Operation Solo Staker live, Ethereum's bazaar - The Daily Gwei Refuel #641 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the early gray refuel where he kept the latest news Newton maker system I'm your host and this designer in today's 16th of August 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so some positive regulatory news for coinbase today they announced that the national uh Futures Association which is a cftc designated SRO has approved coinbase financial markets as a registered Futures commission Merchant coinbase can now offer Futures contracts in BTC and eth to eligible customers in the US now this may not seem like much on the surface but it's a big deal because of the regulatory implications here and of course this isn't the SEC approving this this is the cftc which is the commodity Futures Trading Commission in the US but

the cftc and the SSC are the two main Financial Regulators in the US and we've known historically that the cftc has been friendlier towards crypto than the SEC they have approved Futures markets uh before for things like CME uh for BTC and then for eth well now they've approved coinbase to offer these Futures contracts in BTC and East to eligible customers uh in the US now I'm going to assume eligible customers means uh probably like accredited investors uh and and other kind of entities like that which I guess isn't ideal but it's a stepping stone right it's basically showing that there can be positive regulatory movements within the US for uh crypto companies now I think this

took almost two years for this to happen actually for for coinbase here but it's still signaling that the regulatory regime is turning a bit more positive here and I think that the main signal we'll get for that as well or a big signal we'll get for that as well will be the sec's decision around all of these ETFs obviously and now yesterday there was some uh kind of I guess like predictions that the SEC was going to make a comment on the grayscale case where they want to convert their existing uh kind of trust fund into an ETF so they enjoy a proper ETF there wasn't any decision made yesterday but apparently there people are betting that it might happen this Friday at 11AM eastern time so we'll look out for that

uh and if the if if kind of like the decision is made where the SEC basically says yeah okay grayscale you can convert your your product to a proper ETF well that opens the floodgates right that means that all the ETFs are pretty much going to get approved and I guess like that kicks off the the very positive kind of narrative of okay all the BTC ETFs are getting approved that means it's up next you know the SDC is being friendlier towards crypto now uh whether that's true or not I don't think it really matters I think narrative will take hold for a while there but that is another big thing but still this is pretty big for coinbase so I guess like kudos to the cftc for allowing this to happen and for approving this uh in the US as I said not a not a huge thing in

of itself because Futures contracts obviously something that can already be accessed by a lot of people who know what they're doing right you can go on chain and access these sorts of things well but as I said it is a positive regulatory movement in the US which is always a welcome sight to see all right the EF ecosystem support program has updated or posted an update on their Q2 2023 allocations so uh just a quick refresher here the ethereum foundation uh has this ecosystem allocation kind of program where they basically give away a bunch of money or give grants to I guess like a bunch of different um entities within the ethereum ecosystem building different things across a wide variety of domains so the total they gave away in this uh kind of

update was 9.2 million dollars which uh that's for the whole of Q2 there so as I said I think when I covered q1 if they're giving away nine nine to ten million dollars a quarter I mean that's you know at like 35 to 40 million dollars a year just uh in allocations to various uh companies and various uh I guess like entities doing work within community and education uh on the consensus layer zero knowledge proofs all this stuff here you can check out the blog post for full details on on all of this as well as all the entities that were given a grant here but this is kind of what ends up happening with a lot of the stuff that you see in ethereum you know a lot of it will end up getting a grant from somewhere whether it be the ethereum foundation or otherwise they'll

work on stuff in the background it's a lot of stuff that you don't usually hear about you're definitely not going to hear about most of this stuff on crypto Twitter and he's probably way above crypto Twitter's Collective IQ uh to talk about a lot of this stuff I mean uh but when you're talking about the the bleeding edge of zero knowledge proofs and cryptography yeah not much of crypto Twitter is going to be talking about that it's going to be buried away for a while but eventually some of this stuff gets turned into actual kind of products right actual products that people end up using uh a uni swap is famously a grant recipient they got a a grant from the ethereum foundation of I believe a hundred thousand dollars at the time in order to build uni Swap and then obviously uni swap is now the biggest or

at least one of the biggest apps in the crypto ecosystem today and you can see some of these uh grants go to client teams as well like the like Nimbus for example or sorry sorry status which bills Nimbus and apparently Nimbus is building an execution layer client which I think I've talked about before so yeah I had forgotten about that but that's there um you know stuff on the layer two side of things everything here so yeah as I said you can check out this blog post for full details on all of this I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right Mike neuter is back today with a fresh eth research post all about inclusion lists or I guess how they were traditionally called CL lists or uh censorship uh sorry CR lists or censorship resistant lists which were

this thing that would go hand in hand with PBS or epbs and obviously this stuff has evolved a lot over time since I think I first talked about it but essentially Mike says here in a tweet very stoked to share a new inclusion list design vitalik had the great idea of incorporating deniability to combat the free data availability problem and we have been iterating on this theme since so there's a nice diagram here explaining exactly what Mike is talking about but obviously just the diagram itself is not going to give you enough context to know what's going on here so definitely give the eth research post a read it is very technical it is not something for the faint of heart for sure I mean I read through it and I was like yeah okay I I am not smart enough or at least I don't have enough

background knowledge on all this stuff to actually understand what's going on on here because it is very deep kind of protocol level bleeding edge protocol level research stuff yeah uh but I got the general gist of kind of what's what's what's going on here uh and obviously CL uh sorry see our list or sensitive resistant list or some iteration of that is very important in the context of PBS design and all that sorts of stuff there as well as uh data availability problems uh which is the one that this is actually uh I I think um a targeting rather than the the set what the CR list was targeting in the context of PBS but I believe from my reading I might be wrong here it kind of falls into the same category uh but yeah this is a very interesting read even though I didn't understand most of it

I'd still suggest you guys go check it out for yourself it may be interesting to you so I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right speaking of interesting reads bar Tech from l2beat had a really great tweet thread today about eigenlayer uh and he started off this tweet through by saying I've seen a lot of bad takes on eigenlayer and yes it can be confusing let's try to simplify it somewhat and look at what is actually deployed right now on mainnet so obviously you can check out the full tweet thread uh for yourself on this but the trdr is that really none of eigenlayer's products are deployed on mainnet right now what you're doing when you're basically sending eth into the eigenlayer contracts is essentially putting eth into a contract in like a pending state

so that eventually you can become one of these kind of operators for one of these eigenlayer products at some point in the future and then obviously earn a reward for that now of course people are also putting funds into these contracts because they're doing airdrop farming which is to be expected uh but bartek brought up a really good point around essentially how we're going to have all these different eigenlayer Services right all these different services that are built using eigen layers technology that will be able to tap into the operator pool that is uh being spun up via the restaking mechanism that that eigenlayer is employing here now the the point that bartek made was that it gets kind of like I guess scary maybe scary's not the right well word but it gets kind of I guess like um uh well I I

don't know if it's a better word than that it can get scary but it gets kind of complicated when you think about okay there is going to be eigen layout or legitimate eigenlayer services such as eigen da or eigen data availability which is a data availability layer using restaked eth to secure to secure itself right and to run the the nodes and all that all the random validators and things like that uh that there'll be maybe something like an eigenlayer oracle service you know things like the legitimate things that people uh want and and is needed within the ecosystem and that generally has a has a relatively low risk attached to it but then because eigenlayer is going to be permissionless anyone can spin up any service that they want now what happens when someone spins up a service that is essentially a rug right where basically

they say hey we're spitting up this service on eigenlayer we're going to boost it with some token yield or something like that come uh restake with us and you'll get such and such yield but then what happens when it actually is a rug uh and and and what ends up happening is that they rug you or cause you to get slashed by the eigenlayer protocol itself and it was a malicious service and then people get burned by this uh which has obviously Downstream effects across the whole kind of eigenlayer Stack here uh and and that those are the kind of main concerns that that bartek brought up in in this thread and explaining how this all works and explaining how it can get quite complex and how you can have like restaking on restaking on restaking and then you can have restakers opted into multiple

services not just one so there is definitely a lot of complexities here and and how to kind of handle these things but I think ultimately what needs to happen is that you just need to be weary wary of these things just like you're wary of things like where you put your money into within D5 for example or who you stake with within uh the ethereum staking ecosystem it's the same thing it's going to be true for for eigenlayer restaking and for pointing your restaked eth at certain different services or running software for certain different services and providing kind of security there you're just going to have to use common sense right like as I said there are legitimate things like eigen data availability uh which is being I believe built by the eigenlayer team themselves there'll be other legitimate

products out there but you need to be careful not to sign up to validate as part of the you know the dodgy products or things that may be new and maybe they have bugs or exploits in them which I mean we're all used to and this is where I generally kind of push back on people that maybe say that eigenlayer is more of a kind of threat to ethereum generally than something else um and I push back on that I say well not necessarily eigenlayer is a service that takes advantage of uh staked eth just like any other service on on ethereum so for example there is plenty of steth and and r e then CBE within D5 today right and uh and they're in uh legitimate defy protocols they're in

rugs they're in Risky D5 protocols that may have an exploit and the same is going to be true with eigenlayer restaked teeth and people will say well there's a huge risk in that the on the eigenlayer side that eat gets slashed and then the eigen layer are kind of uh system needs to decide what they want to do if they want to essentially uh use some kind of buffer or they want to take that eth from the beginning chain and then and then essentially spin down that validator through that Arbitrage there there's there's many different parts it can go but as I've stated before it's not in my mind an existential security risk for for ethereum because even if there was a huge mass slashing event on eigenlayer let's just say I don't know 10 of uh of all staked eth was slashed

once it depends what the slashing conditions are on eigenlay I'm not talking about ethereum slashing here I'm talking about eigen layer slashing because eigenlayer can't slash you on ethereum you can only get slashed on ethereum by the ethereum protocol itself so even if 10 of all eth was part of a service that got slashed okay not all of that or not all 10 of that eth is getting slashed it's probably it's going to be a relatively small percentage of that that ends up getting slashed depending on what they do and depending on what the rules are uh and then if it needs to be taken out of the beacon chain there is the withdrawal queue that kind of stems that but I think in reality what's going to happen is that very rarely is anything ever going to be taken out of the beacon chain there'll

be different mechanisms within eigenlayer to deal with slashing and to deal with uh making sure that they are kept whole so that's my kind of pushback on that but you should definitely go check out bartex tweet thread on this uh I will I will link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so it is official operation solo Staker is now live on mainnet so just a refresher here this is an operation or an initiative being run out of the uh etherflight ecosystem here or ether dot Phi team and they say yeah we're thrilled to announce that our first batch of solo stake is from the first cohort are testing so you can see here on the dashboard basically what these are and you can see all their kind of um public Keys here and obviously

everything that you usually see on Beacon chain such as their um the blocker Pros block proposal block proposals that they've made excuse me I couldn't get that out there for a sec um and that's if you drill in you can see attestations all that sort of stuff there see you can see that here uh but very very cool to see this and they continue and say this has been months of hard work behind the scenes and we couldn't have done it without our solo stakers talented devs team East acre and the partners of opal avado and dap node so for a refresher on how this actually works uh they say here edify provides those who sign up to the program with free Hardware capital and software to operate nodes in return participants are able to earn rewards and validate transactions on behalf of the network

and of course solo staking is at the heart of ethereum and the Not So secret weapon to combat centralization uh and our goal has always been to empower individuals worldwide to play a part in the protocol success and contribute to the development so if you want to learn more about this and and get involved yourself you can check out this link which I'll link in the YouTube description below which is in the Twitter thread uh but great to see that the first cohort is live here and excited to see this continue to evolve over time right speaking of ethereum staking Diva completed their first first initial distribution of the uh Diva tokens here so they say yeah this is a major step towards decentralizing liquid staking Diva has been unique in its model of releasing a dow with the goal of shaping the protocol so there's some stats

around this a total of 106 million Diva tokens uh were claimable in the initial Dow distribution over 150 sorry over 15 000 addresses included encompassing ogs dowels and ethereum node operators uh the total diva claimed was 72.4 Million 4 200 users claimed and became voting delegates so yeah I mean the claim period is over right now but I remember shouting this out a couple of times on the refuel hopefully you guys were able to claim your tokens in time here and I did mention yesterday that Diva's test net is actually live right now I think they put a tweet out today where they said that their operator test net is four days old but uh already bigger than Lido not sure how much that counts for since it's a test Nets but I think it's

uh it really does show that it's not really um it's not really hard to be bigger than lighter in terms of node operators because at the end of the day lighter only has 30 right rockable has thousands uh and I expect Diva to be in the same boat hundreds if not thousands of node operators here so just great to see that uh and yeah great to see that uh that they've completed this distribution today all right an announcement out of the safe ecosystem today so they've introduced something called the safe core protocol which is which has the goal of advancing the transition to Smart accounts or I guess like smart contract wallets or account abstraction accounts in a way that is safe modular and intro interoperable so there is a blog post here and a tweet thread with full details on this uh and the the tldr

