Ethereum client diversity, Polygon going green - The Daily Gwei Refuel #353 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where wake up the latest news the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 13th of april 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so vitalik put out a tweet today uh basically asking or he said what are some decisions or trade-offs in ethereum protocol design that you want to see explained better now there are a lot of good uh responses to this with responses from vitalik himself my thing was basically replying with probably everything got to do with why the gas fees are high at layer one you know what the gas limit is how it works why there's a free market why this is needed to maintain decentralization et cetera et cetera unfortunately vitaly didn't reply to to my uh tweet there maybe he's gonna write a blog post about it because i

really do think that we need uh kind of like more and more uh education around that i mean obviously i do plenty of it on the refuel and in my newsletter but i think that there's still a lot of people out there who just have absolutely no idea why the gas fees are higher at layer one and what you know the road map that ethereum is taking in order to to scale as well uh and then there was a bunch of other kind of people asking questions getting replies from vitalik with links to previous work that he had done uh which is which is really really cool i mean i i just wanted to highlight this because i highly recommend uh jumping into this twitter thread uh and basically checking out all the questions and answers basically an ama with vitalik right live on twitter here and uh one thing that

actually stuck out to me was this one where someone asked you know what how did the number 328 come to be to be a solo stake or a solo validator and i've spoken about this in a discord channel before but basically the reason it's like this is because um it's based on this logic in this blog post which you can read but if the deposit size was higher then fewer people can participate obviously right risking centralization but if the deposit size is lower then the chain suffers a higher cost of verification quote-unquote overhead in in the blog post that vitalik wrote risking sacrificing decentralization differently so basically uh you know i've kind of like said this before in the discord channel where i said you know if it was lower then it would it would basically uh it could lead to destabilization of the beacon

chain because there'd just be too many validators uh now as as it kind of gets better over time as the beacon chain gets better over time we may be able to one day lower that amount obviously 32 is a lot these days right like i think when this was written it was uh i think 32 was uh was um a lot cheaper i'm just kind of like going up to the top here um but yeah i mean when that decision was made i'm pretty sure eve wasn't like pretty sure he was still in triple digits and probably low to mid triple digits at that point uh so yeah obviously 32 wasn't very much money then and no one expected eighth to go as crazy as it did like as fast as it did i i honestly like obviously i'm super bullish on eighth but i never expected

eth to go that crazy i mean we went from 80 in march 2020 to 4400 in may of 2021 so just over a year we went like 40 plus x no one no one saw that coming right especially because everyone thought the world was ending when covert first kind of like came to be so you know they can kind of like be forgiven for thinking that thirty tweet was quote unquote cheap or relatively cheap back in the day but as i said it wasn't um the 32 wasn't chosen based on the kind of like dollar amount of eighth it was more like chosen sorry it was more chosen based on what the protocol would handle at the time and as i said as time goes on as the protocol gets better we may be able to lower that because because it can handle more validators uh there but i mean i i

highly recommend reading this whole thread from from vitalik here because he links to a bunch of different great things you can read i mean you could spend all day on this with all the stuff that he linked to and all the rabbit holes you can basically go down there's so much documentation out there around lots of this stuff so i highly recommend giving that a read there and also i mean just keep scrolling down because like there's so many comments and answers from vitalik like it's crazy it's just buried in underneath and there's also answers from other people too to some of the questions which i thought was really cool so yeah it was just basically like an impromptu ama that vitalik did on twitter here all right so tim baico put out a tweet today that i found uh interesting that i wrote a newsletter about today where he

said having multiple client teams for ethereum definitely adds complexity but boy does it ever increase the amount of brainpower we have going into this thing i don't think it'd be possible to get so many super smart folks working on the protocol with a single implementation and then tim continues by saying same thing for doubling down on rollups instead of execution sharding no way we'd have half the teams we currently do working on scaling with a more centralized roadmap so i want to focus on the first part of the of the tweet here ethereum currently has nine different clients being developed uh across the consensus and execution layers or quote-unquote eth1 and e2 if you want to call them that and each of these teams varies in size of course but if you were to kind of like add up all the people working on ethereum core

development today it would be i think 150 to 200 people that are like actually working on ethereum core development across uh the the client teams um in actual engineering work and research work and testing and all that sort of stuff it's about that right now if we only had one client like if we only had death for example uh i think that that number would be a lot less it would probably be less than 50 probably even way less than that right maybe less than 20 people and we wouldn't be able to attract a lot of the people that we've been able to attract because of the fact that everyone would be just basically um working on geth and not working on other clients in different kind of like languages and doing doing things their own way for example geth is written in the go

programming language whereas something like uh lighthouse is written in rust from memory right uh prism is written in go but it's a different thing it's on the consensus layer right instead of the execution layer so there's all these kind of like things that that add up and i think that i completely agree with tim here that obviously this is added complexity but the trade-off uh which i think is a very good trade-off is that we've managed to attract a lot more brain power into ethereum which is what ethereum needs ethereum can't just get by with a handful of people uh working on it ethereum requires lots of of um super smart people to work on it because ethereum's roadmap is very ambitious it's not like bitcoin where it's basically finished and they add an upgrade every four years which basically you know is a very very minor upgrade uh

ethereum adds upgrades ideally like every six months right and they're major things and ethereum has as i said a very very ambitious roadmap so there's no way that roadmap will be able to get executed on if we only had a handful of people working on it so i'm i really love uh that tim kind of like brought this up and also you know he brought up roll-ups right and the layer turquoise system instead of what's called execution sharding which was the original sharding road map and i think this is good as well because it means that we can have like you know a thousand roll-ups blossom on top of of layer one ethereum and each of those have their own team have their own funding have uh their own knowledge and specializations building their own you know technology and then it and then we get like what we have today which is you

know 10 20 roll-up roll-ups live right now you know some of them are forks and and and that but like there's 506 kind of like front runners like big teams that are that have got massive amounts of funding valued at billions of dollars uh from their latest funding rounds uh and working on absolutely amazing bleeding edge tech that actually has a lot of implications for layer one ethereum as well and helps with layer one uh there too so if you add up everyone working on layer one and layer two uh you are gonna get to you know 500 plus people like layered to it the layer two ecosystem has a lot of people working on it and you know maybe not on the core protocol itself but if you were to count the the people working at the layer 2 teams that are working in

community and marketing and business development and which i think you should count those people yeah there's easily like 500 plus probably people working across layer one and layer two uh in kind of like getting adoption to to go up there so that's very very cool to see and i thought this was just a great tweet from tim because you know there's been talk about ethereum being you know overly complex or too complex lately and i i kind of like gave my piece on that a few weeks ago where i said that i think ethereum's actually gotten simpler over time but in terms of the amount of moving parts there is on the social side it's definitely grown a lot from where it was but that's just an inevitability because as the ethereum ecosystem gets more adoption it's going to grow and grow and grow there's going to be much

more people uh involved in it and they're go you know some people will be involved in core development some people will be with d5 with dows nfts people will pick their poison and that's just how things happen like we can't just remain a small ethereum network forever like ethereum wasn't just going to remain a bunch of of djinns uh basically uh uh playing around with with you know the same sort of money uh all the time ethereum has grown to what it is today and it continues to grow so very very uh awesome to see that of course but also awesome to just kind of reflect here and see that yes you know ethereum may have gotten more complex on the social layer over time but that's actually a good thing because what we've been able to do by doing that is attract all these super smart people to to the

ecosystem so i thought that was really cool all right so superfiz shared a a new kind of i guess look at client diversity today uh we're basically showing that prism's at 46 now now this data i don't think is accurate um super fizz followed this up and said you know this is maybe dirty data and this is the data that's coming from amiga labs so you can actually uh kind of like uh toggle it here and it's actually even been updated and now it says 60 for prism from mega labs and then you've got sigma prime's block print which is the thing that michael sprout was working on which shows that at 51 percent look it's it's hard to tell like you're never going to get like a certain kind of percentage here this is just going to be an

an estimation but if we take you know sigma prime and megas kind of like figures and put them together we can safely say you know that prism's at around 60 right now which is lower than it was the other day uh which is obviously really really awesome to see client diversity is objectively getting better no matter about this exact percentage here it is objectively getting better and prism just being below 66 percent is already a huge win as i've explained before so very very cool to see this but i do wonder why uh you can see here mega labs data was was updated and now they're at 60 but sigma prime's data is at 51 which is lower which is just you know slightly higher than um than what this was here uh it's as i said like i i don't know it's hard to kind of like get the

accuracy here but as i said like i think you can have relatives certainly that prism is about 60 right now and falling from there which is really cool now speaking of client diversity here this is on the consensus layer side this is on the kind of like quote unquote e2 side if we move over to the quote unquote eth1 side it's not looking too flash hot either geth is at uh no i shouldn't say either it's just not looking too flash hot geth accounts for around 83 percent of the network there now as a as exists today this isn't like a do or diet issue um it obviously isn't ideal but it's not a do or die issue post merge from what i understand the execution layers being this kind of like and and geth being this dominant is

actually just as bad as prison being uh you know or or a um or lighthouse or wherever else on the consensus layer side having that that that um 66 plus because these clients basically talk to each other and are going to be one uh post-merge so we needed another push to basically get geth below 66 now i don't think this is going to happen before the merge i don't think uh it's you know as critical because geth is obviously much more battle tested than any of the consensus layer clients by far client diversity on the execution layer side has been a bit hit or miss because we've had teams you know fall out like parity obviously was building their client for a while then they fell out that became open ethereum and then open ethereum is kind of like i think it's still being worked on but not not in a major way

then eragon came onto the scene which is second here at 8.8 percent but and obviously there's another mine and basil as well but they're not as near as mature as as geth and a lot of people don't don't kind of like really trust running these other things just yet uh but they're all good clients don't get me wrong but i i guess like we're gonna need another push around execution layer client diversity sometime soon i don't know when that's gonna happen maybe it happens before the merge maybe it happens after the merge but yeah that's definitely a just as important so if you are running a geth full node today switch over to something else uh to help client diversity here you can switch over to aragon open ethereum nevermind or baysu all good clients for you to for you to kind of like check out and run

there but this website that i'm looking at is client diversity.org by the way uh so you can go check this out there's links to everything you need to know about client diversity here which is which is really really cool too to see uh and speaking of client diversity summer esat has put together an introductory article for a series of guys that he's working on to help existing ethereum stake is migrate from the current majority client prism to one of the minority clients so this is going to be cool i think this is going to be really cool when uh when he's kind of like done these articles you can see them here this introduction which is this article then there's going to be four separate ones from migrating from prism to nimbus teku lighthouse and and lodestar and then obviously a conclusion there so just wanted to give you guys a

heads up uh you should definitely go follow some of esat's work he's been doing a lot of great guides for ethereum staking for a long time now uh you can see here he had some of the first guides uh for for ethereum staking all the way back i think when the before the bigger game even came out you can see here uh november 2020 so that was before the beacon chain went live a few days before there uh and and those are kind of guides uh hold up to today so definitely go check out all of his work i'll link it in the youtube description all right so paulie now put out a really really interesting uh tweet thread uh i think just after i recorded yesterday's refuel and that i really want to cover here so he starts off by saying does erp 4844

impact decentralization i.e the cost of running nodes yes but not materially so now background erp 4844 is the eip to reduce core data costs in order to give rollups more scalability uh so it increases sustained hard drive requirements in doing this note hard drive not ssd by around 200 gigabyte and bandwidth requirements by about eight megabits per second the overwhelming bottleneck for ethereum is still going to remain state growth so he goes on to say you know why this is the case why you know why you already need kind of like uh a terabyte's worth of ssd kind of like storage for state and all that sort of stuff when running consensus and execution layer clients here um and then goes on to say yes 4844 is is definitely a um

a block size increase but it's a relatively mild one and uh even that is temporarily mitigated soon after his dank shot dank sharding rolls out as well uh remember 48 44 history unlike state will expire straight away but doesn't have a long-term burden on the connect consensus uh uh network yeah sorry i should say i i get sometimes confused with these numbers i think 4844 is the uh the state expiry uh uh kind of eip here if i just quickly look it up 40 eip 4844 no erp 4544 is the proto yeah proto dang sharding eip with which is the um the blobs of data sorry i should say not the um which is going to allow kind of like roll-ups to have cheaper fees yeah there was there was another one that was a 48

88 or something or there was another the numbers were so similar and i kept getting confused between between the two but yeah 4844 is the blob transactions that i've spoken about before which is code named proto-dank sharding so that's what polynei is talking uh talking about here but i um i think this is always good to kind of like reflect on these sorts of things like yes it's going to this is this goes back to what i was talking about with trade-offs this will marginal i mean marginally kind of not really not materially so as um polynomials here affect decentralization yes it's going to increase the cost of running nodes but in return we get massive scalability for layer twos i think that's a pretty awesome trade-off right if you just increase the the cost of running a a full node or a

validator or consensus kind of like node or anything like that by um a non-material amount then and to get that kind of like extra scale layer two it's just a no-brainer to me like i i don't see a negative to this it's kind of like so so for example going with the gas limit right if we were to go from like a 15 million gas limit to 20 million gas limit i think that would impact decentralization a lot more than what 4844 would do and you wouldn't get anywhere near the amount of scalability gains you would uh with kind of like increasing the gas limit that you do with 4844 so i think taking that into account it's a good trade-off to have but definitely check out this this tweet thread from polonia i'll link it in the youtube description uh it's it's pretty good to kind of get across

this sort of stuff because this is going to be the main stuff that's talked about after the merge i believe it's going to be all about that shanghai upgrade and all about getting these aips in that help with layer 2 scalability uh as part of i think the surge is what it's called on vitalx roadmap which is basically getting you know all that scalability for layer twos in order to finally get those fees down to subset transactions all right so uh retweeted okay kucoin or kucoin today and said deposits and withdrawals and on kucoin for the arbitration one network are now live so another exchange is now live with deposits and withdrawals i used to use kucoin in back in the day before dexa's had a lot of liquidity and things like that so i'm not sure who uses them these days i usually use them

to trade coins which you can now do on unisop so you don't need to to use the centralized exchanges but if you are on there and you're a regular user of them you can now use kucoin uh to deposit and withdraw eth usdc and usdt to the arbitrary one network which is always a good thing to see you know you guys know that i'm all for centralized exchange bridges into layer twos they're critical to layer two future and it's exactly what we wanna see so definitely go check this out if you're a kucoin user i keep switching between kcoin and kucoin i'm just gonna say kucoin all right so maple finance uh which is a project i've spoken about before but they basically uh do institutional kind of like grade uh loans and and they're basically they basically build themselves as an institutional crypto

capital network um and obviously they're on ethereum so you can kind of like see today they've announced a partnership with maker and they're kind of like calling this partnership a way to scale the digital digital economy so this partnership would see makers d3m module and maple's pool delegate model and smart contract kit combined so this is more on kind of like i guess the um the developer governance front here and you can kind of like see how this is all going to work uh and how this kind of like can work with with maple and how they can all work together i'll let you guys give it a give this a blog post a read here uh but this is very cool i like these synergies between d5 protocols like i'm always a big fan of them and i think you know maple finance in particular which is a project i

remind you guys that i'm a seed investor in so just the disclosure that's why i've been following them so closely but they announced the other day that they're actually profitable which is crazy like i forgot to cover this the other day but uh yeah in this blog post they said mabel turned a profit in q1 2022 attributable to the increased appetite for undeclared lending from new and old borrowers across all pools and you can see kind of like um the details of this year in the treasury report there are not many d5 protocols out there that are actually profitable like net profitable you know there are some that will say they're profitable but they're actually paying for that through kind of like token inflation and things like that and massive kind of like token inflation but you can see here the maple dow's quarterly profit and loss is they

made 226 000 of kind of like profit in in q1 here whereas like all these other quarters here you can see that they didn't make anything like that in brackets means that they they kind of like lost money there i think this is super cool like i think we need to be encouraging teams like this and we need to be supporting them because at the end of the day a lot of these d5 protocols are businesses i mean pretty much all of them are businesses and if they can't turn a profit well i mean and if they're subsidizing growth of their token their token's just going to go to zero like over over the long term i spoke about this yesterday about how this is another thing you have to kind of like factor in when evaluating a token is like how is the protocol paying

for growth are they just paying out their token and putting cell pressure on their token in order to subsidize growth you know are they profitable do you know do they have long-term sustainability is it sustainable without token rewards without liquidity mining all that sort of stuff there so that's something i forgot to cover the other day that's that's relevant to here but i definitely recommend giving this post with maker and maple a read to see what this is all about i think it's very cool and as i said i've been a big fan of maple a long for a long time seed investor in them you know the funny thing is like i remember meeting the maple founders in melbourne for a coffee it would have been early 2019 i think uh while i wasn't even working in crypto at that point uh and i was just crazy like

they were talking about it back then so they've been hard at work at this for a while now and their protocol has been growing so well lately um and uh and kind of like they're doing a lot of really cool things and they're profitable i yeah i i maple is one of my favorite projects and i haven't spoken about them in a little while on the on the refill because i don't like to shield the projects i'm invested in too much uh i don't want to basically because i have a token i don't want to basically say hey go buy the token or anything like that but yeah maple is one of one of the things that i'm i'm most excited about because they're definitely serving a need um on the institutional side of things you know i don't know if you'd call them like true d5 because they're

like with institutions they're kind of like acting as a um as a kind of like a bridge into or a service uh with the kind of like the rest of d5 but uh you know they're definitely uh doing a lot of good work so secure those to them but definitely give this blog post a read i'll link it in the description all right so nomad which is a cross-chain communication protocol announced today that they have raised a 22 million seed round led by poli chain with participation from one kx ethereal and hack vc here with you know a bunch of kind of like funds and angels participating as well now the reason i laughed there when i said 22 million dollar seed round is because this means their valuation from what i saw is like 250 million or

something for a seed round now for those of you who aren't familiar with funding rounds a seed round is like normally one of the first rounds that is done there are like you could have pre-seed and like friends and family but seed round is usually kind of like that big thing like you might get a pre-seed round for just as kind of like uh get to get a bit of money in just to prove out the concept and then you go and raise a seed round and seed rounds normally are not 22 million dollars and 100 definitely not usually valued at 250 million dollars so that's crazy there uh but i mean congrats to them on raising this i mean that's an amazing amount of money to raise for a seed round and i'm not picking i'm not trying to pick on them or anything there's been plenty of uh

really ridiculous rounds in crypto i've participated in some of them as well so i have not one to talk but it's just funny how like these valuations are so high uh in in the private market they're still high i thought that would come down by now but they're still high but enough about that uh nomad as i said there's another cross-chain kind of like communications protocol another bridging protocol i believe they're working closely with connects on a few different things which is which is really cool to see um obviously their goal is to make it make you know cross-chain stuff as easy as possible doing you know crosstrain exchange message passing all that sort of stuff there you can read more about their raising their blog post of course um in terms of like their tech stack i'm not sure how much they've they've kind

of like put out on their tech stack um there's been one blog post about their design philosophy which i probably highlighted on the refill back in the day so you can give that a read as well if you're interested in learning more about nomad but yeah i mean it seems like a lot all these vcs and angels and things like that are very confident in in kind of like um in nomad in their technology and at the end of the day like i've said before that i'm really bullish on bridges in general maybe i don't know cross chain i'm more bullish on multi-chain stuff which is basically ethereum and the l2s but regardless you're still going to need that bridging infrastructure and and things like that so you know that applies to layer twos as much as it applies to other networks and things out

there so cool to see them raise this round to continue building out their their vision for what across chain world can look like all right so polygon announced today that they have gone green so they've unveiled something called the green manifesto which is a smart contract uh with planet earth apparently and you can see all the details here i believe they've partnered up with uh klimodao for for this uh and uh or are kind of like working with them and they've pledged up to 20 million dollars to take immediate steps to offset the ecosystem's environmental footprint entirely so this is the blog post here where you can read what this is going on about i i believe that yeah i saw klima was in here somewhere i'm not uh maybe i'm maybe i'm blind here yeah climber down yeah so so

clemente is going to be working with them to kind of like do stuff like analyzing the polygon network's energy footprint and supporting its emission management and mitigation strategy which is very very cool i mean i i think this is just really overall cool because polygon i mean already is uh very environmentally friendly because it's a pos chain it's not that pow channel it doesn't use mining or anything like that but they want to go further than that and they want to offset basically everything or as much as they possibly can across everything that they're doing which i haven't seen any other proof of state network do or or kind of like attempt to do or speak about so i'm hoping that polygons kind of like initiative here actually um uh pushes this forward right and and starts a trend here because that's just yeah super super cool that

they're they're doing this and the way they're doing this is their polygon is buying or this is the first step is buying four hundred thousand dollars worth of high quality and traceable bct which is the carbon credit tokens from climadow uh and carbon credits as well at the equivalent of roughly 90 000 tons of co2 emissions polygon will then selectively retire the offsets with the carbon token pools that meet the highest standards for additional additionality and positive environmental impacts very very cool i love this uh i know klima i spoke about them a while ago um and i did warn against people getting involved with uh their kind of like token and stuff because it was like an olympus fork and the token did what i thought it was going to do which was kind of like bleed out unfortunately that's not a comment about the project

they're selling the project's doing a lot of great stuff but uh yeah at the time there was so much hype around it and everyone's like oh my god you know this is gonna be the next thing and then obviously olympus collapsed still there but like the price went down a lot uh and then treasure and wonderland all that sort of stuff not treasure sorry um wonderland uh collapsed and and and and things like that so yeah uh i i i don't make any comment about kind of like uh the token price what that's going to do anything with climber but the project itself i think is still very very cool they're still kind of like committed to their mission they haven't gone anywhere it's not like it was it was a scam or anything or a rug pool uh and they're working with polygon now which is just

really awesome to see so definitely check out this full manifesto blog post if you want more details here and you can check out the website as well both will be linked in the youtube description all right so nifty island has announced something today called palm dao which basically uh is a dow that's going to be acquiring the best nfts putting them in and putting them in the hands of the community and creating game ready assets around them and playable and nifty island and other game worlds you can see here uh palm dao there's just kind of like a splash splash screen here or i guess some coming soon website here uh with a bit more details you know what is what is palm down they describe it as something to push the metaverse forward by collecting the best nfts and down members are able to utilize those assets

in nifty island and other game worlds now the cool thing about this is the way it's kind of governed is by palm holders so there's these kind of like nfts that they that nifty island issued called palms i own one of the neon ones um very very cool and the kind of like palm holders basically get to get to govern this and get to kind of like play around with it uh and things like that so very very cool uh that this kind of like came out today and very cool it was announced today i i really like that they're trying to push the kind of like space forward here with nfts nifty allen like you guys know i've been a fan of nifty island for a while now uh but yeah if you want more details on this uh definitely go check out uh

kind of like the side and the twitter thread and these are the projects that they're supporting right now uh obviously you know the board ape yacht club uh the idols which is one that's becoming very popularly i believe stuff like mfa's uh tubby cats you know cool cats and my ladies which twitter blew up about for some reason and i didn't get it but yeah and then a bunch of others i mean these are all pretty high quality uh nft projects i think uh from from what i can see here these are the ones that i see talked about a lot um especially obviously board apes and stuff like that regardless of what you think about them they've got massive communities they're doing a lot of stuff they're actually executing on their road maps um maybe maybe i don't know about about me bits though because maybe it's

obviously a lava labs thing and it's curious that crypto punks is in here man i don't follow nfts much but it's funny how quickly crypto punks fell out of favor because of the fact of lava labs not doing much with it and then lava labs sold to uh yuga labs which was uh you know the people behind board ape yacht club and yeah i haven't really heard much about crypto punks like i'm not saying i'm bearish on punks or anything like that but it's just funny how they kind of for now have lost lost the cultural kind of like attention war in the nft land um i think that's for a number of different reasons but i'm no expert on nft so i'm not going to bore you with um with the details they'll bore you with my speculation but yeah just funny to see that they aren't on

this list here maybe they will be in the future but uh but yeah anyway definitely check this out i'll link it in the description all right lastly here my second talk that i did at blockchain week is now live for you to kind of have a have a gander at so this was my one with kane warwick we basically talked about mostly about defy and ethereum and things like that it was it was quite a fun talk it was the last talk of um of the melbourne event here so if you're interested in that you can definitely check it out it'll be linked in the youtube description um but i think 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 me a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter

join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone