Erigon roadmap, Public Goods Network and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #619 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of daily gray review where you kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is honor it has the 10th of July 2023 alright everyone let's get into it so to kick things off today we have a reminder here from eat steak our uh a reminder tweet basically where they said did you know that members of eatstaker have released audited free and open source software to help you set up your solo validator such as the wagyu kenjen is the staking deposit CLI on easy mode uh which is basically the tool to generate your um Keys your validator keys and each Docker and eat wizard are software that automate the staking process and guide you through it and these products these projects are linked here um on the Tweet which I'll link in the YouTube

description below and I have talked about the um eath wizard project before from uh from Remy Roy who works at eat stakon is part of obviously the eat steak uh kind of community here in swedes I hadn't heard of uh wagyuki kenjen before I think I may have heard of it before but I haven't personally used it before but definitely definitely if a steak is vouching for it I can vouch for it as well Esther get is the you know best I think staking community in ethereum I haven't seen anyone doing as much as they're doing in the ethereum staging Community here uh but yeah there is GitHub links there's a website link here uh this is the GitHub link for the wagyu kenjen and then you have uh the overview of eth Docker which is another project uh and of course the 8th wizard

project which as I said I've highlighted on the refill before so if you guys are at all interested in in getting uh started with solo staking uh you know if you've got that 32A then you're just thinking about hmm okay I've got 32 8 but I'm not entirely sure on the technical side of things maybe you've looked at some guides and they're still maybe too complex uh for you something like summer esat's guides or coin cashews guides which look I'm not going to say they're easy to follow uh in in respect to if you're not used to using the command line if you're not used to a lot of uh I guess like computer stuff right like not just cooking guise but getting diving deep into the computer restartable techie stuff then those guides may not be the easiest thing to

follow along with that's why something like eth wizard May appeal to you because it's trying to make everything as easy as possible for setting up a solo validator on your own now of course you can use other services as well as I've talked to before like dap node and things like that um but yeah I mean if you don't want to use that node or for whatever reason you want to use something else then there is other things available here which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to go check out uh as I said I can put my weight Behind these products um and eat steak is a great community that you should definitely be a part of join the Discord Channel if you have any questions about staking they're always happy to help with that all right so over the weekend Aragon put

out their updated roadmap for 2023 now I highlighted this road map a few months ago now um but basically there has been a key a few key changes here so they said the first change was that from two to one major upgrades of our execution layer which would be named Aragon 3 previously Aragon 4 so they seem to have basically I guess cut down on a bit of the bloat here on their road map and made it and collapsed everything that was Aragon 4 into Aragon 3 and then introduced something called Kaplan which is our consensus layer that is designed to run as a single process with Aragon 3 or as a separate process so yeah it seems like there that um Aragon the Aragon team is now building a consensus layer client you can see here Kaplan is on the right hand side as as part of the Aragon 3

effort where they said it is a consensus driven engine and embedded full consensus clients um and it has all these Nifty features here that you can check out I'll link that in the YouTube description below but yeah pretty cool though we're even getting another consensus layer client from the Aragon team here and I I said before that I think we already have maybe enough clients not not that I'm I'm saying that we shouldn't have more of them um and I think that the reason Aragon may be doing this is because Kaplan may help them to make Aragon a better execution like a client because let's say you're uh running Eragon right and maybe you and obviously Aragon is targeting archive node users and things like that um let's say that you obviously need to pair that with a consensus layer client maybe Kaplan will run just a lot better

than um something that when other another consensus layer client on Eragon specifically that might be a reason there and maybe something that they're using as a way to skill up when it comes to consensus layer things because there is cross-pollination between the execution analytic consensus layer client teams but it's not it's probably not as much as uh maybe not it should be but like it can be right because at the end of the day these two things talk to each other and those specs that the client and teams follow and everything like that but outside of that from my understanding there's no real need for for say the gef team to understand how Prism Works or to know how to build prism or anything like that just like there's no real need for prism to understand um you know the intricacies of Geth

obviously they need to understand the high level stuff but from the from what I've seen it's not like there's a huge amount of cross-pollination when they're all working together um in terms of working on each other's code and stuff like that it's more that they work to the spec they make sure that their clients can talk to each other and they continue on uh from there but yeah cool to see this new effort from from Aragon here but in terms of what they're working on right now it's mostly part of I guess like Aragon 2 and Aragon three uh Aragon like one I guess you can call it is in the past it's basically what's been like for a while now Eragon 2 is uh I guess moving Target here but basically includes a bunch of nifty upgrades like uh faster thinking time for the archive node and a lower

disk footprint and then Aragon 3 is their big upgrade which you can see here that they're focusing a lot of their time on and they've also got here that autoscan is embedded now I mentioned auto scan on the reef before it's basically a open source block explorer that you can run locally so you basically go to the GitHub page you uh you download it you run it locally and then you can obviously talk to your own node and be able to use a block Explorer uh without having to allow something like etherscan now of course if you want more data around I guess like the historical state of um of uh of the blockchain then you need to run it paired with an archive no not just a full node or you need to get some snapshots from somewhere but that kind of defeats the whole purpose right of

doing it all in your own being a self-sovereign kind of block Explorer so it's cool to say that that's being directly embedded into into Aragon here and it seems that as part of the Aragon 3 road map the the team is also working on clients for gnosis chain and polygon now polygon I I would assume this means the POS chain and I wonder how that how that changes things for them given that the POS chain is going to become a validium obviously it still needs a client um but I'm wondering how that changes so things I don't think it would change things too drastically for them they'll probably still be able to build a similar client if not maybe the same client as they're building now but it's good to see them supporting multiple chains here but anyway you can check out the full roadmap for yourself I'll link

it in the YouTube description below all right Tony here uh has put out an eth research post that is titled I'm just learning an RPS and get the title a selfish mixing and randow manipulation and there's a TLD at the top here for what this is now for those of you who don't know what Randall is Tony explains it says the round out plays an integral role in ethereum providing the necessary Randomness for the selection of proposers and committees and then Tony continues and saying I looked into the possibility of Randall manipulation and carried out a variety of simulations using historical data uh and those all done in this E3 search Pros which you can check out there is a lot of technical mathy stuff here so this may not be something that is easily

digestible but the reason why I bring this up uh not only to highlight the post here but also because I wanted to kind of give a bit more background here so as Tony says here Randall is responsible for providing that Randomness for the selection of uh proposers and committees so basically the The Proposal of a block and being part of a of a sync committee here now the reason why we needed a source of Randomness is because if you didn't have a source of Randomness you would be able to essentially either game the outcome or know the outcome ahead of time and then use that to your advantage in some economical way or something like that so obviously we need we need Randomness there now what Tony's done in this process basically model out what this would look like if if Randall was

manipulated and I think the tldr I mean from my understanding of the post I I did gloss over it because honestly I don't understand this math like this equation here it's this this is just Wizardry to me I don't know math but from my understanding and from some of the comments that I saw basically you could in theory manipulate randow or manipulate it so that you knew if you had enough validators if you had enough share of the network that you knew ahead of time or a long time ahead of time that you were going to propose a block or be part of a sync committee and do some funky stuff around that but the thing is is that like it's not just the knowledge of that it's also the economic uh I guess out output of that so is it worth basically in plain English is it

worth the your time and your effort and all these other second order consequences that would happen from you trying to manipulate the ethereum chain um is the economic benefit worth it and I think like pretty much all the time it's not it's better just to go along with everyone else right and it's better to play uh it's kind of like a prisoner's dilemma right it's better to just play the game fairly it's better to do the 3-3 I'm sure you've seen that Meme before then defect and do your own thing because in the long run it's better for you even and and you're still being selfish right you're still doing things first up it's still being uh profit maximizing by doing it that way but it's good it's still good for the health of the network it's it's not manipulating anything it's not trying to

destabilize the chain or anything like that so really even in theory if it is possible to do some kind of manipulation here it doesn't actually make sense from a crypto economic perspective and it also doesn't really make sense from the probability of you actually making any money from it as well even if it was worth it like let's say you had like a five percent chance of being able to manipulate Randell in such a way that it gives you an expected profit of such and such is it actually worth it to do that because what would actually happen if you were caught doing that um is that because the incentives are the way they are with ethereum staking people will just unstake from you basically so let's just give an example of a centralized exchange engaging this in in this Behavior what do you think

would happen everyone would just withdraw their stake and if their stake was withheld then um the derivative token would probably trade at a pretty steep discount like CBE thought or um or be eat from binance for example as centralized exchange lsts um or there would be lawsuits against that company or any other number of of kind of second order consequences there but then on top of that even if they didn't withhold the stake and people would say oh you know no one's going to withdraw because no one knows what's what's going on like yes they will I'm not sure if you guys saw what a plan happened with coinbase but the SEC going after coinbase for their staking products actually spooked a fair few people and coinbase's staking market share has gone down because of that so if the coinbase I just as an example

right I'm not I'm not singling that coinbase here but for example if coinbase was to do any kind of manipulation here you bet your ass a lot of people withdraw their state because they don't want to be part of that they don't want to run the risk of potentially being slashed or socially slashed as far as I know there's no in protocol technical um slashing for random manipulation I don't think it's actually possible to do that but in terms of social slashing that would of course be possible if it was a big enough threat if it was something that was being actively done the community would come together and socially slash the perpetrators of that I have no doubt about that even though I've talked about how social slashing is the nuclear option if something is destabilizing the chain then the nuclear option needs to be used if there is no

other way to stop this from happening right in a timely manner as well because time is always of the essence but as Tony's post points out as a few other kind of things that I've seen around this points out it pretty much is never worth it economically reputationally um you know it the chances are just just very low for the expected benefit here and it's much more uh it's much better for you just to go with the flow just to continue playing by the rules uh and earning the profit that way rather than potentially blowing up your business if you're a if you're an exchange service right opening yourselves up to lawsuits and legal liability and all that sorts of stuff so it's just better to go with the flow now of course that works in pretty much like all scenarios except

for a scenario where it's like a nation state doing it right and that's always the final boss is when it's like a nation state because in that world it means that the nation state doesn't give a about the laws because they are the law really I mean at the end of the day if they're doing something like this then maybe they have to answer in some court but it's very different right like I I wish it wasn't different but it is different um especially if it's if it's nation states that don't uh that aren't a democracy right it's even more different than that let me imagine North Korea doing something like this we've seen North Korea in very active in crypto imagine them doing something like this they don't care about the legal consequences of this they're they're threatening to Launch nukes like they don't care about the legal consequences

of this no one's going to stop them right and and it's easy for them not easy for them to do this but it is open to them to do this because it's running on the internet obviously right and it's in the digital age where it's you know you're gonna be able to control any access here but uh it's not just them it's just generally when thinking about nation states that is the final boss whether they're big or small and doesn't necessarily matter it depends on how much damage they could do I mean for example if you talk about like the US government I mean they could in theory right obviously this wouldn't be when I when I say this wouldn't be legal for them to do yeah they can they can make it legal for them to do this but let's say they went and just seized all the

validators from all us-based staking Services uh including coinbase and Kraken but also all of the Lido not up node operators um and all of the other staking services that are based in the US let's say They seized all those validators I don't know how much percentage that would give them of the network but it's probably a healthy percent it's probably like 20 25 30 potentially right of the network and then let's say they engaged in something like random manipulation in order to destabilize the chain well in that world where that happened right you bet your ass a social slashing uh kind of mechanism would be used in that world just simply because there would be no other way to deal with this if the US government has come along and seized these things the only way the community can react is by kicking them out of the

validator set and then for them to re-enter and gain that same amount of stake again would be extremely hard and and uh very uh very expensive they may still have to kind of uh spend money on these sorts of stuff right so yeah anyway that's a long-winded way of me saying that this kind of thing uh when you model it out just not something to worry about too much but definitely something that can be hardened at the protocol level we could look for different sources of Randomness or better sources of Randomness um which I think there's been a bit of research on but I don't have that handy right now uh but yeah that's just some uh I guess like context around Randall manipulation all right speaking of ethereum research things the ethereum foundation research team will host a another Reddit AMA on July 12th at 1pm UTC now you can go

check this out link out for yourself and save the save the date and time here this is very close actually this is what two two days away or so um so it's happening quite soon you can go into this Reddit thread ask your questions ahead of time get them answered by the entire ethereum research team here and this is the 10th AMA that we'll have been doing in the last I think they've been doing this for two or three years now I remember the first one that they did it was just so good when they started doing these because they really do go in depth with the answers that they give on these amas it's not just like a throwaway answer where they're like linked to a pro store say um you know uh this is what's happening here don't give any context around that they

give very detailed context and very um context driven answers and it's not just one person answering you either it could be Justin answering a question along with Danny Ryan and Tim baiko and vitalik and all the other researchers they could be in there and they're answering the questions in their own way so if if you want to ask a question go ask it if not just wait two or three days till it's all been answered and then there the whole ama's down you can read through it and for sure you'll learn a lot from it I mean I learn heaps from it every time I read it and it is a really nice view into what the ethereum researchers uh at the ethereum foundation are actively thinking about and working on all right moving on to the biggest announcement over the weekend which actually happened just before I put out

last week's refills I had already recorded it and then I saw this but uh git coin has launched something called the public goods Network which is a community-led O2 ecosystem for public goods Maxis tldr get coin is launching an L2 built on the op stack called the public goods Network or PGN this is really cool and has been a long time coming I remember in 2020 there was a tweet from vitalik and the reason why I remember this is because I saw a tweet again um from metallic just um over the weekend where he said quadratic funding was like an experiment uh or quadratic funding funded by the ecosystem was an experiment the end game is for quadratic funding to be uh funded by sequencer

fees from l2s and that's exactly what would happen in this world with PGN because as an L2 Network obviously there will be sequences and those sequences will earn fee Revenue and let's just say the sequences are set up so that a portion of that fear Revenue if not the majority of it goes to a public goods pool so let's say there's obviously get coin live on there uh there's the protocol Guild live on there there's other public goods initiatives live on there just any public goods project you can think of and then they you know it's it's a generalized chain for public goods networks people are doing payments on there donating to people there's people doing their own initiatives like kind of like a GoFundMe Network so you know so to speak right it could touch it real life or just crypto all that sort of

stuff and all that activity is generating fees that could go to public goods just like optimism is doing when they're running their their centralized sequencer right now they're donating all of the the proceeds to public goods funding um so you know this is exactly what can happen with the public goods Network here and you know some people brought up objections to it saying that you know why would anyone use the public goods Network when they could use something like arbitrine one or optimism um to do D5 stuff and things like that I was like yeah yeah that that's totally fine I don't expect the public goods Network to be like a defy Hub or anything like that sure Universal will probably be deployed there and a few of the other popular defy apps will probably be deployed there just to enable the use cases is of what the

public goods are trying to do what the public goods apps are trying to do but the public goods network is not trying to be a D5 chain and he's not trying to be an nft chain it is trying to be a public goods chain essentially right um and then they detailed this Vision uh more in this uh Twitter thread here I'm going uh going deeper about it here as long as well as the website at publicgoods.network uh and it only makes sense for them to build this on top of op stack I believe since optimism is all about public goods they have been for quite a while now they're definitely at the Forefront of experimenting with different public goods funding mechanisms uh and and coordination mechanisms and all that good stuff there uh so yeah this was just honestly really cool and really something that you know

oftentimes I look at things in crypto and I kind of think to myself there's a lot out there that I look at and I'm like yeah okay this is interesting but like I don't get that buzz about it a lot of the time these especially me because I'm like a boomerang crypto at this point but it's it it takes a little bit for me to get a buzz out of something and by Buzz I mean something that makes me think wow okay this is actually different right this is actually something that could push positive forward change or not uh push positive change forward or not just the speculative front or the finance front but something that actually touches people in a different way right and touches on their values right their their values and scale that out to a Global Network of people and that's

exactly what things like the public goods Network can do I mean that's why I'm public goods Max you're right I've always promoted and talked about Bitcoin I've always promoted and talked about protocol Guild I've tried to contribute in my own ways encourage you guys to contribute to it uh and all that good stuff there but we needed a scalable way you know we needed a way to scale this to the world which is what the public goods network is trying to do we needed to Foster an ecosystem that goes beyond just uh ethereum L1 which priced out a lot of people obviously if you tried to donate on git coin you were priced out a lot of it because of the fees and stuff like that but we need to do all that and that's exactly what the public goods network is trying to do here and I

really do want to stress that this isn't just a crypto thing that Bitcoin team and I guess like anyone that's working on this what they're really trying to do is scale this out to have a real world impact they don't want to just be limited to crypto because for better or worse I guess the majority of crypto is speculative right now and there is a way to turn that speculation into public goods funding we call it regen Finance or regenerative Finance which is something you know I've done before when I did my nft mint for the one year anniversary nft I donated all the proceeds to public goods and I basically was it was banking on that speculation we were buying the nft because they were speculating on um it going up in value even though I said that it was it was just like an

anniversary nft right I wasn't I wasn't um creating it to be speculative but I was handing a little bit of that d-gen behavior for regen efforts right and there's plenty of other examples of this happening like optimism obviously with the sequence of fees and stuff like that are going to public goods so how can we do more of that within uh you know crypto but also outside of crypto and outside of crypto it doesn't have to be just harnessing djm Behavior you can literally um uh uh get these organizations from all around the world that are trying to do public goods things within their communities and get them on chain on board on the public goods Network offer them those low fees and fast train transactions and and basically get them using ethereum to scale up and coordinate their public goods networks

or public goods uh I guess like foundations or whatever they're trying to do which is why I said before it's rare for something to give me that like true buzz but this definitely did when I saw it and I'm super excited to see how this evolves I'm going to be getting involved with it as uh as much as I can but you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right connect has announced something over the weekend so they've quote tweeted Arjun here who is the uh the one of the founders of the connects Network talking about the recent multi-chain uh exploit this is the second exploit multi-chain has had are the cross chain uh kind of bridge protocol here um and I think this this was a um a multi-sig kind of compromise or a key

compromise on multi-cigs but Arjun goes here and says that uh or cesia that the multi-chain hack is a sad reminder for the systemic risks tokens face from Bridges and then he says we believe these risks stem from a single underlying problem token sovereignty we're proposing erc7281 AKA XR erc20 and open standard to fix this so essentially what erc20 enables is tokens Can seamlessly move across chains with no slippage fungibility of tokens between Bridges such as third-party or canonical token issuers get granular control over their token security and scalability to a 1000 plus roll-up chain world and Arjun has more

information about this in his own tweet thread and how this will work which I'll link in the YouTube description below uh but this makes a lot of sense I think you know their Dev definitely needs to be a standard that people adopt and that projects adopt for cross-chain bridging because as I've said before the it's it's not great how it currently works right there's ious on top of ious the ultimate source of where that asset actually lives is usually the uh Bridge uh sorry the um the network that it was issued on so for example eth on is on the issued on the ethereum network so eth that exists on any other network out there is not true eth right unless the eth is actually provably burned on the ethereum side of things then what you have on let's say another L1 as eth

that's been probably burned you have uh I guess like the real eighth because it doesn't exist anymore on ethereum but it's still not the real eat because I mean it's on another chain it is not secured by ethereum see what I mean it gets really murky when you think about it but the way most of these things work is that there's no burn for especially when you're going from from an Ulta from uh from ethereum to another L1 what hands up ends up happening is that you send tokens to a Smart contract on ethereum or e to a Smart contract on ethereum it gets locked there and then it you get issued an IOU on this other chain and you can only unlock the coins on ethereum by bridging back from the other chain and kind of swapping it shopping that IOU back there so that's

not ideal either because then it's just there's just ious and ious there's massive honey pots for these assets right it's just and there's fragmented liquidity there's just so much stuff that that happens that is just not great right and definitely not great and that's why Arjun uh and and I guess a Connex account here is talking about erc7281 as a way to fix this and if you want to know learn sorry learn more details about how they're actually fixing this from a technical point of view you can read arjun's tweet thread which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to do so it's got a bunch of helpful diagrams here as well that I can't I can't speak to you and you can just go see for yourself um and it'll give you a great primer and breakdown of how this all works

all right just wanted to give a heads up here that uh there is a new scam going around unfortunately so the revoke.cash Twitter account said yesterday we received reports of people seeing unknown approval transactions in their transaction history it turns out this is a new scam where scammers use so-called gas tokens to steal money when victims revoke these quote-unquote fake approvals and then revoke cash continues fortunately many of these approvals weren't showing up in revoke since they were filtered out based on heuristics but a few always slip through the cracks so to combat this scan we've just added a check that disables revoking approvals if there's an excessive gas fee so I actually didn't know this that revoke.cash has a system where they um basically filter out things based on a

bunch of heuristics here to protect users that's really cool and they've added this new feature to protect against this new scam but generally when you see these sorts of stock stuff guys happen to you and this I believe can't happen on ethereum because ethereum disabled the gas tokens it's happening on other evm chains um but essentially when you see on like eat the scan or something like that uh something being approved that you didn't approve yourself it's like almost I mean it pretty much is a scam because like if you didn't improve yourself then it's a spoofed transaction on on either scan that basically shows that you approve something and then what they do what you do is you go and attempt to unapprove it on revoke.cash or wherever else and then you end up getting scammed out of your um out of your money for doing that so

do be careful when using these revoke sites make sure that you're revoking something that you actually approved yourself and and it's not just a fake revoke or anything like that which is which is common here and you should be managing your addresses Health regularly as well with with approvals you should definitely be revoking things uh approvals to things that you haven't used in a long time or or things that um you used once and you probably don't plan to use it again on that address or anything like that but honestly if you don't want to deal with the hassle of that you can literally just start new a lot of the time you could send all your assets to a new another address yes and then just start again you'll have to approve everything again but then you don't have any approvals on that new

address so that could be an option for you as well right uh but yeah just you can go read this Twitter thread from revoke.cash to learn more information about this scam but just something that I figured was worth highlighting for you guys because I always uh love to highlight this stuff to make sure that you guys are being protected from all sorts of scams in the crypto ecosystem all right finally here just a shout out that I was on the bankless weekly roll up with Orion Sean Adams this is the first roll-up I did with Ryan I'm actually going to be on again this week but if you missed this one or haven't checked it out yet feel free to do so uh we Ryan and I had a pretty long discussion it was almost a two hour long discussion about all things that happened last week in crypto from uh the

Gary Gensler resigning of rumors to the BlackRock stuff um and and lots of other stuff like nfts and things like that so definitely go check out that I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh but I think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone