ETH staking chat, AxioM mainnet alpha and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #617 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where we kept the latest news near Theory maker system I'm your host and this is the 6th of July 2023 alright everyone let's get into it so I figured I'd start today's episode with a discussion around Eve staking looking at some metrics that I have highlighted on the refill before but I figured was worth revisiting since it has been a little while since shapala went live I think it's what been to almost two months now uh actually is it been longer than that April to May made it it's almost been three months okay yeah uh time is getting ahead of me here so yeah almost three months since um steak eat withdrawals went live uh and things have obviously been heating up an ethereum staking space from new LSD protocols coming online and growing

DVT steak fi you know reshuffling of steak uh uh mistaking being the risk because of withdrawals being enabled and all that good stuff there so I figured almost three months since then it's good to kind of like visit these dashboards that I've shown before and the first one is from a hill Dobby so this is Hill Dobby's eth2 staking dashboard on doing analytics this is probably one of the best dashboards that I have come across when it comes to tracking ethereum staking probably the best because there are so many different metrics here and we can start from the top basically it gives you a breakdown right at the top of the current state of each staking it tells you how much ether staked which is 23.7 million each staked right now tells you how many validators there are the net flow since uh Shanghai or since

Chapala went live so there's been a net increase of 4.3 million eth on the beacon chain since then you have a percentage of the total Eid Supply Stakes which is almost 20 percent stake through Lido netflow excluding rewards uh since Shanghai as well um because with rewards obviously they're automatically withdrawn from uh from the beacon chain and deposited into people's uh withdrawal address without them having to prompt that that's just done on automatic process uh uh and Cycles through every block um but yeah so that's the the kind of at a glance and then you've also got a breakdown of where the stake is on on this section here now so what providers is it with such as Lido and centralized exchanges rocker pool stuff like that

you've got a nice little pie graph here as well pie chart here and you can scroll down and you get more granular information and you can see like uh there's the last three I think this is since yeah since chappella you can kind of see what the flows have looked like you can see uh what the one month change is for each stake is uh as well and you can just keep scrolling down you've got a bunch of different metrics here I just wanted to highlight this again for you guys and I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out but I think really the tldr of all of this is that e-staking has been up only since japala and it's just been incredibly successful since its launch in December 2020 and I think a lot of people forget that that e-staking has

actually been around since the December 2020 when the beacon chain went live obviously it was a separate chain it wasn't part of the main ethereum Network it was its own kind of like uh uh a separate chain that was just the beacon chain it was just coming to consensus on itself it wasn't processing transactions or anything like that right but it was still live life and it was still live in the in the same capacity then uh that it was uh that it was when the merge happened then it became part of the the core ethereum Network and we're coming up on three years uh this year so this year in December December 1st it'll be three years since the beacon chain has uh been live so it's been quite a while but in terms of how the stake has kind of uh I guess like evolved or how

ethereum's taking has evolved over time uh you can kind of go to the beacon chain website and they've got a bunch of uh charts here and you can go to the validator Chart you can actually see all the way back to December 1st 2020 so you can see the whole life cycle of um Eve staking and validators I mean it really has been up only for most of it because there wasn't an ability to withdraw until Chapala went live three months ago but you look look at this right just just eyeballing it here you can see where Chapel went live right um you can kind of like point it out it was around here because we had like a few weeks where the number of validators laid flight because some people were withdrawing some things were happening right but then on around May 10th validated it's spiking like crazy so May

10th we were at 563 000 validators now we're at 650 000 uh active validators plus the the 90 000 that are waiting in the queue gets you to 740 000 validators on the network so obviously um withdrawals was very bullish right overall very bullish for Aid staking but you can kind of see different parts where it spikes up a little bit here and there and there now sometimes event driven reasons for that and sometimes not but generally the the kind of um a trend obviously has been and it's just up only and it's funny because you can go all the way back to December 1st the beacon chain really uh I guess for for quite a while here was under a hundred thousand validators for about I don't know four four or five months into into 2021 and it's funny

because the beacon chain launched just before the bull market really got started and then you had uh sorry this is March 2021 so about three four months yeah and then you had obviously the bull market but like you could argue that the first top I mean the first top it was in May of 2021 there was only like 150 000 validators on on the beacon chain so it's still very very small right and then it obviously kept growing since then but by the end of 2021 we were still only at what was it uh let's go to the end of 2021 here just eyeballing it off the chart we're about 275 000 validators then through 2022 which was the bear Market ride which was the peak of the bear Market if you go to the end of 2022 uh if I go here it was almost

500 000 validated so we doubled the amount of validators that were live on the network during the bear market and I remember mentioning this on the on the refuel saying that it's kind of crazy that 2022 was so brutal of a of a bear market right it was it was so brutal so many people blowing up so many funds blowing up so many VCS and and obviously FTX and stuff like that and Terra and all that sorts of stuff uh blowing up right um but but still e-staking was up only and obviously it was up only because withdrawals weren't enabled but at the same time people didn't have to put Ethan to staking right they didn't have to stake there they could have sold it when they did it they just kept staking it they kept staking it and we doubled the amount of active validators on the

network during that now since then since the beginning of 2023 it was at around 500 000 validators and now we're at 750 000 validators if you um if you kind of like count for the ones that are in the queue so we have added another 250 000 operators in half the time it took to add them in last year right and we're still not in a bull market right we're in a crab market obviously things are starting to get more positive there are for all the reasons I've outlined recently on the refuel but it's kind of crazy to see just how much this has accelerated recently uh given that the beacon chain has been live for so long right and as I've said just before it was because of that de-risking event uh because of withdrawals because since withdrawals was enabled we've added almost 200 000 validators because before

then it was uh you know if you go from the start of 2023 which is around 500 000 to when Chapala went live was 561 000 so we only added 60 000 validators in the first four months of the year but then the pre the next three months we we added another hundred thousand uh basically or more more than that I I keep forgetting this doesn't account for the um it doesn't account for the the pending validators so almost 200 000 which is crazy to me right uh and you know what does this mean overall for ethereum as a network for either it either as an asset things like that I mean there are obviously see broad implications here I think that for ethereum as a network the questions around how many validators we want to be active on the network at any given time

have really kind of um reared their ugly heads again so to speak and there's lots of conversations happening around that with regards to potentially soft capping the validators on the network and soft Capital basically mean people could still stake their eighth but there would only be a set a number of active validators for any given time period basically and it would probably be based on the uh the different epics the different epic time periods there and obviously with finality and stuff like that but then there were conversations around increasing the max effective balance of each validator so we could basically shrink the number of validators on the network but still keep the same security guarantees because the same amount of eth would be staked and it would be the same node operators anyway so there are those conversations starting here I think one of those

Solutions will definitely go into the network in the next uh maybe 18 months or so let's say right maybe maybe towards the end of next year or something like that and they're definitely needed because it does seem like like we're gonna hit a million validators sooner rather than later we'll probably hit it sometime next year if the pace continues here and it's kind of funny because looking at the historical data here over like what e-staking looks like in Bull and Bear markets we added more validators in a bear Market than we have in the bull market but east taking has been live for longer in a bear Market than it has in a bull market because I guess you could say or you could argue that the um the crypto bull market started really at the first uh maybe first half of 2020 so so

say like when D5 Summer started maybe June of 2020 but I think before that I think you could say that if you discount the cover dump in 2020 the bull market started at the beginning of that year so you could say that the whole of 2020 uh the big enchant wasn't live right and then it was only live for around six months of the the the real bull market I I actually don't consider the second half of 2021 to be uh part of the the bull market because of all that stuff I mentioned yesterday around me thinking that it was kind of a fake pump because of all the leverage and I I really don't think that it lines up with what you see in a typical bull market but even if you include that each stating has just been live longer in a in a bear Market than

it has in a bull market so it's kind of hard to tell what it's going to look like like are people going to withdraw as the eat prices going up in a bull market and sell like our validated is the validate account going to go down because of that I really don't think so because there are other lsts and if people want to sell they sell their lsts and yes that does have an effect on the beacon train because it's lst's start trading at a discount to fair value people will buy them and then Bob them with the beacon chain and there'll be complex strategies that people employ to do this but at the same time I just don't see like a mass outflow I really do feel like a lot of people staking eat are in it for the for the long term um and I really do feel like a lot of

these people uh even if they sell their eighth when it goes up and they stop staking I reckon they'll wait until the bear market and buy again and just restate so I I really don't foresee a mass outflow there because the price is high and people are just selling their Ethans things like that rewards for sure rewards are a different thing I'm talking about like just a principle here rewards are a different thing altogether and I I think that's out of scope of what I wanted to talk about today but yeah this chart has always been something that I found I found was quite fascinating just just watching and seeing how validated Trends or how big and chain Trends have kind of changed over time and how it really continues to be up only here but yeah you can check out this chart for yourself you can also

check out Hill Dobby's staking dashboard here which I'll link in the YouTube description below but I just figured it was worth talking a little bit about it again today just to keep you guys up to speed on what's happening in the staking space uh and just maybe refresh your memory on a few of these things all right so uh speaking of staking dap node has an update out that I forgot to cover yesterday I actually had this tab opening in yesterday's episode but I I somehow skipped over it but uh dap node uh chatted about something uh called adapt node monitoring back in uh January and boosting it uh they're almost there so they've been they're introducing something called the ethical monitor which is a privacy focused service for adapt node alerts and the tldr is that our depth node are about to launch a

service to receive alerts about the status of your adapt node that is completely ethical and does not compromise your privacy so what I find really cool about this is that if you want to be like a a completely self-sovereign state car and you want to maintain your privacy and you don't want to leak any information about yourself when you're staking your eth but at the same time you're not a very very technical person and you're using something like dapnode which makes it really easy to stake your ear there's a solo sticker um then this is really cool for you because it means that dap known users now get access to something that preserves their privacy without having to go to some third-party service and Link everything together which you know if you if you if you're fine with that that's that's fine as well and you can

actually link things pretty easily if you know what you're doing um with third-party services like big the big and chain website for example you can sign up with an address that doesn't link to you at all and then add your valid is that way and it would be relatively hard for the beacon chain operators to uh essentially track you down right or or link the address to you one thing they could do is I guess like link an IP but they'd have to get the IP details from somewhere else and it wouldn't be easy right so there are ways to do that but with that node they're just going to make it a lot easier because they're going to build it right into the DAP node stack and they're going to make it easy for people that are running dap node that that aren't Technical and and obviously want to be

able to do this in a privacy preserving uh way so yeah as I said this is going to be live soon uh this and this was posted uh this blog post was shared again but this was posted on Twitter on July 4th so yeah I'm not sure on the exact date I don't know if they mentioned it on the um on the on the post here but you can check out the price for the full details of how this is going to work I'll link it in the YouTube description below but I just figured it was something that was interesting and worth bringing out for you guys to check out because I know a few of you definitely run adapt node uh to be a solo Staker on the network all right so Giorgio's from Paradigm here uh who is also behind the uh wrath

client that I spoke about or I've spoken about a bit on the um the reefer before the ref execution layer client for ethereum has run a uh or Josh here who he's working with uh who's the VP of engineering at Lens protocol um and Ave has run a benchmark of uh the graph versus the versus wrath doing a um uh doing a hosted service here so you can see the Tweet reads so apparently Josh ran a benchmark versus the graph hosted service and apparently it's 60 times faster start at 11m and 17 M 18 hours so far 98 is it uh and ref did it in 20 minutes probably nothing so for those of you who don't know the graph is an indexing protocol basically um works as a way to serve different events and

indexing and stuff like that too two different projects so for example when you go to a D5 front end and you see all the information on there such as like total value value locked and aprs and stuff like that a lot of that is served by the graph itself um but the graph has its own architecture that it works with and it definitely works with ethereum clients but the ethereum clients that exist today on the execution layer side of things aren't optimized for for stuff like that whereas ref is actually working to to optimize uh for these sorts of things and make it faster to to index things so this is a ref indexer that is basically 60 times faster than than the graph and doing the same thing the graph would do which is the task is actually

um is actually outlined here so what they were doing with they were indexing uh rocker pulley transfer slash approval events both starting on block 11 million and finishing on Block 17 uh 0.5 million here and the graph took 19.5 hours to do this whereas wrath did it in 20 minutes that's kind of crazy when you think about it right um now I don't I'm not expert on each on any of this I don't know they have the lying technology of what uh of what the graph is using here and why it's so slow I do know the graph is trying to be a decentralized service I don't know how far along they are with that road map just yet um but they could definitely integrate ref into their stack here and and make it faster for everyone using the graph

as well and make the indexing fast edges generally but it really goes to show like how much more Improvement can be had by just improving the clients and as I've said before the various ethereum clients that exist they optimize for different things on the execution layer side the only teams optimizing right now for indexing and for things like archive nodes are Aragon and and wrath I don't think never mind or Geth are optimizing for those sorts of things um I don't think Basu is either but Aragon definitely is as part of their core road map and ref is definitely doing it as well uh whereas you know in the consensus layer side of things they don't have to worry about indexing like the execution layer does because they're just handling the beacon chain

they're not handling the the actual transactions that are taking place on the execution they are that will change in the future especially with things like erp4844 blob style transactions because those are actually stored on the consensus layer um and there are different kind of uh considerations there but generally if you're looking for indexing uh transactions and events and stuff like that that's all happening on the execution layout side so you would you would do this in an execution layout client and that's exactly what ref is is kind of doing here they're optimizing and uh for these sorts of stuff optimizing for archive neuros and I've gone through before how about how wrath is currently the fastest uh archive node so fastest one to sync an archive node which is also very cool but just figured it was worth shouting out because as I said it's worth showing that there are

so many improvements that are going to be made around clients over time and there's going to be it's going to lead to such a a more powerful ethereum and such a more powerful way of running archive nodes indexing things and archive nodes could One Day become like the default know that people run instead of a full node yes a full note give you the same kind of guarantees but an archive nerd gives you access to more data but if it's if it's if it's the same thing to run an archive node versus a full node and you get access to that extra data we should see more archive nodes come online it may take a bit take up a bit more space than a full node depending on how much you're syncing but still I thought it was uh was something pretty cool to highlight for you guys

there all right so Axiom has announced that magnet Alpha released so for those of you who don't know what Axiom is they are a the first ZK coprocessor scaling data Rich applications on ethereum now if you don't know what that means the tldr is basically that Axiom introduces a new way to access data and compute on-chain based on cryptography all results returned by Axiom are verified on Chain by zero knowledge proofs meaning smart contracts can use them without additional trust assumptions so from my understanding essentially what Axiom allows you to do is process everything off chain slap a ZK proof on it and then put that proof on chain on ethereum and essentially have the same guarantees as doing the processing on

chain now why you would do this is because obviously it's a lot cheaper to do processing off chain than running the the process on channel and ethereum L1 and then just post the proof to to ethereum L1 now if this is ringing a bell it's because this is what l2s effectively do they take the execution side of things off of ethereum and they do that off chain and then they just kind of like roll it up right and they bundle it up and they post the data and the proof on ethereum L1 and it makes it a lot cheaper uh by doing that and axiomi's planning to do this in a more generalized way where essentially you can do any computation that you want off chain and still have the same security as you would if it was done on chain because you have a ZK proof uh basically

improving the computation did uh what it said it was going to do now there are a few ideas uh that they've come up with here so they said we're excited about new types of trust minimized applications that Axiom enabled enables a few ideas in identity uh off-chain governance enforced and enacted on chain without the help of a multi-sig on-chained loyalty systems a trustlessly rewarding a protocol's most valuable users an action can also create new trustless oracles for on-chain data such as gas price oracles to settle block space markets trust minimize price and volatility oracles for arbitrary assets on top of uni stop liquidity and settlement prices for exotic derivatives or Structured Products so this is really cool I mean it's basically taking a lot

of different things you can do off-chain or basically anything you could do off-chain and compute off chain bringing it on chain something like what chain link does but doing it in a way that it can give you similar if not the same security guarantees as it can uh if you were to do the computation on chain now uh there's a lot of things to digest here obviously this is something that is very new something that you can check out yourself I'll link this in the YouTube description below but for me when a lot of smart people that I respect and follow are getting excited about are things like this it's when I start getting excited about it and I've seen a bunch of smart people that I respect talk about this project talk about this technology and say yeah if this works as advertised this is going

to be huge and there's no reason why it shouldn't work as advertised because the technology that they use using is not theoretical it's practical it's being used in the in the wild today and it definitely has a lot of uh very deep implications for uh different things happening on on ethereum here so you can check out their full blog post here for uh I guess details on what they've launched today as well as their website to learn more about Axiom there all right so stock Nets uh has been growing a lot lately actually I haven't talked about them in a little while but I've been keeping tabs on what stock net has been doing they are doing a lot actually so uh they announced today that they have uh basically uh done something called the starknet Quantum Leap which is a major throughput Improvement for

Stark Nets and if they've got stock net Alpha version 0.12.0 uh was released and uh now um increases throughput by 10x so you can go check out the blog post for more details on this but there was uh influence which is a game that's running on uh starknet here that's saying that their testnet client is showing a clear 10 times Improvement in game action finality what once took minutes is now down to low seconds so there is already a practical and real world impact here of what stock uh where has released for starknet and you can see the TLD at the top of the blog post for for what this uh what this did and yeah Stockman is definitely still in Alpha but they're making big improvements to this they

being stuck where they're making some very big improvements to stocknet as you guys know stock net is a non-evm uh layer 2. so they're trying to do a something different and they're not just trying to do something different in terms of like not being evm but they're also trying to to make to make it so developers can uh can uh write applications in their language which is Cairo um and they're trying to do uh new things with New Primitives as I said like there's gaming apps on here that are running fully on on chain influence runs fully on chain guys this isn't something that has like an off chain component where you do all the computation off chain no this is done completely on chain on Stark Nets and as you as I said here what usually took

minutes is now down to low seconds thanks to these improvements uh and and you know the cost improvements as well are there and that's coming down all the time as well uh but yeah that's that's really really cool to say that there's already that kind of practical Improvement there but as I said this is only on testnet right now but it's great to see the stock net ecosystem continuing to grow I'm rooting for their success definitely I have been kind of a little bit harsh on stock where in in the past um and I have been a little bit bearish on them only because it seemed like they were falling behind in terms of adoption in terms of getting things built out in terms of getting developer traction but I think that the reason why I felt like that was because a lot of the developers in the ethereum ecosystem

today are like all about the evm right they're all about evm they're all about solidity they gravitate towards that but I think that what stockware is trying to do and what they've been pretty successful in doing lately is onboarding developers that maybe they don't know solidity maybe they're not married to the EVN AVM maybe they know rust and and maybe they want to learn a new language like Cairo and I think stock was doing a really great job of onboarding those people and those are the ones that I think are going to push the the boundaries forward for stock net and get adoption there and in terms of users there are definitely users on there there's obviously a lot of airdrop farming as well because stockware haven't haven't um hair dropped their token yet they have announced that there's going to be a token but it's not it's not live yet

so you've got to keep that in mind as well but I think that's true for like pretty much every everything that doesn't have a token right but there definitely are real users there uh using it playing around with it on both test net and mainnet there are wallets that support it such as Argent so yeah just great to see the stock net ecosystem continuing to grow here and you can check out this latest update which I'll link in the YouTube description below all right speaking of l2s uh well and l3s loop ring announced today that uh loop ring L3 is now officially live on tychos Alpha 3 ZK evm testnet so they say yeah this marks the beginning of our L3 Journey towards achieving greater scalability and highly optimized experiences tailored for our smart

contract our smart wallet and decentralized applications so it seems like Loop ring is look maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here but I think that what's gonna happen with Loop ring is that they're going to possibly just Sunset their L2 and go all in on this L3 on Taiko once it's live on mainnet it makes a lot more sense for them to do this in my opinion because the L2 like looping L2 hasn't gotten the traction that uh I I believe Lupine wanted it to get for a little quite a while now um core people from Loop ring uh left and started Tycho so there's a close relationship there and it makes a lot of sense for loopering just to piggyback off of Tycho right instead of trying to maintain their own L2 and their own L2 protocol they can become an L3 on top of

Tycho and then just benefit from all of tycho's growth uh yes Tycho is not live yet it's very new still and maybe uh Lupine is going to just have like a wait and see approach here but I wouldn't be surprised to see Loop ring Sunset there L2 and go all in on the L3 uh just purely for the fact that it's a lot easier for them to focus on that instead of trying to build out their own L2 um and I think that that and and I think that looping wants to be user-facing as well so an L3 is perfect for that because they want to get able to use their smart wallets uh and use their different applications that they've built out for for various different use cases uh so yeah I I'm making a prediction now that I believe at some point in the future Luke brings L2 will

be sunset in favor of its L3 and then everyone will just use their L3 on Tycho because the loop ring Tech uh isn't isn't bad um but I think that Tycho is going to be a lot better in terms of uh the fact that the Taiko team's just focusing on the L2 itself they're not focusing on being particularly user-facing they're going to let the apps do that and loop ring at the end of the day is is an app right and they could do their own ad specific L2 if they wanted to but there are trade-offs there as well with things and obviously doing that as uh as an L2 comes with trade-offs and they could do like an arbitrim Nova L3 but I think why they've chosen Tycho is as I said they have close relationships with the people building Taiko because that a few of

them are former uh loot bring people uh and it's probably just easier for them to do that and work with them there and maybe the tiger technology also just benefits them and makes more a lot more sense for for what they're building than something else because it is I don't know if it is but it might be built using similar Tech because they're both a ZK roll-up CR so yeah that's really cool to see that Loop ring has uh put their L3 live on the uh the Taiko ZK VM testnet you can check out the Twitter thread for more information on that uh and uh yeah we'll see how Loop ring evolves from here and we'll see if they actually do end up sunsetting that L2 in favor of this L3 uh sometime in the future but I think on that note that's going to be it for today's episode 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