Danny Ryan: Ethereum Foundation – An Eth2 Progress Update #393

Transcript

[Music] hi danny it's good to have you on yeah it's great to be here thanks for having me cool so danny ryan is with us um for the ethereum foundation and we'll talk about ethereum two in a bit and we also have a special guest co-host today martin kapelman from gnosis yeah good to be here i'm looking forward to learn more cool before we dive right in um let me tell you about our sponsors our first sponsor is solana

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what brought you to the ethereum foundation what did you do before what piqued your interest in blockchain i honestly it's an honor to be here i um early on in my blockchain journey i remember listening to epicenter and kind of gobbling up all of the content so it's cool to be on the other side of that right now how did i get here it's a similar story to most i think honestly i i used to be a freelance software developer for many years i graduated college and was like i really didn't want to work a normal job i didn't want to work in an office i didn't want to live in san francisco all that so i moved to new orleans and was just kind of like helping small businesses with weird software software solutions

um that was fun did that for many years and then i think i started paying attention to ethereum around the dao pre-dao hack uh someone sent me an article i think it was the new york times it was like all this money is being raised for this weird thing uh and that that peaked my interest i had heard about ethereum before and i hadn't realized that it actually launched and i started paying attention um and and the dow in particular i know it was a fantastic disaster but the fact that that could exist and was happening um really i think allowed me to see and start to process what these tech this technology uh could do so i guess that was about 2016 i became more and more obsessed

at the beginning of 2017 i realized that it's all i wanted to think about and all i wanted to do so i got rid of all of my freelance clients and i said i'm going to figure out and make this my job on the journey of how do i actually make this my livelihood i heard this proof-of-stake thing and i i thought to myself okay well this doesn't make any sense this is never going to work a couple weeks later i'm like okay this makes sense this is interesting uh but how can i how can i make this a business can i do something with this uh to make this my livelihood i'm like okay i could probably make like a staking pool so i started reading all about uh proof of stake and all about how it was gonna work and all that kind of

stuff in 2017 thinking that i could i could make a staking pool um then i realized there was still work to do um so i started helping out with some of the work here and there uh like contributing to the research where i could and um like helping out with testing and various things on online so come come end of 2017 i had been collaborating on the internet uh with various contributors i had been working on some like testing infrastructure for casper ffg different things and um the ef was like hey do you want to join uh we have plenty of work to do so i joined the ef at the beginning of 2018 and at that point i thought we'd probably launch proof of stake in about like

six seven months little did i know that i would still be working on that very problem today um and as we will discuss we uh proof of stake for ethereum is live but it's certainly not completed um and so today i am still working on that very problem super cool yeah it's it's been a long time coming so what what exactly do you do at the ethereum foundation so i work on the research team and i do a mix of research specification writing and then a lot of like communication and coordination around those two things um so the e2 project is consists of many teams at the ef

many external teams e2 clients whatever that may mean eth1 clients and the intersection of all that so i spent a lot of time communicating with engineers and helping people understand things and helping kind of coordinate and make sure the project keeps moving forward yeah super cool how many people are are they working on eth2 currently do you have any idea definitely over a hundred uh but it there's there's five active e2 client teams of varying size there are probably 20 people at the ef that work on this stuff full time there's people plenty of people that work on it part time increasingly so as we approach the merge which we'll talk

about later uh what we call eth one clients um are are increasingly working on the merge uh and working on eth2 and so it's it's uh quite quite a number of people it must be difficult to coordinate because it i mean it's it's kind of um there's so much of a research angle still to it and i think uh research is something that is not infinitely parallelizable right right and you know i'm one of probably many people that coordinate various things um and it's it's a very organic um open source effort um and so the amount of coordination isn't incredibly high although at a certain at the end of the day we all need to talk

to each other we all need to like coalesce on on single path and decisions and so i try to help facilitate that then maybe let's talk about the things that have been decided and connected our life and kind of yeah basically tell us about the state of um yeah phase zero or what what is life and what is already working so first i'm going to answer what is what is eth2 very broadly and eth2 it's definitely a bit of a misnomer but we can go along with that term it is a series of major consensus upgrades for ethereum aimed to make the protocol more secure more sustainable and more scalable and

at the core of that is the move from a proof-of-work consensus to a proof-of-stake consensus so instead of securing the network with mining hardware and energy consumption securing the network with the tokens itself the ether and so at the core of that is the bootstrapping and the creation of this new consensus mechanism and what uh as you mentioned is live today is what we call phase zero and that went live in december of 2020 and that was really the bootstrapping of this new proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that is called the beacon chain so in december um tons of theorem community members and different institutions

put a bunch of ether as capital and collateral into what we call the deposit contract and kick-started this new consensus mechanism called the beacon chain the beacon chain exists in parallel to the current ethereum network so in parallel to the proof of work network which is still securing all of the assets and applications and contracts and accounts today so we have on the one hand the proof of work network chugging along and on the other hand this new consensus mechanism called the beacon chain existing in parallel to this um building and securing itself i think today there's something like 4.5 million ether locked and secured in this chain i don't know what that's

worth today depends on the the minute and the hour but this thing exists this thing finalizes itself this thing builds itself but ultimately what it does is it just builds and secures itself and this is by design this is an iterative path to get rid of the proof of work and to move ethereal main net to this new consensus mechanism obviously if their main net is used by tons of people secures tons of value and there's there's a lot at stake in this in this operation and so what we've done is is built it in parallel uh kind of vetted it in production uh done tons of tests uh live and now what we're working on is

actually uh the deprecation of the proof of work consensus mechanism in favor for uh this live proof of stake consensus mechanism so that's where we're at today there is a proof proof-of-stake consistent mechanism bootstrapped live securing tons of value but really just kind of securing itself in isolation then let's deep dive into what it exactly does so right now it comes to consensus on what um it comes to consensus on itself and it's by itself um what i mean is is the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and all of the the little gadgets and things in it so it has a validator set each validator is worth approximately 32 eth

so there's something like 140 000 validator entities in this consensus each one of them has like its own little state it has its balance it has duties it has like a job at any given time it has randomness generation it has information about finality so which portions of the chain are finalized and would never be reverted and it has a lot of just various accounting finality and and kind of the head of the chain uh so there's a number of operations related to the functionality of this chain and those operations are kind of what we call validator level transactions so system level transactions and really what it does is there's a

there's a core operation called attestations where validators are constantly signaling uh what they see as the head of the chain and what they see is their local state of the world and they use these messages to come to consensus with each other um and ultimately drive this this core like system layer of the chain there's some other operations um related to validator activity like deposits onboarding new validators exits uh leaving the validator set and a couple other things so really really it's like this this it's a proof-of-stake system and there's a lot of different accounting different little operations going on and it builds and comes to consensus on itself let's get to our sponsor solana now this is a special ad for me to read because

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in a number of ways but uh you can go to launchpad you do a key generation step where you generate an active key so the key that's going to sign out to stations and build blocks and different things and then what we call a withdrawal credential which is can be a cold key it doesn't have to be on on the machine and that ultimately owns the funds when the validator is done with with validation and so what that validator to become a validator what you do is you take the 32eth generate some keys sign a deposit message and send that ether to the deposit contract which is a special contract on the current ethereum main net on eth1 uh you send it with this this data and

then the beacon chain which operates in parallel to that uh proof of work network uh is listening to the deposit contract coming to consensus on the state of the deposit contract and inducting new deposits so right now it's kind of like a one-way bridge from the proof-of-work ethereum into this new beacon chain once you have your validator deposit inducted into the beacon chain there's a little bit of like process overhead a little bit of time that it takes in terms of come to consensus on this then you get a new validator record in the state of the beacon chain the beacon state is like this kind of system layer state of this thing and after a number of epochs at something like four epochs each epoxy 6.4 minutes um you then become activated and

at that point your validator now each epoch will have uh at least one if not a number of duties with respect to the the beacon chain um and they they get little assignments and they listen to the network and sign messages and talk to each other and come to consensus on things i i want to directly ask about the the deposit contract because the premise so far was that the two things are living in parallel but that is all already obviously a connection so apparently you need or these two chain needs to read from the east one chain and kind of needs to understand the ease one chain so does that mean that to run a h2 validator you also need to run an es1

client or otherwise how would you know that this deposit happened right so yes there is a one-way and very restricted bridge from the eth1 chain into the beacon chain and um as a validator you are running the beacon chain which is actually relatively lightweight and running the ethereum one proof-of-work network this is to be able to listen primarily to that deposit contract and be able to build and connect that bridge to bootstrap this consensus mechanism which is the crypto economic consensus mechanism based off of ether uh you do need ether um and so

that link is is critical for uh the boot trapping and functioning of the system as a validator you do have these two pieces of software that you're running in parallel and communicate with each other and this actually is kind of representative of what the system would look like after the merge so once these systems are unified you similarly would have to run the beacon chain which is kind of the system level level state as well as a piece of software that will give you access into the execution layer into the things that we know and love essentially like guest minus proof of work plus beacon chain i assume it's uh incentivized to be a validator so what do i get if um i get to build a block and how is it

determined if and when i get to build one so there's two primary actions that are rewarded for the validator and uh one is this action called testing which you are assigned to a test exactly once per epoch so exactly once per 6.4 minutes and this accounts for actually 7 8 of your validation reward so it's the majority of of the issuance goes to this very regular interval activity which is nice there's a reason for this because it helps with um kind of hardening the fork choice and keeping things very stable because many validators get to even though only one validator at any given slot is

producing a block many validators get to throw in their weight and say what the head is so it makes it very difficult for these like this monopolistic activity of producing a block to be able to uh reorgan and and do different attacks and it's also nice because it really smooths out rewards whereas in in proof of work you're rolling the dice over and over and over again and every once in a while you randomly get a chance to produce a block and get a big payout whereas in this proof-of-stake system the rewards and payouts are very much more regularized even if you have just say one validator so at the stations uh are this like very critical uh message type for securing uh the head of the chain and finalizing things but then as you

said uh this other very critical role is actually producing a block and so based off your validator assignments which is based off of randomness gener generation on chain which we can talk a little bit about every single slot there is exactly one validator assigned to produce a block a slot is every 12 seconds it's kind of like the heartbeat of the system so instead of this stochastic process of mining which randomly there's a target for block time and randomly blocks get produced kind of around that target instead there's this uh click of every 12 seconds blocks can be produced if the proposer shows up and every single 12 seconds a producer a

validator is assigned and so if it's your say it's slot 1001 you had a little bit of look ahead say uh you had 32 slots in advance you knew that you were gonna produce a block so you're listening to the chain and you listen for valuable things to include in your block and you build off of the parent and produce a block and broadcast the network valuable things today are primarily just these validator operations so attestations and deposits and things like that but post merge you would also be including user land application layer transactions and seeking to like maximize transaction revenue like like miners do today

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proof of work like sometimes you have blocks that happen and 10 seconds sometimes you have blocks that happen in 30 seconds uh so in the event that a slot was skipped you would have uh 24 seconds in between the slot time and that would look like a slight reduction in capacity of the chain for that given time uh interestingly with like 1559 fee mechanics and and variable block sizes that can kind of like be self-balancing in the in the average um but what we've seen in the live system is something like a 99.5 uh participation rate with respect to blocks and attestations um so in the normal operation of the chain so not crazy global latencies or uh not some attack scenario or major

failure in a client um we we expect to see almost all the time a block every 12 seconds so you said 99.5 percent for both the stations and the blocks yeah all right okay and do i get slashed if i don't show up or if i don't detest so i we reserved the word slashing for uh very explicitly malicious activities and what can be more severe penalties so in normal operation we have rewards and we have penalties and so you have this 32 stake and if you do your job well you can be rewarded and if you don't do your job or you like

are failing you're trying to do your job and you can't quite find the head of the chain you might instead lose a small amount of ether and so in normal operation if you and this is variable depending on the validator the size of the validator set but in normal operation in a year you might make anywhere from like six to twelve percent return on that that thirty uh deposit whereas if you were offline the entire time uh your penalties would equal approximately what you could have made so you actually instead of uh making six percent that year you would have lost six percent that year and it's not just opportunity cost you would have actually been penalized a little bit and seen a linear decrease in your stake and so that's

rewards and penalties for all the basic activities you can either receive rewards or you can be slightly penalized if you aren't able to to perform your job there's individual ones and there's also group so like if the amount of your attestation reward would actually scale with this like group mechanic so if like 100 of the validators online you can receive maximal uh validated reward but if only 80 of the validators were online um you would actually only get you know 0.8 of your total attestation reward and this is so that uh there's this like incentive one to not like dosh your neighbors um and take them down so you can get their rewards instead and also in the event of crisis there's this group this group dynamic so

that you want to figure out what the hell is going on and try to fix the network so those are rewards and penalties you did bring up slashing slashing is actually it is a penalty but it's a much more severe penalty and it's in relation to these explicitly cryptographically provable nefarious activities so for example you're assigned to a test every epoch this is very important for the operation of the chain this helps finalize things this helps secure the head of the chain and the fork choice and you're only supposed to do it once per epoch if instead you do it twice per epoch you can be slashed because this is an activity that could lean to lead to a network fault

essentially the idea is in proof of work um you have a physical real world piece of hardware that you can only point to one chain or another so one fork or another um and or you could split it you could do 50 on that for the energy on that for 50 on the on the other fork but you cannot put 100 onto 4k and 100 on a fork b whereas in in proof of stake that economic asset is actually just related to you signing messages signing messages is really cheap and so the idea here is that messages that can lead to you attempting to apply your stake in multiple places and could lead to network faults and confusion as to what the head of the chain is

we have to make those messages expensive similarly to how allocating your physical resources uh the mining hardware was expensive and so thus if you do some of these activities where you're essentially signaling two different uh versions of a history you can be penalized severely because they're provably nefarious messages and that's what is called slashing by severe i mean that if enough validators were doing that type of like double signaling within a recent window of time to create a network fault and that minimum threshold is one-third of the validators

then you'd be punished maximally so if one-third of the validator set is doing slashable things within a recent time window um then those validators actually lose 100 of their state and that's because we want to have like provable security bounds uh based off of you know if and when attacks happen whereas if you're if this is just like an isolated event say i'm just running a single validator um i do something ill-advised with my staking setup and i'm signing double messages uh by accident then and but no one else has really been doing it in the recent time window i get a slap on the wrist i get kicked out of the validator set but since the fraction of validators that have been slashed recently is very

low uh my penalty is like still relatively low i might lose like one eighth um and get kicked out of valid intercept so that's so we have rewards we have penalties for normal operation and we have slashing which is for these like very explicit uh nefarious activities like double signing out to stations or producing two blocks in the same slot that kind of stuff they are talking about slashing is there a chance to do to do something that's yeah offend offendable to the level that you get slashed by accident so concretely well we have multiple client implementations so well there might be the situation that one client uh says well that is a valid block and another client says that's not a valid block and therefore is kind of ignoring that and proposing another one

we have seen some a number of slashings on mainnet since december and almost all of these have been due to individuals and institutions creating sophisticated and attempted to be sophisticated redundancy setups so essentially it's very if you have your keys in one place and you're tracking the messages that you've signed it's very simple it's very the logic is can be uh you know in six lines of code it's very simple to like not double sign um essentially there's a couple of conditionals and a very very small database and i can prevent myself from doing this but if i have my keys in two locations

say i'm trying to run client a and client b and i'm trying to run them on two machines to make sure that i don't have any downtime then i'm going to be signing double messages um almost every epoch and i'm going to almost certainly be slashed and so this is actually what we've seen is we've seen some hobbyists that didn't didn't get the memo and are trying to make sure they don't have any downtime they've been a couple of them have been slashed but actually what we've seen more so is these institutions who want to advertise you know the best uptime ever and what they do is they have like way too sophisticated of uh deploys and and don't manage the keys properly and have the keys in two different locations that's the key if you have your keys in two different locations and they both

think they're in charge and they're you know there's no communication there you're going to be slashed because you're going to like eventually have a slightly different world view like one block one client might see the block the other client might not see the block and they both will sign something different so basically your advice is not don't do it too complicated leave it simple keep it simple because if you're offline even for a day like you're gonna lose very very little money because again we have rewards and penalties for normal operation you if you're offline for a whole year you might lose like eight percent whereas if you if you like do too complex of a setup you're gonna uh you know you will lose much you can lose much more than that so there's many client teams and a number of them have implemented this new

feature uh called doppelganger detection superfiz came up with it and superfos from the eaststaker community and he the idea is right when you turn on your client and it knows that there's some validator keys associated with it it actually won't start its job immediately it'll wait like an epoch or two and just listen to the network and it knows that it's not signing anything it's not broadcasting anything so if it sees any messages come in from itself it's detected a doppelganger and it says oh no abort abort don't sign any messages um and this is actually a new feature that's rolled out a number of clients and i think it's protecting especially especially the hobbyists with

the simple setups obviously then you have like an epoch or two of extra downtime but like i said downtime's not the issue it's really like double signing is like this severely uh worse activity and so i think you can like manually override you can do like a flag that's like dash dash capital letters unsafe disabled doppelganger detection but for most users they should just run with the run with the default um and and have those protections so when you're looking for a flight you go to a flight aggregator to see all the different places where you can buy the flight to get all the options and make sure you get the best price for your travel plans and when you're making a defy swap just

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like i said slots are every 12 seconds so an epoch is every 6.4 minutes slots are this unit of time at which blocks and very granular actions can happen whereas epochs is like a collection of slots and there's like an aggregate of duties and different accounting that happened at east gpa and so every pocket 32 slots every validator is assigned to a test to exactly one slot per epoch and so an epoch in advance my validator client gets notified that okay at the sixth slot into the next epoch you're gonna have to attest to the head so at that point you'll you'll brought you'll sign a message and broadcast and attestation and similarly like within an epoch you'll be you can potentially be

assigned to a block and so all the valid the entire validator set has this one out to station per epoch um and thus at the end of an epoch is kind of the when accounting is done so in the previous epoch uh we go and look okay how many attestations were there uh was there agreement was there disagreement what were the rewards and penalties based off of like the individual and the aggregate activity um and is there enough consensus um on the state of things to update the finality calculations and epoch can first be justified and then be finalized justification is kind of like this first round of signaling for validators to say i think that this

block will remain in the chain forever and then once something's justified they can signal a deeper thought which is okay let's now say this this block will remain in the chain forever and so what we have is this like two epoch finality cycle where the end of epoch at the end of epoch n you might justify it and at the end of epoch n plus one you might finalize optimally finalize epoch n um and and in mainnet i think we see like pretty much every single epoch just kind of goes through that cycle of justification than finality justification and finality and that's also at these epoch boundaries is where a lot of like rewards accounting happens and various other things like you might also

at that point update what the view of the the eth1 chain is so that you can induct do deposits and different things so it's really like it's these accounting boundaries it's it's really these larger than block groupings of logical activity and and from from a finality standpoint uh you can really think about you have all these little blocks but you can think about these epochs as more of like larger packages it's kind of like the meta chain on top of the little the little mini chain does it mean the maximum kind of re-arc that could happen is like one epoch or two epochs or is that one way to think about it so there's like increasing depth and probability of reorgs in the e2 beacon

chain and at every slot uh a validator first creates a block and then one thirty second of the validator set is uh during that slot because they're they're assigned to that slot will then send it out to station that attestation immediately gives weight to people's fork choice um and recursively gives weight to the to the chain prior and so actually because of the way that uh the validator set much of the validator set participates each slot um you end up with uh probabilistic guarantees at the depth of slots that the chain won't be reorg so it's something it feels a little bit like proof of work at the chain tip where there's you can make probabilistic claims

that there won't be a reorg unless x y z happens um and under normal operation those probabilistic claims are actually very very strong uh because most of the validator set is participating and sending signal at each slot then at the depth of one epoch you can have justified so something 32 slots ago can be justified and this is really this is like i said the first step in finality justification you can make a much stronger claim that something justified would never be reorged because it would require a very large amount of validators call it at least one-third likely more in the one-half even two-thirds realm to not run the protocol so it's essentially to run a

an altered version of the protocol where they stop listening to justifications because once something's justified locally you say that's what i want to build on and something won't be elsewise justified unless people like change their their local protocol granted that wouldn't necessarily do a slashing uh but it's it becomes very very uh unlikely then at the depth of two epochs so 30 64 slots or uh 12.8 minutes then you can finalize um and this is this means that locally in my software whoever's seen that that that is finalized would never uh revert and you can make claims that no one will see a different version

of finality unless a minimum threshold of validators were slashed and that minimum threshold is one-third one-third is actually although theoretical attack could happen at one third uh it's extremely improbable that you could even conduct it at one third and probably be much much higher um and so you can make crypto economic claims that this is finalized this will remain finalized and nobody else will see a different version of finality unless a large amount of capital is burned and so we have again we have like the head of the chain we get to make probabilistic claims uh based off of all these adjustations that things won't be reored um then 32 slots we get justification which you know for almost any operation is uh much is enough uh depth and enough

confirmation and then at 64 slots we get that uh that finality which is like that ultimate claim of crypto economic like it's not going to revert yeah that sounds to me like like just very high level on proof of work it's kind of totally normal and totally expected that it happens multiple times a day that a single block or even two blocks get to get reverted here it sounds like even a single yeah block or slot revert uh would be highly unlikely in normal normal operations yeah in normal operation absolutely so if i saw like 99 of the slot attestations come in um i can make like i can i can be pretty well assured that

this is not going to revert unless there's actually something malicious going on if instead i saw 10 of those that slots out to stations come in then i wouldn't i wouldn't start locally making decisions necessarily because i don't have like a high probabilistic guarantee but in normal operation we do see almost all validators assigned to each slot attesting at each slot and and thus we do get that like probabilistic uh increasing probabilistic guarantee that things won't be reverted yeah so so it's probably in a normal operation as good as proof-of-work confirmations um and then increasing depth uh increasing kind of cryptoeconomic guarantees of non-reversion but on a very fundamental level this is still very different from eth1 right

because on eth1 one of the general design decisions is of availability over consistency so basically the the chain can never hold but this comes at the cost that there might be reorgs right so and then you have like the the the converse with bft style consensus algorithms that uh retar basically they they have finality but in principle the chain can hold so very much like on tendermint it seems like easter does something weird hybrid yeah it has this weird hybrid or this this middle ground that i didn't even know existed beforehand so what are the trade-offs of having like this this hybrid model right so like proof-of-work consensus

the eth2 protocol is fundamentally liveness favoring meaning that the chain can be built even if you don't have these like bft thresholds of validators and this is to provide kind of the uptime and availability of the network that blockchain users and what i think a global decentralized network expects at that point uh it's all it's ultimately up to local node operators to make decisions about what is accepted like if if i'm in exchange i might always only operate under finality but if i'm like sending nfts to my buddy and like we don't have finality i know that this this operation will clear and and it's it's not a big deal

so what we get here is really like we get a live chain and we get a bft consensus kind of like following and so from the perspective of the designers of b2 that's kind of at least for the expectations of guarantees of blockchain systems a really nice compromise and the idea ultimately is a safety favoring chain cannot simulate a liveness favoring chain whereas a liveness favoring chain can simulate a safety favoring chain and thus the latter is ultimately like a more powerful construction because it gives more optionality to users on how to

interpret the world view at any given time there's much debate on this point uh and as to like what the quality of service can or should be um and whether it's really worth having these like live chains uh without finality but again that point ultimately is is like the the the clicking point for me is really like sure if there's not finality i don't have to finalize anything but i do provide optionality to users and systems uh based off of like probabilistic guarantees and different things um liveness favoring system super interesting so maybe let's talk about the merge for a little bit there will be the merge and the merge um will merge eth1 into the beacon chain

um so how exactly does that happen when is it going to happen i imagine eth1 and eth2 have separate states how is that handled how do you how do you kind of make them congruent so let's think about what each one is eth1 is and this is a construction for each one's a lot of things and there's a lot of different ways to think about it but for the purposes of the merge we can think about it in two layers we have this application layer or this execution layer where all of the users hang out it's where all the applications are it's where the user layer state is it's where transactions are being processed and all that it's really like what i as an end user care about

i care about you know my uniswap trades and that kind of stuff and then you have this thin purple work consensus module that's driving it it's really like providing the service it's providing the quality the um it's providing the service to this execution layer it's the cradle for blocks it's providing guarantees about reorgs and different things like that and what we have uh is is really these two layers we have the proofwork consensus layer uh providing the application layer two services into users and then what we've bootstrapped in production today is the speaking chain which is a proof of state consensus and the idea really here is for at one

point in time uh the proof proof-of-work module to be driving that application layer and at the next point in time post-merge that proof-of-stake module that beacon chain to be driving the same execution layer the same application layer and so the the transactions essentially the cradle of ethereum right now is these like proof-of-work blocks and that proof-of-work consensus and post-merge the cradle of ethereum the thing holding it all together is ultimately the beacon chain and the proof-of-state consensus and you can imagine the essentially that that payload for the execution layer is essentially moving locations uh upon some condition and so people are running software that knows

prior to this time or prior to this block height i'm listening to the miners and after this time i'm listening to the proof of stake validators and there's there's like a number of little details to work through on the actual point of merge and how you maybe handle attacks on this boundary and reorgs on this boundary but the the simple case is essentially you have a chain being built by proof of work um at one point in time and that same chain that same like payload of execution layer that uh validated that end users care about is then being built by these by these validators and the nice thing is conceptually these these layers um are important from like a mechanism design

standpoint but they actually translate into um really nice like software reuse and so we have uh what we call e2 clients which are these beacon chain clients they've built a highly sophisticated uh proof of stake consensus mechanism and then we have like what is an eth1 client an eth1 client really is a highly sophisticated execution layer it's highly sophisticated evm transaction processing mempool management and all that kind of stuff plus this thin proof of work module that like literally hasn't been touched since day zero um it it's a relatively simple mechanism from the software perspective and it hasn't been it hasn't been touched and so what the software after the merge looks like

is really taking an eth1 client which is primarily a highly sophisticated execution layer cutting out that proof of work module which is was the driver of that execution layer and instead of listening to that proof-of-work module listening to an eth2 client and so the the the software post merge actually looks like you take these two clients which are highly sophisticated proof of state consensus mechanisms you take an eth1 client which is a highly sophisticated execution layer and you smash them together and you have the proof of stake client driving that execution layer asking questions about the execution layer so for example instead of the proof-of-work module saying hey give me a give me a valuable transaction bundle to include this block the beacon chain client is instead saying hey geth hey nether mind

hey open ethereum um my my local adjunct execution engine give me give me the valuable payload hey process this payload and that kind of stuff you mentioned so there's a state before and there's a state after really that state there's there's a beacon state which is like the system layer state of this proof of state consensus mechanism and then there's the application layer state that exists in these in these like proof-of-work blocks today and really uh this consensus mechanism is really good at doing that it's really good at coming to consensus on things and so it's really just like slotting in in its state transition and in its uh in its state it's embedding the execution

layer state of ethereum into that and so if you think about it as like a tree of all the things embedded in the the beacon chain outer layer state that is built and finalized you're essentially having like the application layer of ethereum is embedded into it as like a sub component of its state and so that application layer state right now exists in like the proof of work land and it's really just taking that application layer state and subsuming it into the the beacon state which when you finalize the outer state route of the beacon state you finalize everything within it and so you then just if if within it is the application layer state that's been consensused on then you get you know these finality properties and

the other properties that uh proof-of-stake is giving to itself so you're kind of spooning over the state but i mean in principle the miners can continue with the original chain right so basically this is kind of a natural break point for a fork yeah i mean it's it's if anybody wants to run proof of work ethereum uh i think blockchain government's governance ultimately works is that anyone can continue to run it um there's a couple of things that i think might make it not super viable the ethereum community has consistently since genesis put this thing in called the difficulty bomb the difficulty bomb was intended to

ultimately at the beginning to to allow for a cleaner shift to proof-of-stake ultimately like the mining difficulty at these points of the difficulty bomb uh increases exponentially so that it becomes non-viable to mine that proof of work chain unless you actually hard fork so that might dissuade a proof of work fork here but another another interesting point is that when in the last contentious ethereum hard fork so which created ethereum classic there wasn't a lot going on in the application layer there really was this dowel thing and then a bunch of like little experiments and so the application layers could kind of fork and exist in parallel and it wouldn't it didn't really

yeah there wasn't like any of these like big dependencies and stuff whereas i would posit that if ethereum forked today and you had a majority community stake in one and then a minority community's taking the other that the application layer on the minority one is likely going to implode um there's a lot of like interdependencies and a lot of value and stuff here for example oracles may or may not be run on the minority fork and even if they are you have systems like maker which if they're if the the value of the eth on one side or the other drops significantly you have like mass liquidations

then dye is integrated all into d5 and you have rippling and all the all the uh backed assets like used you see tether and so on so yeah i i also think like the the the support for proof of stake in the ethereum community is so overwhelming that i i really don't think there will be any debate or any question kind of what's the right thing definitely from a community perspective i'm like 99.99 are just like let's do this we've been wanting to do this for years can we just do this come on whereas you could theoretically run a proof of work fork but i think that uh it will quickly become a wasteland you said earlier that proof of stake has two main reasons behind it so one is the

environmental sustainability and i think that's pretty straightforward um why that is the case and the other one is the security so let's talk about the security aspect why is proof-of-stake good for security purposes so proof work and proof of stake are fundamentally cryptoeconomic consensus mechanisms meaning that they have certain properties if uh no entity has certain thresholds of value securing the network um and so they're they're pretty similar in that sense and have some similar properties because of it but i think the the crux of the um proof of stake having higher security is really

because that asset securing the network is actually in the protocol and so you can not only reward that asset but you can penalize that asset and this especially in the failure modes leads to much more secure system and so let's think about what happens if a proof of work chain is 51 attacked if a proof of work chain is 51 attacked that's kind of it like you have a you have a party that has 51 of the assets and they can reorg and do whatever they want there the only recourse here is uh forking the protocol so that you have a new mining algorithm uh at which point you bricked all the good guys hardware as well you can think about it as there's a

budget for the attack the budget for the attack was securing 51 percent of the assets but then there ultimately really wasn't a cost and so once i secured the budget i'm now just god whereas in proof of stake because those assets are in the protocol there's a budget so secure 51 of those assets but then there's ultimately a cost as well because if uh if you do connect a network fault then those assets are slashed so i can do the attack once and then i lost all my money and i have to accumulate all those assets again i can do the attack again you know whereas in proof of work i just entered god mode and could reorg over and over again and in the extreme where you're some say

maybe hit like two-thirds threshold and you're some sort of like censoring majority or cartel uh this can also be detected uh socially so i can i can identify this cartel the censoring majority and in the extreme there can be social recovery so these assets could be forked out of the protocol and burned um whereas in proof-of-work uh you don't have this nuance and you the only the only recourse was ultimately uh forking the good guys and the bad guys out that's definitely like uh something a failure mode you don't want to run into but the fact that that recovery does exist i think it ultimately would dissuade even those extreme types of attacks yeah i mean this is a question about what is more secure i

think the debate well was going on for years and i think i really think it's settled now i i really think uh proof of stake is it's absolutely clear one thing where it's way less clear to me how it will play out is the question of centralization because originally i used to bring up the argument that proof of stake would lead to less centralization than proof of work because in proof of work you have the economy of scale so you have if you spend i don't know 10 million on mining you will get at the end a better return for your last dollar than someone who just spent a thousand dollar on mining

uh while was proof of mistake arguably or well maybe that that is less the case and kind of each validator even if you just have like one validator you kind of probably will have the same rewards that being said there are significant arguments i would say also for uh centralization in proof of stake and that is likely the idea of staking derivatives and i mean to some extent that's already what we are seeing is that of course uh yeah there are specifically now where you cannot get your ether well immediately out

so it's quite quite a commitment to to do it manually or to do it yourself kind of stake your 32 ether you could just go to an exchange and they will offer you a nice service they will say okay well if you want to go out well we find a seller for you we we create a well staking derivative or whatever we call them yeah yeah and and we have a market for that and of course to someone to to an individual i mean that that's that's a big big plus but that comes at the cost of um yeah or well or it threatens as decentralization and i maybe you know better than me the current statistics but exchanges play already a big role right right

i mean between exchanges and staking pools it's probably something like 50 55 of staked assets that we can tell today um there is a definitely a strong hobbyist community and but you're right like this there's this like before the merge there's this this unknown lockup and so uh liquidity is certainly a question and certainly uh a driving factor for people to move to these um these other types of institutions is there anything we can do about it so there are some things that are done uh today so one thing uh i i mentioned earlier this is this is kind of a minor point but the fact that you can participate with a very small percentage of the network and still have regular rewards and payouts that's like a nice little thing

and that helps the hobbyist community one thing that is designed into proof of stake systems which is not uh improved work systems is there's these like discorrelation incentives and so if you are with a majority if you're with a very large staking institution and they go offline the amount that you lose is is much higher than if you were going offline in isolation or in even a smaller pool even worse is if you're with one of these large institutions um and they have some sort of security breach or some sort of bug or issue uh then that causes them to be slashed then again the amount that your slash scales with the percentage of the network

that was recently slashed and so if you're with like a 30 staking pool uh or 30 staking provider exchange that has uh you know a major slashing event say somebody internal uh just wants to watch the world burn or somebody hacks the system or they're running just buggy software or someone you know trying to be clever with their redundancy um you know you would lose quite a bit of capital and so there are these disincentives to being with the large institutions um this might drive you to be a hobbyist and stake at home but this also might drive you to be uh you know with a smaller pool and so i think even if we end up with a highly pulled landscape which we certainly are beginning to see at least in the 50 range

there's still these these incentives to not be with with the mega players and so whereas in mining i think we have like two or three pools uh that you know you add them together and you're at 51 percent uh the only thing that keeps those pools from being larger than that is is because it's not socially tenable um ultimately like it wouldn't you know people don't want to join the pool that's too big whereas there's actually a disincentive of joining pools that are that are that large in the staking landscape it is unfortunate that those disincentives are in the tail risk scenarios which i think that humans are pretty bad at really assessing tail risk and so i think we might we might see waves of centralization and then decentralization as some of these events happen uh so if if

something major happened to a major exchange all of a sudden we might see everyone like scatter their stake and and and redistribute uh but but we shall see staking derivatives are certainly um another interesting thing i think we've seen there's a there's an entity that has something like seven percent of staked assets right now and i think that number has increased quite a bit in the past few months and that's primarily because they offer i won't use the word decentralized they offer they offer an on-chain staking derivative um and this you know they have an interesting mechanism where they're kind of distributing they're kind of like this tokenized middleware that then like distributes to various pools and so although it represents seven percent of the stake it's actually distributed to like 10

pools underneath the hood um and then you have these staking derivatives that represent like kind of the shared risk across these these pools um this is i see as a competitor to exchanges rather than a competitor to the hobbyist like if i'm a hobbyist i'll probably be a hobbyist whereas if uh you know i was gonna go to coinbase i might instead go with this like decentralized option i hope that we see a number of these uh so we see a lot of competition and i hope that we see a number of like staking institutions so we see a lot of competition i am more optimistic probably than you led um in terms of the although we might see like a highly pooled and highly institutionalized space um i think we're going to see much

better properties than we've seen with mining pools i mean one one is that every exchange wants to get in all the action so every exchange is probably going to create a product whereas mining pools we saw install very few entities that ultimately are these like very large pools yeah one one argument you brought that is definitely very strong is just this continuous payout i mean that was definitely a driving factor for mining pools in uh well in in proof of work how is that affected after the merge because then well i guess we are talking about transaction fees do they go then to the block uh to the block producer or at least probably mev will go to the block producer

so that will affect the value of the payload of the application layer payload so the transactions that we know and love goes to the block producer they're the sole uh entity responsible for bundling and finding that that value and so they're the ones that are paid out this actually is is definitely like a especially in the like ever evolving landscape of mev um this is definitely a huge point of research and huge point of discussion uh and ultimately i think it comes down to uh the democratization of mev meaning uh who has access to it uh how much of an edge do institutional players have over hobbyists uh and ultimately i think it's very

important for one for application layer contracts to design their system so they don't have highly exploitable mev and two for tool open tools and open access to mev to be created so that hobbyists have don't have like a huge discount on institutions and three uh even investigation of uh layer one protocol techniques to for meb minimization for example 1559 ultimately does put a a bound or does reduce the amount of mev available essentially like the the because of that in protocol burn so there's potentially is very like exciting um area of research but potentially

there are other types of techniques that may make its way into the protocol over time there's also there's a there's a security component here the classic bitcoin issuance model is not sustainable uh hinges upon the fact that as the issuance goes towards zero and and transaction fees become the dominant um component of the block that it becomes the mine on the head component of of the protocol becomes game theoretically unstable whereas i might you know if i have 20 in the network and i see these like huge transaction fees it might actually behoove me to reorg and try to re attempt to reorg uh the head even though i only have a small probability of doing so to try to get those fees and what we're

seeing uh with with the rise of mav and that ratio of like block value to block issuance go up um we definitely see some of those like similar uh weird incentives pop up on the layer one security and so that's like definitely a huge component of research and uh um i wouldn't say quite a huge worry but there's a lot of people thinking about this yeah new interesting insight at least for me that reducing mvv might be a factor for decentralization yeah absolutely um and so it is certainly a concern i think in a world in which you had you know hobbyists couldn't access mev and you had um major institutions um with pouring hundreds of millions of

dollars into optimizing mev uh that that's definitely like not a good outcome for decentralization um and so there's a kind of a huge parallel tract of research right now uh on democratization and maybe minimization that i think is going to be critical to the security of the system in the future yeah i mean even if it's completely democratized and everyone would get the same you would still have the variance issue so you would still there so you would have um you would have certain you do have those consistent payouts which maybe keep your machines keep your lights on uh but you would see these like larger uh payouts but so it's definitely definitely like the the optimal of like having these like

very clean consistent uh revenue streams uh changes it changes the the calculation certainly so the other thing that ethiopia is going to bring albeit not immediately um is scalability with um with sharding so for some reason this is lumped together with the proof-of-stake transition but it won't come live until next year i'm guessing at the very earliest is that correct later for sure uh so yeah the the eth2 i think i often say is is to increase security sustainability and scalability while retaining decentralization and this is so that we can you know the ethereum can can provide a secure

and sustainable environment uh for the world's decentralized applications at the crux of of sharding at the crux of this consensus mechanism being able to provide more scale is really like sophisticated mechanism design and it turns out that it's much simpler to design these mechanisms when you have about when you have a participant set when you have a validator set when you have like the consensus entities at hand to essentially like orchestrate and dictate through mechanism design with proof of work there's this notion of there's no notion of a validator set at any given time there's no notion of consensus set and so sharding which relies heavily on randomly sampling and

validators and consensus entities validating subsections of uh the system at any given time really needs to know this um this set you could imagine there there are like some proof-of-work charting designs but they ultimately end up trying to mimic a proof-of-stake sharding design and that there might be some sort of like election into a set like you have to mine for a certain amount of time and do a certain amount of blocks and all of a sudden you're in the set then you can be sampled and it's much cleaner and much simpler uh to just have a validator set known and with proof-of-stake we get that out of the box and so really the foundation is get a proof-of-stake consistent mechanism out there and then they come to consensus on valuable things

valuable things are the execution layer of ethereum today the application layer and also more things so so sharding so take this consensus mechanism and utilize it for the value of theorem and there's really the prioritization here between these two major upgrades uh it's the merge and charting the question was which to come first and the really nice thing is that there are tons of scaling efforts uh layer two scaling efforts going on in parallel uh to all this layer one development and so uh coming online today and increasingly so are these these roll-ups which scale with the amount of layer one data

and aim to provide like 10 to 100x scaling for ethereum without uh changing without moving to the the sharding designs um and so what we get to do is do the merge which gets rid of proof of work which makes the system more secure more sustainable simultaneously we get all these layer two scaling solutions which makes the system more scalable and then further down the line uh bring on sharding which would complement these layer two uh scaling solutions by providing more uh more layer one data to to get even more scale and so essentially all these all these roll-ups are uh they're buying us time and so we get to work on the other two components um through the merge and then and then prioritize starting so essentially if we did if we did charting

today instead of the merge we might get you know we get all these layer layer twos and then we get all this um all the scale from sharding and but we didn't get the the increased decentralization increase sustainability so instead we get to tackle them all at once at these different layers and then enhance it for the downline from your perspective is it is it an option on the table that it will stay at proof of stake that basically saying kind of well we do the transition to proof of stake but after that l2s will do the job and that's it i don't think so but i mean i i don't get to decide you could imagine uh some movement within the community being like this is enough stop

stop messing with it um and and you know i think ultimately that would be it with with 10 to 100x scaling with rollups like that would give us something i think the ethereum would be a very valuable and powerful tool but i don't think that it would give us the the scale that much of the community has imagined um throughout the years and so what we do have going on right now is there are sharding specs up in the spec repo there are people working on r d and working on prototypes um i think even within the next few weeks we might see like a very small like sharding devnet uh which builds upon the beacon chain and the merge and but ultimately like from an engineering perspective like one had to be prioritized together uh or we just both would take longer and

so yes there's a lot of unknowns there's always a lot of unknowns and and the road map and the technical specifications uh have often been been in flux and so like you could imagine in 12 months something radically has changed but uh i do think that come the end of the year um with the hardening of the sharding specs and with increasingly some like test nets um with some of the people that are sprinting on prototyping that will have like a good idea as to how this slots in in the next like 12 24 month roadmap obviously there's there's this thing we call eth2 which is all the stuff we talked about so far but there's also like tons of other people always want to do and prioritize and so like it's it's a constant kind of

debate and discussion um other other things you might have heard of are like state management and state sustainability through like statelessness and other techniques which help reducing the load of running a full node which help with light clients all that kind of stuff so there's there's a lot of different parallel r d efforts i think i can say very confidently the next major thing to go to mainnet will be merge uh the merge but then post that uh it's kind of a very active uh discussion debate yeah i'd love to do another episode sometime about charting and the other efforts just because you know having them like on the sides like this it doesn't do them justice but i do actually have a couple more um very tangible questions on proof of

stake so who will get to determine um the block gas limit after the merge so the execution layer is like at the beginning the merge is untouched so the um essentially everything dictating that realm uh is ported and instead of the proof of work miners producing and sending signals on that it's the the proof of stake validators and so in the construction of a block that has this execution layer payload similarly the got the block gas limit could be dictated by by a validator than uh by a proof-of-work miner and so that knob still exists the block producer

can still turn that knob the block producer just happens to be a validator now instead of a miner similarly like the 1559 feed mechanics which are expected to go live uh in the next couple of months that mechanic at its core is in relation to the block producer right um and the block producer post merge happens to be a validator rather than a minor uh on on this topic i i really have a very high level question uh on on how we see well or how you see ethereum uh and specifically was this um yeah question of what's the purpose of ethereum and is there potentially even a conflict of interest so what i'm

talking about one way to look at ethereum very critically currently is look and look at the high fees and see users and applications paying currently enormous fees so one way to look at it very negatively would say well they got lurked into this chain they kind of started there assuming well everything would be cheap and free and currently they are getting the maximum rent extracted from uh from from from those fees uh and i mean the the the narrative is is getting stronger around ultrasound money or kind of making a lot of money in a way with ethereum so to what extent or maybe what's

what's your comment on that or is there a chance to come to lower fees um or maybe even the question what what is l1 yeah i mean i'm i'm i i don't claim to be an ultrasound moniest um i do think that uh these systems that the foundational asset of these systems must be valuable uh because these are crypto economic systems and they rely on crypto economic consensus models which generally are more secure when that foundational asset does have value and so i i get the push there i mean there's probably two pushes there some people are trying to make a lot of money but ultimately a secure ether a highly valuable secure ether does provide good

properties to the system so but but that aside um the crux here is ultimately capacity um which is supply and there's a demand you know has outstripped supply uh quite a bit and people really want to use the system uh because of the network effects because all the is there like you said they've been roped into the system that's where all the action is happening um and there's also like an argument that and maybe again it's kind of the tail risk thing but uh the system's much more secure than other systems uh by virtue of everything happening there and by the network effects and the value of the the foundational asset ultimately we need to figure out how to leverage this

secure uh network for more capacity um and and there's a couple of techniques there we talked about earlier but roll ups kind of go into this realm of can we can we use this as like a settlement layer to like a a parallel system and leverage and get the same security out of it it turns out that that you can um and it has been quite a journey to the to construct systems like that i think plasma was like this promising thing and we kept running into this issue of like ultimately like there's there's a data availability problem and and there's all these like kind of ransom attacks and different issues that arise there and roll ups solve that and are extremely promising to use ethereum more

as like a settlement layer to leverage its security to secure much more and secure much more activity which is great and then ultimately sharding these techniques of random sampling of using consensus participants in a way that does not degrade security but can come to consensus some more ultimately like what is l1 i mean l1 is a l1 is a security model and a certain amount of capacity and with with other with with a a spectrum of decentralization i think ethereum thinks the ethereum community uh the ethereum ethos thinks that decentralization is like a very critical component to the value of these systems

and to the value to the world um and thus all of those design decisions that sharding the how to get more capacity ultimately like is unwilling to really sacrifice on decentralization and thus uh it's taking time and it's difficult and i think one of the reasons that a lot of applications and things are here is is because of that ethos because of that philosophy because of the value that we think decentralization is going to bring the world but we see a lot of like other competing systems that i think make different design decisions especially on that decentralization spectrum provide much more capacity and the systems may or may not have their place in the future uh but i think ethereum is attempting to build a certain type of future

and that's really the the guiding light and i think really ultimately the value proposition cool thank you that uh that was super fascinating and i'm afraid we kind of have to rap because of because of time not because we've run out of things to talk about danny it's been an absolute pleasure um where can we direct people to learn more about e2 or even join the effort uh so there's this fantastic place called the eath r d discord um it originally was the kind of an eth2 effort and uh then the all core devs the the theory one effort it all emerged and it's just this like fantastic fantastic place to get involved in anything l1 ethereum r d um

so check that out you can find links on like the spec repo you can i think you can probably find it pretty easily there's eth research which is a more asynchronous forum to discuss uh research ideas there's the e2 specs repo where a lot of the magic happens on getting the specifications for this major upgrade in place um and then there's the you know the dumpster fire of crypto twitter which you can at least like uh find access points into into all these different things we had a link to all of these in the show notes so thank you so much daddy yeah absolutely i really appreciate you having me it was a fun and fascinating conversation thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes

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