Node operator chat, STRK airdrop and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #731 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delway refuel where latest news new etherum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony Z and today's the 14th of February 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so a big day today very exciting day today a lot of things to get through uh we have eth going up in price which I mean I'm not going to talk about that today I spoke about that yesterday and you guys will obviously be uh uh listening in or check tuning in to the podcast I did with Eric when I release it on Saturday but we also had starkware announced the Stark net or Stark token aird drop today which I'll be talking about and just a bunch of other things as well so I guess like without further Ado let's get into it so the first thing I want to talk about was

a cast that I put out on farcaster today that I've spoken about on the refi before but it's all about I guess eth staking generally and eth note operating generally so I put out this cast where I said increasing the decentralization of the ethereum network means increasing the number of node operators on the network this means having individuals or groups running a full node with OnePlus validators attached to it you can either do this so solo with 32 eth as a group with tech like distributed validator technology or with a pool like rocket pool now this is nothing new to you guys I've discussed this extensively on the REI before but I do think that the eth staking ecosystem is ongoing significant changes right now and I talked about this I think yesterday or the day before with regards to uh reaking changing the landscape and and liquid reaking tokens

changing the landscape but when it comes to solo and home staking that is also going through some pretty rapid changes here because there are more and more solutions coming online you know there's DVT which went online recently where you can have anywhere from 2 to 10 people you know up to 10 people uh staking all at once so essentially what would happen is that you each put three if you have 10 people you each put 3.2 e up to make that 32 e requirement and then you all get to be a note operator you all get to run the full nodes and validators on your local hardware or in the cloud wherever you want to run it really but you all get to be a note operator here uh there is obviously rocker pool which has existed for a while there are other pooling Solutions coming online there

are other solution solons uh from the likes of ethery and puffer and swell and all these other protocols coming online so really home staking and solo staking is just getting better and better as time goes on and it's not going backwards contrary to popular belief as I've mentioned before yes uh Solo stakers or home stakers may be a minority in terms of the amount of e Stak but they are pretty much the majority in terms of uh note operators right Rocka has thousands of note operators there are thousands of of true solo stakers I believe I don't know the exact number there but they I I think there has to be I mean maybe there's maybe there's hundreds uh because if you include Rocka pool node operators in the solo St it would be in the thousands but obviously it's very hard to know um you

know very very hard to know who's an active kind of uh note operator there but I think we can safely say that there's uh potentially upwards of 10,000 plus node operators on the network right now which is which is really exciting obviously um and because of that and because of the fact that the node operators are what really matters from a decentralization uh perspective on the network we should be optimizing for that and that's what we've been doing which is really really exciting um now last thing I'll say on this cuz I as I've said I've talked about this a lot on the refu before but I just figured it was worth kind of reiterating these points here last thing I'll say on this is something that Nolan V brought up in in a reply to my cast where he said you know is it good to lower this 32 e

requirements is it good to allow people to stake with you know maybe just one eth or something like that and I'm like and I've discussed this before on the refu as well but I just want to refresh people's kind of memories here of this so lowering the barriers to staking should be our number one goal as an ecosystem but there is a limit to that as I've discussed before the limit is economic in that you can lower it to like 0.1 e let's just say you spin up a full node with oh sorry you become a node operator with 0.1 e that includes running a full node and running a validator okay 0.18 right now is $270 right so you first buy that eth then you buy the hardware so you spend what $400 on Hardware or something like that at best it depends where you are in the

world but let's just say $400 on hardware and then you earn like 3 to 4% from staking to get back just the hardware cost would take you a very very long time because you're not earning much 3 to 4% on $270 even if e you know goes 10x from here 3% on uh on uh $22,000 something like that right in the best possible case scenario for the foreseeable future is still not that much right so when you look at it from kind of that perspect oh no not $22,000 I do my math wrong there it's $2,200 right so 3% on that is not not that very much so there is really a limit here to how low you can get the capital requirement barrier uh but that shouldn't mean that we shouldn't lower

it as much as possible we definitely should and obviously the calculus can change based on the USD price of eth but there is a limit there right uh and I think that the capital requirement is the number one barrier by far right now uh for for stakers for solo stakers for home stakers but then that will eventually shift to the technical barrier as being number one one and then we can kind of focus on that and see what we can do in that regard but we are I mean we are doing that in parallel we are focusing on that we are improving it in parallel but it's definitely not the main thing right now the main thing is still that Capital uh requirement there so anyway enough on that one just an actual related tweet here that e Staker put out today uh there's a frequently

Asked question right now from home stakers from people who run their own nodes you know how much more dis space will your node need with blobs being added so the maximum amount you will need is an extra 100 Gig so so if you have a 2 terab drive right now you should still be fine and I know some people have been saying that their 2 terby Drive fills up that's because you need to be pruning your full node you need to be proving your exe pruning your execution layer full node or you need to be running it in a mode that does auto pruning that way you're not going to be storing all this unnecessary data and it's not just going to be reaching that 2 tbte limit there but also at the same time if you're someone who just wants as low maintenance as possible and you

don't want to go through kind of pruning and things like that then just run a 4 terabyte drive in there I mean a four terab drive is not that much more expensive than a 2 tbte one uh and the price is obviously coming down all the time so you can run a 4 tab drive and not have to worry about this issue at all but I mean I run two terab drives on on uh my solo box is two terab right now and I think my Rocka pool box is two ter oh no I think my rockol one's 4 terab but my two terab solo one's five there's not there's nothing wrong with it I'm running uh never mind on there with I believe a lighthouse I always forget which ones are running where I need to check my I got a little diagram that

I've drawn up that uh they're kind of uh kind of reminds me of where what I'm running where because sometimes I forget cuz I have so much going on I'm I'm running so many different kind of things here um but yeah I me my two terab Drive is is fine I mean uh and I think it's going to be fine post denune but yeah it's about 103 gig Max for blobs because obviously blobs expire uh they exp expire every 18 days so and the expected average is around 50 gig as well so yeah you should still be fine with a two terabyte drive there all right so epbs has been a huge topic of the discussion over the last few weeks in particular you've seen a lot of core devs and researchers tweeting about this I've talked about this a lot on the refie and linked you

guys a ton of resources for you to kind of I guess get up to speed with this stuff uh well apparently there is a new epbs breakout call that is uh that is happening so the first one happened yesterday or today I guess depending where you are in the world and Terren has some notes Here uh from that call so if you at all interested in in kind of keeping up with the bleeding edge of epbs research and development these calls are probably what you're going to uh uh uh be maybe listening in on if they're public I'm not sure if they're public and basically reading these notes here from Terren and others on what the calls actually entail because epbs uh the reason why it's become I think such a uh I guess like loud issue now or come to the Forefront of a theum development

now is because I think the core devs are getting getting fed up with uh PBS existing outside of the core protocol because it's just an annoyance for them to have to deal with so I think they're just trying to to enshrine it as fast as possible so that it's easier for them to reason about and i' I've talked about this before on the refu about how because meev boosts Builders and relays exist outside of the the core protocol it is really annoying especially the relays it is really annoying for the core devs because they have to monitor this sidecar software while not having any influence over it or any direct influence over it and not having any um easy way to reason about it because it's not part of the core protocol right it's not part of the core client software it is a sidecar software and the reason why

they have to worry about it is because like 95% of the network runs meev boost so they want to enshrine it as quickly as possible and enshrining it is also good from from other kind of like lenses that you view this stuff from but yeah if you want to read the latest call uh the notes on this latest call I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right Tony has shared a cast on farter today of a paper that uh has been published by him and a bunch of other ethereum researchers uh on stealth addresses so uh he says here we introduce a standardized stealth address protocol for ethereum called ERC 5564 enhancing privacy with unlinkable transactions the paper was created in collaboration with these fine folks here

including vitalic of course you can find a link to the ERC in in the cast which I'll link in the YouTube description below but stealth addresses has been something that has been worked on for a little while now and as Tony says here basically allows you to have unlinkable transactions so you're not going to get like fullblown kind of Maximum privacy know default privacy across everything here but the way this works is that uh it essentially from a high level allows you to unlink certain transactions from each other so at least from my understanding you would basically be able to unlink uh Trails of you trying to send eth to a new address for example like say you've got an address that's doxed say it's sassle doeth uh using this you should be able to at least from

my I might be wrong here but this is from my understanding I should be able to send eth to another address without uh those addresses being linked that would be really cool because like right now I can't do that right right now none of us can do that the best you can do is use tornado cache but like most of the people in crypto are barred from using tornado cach because if you're a US citizen or person it is illegal for you to do that and it is a very gray area depending where you are in the world for you to use that and so most people just default to using centralized exchanges where essentially what you do is uh you you send eth from your doc address or from a known address to a centralized exchange or you send a token or stable coin then you wait a bit and then you

withdraw that those funds from there to a new address so obviously the centralized exchange can connect those addresses together but it is very very difficult for the everyday person to connect these things together the onchain analytics tools can do it relatively easily because they use a bunch of heris to kind of Link these things um but yeah I think tornado cash is still the gold standard as a mixar but that's sanctioned right now that is also not the be all end all we can do more than just tornado cache for preserving privacy here and that's what stealth addresses uh attempts to do so if you want to read this paper I'll will link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so uh definitely something to keep an eye on here all right so biggest news from today of course is the announcement and

the I guess like release of the details around the starnet airdrop for the STK or Stark token now of course you can check your eligibility at provisions. Stark net. please do not go to any links except that one or any URLs except that one I will link it in the description below please do not Google this or anything like that go to starets Twitter and go to the link here the official link because obviously there's a lot of fishing going on right now and if you haven't yet please switch from metamask to Rabbi or please just use rabby as your main uh main uh desktop client even if it's a pass through for your Hardware wallet it is just so good I've been using it so much since I got fished and it just it's amazing I love it so much it's just such a beautiful experience

and it makes me feel so much safer on chain as well but yeah just just wanted to give the shout out there now onto the air drop itself this airdrop is pretty big it is pretty big you can see here bankless did a thread on this air drop so you can see here that more than 700 million Stark tokens are being allocated which I believe is a huge chunk of the supply um I don't know what the total Supply is of Stark right now but I believe that this is a pretty pretty huge chunk here and then they've broken up this allocation in this pie chart that you can see and allocated uh tokens to different users uh users here or different kind of like entities here so one thing that sticks out here which I was very very happy to see is that e

stakers uh 22% of the 700 million tokens so they get 22% of these 700 million uh Stark tokens here uh and that is the biggest allocation besides star net users obviously Stark net users are going to be prioritized here but that's 51% for starnet users then you have ethereum developers getting a nice chunk EIP authors getting a nice chunk the protocol Guild getting a chunk and then uh just open source developers and Stark neet and Stark X users of course as well here but what I really wanted to talk about was that allocation to e stakers this has been something that I've been hopping on a lot about for the last week especially I did tell you guys or did say to you guys that I thought that there'd be a big project or relatively

big project that would do something like this uh and that should start a trend now obviously that you know Stark's done this but there's no Trend yet because other projects haven't done it but I really really do hope that there is a trend being started here with this because as I said before as I said yesterday and the day before I think uh you want to be rewarding e stakers and this isn't just solo stakers this is also stakers through I believe Lio I think it's like everyone pre merge from what I read he's getting rewarded here and as I said you can check your allocations on the website that I'll link in the YouTube description below as part of the Tweet uh but yeah I I I just really love to see this now in saying that I checked some of my addresses and

it said out they weren't eligible when they definitely were and and I believe they used they being Stark net used the rated. network solo Staker list for the uh for what they allocated uh Stark tokens too now I think I discussed this yesterday or the day before where I said that that list is not great there is a better list that I tweet tweeted out about that uh had all of my addresses on it it had full coverage but these other addresses did not sorry rider. networks list did not so I think that what I'm going to try and do going forward because the creator of that list that I showed you guys yesterday actually dm'd me on Twitter uh and we we you know we uh we we kind of had it back and forth there uh but basically what I'm going to

try to do is I'm going to try and create a master list of solo and home stakers for projects to use I don't want us to have multiple lists out there that projects are using and I don't want us to have shitty lists either because like multiple lists is already like a headache but shitty list is even worse because then people feel slided people get disappointed people feel like upset right and you want to have as good of coverage as possible is the coverage ever going to be 100% probably not like that that's that's going to be very very difficult to do is you know if we can get it as close to 100% as possible that's great so I'm going to probably try to take this initiative on board I already have no time in my life but hey what's another kind of thing to add to

that pile there and try to get a master list that projects use and what I want to do with this master list as well is I want people to be able to attest to this list so essentially what you could do is you could put this list on the ethereum attestation service and people can attest to it and basically say okay well my address is on you know on this list and I am a solo Staker so I'm attesting to this projects can also attest to it and say this is the list that we're going to use uh you know if uh if you know we do an airdrop or or or we're going to use this list because this is the list that we agree is the right one it has full coverage or it has as best coverage as you can get because we just

do need that kind of like Master list of solo and home stakers and second point would be to update that regularly as well because obviously the one I showed yesterday was updated to September and there's been a lot more validators coming online since then not sure how many solo validators have come online since then it's hard to tell but still we do need a good list here uh but in any case the fact that starnet you know Rel I mean very big project within the EOS ethereum ecosystem right one of the biggest l2s has kind of fired the first shot here I expect to see other projects follow suit I'd be very very surprised if projects like Igan layer puffer swell and ethery didn't air drop some portion to solo stakers obviously they're going to prioritize their own users in an

airdrop because that's just what you should be doing honestly because at the end of the day your own users are the ones that you want to be rewarding the most but I'd be surprised if they didn't do at least something there and then outside of each stakers as well obviously there's a protocol Guild contribution here from Stark net which I love to see and I've personally taken it upon myself to contact projects that I know that I'm both invested in and not invested in and basically asking them hey have you heard of the protocol Guild have you heard of the protocol Guild pledge which is to pledge up to 1% of your token supply to the protocol Guild when you launch your token I have now gotten two projects on board by doing this with four in the works and I'm going to be having I'm going to be

getting more in the works uh and I was speaking to actually Trent Vans about this today and we kind of joked because I was like to him yeah I'm going to like do this thing where I just reach out to projects and get them on board he's like oh we should have like a leaderboard and I was thinking in my head I'm like that'd be nice because like I think I'd be at the top of that leaderboard in terms of people in terms of someone who' referred the most amount projects to the protocol Guild and got them to actually donate here but at the same time I'm not doing it for that what I'm doing it for is trying to start the trends the two Trends I want to see is what I tweeted about the other day I want to see every single project that hasn't done a token

yet that is going to do a token allocate up to 1% of their to Total token supply to the protocol Guild every single ethereum project right I want to see that and I want to see all of them reward e stakers doesn't have to be just solo stakers doesn't have to be just home stakers can be stakers generally but I want to see each stakers rewarded those are my two main missions going forward I I I kind of think that those are the most impactful things I can be doing going forward um outside of the other stuff that I'm already doing and I'm going to be kind of sticking to that there for the foreseeable future so uh yeah anyway enough about that uh you can go check out the eligibility criteria in bank's thread here for Stark they've actually got a really great thread

showcasing this uh and uh basically what you have to do there there's a lot of Eligibility criteria here actually because you could have used like immutable x uh when that was kind of using starx and you could have used diversify which is a starx kind of um app as well starx L2 as well so there's a bunch of different criteria here and and and it's all listed on the bank list thread so I'll just link that in the YouTube description below uh for you guys to go check out but yeah very very exciting day for ethereum for eth holders among us as I said eth price is going up right now I mean at time of recording it's at 2760 is we're very close to 3K like all of a sudden we were at almost 3K when we were you know not close to 2K not too long ago and I did

say to you guys that I thought that when eth moves it'll be a relatively quick move because too many people are sidelined right now but as I said I don't want to talk too much about the price here but that's exciting Stark air drops exciting plenty more air drops coming this year for you guys like there's so many projects that haven't done tokens yet that I'm sure you guys are kind of like farming U air drops for and and as I said I'm I hope that a lot of them get aird dropped to eth stakers as well because I know a lot of you guys Stak your eth so yeah just a very good very exciting time to be an eth holder and an ethereum and I can't wait to see what the guest L rest of the year has in store for all of us all right so EIP

4844 is right around the corner less than a month or probably exactly a month from from now actually or just just a little bit under a month based on where you are in the world um what kind of date it is there until it goes live until Denon goes live and we have optimism here basically giving us a a history lesson on EIP 4844 and go basically how it came to be very very short and like how the development happened and what's going to be happening in a blob space world so you can go give this a read it's very short I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to for you to read it here uh but there's also a tweet thread from offchain Labs talking about EIP 4844 and what it means for users on L2 and what I like about offchain labs's

thread in particular is that they really focused on the fact that we don't actually know exactly what the cost savings are going to be for R UPS using blobs uh because of the fact that blobs are going to be a competitive market just like coold data is just like ethereum L1 block space is there are things like inscriptions that could happen short term uh on blobs there are a lot of other variables at play here with with the fact that people could potentially Arbitrage between core data and blobs there is the fact that blobs can only be bought in like a full batches so you have to buy buy like one blob you can't just buy a portion of a blob at least from the protocol but there are going to be extra protocol things where you can actually buy portions of a blob and it depends on how

frequently each rollup is buying blobs so there is a lot of kind of like variables here and we're just not going to know until blobs go live now as I've told you guys before once blobs go live we're going to have to wait a little while it's not going to we're not going to have good data within like the first week we're going to have to wait you know maybe two three months or something to get some really kind of like good data that has a lot of signal and not too much noise in it because I do think that we're going to see some kind of D gen Pro project say hey we're doing inscriptions in blobs maybe they just called blob scriptions and oh my God I just came up with that and if someone uses that I I sorry because I don't know

if some some kind of like DJ project is going to use that terminology but it's out there now but yeah I can imagine some project coming along and being like Hey we're blob scriptions and you know it's really cheap to do this on eth L1 and they're not going to maybe inform their users that blobs expire after 18 days so it's literally useless to be putting inscriptions in blobs but I I just think that the D gen kind of energy runs deep especially as the market gets hotter and hotter so we could potentially see that now again that's only going to be over the short term it is not going to be in my opinion a long-term issue I do think that the rollups are obviously going to crowd out this stuff anyway because they can they can afford to outbid everyone because their rollup is basically you know

thousands tens of thousands of users uh transactions all kind of rolled up into one so they're definitely the biggest players on uh you know on in in the blob space Market but we're going to have to wait you know I'm going to give it at least like 3 months to get some decent dat and I'm sure the L2 teams are going to do their own retrospectives on these things they're going to do their own analysis on these things but it's going to be exciting to see how it goes there but yeah anyway you can go read optimism's post and offchain labs's tweet thread I'll link them in the YouTube description below for you to do so now I know you guys are waiting until Saturday for me to uh publish the episode I did with Eric Connor on the eth bull case and why eth is going to 15

to 20K but as a teaser I'm going to spend the last few minutes of today's episode going through through some of the stuff we spoke about uh and just giving like a little teaser here and the reason I'm doing this is because Eric posted a tweet today saying upcoming eth bullish narratives of course we have the ETF right the spot e ETFs which I've spoken about extensively on the refuel uh and I've spoken about the fact that I believe they're going to be approved in May of this year which is not very far away from now and then he lists Larry thinkink obviously Larry thinkink is the CEO or the current CEO of Black Rock the largest asset manager in the world Larry f doesn't miss guys honestly I I don't think you like crypto natives realize just how much power that dude has like I

mean especially political power which means a lot more than than people give it credit for so I think that Larry don't miss which means that we're going to get those eth ETFs by by May uh Supply shrink obviously ether has been deflationary since the merge there is just more and more Supply coming off the market because it's going into like staking uh it needs to be used to pay gas fees which just makes eth deflationary more people are using eth as a story of value as a money you know there's just not enough eth to go around sound moneyness you know the fact that eth Supply is you know is dwindling is shrinking e is used as money so much eth is a collateral asset it's theoric value just increases its moneyness uh reaking obviously a new primitive wasn't around in other bull markets has grown just so

large at this stage Igan layer is one of the biggest projects now on ethereum in terms of tvl uh data blobs as I just discussed blobs are a huge unlock for rollups air drops generally I mean we just saw the first one today with Stark net many many more to come uh an aifi proof of stake chain uh and then he said uh upcoming eat bearish narratives nothing now the funny thing is I agree with everything on his list except oopi proof of stake chain the I do want to put this out there the proof of stake chain on ethereum is nowhere near oide and it is going to change a lot over the coming years there is a lot of stuff that the core developers and researchers want to do to to the proof of stake chain to make it a lot better than what

it is today and the reason for this is because the proof of St St chain honestly exists as a miracle if I'm being honest it was developed as a separate chain obviously as the beacon chain before uh you know long before we knew that we we knew it it would merge but like long before it was merged right it launched December 1st 2020 and then it merged September 15th 2023 so it was a long time between those periods there but the reason why I saying it's not going to be aifi anytime soon is because there are tons of upgrades coming and there and there's a pretty substantial upgrades right there's single slot finality that's that's a pretty substantial upgrade to the that e proove of stake works there's the max effective balance increase uh coming there's the stuff around PBS as well so yeah the

bigon chain or the proof of stake chain on ethereum is not aify anytime soon I I think that um what Eric maybe meant here or what he kind of like hopes is that the osificante uh they're not going to it's not going to be like a whole rewrite at least from my understanding on things but it's going to become stronger with things like single slot finality and so on and so forth but yeah there's plenty of upgrades still coming to to the proof of stake chain which in my opinion is just way more bullish than an aifi chain right um and obviously moth is going to get staked as well which kind of play which plays into that and plays into the whole reaking thing but that there is

just a teaser of what we spoke about on the episode which again as I said is going out on Saturday going to keep you guys waiting for that and the reason I'm doing that is cuz I don't want to cannibalize the refu I don't want to put the refill out and the the episode out at the same time and I want to give you guys something to be bullish about on the weekend on Saturday because it does seem like the market is beginning to trade more and more in lock step with the tradire markets because the tradire markets have def in the US at least have defined kind of like opening and closing periods and because of the BTC ETF those things are only traded during those periods and then obviously um a lot of the Trad five folks that are playing in that but also are able to access Crypton

native markets are playing there as well so you know given that uh I do think that we you know the weekends are probably going to be quieter than they usually are in the ecosystem from at least Market perspective uh and yeah I'm just going to give you guys something to be bullish about on Saturday and I mean I usually put the drive-throughs out on Saturdays anyway so that's not a not a thing there we just recorded on the Tuesday because it was the only time you could find to record uh because Eric I think is busy for the rest of the week so we really just wanted to record on on the day that we were both free and able to do it even if it was if it was too early there but hey uh hopefully the episode lives up to all the hype on ly

because I'm hyping this up as something you know as something massive but really I I came away from the podcast more bullish than i' had been in a very very long time and you guys know I'm like Perma bullish on eth and probably the biggest eth bull in the world but I came away from the episode being like oh boy I need to buy more eth and I honestly guys like I have like such little money left to buy eth with because I've just been buying it so much during the bar and crab market uh and and you you know I do other things like Angel Investments and stuff like that but I came away from it I'm just like can I find some money somewhere can I like rotate some money from somewhere else to buy more eth like I'm too bullish right now right so yeah

anyway enough on that I'm rambling now enough on that that's 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 it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone