Goerli forks to Shapella, 3mil ETH burned and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #549 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel wake up latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host the internet designer and test the 15th of March 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so apologies for missing yesterday's episode my cough unfortunately came back with a vengeance so I wasn't able to record an episode uh but I'm feeling a lot better today actually it's the first day in I think a week and a half where I haven't felt absolutely exhausted and had to have a nap or anything like that uh covid I think affects everyone differently and it was really weird for me I kind of just had I mean I had the fever when I was in Denver actually um and then I had the cough of course but I was just like really really tired and I couldn't really focus on on things

and I had to have naps during the day and that really actually annoyed me because usually I like to go the whole day and I don't like napping I just you know go to sleep when I sleep and then get up and and do everything but uh but yeah that was kind of frustrating but anyway as I said I'm feeling a lot better now shouldn't be missing any more episodes so let's get into today's one uh which is news of girly forking or successfully upgrading to chappella so you can see here parathosh put out a thread saying that uh it's all well and done I think there were a few issues with finalization because of the fact that people were just being lazy and didn't update their nodes in time I update their software in time in order to uh be on their shapala Fork but I

think that's all being resolved and it did end up finalizing in the end there so everything's gone through all right from what I can see there are people doing withdrawals on Gurley and that's all working fine so very very cool too to see that there now obviously next is mainnet I don't think there's a mainnet date being given yet but as I've been saying two guys I think it's going to happen pretty much like mid-april at this rate I guess because the next all-call devs called I'll probably decide on a date since everything's gone well and good on the test Nets now but not too far away I actually saw today um a few different things actually on on Twitter around withdrawals through the different uh Services the different uh staking services so apparently Lido's withdrawal function won't actually be

ready till mid-may now this is simply because they have to integrate their own withdrawal function into their own smart contracts and they have to get that audited and all that stuff there I don't know why it's taking them till mid May when they've known that withdrawals has been coming for quite a while now and they could have done this probably sooner but I'm not going to throw any kind of any shade there I think that rocketpool will be ready in time they've got their Atlas upgrade going live relatively soon so they should be ready in time uh the centralized exchange is not sure but I'm assuming they'll be ready in time as well but obviously Lido being as big as it is it's kind of a blow I guess for me it's kind of like I saw it and I was like you know what this

is not this is not fun right this put this is kind of silly because it means that we have to wait till mid-may now to see how much eath would actually leave Lido and go elsewhere uh which is obviously not uh not ideal but that's the way it is it's not too far away it's probably going to be about yeah a month after it goes live on mainnet but still that's a month's worth that I guess could have been done in time uh but I'm not sure why it wasn't there but as I said I'm not sure about the other services besides rocker pool uh coinbase and Kraken and binance and all that we'll have to see what happens there but I think they should be ready in time so that'll be all well and good there but anyway great to see that uh girlie has fought to chappella and uh

yeah I'll keep you guys updated on when the main net date gets announced all right so the initial kzg ceremony uh contribution period has now ended so it ran for two months from January 13th to March 13th and now for the next two weeks the lobby will process existing occupants but not at add additional ones so if you were wearing the lobby and you were trying to get your um I guess contribution processed well that's what's happening over the next two weeks and we ended at about 75 000 contributions and by the time I guess it gets through the rest of them we should be up to almost 90 000 contributions which is very cool uh and they're and then after that there's also going to be a special contribution period from April

1 to 16 uh which will allow for a handful of more complex contributions that have been allocated slots uh and then um Trent van amps continuous yeah some have large groups collectively generating entropy or particular setup restrictions which may need more time for computation these contributions were proposed by the community and funded through the kcg grants round open for anyone to submit to so yeah I guess like the final old as a mission will go in on uh you know by April 16th here maybe we do make it to that hundred thousand uh submissions that I originally said that it'd be great to see a hundred thousand unique submissions here obviously some of those are Bots and some of those are people farming airdrops but um from what I've seen it doesn't seem to be the majority there's a lot of

people just wanting to get involved with it wanting to contribute wanting to being part of ethereum History here which is obviously always great to see but uh but yeah if you're still in the queue and you've still got your kind of browser open to get your submission through then leave it open because there is this special contribution period for the next two weeks uh or I should say this um backlog contribution period and then that special contribution period will be going from April 1st to 16th uh there all right Mario Havel has shared a picture of the third cohort of the ethereum protocol Fellowship members as it is now over um he says here many talented fellows had opportunity to contribute to various protocol projects and after months of

work it was a great success and then Mario continues reflecting on the cohort projects and onboarding core devs in this little thread here which of course I'll link in the YouTube description below but you can see the photo here all the people that participated great to see this see Danny Ryan right at the the front there uh all happy smiles uh probably because you know as I've kind of described before this um uh this Fellowship is basically tasked with the mission of getting more people involved with ethereum called protocol development and called protocol research and of course the existing protocol devs or research um uh core research people like Danny Ryan would be all smiles here because they're getting more help with uh with core protocol work but yeah great to see this I think I've talked about this before on on the refueler

bunch as well and I think that there'll be a fourth cohort announced relatively soon he also keep an eye out for that if that's something you're interested in but as I said Mario put together a thread here it's it's quite a detailed thread that you can go check out for yourself there's a bunch of resources there as well to learn more about this and to see what uh what what they've been up to here uh but great great picture uh and congrats to all the fellows here on a job well done all right so raider.network has a thread on the crazy on chain Weekender action from an ethereum infrastructure perspective so obviously over the weekend we saw a lot of volatility on the ethereum network because of the usdc d-pag and all that banking stuff that was going on and of course uh you can

see this obviously because the chain is fully transparent while raider.network has a great overview here so they've got an overview of uh what happens on the I guess uh staking side of things on the validator side of things so you can see here that overall uh overall network of Effectiveness actually dropped a bit to 95.7 from 986.2 percent uh as the all-time average and most likely due to slightly higher percent of missed blocks the performance degradation is evident in the per operator view as we observed higher than normal performance under the network average from from more operators than we normally see obviously because of that volatility and all the mov stuff going on absolutely crazy and then they talk about the Mev stuff that was going

on and and how it was the big I think it was the biggest day in mov history as I highlighted yesterday as well uh they highlighted a bit of things around the block Builder side of things and how Builder 0x69 had a fill day serving blocks that were almost two times as valuable as those from the flashbots builders representing 37 of mainnet blocks and there's a bunch of other kind of stats here along with the highest proposal payments so there was a block that was worth 60 each so whoever was able to get that block is very lucky um I don't know if it's actually listed here who got that block I it probably wasn't a solo validator it was probably one of the staking pools but imagine that you're a solo validator and you get a 68th block that's just almost two new validators right just crazy thinking

about the rewards here and it really is a lottery as I've said before the Mev ecosystem really is a lottery uh you can win big or I guess like win small you win small uh most of the time because when you propose a block if you're using uh Mev boost then you're gonna be proposing a blocker Mev payment in it but in order to win that big payment there's only a short period of time for that because the volatility or this level of volatility doesn't last very long uh especially in obviously a bear market so it really is like winning the lottery but if you do yeah you could stand to get a very very juicy proposal payout here and this eighth is actually available to you instantly because it's an execution layer reward so we'll go straight to your nominated address and you can use it straight away

there's no need to wait for withdrawals there's no need to wait for even post withdrawals to to kind of process it it's available to you on the execution layer side of things which is obviously all the more awesome because imagine if you get a 68th payment uh add 40 to that you've got two new validators that you can spin up instantly I mean I wish that were me you know like that Meme God I wish that were me uh yeah for sure but unfortunately not me and it was actually funny today uh I was I had a block proposal that I was I was due for and my internet went off for six hours of course I was waiting for a block proposal and I saw one come in and I'm like yeah and then my internet was off for six hours so I actually missed that block proposal so

that sucks uh and the reason why my backup I I I've said to you guys before I have backup internet that I that I use but unfortunately that that can't last very long because I don't have much data on it and staking is actually very data heavy and I don't just have my solo sticking box I also have my Odell box or my rockable mini pool box as well so yeah it chews through the data very quickly so I tend to not use the backup for very long and yeah my internet was unfortunately down for around I believe six hours in the end it ended up being and I missed a block proposal because of it so damn you staking gods for uh blessing me with bad luck I guess but it's the aim of the game and as I said before that's the the most punishing

thing for the I mean I guess the biggest punishment for going offline is missing block proposals uh the inactivity leak is very forgiving so uh you know not not too big of a deal there but anyway you can check out this thread for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right speaking of staking we have an update out of swell Network so they've got the latest uh Deep dive on swell with audit details guarded launch update and a sneak peek at the new interface and it seems that that they've also changed their branding a bit here which is pretty cool to see their design branding so great little new logo there which I like but uh but yeah so you can see here in the blog post the smart contract audits have commenced they're using Sigma Prime who are the developers behind the lighthouse

consensus client to audit their smart contracts uh they're going along with test Nets they have a guarded launch set for early April uh and yeah they talked about their their new branding as well here along with a bunch of top tweets so soil is making moves I think they've been uh under the radar for quite a while now I've talked about them a bunch on the refill before but they're definitely making moves and I guess they're waiting right up until withdrawals are enabled in order to get their system live as I said there's a guarded launch set for early April which is going to happen after the smart contract audit here and then uh I'm sure they're going to kind of raise that limit on their guarded launch as time goes on there so great to see this coming in time for withdrawals as I've

mentioned plenty of times on the refuel that great reshuffling uh of steak that I've talked about I think is going to happen definitely post withdrawals it's not going to happen instantly it's probably going to be like a six to 12 month thing where we see a lot of steak uh uh reshuffled and we see a lot of people uh staking with uh sorry withdrawing from certain providers and going with other ones I'm very very curious as I've said before to see what the staking uh distribution looks like or the stake distribution looks like 12 months after uh withdrawals go live so we'll have to see how that shakes out there but if you want to read this deep dive on swell for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description for you to do so all right I did mention the EULA Labs uh uh exploit the other day which was

unfortunate and honestly it's really unfortunate uh because there's been a lot of people that I've seen that have lost money in this it affected a lot of people within our community uh which is just super super sad uh the funds have not been returned yet uh it ended up being around 200 million dollars that was stolen there are messages going out in order to kind of offer a bug bountif or I guess like a bounty to the hacker basically saying hey you can keep 10 million dollars if you return the rest uh nothing has happened there yet and I believe Oiler is going to be putting a one million dollar Bounty up for people to report on uh if they can find an information about who the hackers actually are look I don't know who the

hackers are I mean obviously there are only probably a few select groups that could do a hack like this and also get away with it unfortunately if it is the North Korean hacking Group which has been pretty prevalent within crypto those funds are never ever coming back like I don't think North Korea gives you about being found or being found out uh those funds are never coming back but as I said it's not confirmed uh no one knows who it is just yet but I'm sure it'll probably come out eventually but there's also an update thread here from oil Labs talking about what they've done uh they stopped the attack they basically pause the contracts I believe or pause one of the modules uh they engage trm labs and chain analysis and the broader each security Community to help with the investigation they

notified and shared information with us and UK law enforcement and also they're clarified in their thread that the code that people were saying uh was added and wasn't audited is actually false so the vulnerable code was reviewed and approved during an outside audit but the vulnerability was not discovered as part of the audit now I don't know if that audit was done by the same six firms that audited the original code uh it may have just been done by one or two firms and have been different firms that did that but the actual code that was changed post audit uh or post I guess like those uh those six audits that they have had was audited it wasn't just put in there and no one looked at it the bug

I believe stayed around for eight months yeah it was it was like for eight months before someone exploited it uh or the vulnerability I should say which was very unfortunate here um but there was a one million bug bounty in place during that time as well now obviously this is the this is the kind of like Catch-22 with bug bianni's or the shitty thing about bug bounties is that okay there's a million dollar bug burning up for grabs but depending on who you are do you take the million dollar bug Bounty or do you steal 200 million dollars I think you're gonna go with 200 million dollars especially if you're a group that doesn't give a like the North Korean hacking groups they obviously don't care about any of that like for them it's like okay well we're gonna steal this 200 million who's gonna stop us no one's gonna stop us uh

and we're just gonna we're just gonna walk away with it and that's what they've done with a bunch of other hacks that they've that they've kind of been involved in and that's what makes these hacks so I guess bad is that because crypto is a I mean a global thing because these networks are Global that there is access uh able to be had anywhere in the world and there there is literally nothing that can be done against North Korea like no nation state is going to pursue North Korea and say hey like what are they going to say to them hey pay the money back or else we're going to sanction you I mean they're already sanctioned pay the money back or else we're going to serve you with a warrant I mean they don't care this is the this is the thing this is

why I always talk about decentralization and security being so critically important because it's not the nation states that have a rule of law that are democracies that you have to worry about necessarily maybe you do in the in the longer term but it's these other ones it's these Rogue nation states like North Korea it's these these kind of dictatorships basically like North Korea and and others that you really have to worry about because they don't give a about the rule of law at all they're not scared of anything um they need the money for starters as well I mean someone made a joke that North Korea just funded the then the the a bunch of their next missile launchers right but seriously they do obviously need the money and as I said they don't care about the consequences so those are the actors that we are building the

systems to resist the ones that literally don't care about consequences will do whatever is possible to either steal money from a system or to stabilize it in such a way uh and that's what all of these protocols need to keep in mind whether it's a base layer protocol like ethereum itself or the D5 protocols built on top I think for the D5 protocols built on top they really need to think about this a lot more and obviously they get their audits done and Euler had six Audits and and obviously and obviously um they introduced this code and I don't know if it was audited by six different firms but things slip through audits guys like I mean I don't know how how much you guys know about audits themselves but a lot of them are just checklists a lot of them actually aren't as sophisticated as you think they are

and I saw some some chatter today about how this uh chat GPT could be used to audit code and how AI can actually be used to audit code I actually think that's a great use case of of AI using it to audit code because at the end of the day the Auditors are human they can miss things and they can miss things quite easily for a number of different factors whereas these AIS can also miss things but they can also uh learn from their mistakes a lot more rapidly than a human can and they're not necessarily going to be subject to the same kind of I guess human uh related pressures and human related intricacies when auditing things like that like for example an AI is not going to get tired right they're not going to be exhausted at the end of

the day and miss a bug in a contract they're just going to look at it laser focused on it and they're going to find whatever vulnerabilities they can and as I said of course they're going to miss things so having AI as as like a sidecar or as like a side kit to for an auditor I think it's going to be very very powerful uh obviously for things like D5 and just crypto more broadly but anyway you can read Euler's thread for yourself uh about what they've been doing I'll link in the YouTube description below but that is the latest on that unfortunately there has been no return of any of the funds so far and we'll have to see and wait and see how it all plays out all right so op Labs has posted a very short blog post just talking about their

path to to technical decentralization so it seems that they're taking a two-pronged approach here with their Milestones so there's Baseline decentralization and then there's Canon fault proofs so the Baseline decentralization is about decentralizing uh the uh Bridge especially and also having permissionless output proposals and then the cannon fault proofs decentralization is all about decentralizing the fault proof system uh so that it can actually be used in the wild because as you guys know right now uh fault proofs or fraud proofs are not live on the optimism mainnet yet it will be live with bedrock but it's going to be permissions well these are the two prongs that they're going down with technical decentralization it is a long term thing there they they say that

they're going to be focusing on fault proof decentralization in 2024 with the Baseline decentralization being a focus this uh this year uh so yeah this isn't going to happen anytime soon but there's still a credible path there's still a a path that everyone can can kind of see uh towards this happening and that's what I've been talking about a lot when I talk to people about these l2s and how they're currently very centralized the difference between the L2 or an L2 and an L1 is that l2s have a much more credible and easy path to decentralization than an L1 does across a number of different factors the biggest factor for me is the fact that it that an L2 is a one of n trust assumption where essentially you only need to trust uh one party right whereas

with an L1 it's a lot different it depends on the consensus mechanism but uh it's definitely a lot more than than just trusting one person you have to trust either one third or two-thirds of the network or something like that as I said depending on the network if it's a proof of stake proof of work Network as well uh it's a totally different ball game so that makes it a lot harder to decentralized and that that's a that's the beautiful thing about l2s is that they can be one of n uh of a one of entrust assumption because they basically Outsource their decentralization and and security to the L1 in in this case obviously ethereum so yeah that's why I've always said that I believe that these l2s are going to have a much easier time to decentralize and they've got a much more credible path

towards that as well all right so speaking of l2s Aztec Network I put out a FAQ Thread about why they are actually sunsetting Aztec connect now I remember the other day I discussed that I figured it had to do with regulatory pressure but they actually clarified that it hadn't got to do with that at all and I did mention that Aztec was a U.S company I believe I was getting them confused with another company they're actually a UK based company um and uh I mean I don't know how much that materially changes given that the US and UK are very similar on on certain things but just for for accuracy that was that was the case there uh and in this FAQ which I think that they should have put out originally they clarified a

bunch of things so they actually aren't shutting down Aztec at all they're just shutting down Aztec connect because it seems like it's not something that they necessarily wanted to focus on it was a distraction for them but they are continuing to build out their what they're calling their next Generation uh I guess privacy protocol which isn't L2 so I I've had people kind of come at me and ask hey it seems like they're building an L1 now no they're building a privacy preserving L2 an encrypted L2 here and they've clarified it on in this in this thread and uh they've as I said they've also said that uh they're not building an L1 uh and they weren't uh they weren't um sunsetting Aztec connect because of regulatory pressure they literally announced the answer that yeah they say we're under no regulatory pressure nor

have we filled any inquiries from law enforcement in law enforcement as their connect is and was compliant with UK law given Aztec as a UK company uh and then they also say that they have over 40 strong team members right now and they're actively hiring so that might be something that you're interested in uh but yeah I really enjoyed this thread I'll link it in the YouTube description for you to read it for yourself but as I said I feel like this should have been posted with the original blog post because there was a lot of confusion around why Aztec connect was so abruptly being shut down uh and obviously in the wake of the tornado cash sanctions we are kind of sensitive to privacy products being shut down uh so yeah I'm just glad Aztec put this thread out you can check it for yourself I'll link it

in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so eigenlayer has uh or is rolling out a refreshed visual identity and website so you can see here that they have a new brand identity that I think looks pretty cool I like it honestly uh eigen layer look the fonts are pretty funky there and then they've got like a new logo a new uh a kind of typography there and all that good stuff and they've got a new website or I guess like when you look on their website at eigenlayout.xyz as you can see here it looks very cool I look I like this I really do I like this kind of flat design where it's it's stylized it's got its kind of own feel going on uh with it and uh and and the website actually has a lot of information on it for you to

check out along with the white paper and things like that so you can go check that that out for yourself but great to see uh that this brand looks a lot more mature than the than the previous brand you know what's kind of funny I don't even remember what their previous brand was because it wasn't that uh I guess notable it was it was definitely a placeholder and now that they have a much better Brown identity in place this is definitely something I think people are going to uh going to remember and going to to kind of pay attention to so congrats to eigenlayer for the I guess uh new coat of paint here you can check out their website as I said it's at eigenlayer.xyz but I'll also link it in the YouTube description below and you can check out all the information on the

website there all right so bartek from the l2beat team has put out a tweet where he said on on the L2 beat risk tab you can learn about the data availability layer used by each L2 to call yourself a roll-up you must use a L1 ethereum on chain in this column but what data exactly is being made available and why it matters and bartek has a thread here discussing this and this is really cool because as I've said before if your data is off chain you can't be considered like a true L2 or a true roll-up you there's nothing wrong with being having a data off chain like a validium type construction is very uh is very useful for certain use cases but being technically accurate is what l2b is all

about it's what I'm all about so the fact that if you're if your data is not on chain you cannot be called a true roll-up or a true L2 now if your data is on chain but your proofs aren't on on chain then it's the same kind of thing so you have to have both things on chain you have to have your proofs your fraud or your validity proofs they have to be on the L1 on ethereum L1 for example and your data has to be on ethereum L1 because then you get and inherit the full security and decentralization of layer 1 ethereum now of course as I've mentioned plenty of times a lot of these things are centralized blah blah blah but I don't think that really it's kind of orthogonal to my point here in that just because it's centralized doesn't take away from the fact that

it's still a a true roll up it's still a true L2 and it's what we mean when we say when we say Roll-Ups here and I'm very very happy that l2beat exists because I know that there's always going to be a lot of confusion around this there is always going to be a lot of uh marketing spec depends the truth here I know for example that metis um never really mentioned that the that they weren't a roll up anymore when they've moved their data off chain they basically said hey you know we lowered fees by a lot or whatever right we lowered fees by uh considerable amounts uh but the only reason why they were able to do that is because they were storing their data off chain and they weren't a roll-up anymore so I think it's always good to make sure that you know what you're getting into

here and I think the Euler explains a reminder of this is that you shouldn't be putting all your funds in any particular protocol I should maybe have like a DJ in stack or a stack that you're comfortable losing uh and I've warned about this plenty of times before and I've told you guys plenty of times before a lot of this stuff is still beta software even the l2s I mean I don't have much of my funds on L2 still because they've they're centralized they're still quite early uh and they do have single points of failure but that's not to say you can't play around with things I mean I play around with my DJ and stack or uh and and obviously it'll depend on how much you want to play around with my rule of thumb is no more than 10 of total portfolio that is quite High

though it depends on what your percentage is like for example if you've got like a thousand dollars in crypto 10 you know a hundred dollars is probably gonna it's probably gonna hurt you if you if you lose that right um whereas if you've got a lot more money in crypto 10 may not hurt as much hey you've got like 100 000 in crypto maybe losing ten thousand dollars doesn't really affect you that much because you've still got 90 000 uh and you've got like a bigger buffer there but it's all down to the individual right so for me I mean I don't do much DJ and stuff these days but generally I I try not to put more than you know five maybe five to ten percent of my stack any of these things besides ethereum staking obviously I put a lot more of my

stack in ethereum staking there but there's still risks inherent with everything that you do and it's good to keep in mind and it's good to know uh what those risks are and I'm I'm kudos to L2 beat for being so transparent with these sorts of things and and having it on display for users to go check it out for themselves all right last up here just a quick shout out that we have burned three million eighth since erp1559 so yeah p1559 uh went live 586 days ago man it has been a long time since uh 1559 went live time just flies doesn't it uh but yeah so it's been 586 days and we've burned 3 million eth and actually since the merge we've burned I think 63 000 eth so we're net

deflationary uh it's just crazy it honestly is crazy to me how much eth that we have been able to burn and the fact that it has been that deflationary deflationary for quite a while now uh it just speaks to the fact that the ethereum network is so useful people are still willing to to pay the high fees to use the ethereum network to get whatever they want done it's just crazy I love it I love it all I love seeing these Milestone numbers uh but yeah very cool to see that three million eat has been burned since 1559 onwards towards four five ten million you know I'll definitely be reporting on that once it happens uh there but anyway that's gonna 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 the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone