too much of a of a delay um and I don't think it is really too much of a delay I was

originally giving like mid April I believe so yeah 2 to 3 weeks from there maybe we get early May early to miday there but not too much of a delay on that front but the good news is is that the as I just mentioned the fusaka uh spec is going to be frozen or aiming to be frozen by April 10th so even though we're not going to get pectra till probably may fusaka can still happen by the end of Q3 because that timeline is still being respected there so that's great to see but obviously understandably the core developers aren't too keen on doing a Petra main net fork in in April at this point just because of the fact that we've had issues with the test Nets yes not directly related to Petra but still it all kind of Falls in uh on on itself

there so that's the latest updates on all of that there I will say as well on top of all of this when it comes to fusaka as you guys know there were really two things slated for inclusion or at least considered for inclusion so far that was pias which it seems to have Universal agreement on there's no Dr around that it seems like that's going to happen in faka and eof now there's been a lot of drama around eof there's a lot of people who don't think it should make into the network I don't know where I stand on this uh it's too I guess technical for me it's more developer facing it's not something that would necessarily affect me directly so I don't have a strong opinion on it but I am reading a lot of the takes that people have especially on Twitter and

and in Discord channels and elsewhere and it seems like and I don't want to like uh insult any any core developers here but it does it definitely seems like that eof is not something that the network needs the security tradeoffs is not worth it and it seems like one of the major reasons it's being pushed is because it's been worked on for so long I think it's like four years now or something like that and the the core developers that have worked on it don't want to see their work go to was which is totally understandable I I I I I I completely get that but at the end of the day I think network security and stability comes above everything else and I think that if there are enough people enough serious people saying and flagging saying that you know this isn't worth the risk then I think we should

take that on board no matter the work that has been done on eof for the last few years there so as I said I don't want to insult any core developers or belittle their work or anything like that but from my point of view I I I I and from what I've seen it seems like the people that are against it aren't against it for any other reason uh except the fact that they believe that it is just not worth the the security tradeoff here it's not worth the extra risk cuz it doesn't bring that many benefits to the network now what those benefits are and so on and so forth I can't really go into detail about because it's quite technical but if you want the pro eof case uh Ben Adams in the daway Discord Channel who works on nethermind uh has been very vocal uh in

vocally in support of eof so you can probably tag him in the de Discord Channel and ask him all the questions that you need to or that you want to um he'll be able to better answer it than uh me there but anyway I think that's the latest cev updates from the last week or so a lot to digest there but I'll keep you guys updated as things move forward uh from here all right speaking of C deev related things Tomas as you guys know is one of the new co-directors of the EF I believe he starts soon I don't remember what his start date was it's going to be any day now maybe it's today I don't know but anyway he put a tweet out where he basically asked the execution layer client teams uh sorry he asked a bunch of the stakeholders within the community

starting with the execution layer client teams what they think around various different um different things related to a 100 million gas limit for L1 by the end of year so as you guys know the gas limit was raised from 30 million to 36 million a couple months ago there is a there is going to be a push to raise it to 60 million after Petra goes live and after the um history expiry goes live tentatively scheduled for May 1st but we'll see what happens there I don't know if it's 100% May 1st or not but that is what has been scheduled for uh and then by end of year there's been a an appetite to go to 100 million so that would be I guess from 30 million starting the year to 100 million and over 3x increase in the gas limit which is unprecedented for for ethereum we

have not done something that aggressive in a very long time so Tomas is asking the execution layer teams is this okay he's asking the consensus layer teams are there any challenges here with things like reorgs he's got asking the community is it a bad or good idea he's also asking the l2s what are your um gas limit targets or equivalents here so I think that uh the community is very in favor of this uh it seems like and I think that obviously the community is a large kind of organism if you will there are people that understand the trade-offs there are people that understand the impacts and there are people that don't from everyone that I know that understands the impacts uh they're in favor of it and everyone that doesn't necessarily understand the

impacts but just wants to scale ethereum are also in favor of it so the community is pretty pretty in favor here execution lay client teams seem mostly to be in favor they don't really seem to be flagging anything other than State growth um which seems to be a solved issue mainly and doesn't seem to be that big of an issue there's also uh an issue with things like um chain stability overall but again that doesn't seem to be a big issue in the contestas layer teams don't seem to be uh very concerned there and the l2s I mean they're just pushing ahead as fast as they can and as as strongly as they can on on their targets here so will we say 100 million by end of year not sure I want to say 60 million first before I say 100 million of course and I want to see how the

network handles that I want to see how the network handles more blobs because if you put this all into context let's fast forward to the end of the year December 31st or um or whatever it is there New Year's Eve rolls around um right and and we're into the new year what does the network look like well we could potentially have a network with 100 million gas limit which as I said is 3x the gas limit from the start of the year we could have a blob Target and limit of uh you know with pi Dash up to I believe it was 48 blobs is the target there when we started at 3 so that is a more than an order of magnitude increase of the The Blob Target there um and we could H we could also have a um the l2s be higher than what they are now much

higher than what they are now by by the end of the year does the network handle that can the network handle that I think so I honestly think so yes there might be some people that K kicked off and uh like Solo validators or or full no that get kicked off because their bandwidth is just too low the aim is to make sure that doesn't happen but there there is always I guess like unintended consequences we don't have 100% full view of the network we don't know every stakeholder on the network we do surveys we ask people to speak up if they are going to be negatively impacted by something but again we don't have a full view of the network there but I think the number one question to ask is are we still retaining ethereum's uh core properties of decentralization censorship resistance security

reliability and I really do think we are because with blobs and with pias we're basically scaling blobs by we're putting a bit of extra load on the network but it's not like we're putting a massive load on the network we're not putting an order of magnitude load on the network because of the fact that with pias we're basically um doing data availability sharting or sampling um and we're essentially splitting up uh the the blobs across the network so not every node has to have every blob so again when just because the blob capacity is going up by you know whatever it is 15x it's probably I think it's a bit less than that but whatever it is there doesn't mean that uh there's 15x more I guess strain on the network gas limit is I mean there is 3x more than 3x more

strain on the network from the beginning of the year that's just that's just how the gas limit works so when you look at it from I guess kind of that perspective there I do think the network can handle it but we're going to have to see with with regards to bandwidth constraints uh and so on and so forth there so anyway you can go give a read uh of all the replies that Tomas got as I said seems to be mostly in favor some concerns here and there um but yeah I I think that we are aiming for this we'll see if we hit that Target by end of year there all right speaking of things that uh ethereum should prioritize uh Terren here from the prabs team who builds the prism consensus layer client put together a list of things that uh we should stay focused on uh as part of the

ethereum road map scale blobs with p and full Das obviously like I think everyone is focused on that right now I don't think there's any dramas around that scale execution with epbs delayed execution and shorter slot times that goes into what I was just talking about with regard so the gas limit as well add entropy to block construction with fossil AKA makes censorship resistance way better on the base layer get faster finality uh so single slot finality I think is out at this point I was talking to some people about this at the event last week actually um I was talking to uh medy actually from Sigma uh Sigma Prime who's a core developer there about this uh three slot finality seems to be the Target now rather than single slot finality so at the same time it depends on what timing of the slot is so if we

get a shorter slot time it actually ends up being single slot finality in the old slot time so let me explain current slot time 12 seconds right so if we had single slot finality finality would be every 12 seconds so if we have three 4 second slot times which is the Target by the way and have three slot finality it's 12 seconds to finality so technically it's still single slot finality in the old Paradigm so regardless 12 seconds is fine like I don't think anyone's going to be complaining that it's not 1 second and and there's 12 seconds and keep in mind that not all finality is created equal there are other networks out there that claim to have one second finality but that's only technical finality that's not economic finality ethereum has economic finality where that 2third of the stake uh if if if someone tries to

mess with the finalization of the network 2/3 of the Stak stands to be slashed um of the E Stakes stands to be slash here so it has economic finality here and three slot finality 12 seconds that's more than enough that's that's that's completely fine that's great for things like interoperability between l2s they can trust that the the main uh the base layer is uh it has got that finality there it's not going to reor or anything like that so yeah that's great and then finally zika zeying the state transition with the beam chain here which is obviously a longer term road map item uh there but I agree with Terren this is the stuff that we should be definitely focused on here and I actually put a similar tweet out where I said you know there are two main things that the etherum ecosystem should be

focused on scaling ethereum to the world while keeping it decentralized and unified ensuring that eth captures as much of the value generated by ethereum as possible and then I said if we do this right we win so to terrence's points and even to tomas's points scaling ethereum to the world while keeping it decentralized and unified all those things that I just named are part of that effort the unification efforts can happen extra protocol with the l2s and with the different standards there and then the the the second most important point because ethereum is a network of ethereum the world computer e as the money store value we need to make sure that eth captures the value in various different ways now I've talked a lot on the feel before about the fact that eth captures values in many different ways not just feir Revenue it's uses collateral it's used in

staking it's uses in money as a store of value so on and so forth right so we want to make sure that eth can continue to capture that value and all the value that it has been capturing as ethereum scales uh to the world here and I think we are doing that but I think when it comes to the value of these assets especially assets that are trying to be a money and a store of value The Narrative is just as important as the fundamentals if not more important than the fundamentals because think about it for a sec right the The Narrative of Bitcoin for example is that it's digital gold it's not digital gold because it's digital gold right it's digital gold because people have managed to spin a narrative a story around it and convinced a lot of people that it is that so pretty much like most people in

crypto believe that Bitcoin is a store of value and it is a digital gold right a lot of the people outside of crypto that are getting in they're getting exposed to that narrative first and foremost the ETF buyers for example the the trafy ETF buyers these ETF issues are going out to them and saying well Bitcoin is a store of value and it is a digital gold for such and such a reason right uh whereas uh as I said that's just a story that has been told and repeated at Noam it's not something that has been divined on bitcoin it's not something that uh some uh Godly Authority has given Bitcoin uh you know it's it's the same as normal gold right it's just something that we agreed upon as humans to give value to to act as a store of value yes gold has uh

fundamentals if you will in that it is used uh in in in the in Industries uh like I think 10% of its value comes from like industrial use and use within the the economy but 90 plus% of it is its value as a store of value as something that exists outside of the fiat currency system you guys know the whole story here it's the same for Bitcoin but Bitcoin is just a digital version but again it's the story that's been told here so it's just as important for us to tell stories around eth and how it captures value it is exposure to the onchain ethereum economy right from fee Revenue um if you stake it you get access to that but also from the burn you don't even need to St it you get the burn um uh uh um you get the burn uh

benefits there it's also a money within that economy it can be used as a as a villa store of value regardless because it has a predictable monetary policy it is minimum viable issuance it has a predictable security budget as well which is something Bitcoin doesn't have I've talked about this before where essentially with ethereum you have uh uh strong guarantees that the network is going to be secure decades into the future because we have Perpetual issuance yes people will say well that means that ethereum is not capped which mean makes it a shitty store of value but gold is not capped guys and it's still a good store of value there are many things that aren't capped that are still uh treated as stores of value right um and then when it comes to bitcoin I don't believe Bitcoin is going to remain uh capped forever because it's

going to have the security budget crisis in around 10 or so years there but I've talked about that before I'm not going to not going to rehash that there but I do think that as I said it's very important to keep reiterating that eth is as part of ethereum as ethereum techn the the evm is I guess like the evm can scope out what ethereum does as an extension of its Network there and what it does as as a network it allows for smart contracts and and and and and stuff like that so I think that we need to make sure that eth and ethereum are talked about equally and that's something that etherealized does a lot of that's something that I'm seeing more and more people from the ethereum foundation talk about and that's also something that the uh ether Guild is doing so this is a perfect Segway Into

The Ether Guild now I teased this the other week but essentially this has been officially introduced so this is is a successor to the ether's money effort so essentially what The Ether Guild is trying to be is a an open S uh I guess like an open Community effort to Rally people around ethereum and different sub kind of categories within that such as ether's money such as ethereum as the world computer such as uh regenerative Finance uh things like the protocol Guild U such as uh supporting educational content and so on and so uh forth so essentially if you want to get involved with this effort you can it's completely open you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh I am actually involved with this effort I am uh basically uh part of the the founding

team of this as an extension of uh eth's money here and you can see uh the daily gay is listed here uh uh sorry that that's the educational content here the daily gray is um listed here as part of the guild treasury management alongside a bunch of other organizations such as bankless grow thepie etherealized and U metal um metal here sorry metal. build here uh so yeah if you want to keep up to date with this you can uh I'll link this in the YouTube description below but I'm loving these Community efforts guys because obviously there's been a lot of talk around the ethereum foundation and what they should or shouldn't be doing and I've also said that the etherum foundation is good at certain things they should keep doing that they should keep doubling down on that and making that better but then now

we have etherealized which is good at doing uh things such as going out to Washington D DC and politicians going out to institutions going out to Trad fight and evangelizing ethereum and eth to them now we have the ether Guild which is a run effort that can evangelize e ethereum and everything in between to whoever they want like it doesn't necessarily have to Target anyone it can be a community effort it can Target everyone basically and there's other efforts that pop up all the time you know consensus is still going here um all the l2s have their own efforts as well because they're aligned on making sure that ethereum succeeds because it's better for them and uh so on and so forth there so yeah love loving uh seeing all these efforts pop up but as I said you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube

description below for you to do so now last up here just wanted to talk about this uh new release from Paradigm so they've released something called rest which is a fully validating stateless ethereum node with just 14 gig disc requirements built on wreth and um Roman says here statelessness paves the way for scaling the L1 gas limit scaling optimistic l2s and for implementing native rollups to improve the L2 ecosystem security and interoperability now as you guys know status ethereum is one of the end games of ethereum we want to be able to run ethereum nodes off of a smartphone we want to be able to run ethereum validators off of a smartphone well Paradigm took that uh you know basically to the Future and said well let's just release a fully validating stess ethereum node today and that's

what they've done and they've shown you how it actually works yeah there's a GitHub repository for you to go check out but I'm really excited to see that this is already kind of a reality because it's been a long time coming I believe the stateless ethereum has been talked about since as early as 2016 maybe even early than that that's as early as I can remember but yeah very very early on it's been talked about there's a lot of work doing being done on the core protocol itself to make statelessness much better than what it is uh that's known as The Verge part of the road map um but outside of that clients can still exist that act as these kind of stateless ethereum clients and talk to these other full nodes now they're not going to be fully trustless yet but the goal is to get them to be

fully trustless so as I said you can run a validator like a a validator that's St e on a smartphone and not need to run a bulky full node you can run a light validator with a stateless ethereum node and have pretty much uh like the same guarantees that you would running a full node because of the fact that statelessness gives us those properties there so very cool to see this if you want to run this you can I'll link it in the YouTube description for you to check out there now I did mention at the start of the episode I wanted to talk a little bit about the state of the ecosystem so I've got a few minutes left here to do that I'm not going to ramble too long because I tend to do that I don't want to take up all all of your time with my

my rambling here but I think at this point in the crypto ecosystem not just ethereum but like crypto broadly we've reached the point where I think we've saturated the retail market now what do I mean by that I mean that as I was saying before there's really only one reason most people come into crypto and that's to speculate right that's to buy an asset hope it goes up in value and if it does cash out and be on you Merry way obviously most people don't do that they come in they buy they lose money on and then they go away um and we had that this cycle with meme coins we had that last cycle with like nfts and stuff every cycle we have something that

people come in and speculate on and then go away but the problem is is that they've only ever come in to do that uh we do have people that come in and use the technology use the onchain products use the onchain stuff but it's a minority like if you were to say 1 million people let's just say 1 million people came in um to crypto in the last kind of I guess like bull market maybe let's look at the proper bull market because this cycle that we've had has not really really been a great cycle let's look at the the last one let's say and there's probably more than this a million people came in in 2021 how many of those actually did anything on chain probably very few very few percentage okay well how many of those did something on chain but it was only like

one or two things like such as buying an nft and then after that they just haven't used anything on chain in in a few years now now probably a lot to be honest so when you look at it through that lens and you look at it through the lens of we've had many many cycles bitcoin's worth 1.5 trillion eth is worth what is it 20 250 billion the whole Market's worth almost 3 trillion right when you look at it from that perspective yes compared to like stock markets and stuff like that the valuations are still relatively low but the problem is that most of the crypto assets are fundamentally worthless like they're actually worthless they don't generate any Revenue at all they're failed businesses a lot of the time they have absolutely no reason being worth of they're worth uh but it's just like a

lot of Hangover there and the biggest asset in crypto isn't is Bitcoin and that is only worth what it's worth because of its story because of its narrative it has not it doesn't really have any fundamentals beyond that it's fear of you is poultry so you can't say it's got cash flows you don't have any right to those cash flows because there's no staking like you have to be a minor essentially which is outside of the BT outside of BTC the asset which I know is considered a feature Bitcoin but just laying out the facts here so when you look at it from that perspective and this is why I was saying earlier that it seems like the biggest kind of on boarders into crypto over the next few years is going to be the institutions and traditional Finance who are going to incorporate a lot of this technology

into their existing Suites of products and then on offer those products to their customers and that's how most people will access crypto I think you know for the foreseeable future if not forever because most people as I said don't want to do things on their own they want to Outsource these things and if crypto is just the not just but like if crypto is the new Financial rails which I believe it will be and I believe ethereum will be at the heart of this then those financial rails are going to be used by players that want to upgrade their systems they want to make them more efficient they want to make them more um want they want to save money they want to offer more uh you know a different and and more exotic products to their customers in order to make more money and that's what they're going to

do ETFs are just the beginning there's going to be so many more like tokenized real world assets stuff like that right there there's all that stuff coming so if we look at the state of the ecosystem today I think what you've got is a lot of the ogs a lot of the people who got into this industry for the uh Cipher Punk ethos they're either in ethereum somewhat in Bitcoin or they've gone because a lot of this ecosystem doesn't look like what they actually like because they don't care for the speculation they don't care for the casino they don't care for all the scams which is fair enough so when you look at it from that perspective it doesn't really surprise me that a lot of the ogs are burned out like I've talked to of than myself and they're definitely pretty burned out they've been around

for 10 years as well I mean anyone would be burned out of being in this ecosystem for 10 years but it's totally understandable there so long story short of where I think the ecosystem is today I think we're in the long kind of period of essentially as as an ecosystem accepting that a lot of the vision of what we thought was going to play out maybe isn't going to play out as like a broader thing and that we're going to be getting a lot of the adoption we want through these intermediaries bringing in customers as I said that goes against a lot of what we want to see but there is a silver lining here the Silver Lining is that if you look at the current Financial system to access the digital version of The Current financial system

you have to use a centralized intermediary you have to use a bank you have to use some kind of third party you cannot do it yourself but on chain on ethereum you do not have to do that you have the choice you can either go through a centralized intermediary or or you can go straight on chain yes of course if you're using stable coins like usdc or usdt you're still technically using something centralized still technically going through an intermediary but if you're using pure eth on ethereum you are a fully self- sovereign individual accessing a digital Financial system without any third parties you can run the full node yourself you can even go that far and talk to your own RPC yes it's more involved yes it's more technical yes it's something that not many people are going to do but the option is there and

that is the real killer because we are building a Global Financial system and a Global Financial system only works when it is permissionless when it is not controlled by anyone when it is open to everyone when it is easily verifiable by everyone that is why we so strongly believe in the property of decentralization we so strongly believe in making sure that people can run a full node at home from their own consumer Hardware even if most people don't do it it is Insurance it is a check it is a balance on the power of the network and that is what we are here to build that's what we have been building that's what keeps me in ethereum but as I said if we look at the state of the ecosystem if you look at what and where adoption is going to come from it's going to come from centralized

intermediaries it's going to come from the banks it's going to come from the institutions that just incorporate this technology into their ex existing Stacks into their existing product Suites offer new products to their customers and that's how most people will come on chain so maybe not the ideal kind of environment not the ideal kind of future that we all envisioned but it is still one where crypto wins it is still one where ethereum wins in my mind there anyway I think on that note I've ranted enough today I'm going to end that episode there so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subcribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Friday thanks everyone