is that they're they've introduced this white paper for a modular open source protocol aiming to advance the smart account transition so you can read the wipe it for yourself and also the blog post TR but essentially the three main problems that safe sees in the current smart account landscape is fragmentation vendor lock-in and security risks and losing composability while introducing lock-in effects akin to web 2 stands fundamentally against the promise of web 3 and digital ownership so the first design of the safe core protocol puts forth an open source modular standard with an additional abstraction layout manager to manage various complexities and interdependencies so I mean I I definitely agree with this where there are going to be vendors or I guess like product creators or a smart contract

wallet creators that want to create lock-in right they want to keep you in their ecosystem because that's how they monetize but that definitely does go against the the core ethos of ethereum where essentially we always want the back end to be decentralized open source you know free to use not controlled by any one entity so that people can build their own products on these sorts of things instead of Reinventing the wheel and building their own proprietary product or their own lock-in product from my understanding uh the the safe core protocol here wants to do that they want to build out this kind of like infrastructure and they want to build out this this open infrastructure that anyone can tap into and anyone can build on and build in an open source a way that that is true to ethereum values and

and decentralization so uh yeah you can check out the tweet for yourself the blog post and the white paper which I'll link all of that in the YouTube description below uh but very interesting announcement from safe here today and I hope that they continue to iterate on this so Kevin owaki one of the original founders of git coin uh has put out a big tweet today covering all the drama that I spoke about yesterday with the git coin and I guess like shell uh partnership now I'm not going to read the whole tweet it's huge but I highly recommend giving it a read because it gives a very nuanced and a very measured kind of take on what exactly happened with the partnership what Bitcoin is today what uh Bitcoin needs to be moved towards and all that good stuff there so

I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to check out but I also wanted to address some of the comments that I saw on the YouTube video yesterday about my opinion on the shell Bitcoin partnership I understand that shell and obviously other oil and gas companies around the world provide immense value to the world right they provide you know the energy to power everything that we know know and love right I understand that but my point was that it we shouldn't excuse bad things that individuals and companies do just because they do good things right like that that's just such a bizarre way of thinking about it to me because to use a loose analogy here this would be like excusing someone for committing murder because they donated to charity right that's the kind of analogy that I came

up with it's like wait a sec you know as I mentioned yesterday shell and other oil and gas companies have spent decades uh uh um uh promoting missing disinformation campaigns against climate change that they knew was real you know decades ago in order to further their own agenda which has more than likely I mean almost certainly resulted in excess deaths from that right deaths that have happened in in in in direct contribution to their efforts to undermine policy changes to undermine the I guess like uh uh uh a work towards renewable energy and all that sorts of stuff so I'm not going to forgive all of that personally and I'm not going to turn a blind eye to that just because they power you know a lot of the world as it exists today but you could make the argument that the only

reason that they're so powerful is because of those Miss and disinformation campaigns that entrench them as basically you know duopoly is in a lot of monopolies and duopolies in a lot of regions around the world uh and and really if you if you want to dive even deeper into that you can consider it a blood money that was given to get coin right where the money was was was was earned in in ways that aren't ethical in ways that are pretty much illegal but because they write the laws they made it legal so you see where I'm going with this like you can't just excuse a company for all the bad things that they've done just because you think that they've done good things for the world such as provider energy and stuff like that so both things can be true they do good things they do bad things the world

is not not a binary thing where it's like because you know they've done good things it excuses all the bad things no I think there's a lot more Nuance there than that but that's my little mini rant on that one now you can disagree with me fine like I don't I don't mind being disagreed with but I like when people disagree with me while having like a nuanced discussion about things I don't like the binary thinking I've never liked that you guys know that if you've listened to me long enough you know that I always try my best I mean I don't always succeed at it but I always try my best to have a nuanced take on on everything especially when I have strong opinions about things um and I like to have those discussions we have them all the time in the daily

wear Discord channel it's really great in there uh so yeah that was my take on that but you should definitely go give Kevin's a tweet a read because it goes into more detail about about Xiaolin the Bitcoin context and how it all plays together there so I'll link that tweet in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right Dan Romero from farcasta has said that uh there he's quote tweeted a tweet from Varun here saying that uh flycaster is a step closer to 100 permissionless uh to being 100 permissionless so warpcast runs four of 30 hubs the rest are independent and not subsidized if warp cast disappeared tomorrow the network would keep working and next up is ethereum L2 mainnet into migration and turning off sign up gating

so I've been using fire customer lately uh I've been mirroring some of my tweets uh to farcast I've been trying to get more involved there it is admittedly quite difficult for me to use both platforms I already invest so much time in Twitter so to invest so much time in both platforms it's quite difficult but I do notice that the conversation the caliber of the conversations on firecast are a lot higher quality there's lots less toxicity on there and it's generally a more positive experience than I've had with Twitter but I think that could be because it's been invite only to to this date right and as you said as I just said Dan I said that they're going to be turning off sign up getting which means it's going to be open to everyone and they also want to integrate with an ethereum L2 mainnet

migration here so a lot of interesting things happening on firecast and it is at least at this point the best attempt that I've seen at a decentralized version of of Twitter I I really am liking it I really am liking the conversations that I'm having on there and everything that I'm getting out of it so far I'm going to keep upping my usage of it and I do have invites left so if you are serious about actually using it and not just signing up and then abandoning it I'm happy to give you an invite I don't have that many left but I've still got a few left there uh but yeah exciting to see that firecast star is really uh close to being I mean pretty much at the kind of fully permissionless level here and great to see that they're going to be turning off

sign up gating or invite uh voted uh kind of sign up here I'm sorry invite code sign up here uh at some point in the future I believe it might be like october-ish or something like that so not too far away uh but great to see all of that all right so I've lived a few minutes at the end of today's episode to talk about a tweet that I put out today uh that I think is quite important uh and I think it's good to take stock in this tweet and not to lose sight of things that are happening right now because I know that the markets are still boring I get that as I've said before and I'll say it again I do not expect any excitement from the markets for the remainder of the year I know there's still a few months left of the year but I'm just not

expecting anything right so and that might lead people to believe that there's kind of like not much going on obviously Refuge listens and Watchers don't believe that because you guys know how much is going on because I talk about it all the time but generally in the tweet that I put out today I wanted to kind of uh I guess I put this message out to the wider ethereum and crypto ecosystem about what's going on now the twit itself is very short so I'll read it out first and then I'll dive into it so I said the ethereum ecosystem is now executing faster than it ever has we have a defined core protocol roadmap with great coordination and Leadership driving the deliverables and a blossoming L2 ecosystem to scale ethereum to the world ethereum future has never been brighter now so that defined core protocol roadmap that I'm

talking about is is obviously that roadmap that vitalik has posted a few times on Twitter that flowchart The Surge you know the purge The Scourge all that sorts of stuff that is a defined roadmap that ethereum has now of course each item in that road map is not concretely going into the network it's going to evolve and change over time there's different research posts about it some of them have progressed to the EIP stage some of them have already been delivered obviously the merge was delivered and things like that right so that that kind of core protocol roadmap is there but it's not just about having the roadmap it's about actually executing on that roadmap which is exactly what ethereum has been doing very well for at least the last couple of years at least the last two to three years now and that is due to really

great coordination and Leadership and that's what I talked about yesterday in the context of of when I was talking about Dows about how we have these um two people it's not just them but but it but they are definitely the um the most visible of Tim baiko and Danny Ryan are working Tire to coordinate and lead the effort of of shipping the ethereum core protocol roadmap right so so they're doing a lot of great stuff there and I talked about it yesterday so I won't rehash it now and then I talk about this blossoming L2 ecosystem that we have and Eric Wall actually uh replied to my tweet with something that I've talked about a lot on the reefer before on the refill before and it's good to see someone else actually saying this um someone that I really respect he said uh it is really interesting to see all of

these l2s innovate independently from each other compare this to the old sharding roadmap each Shard has the same execution environment the same finality properties the same data availability mode the same languages and the same account obstruction trade-offs there is a major difference here and yeah I mean as I said I've said this plenty of times on the vehicle before and then I replied to Eric and I said this is exactly why I've been so bullish on the modular slash roll-up Centric roadmap over any monolithic road maps it's the classic Cathedral versus bizarre model now I've talked about this model before and there's actually a blog post that you can go check out um called Welcome to the bizarre by Ben Edge it's a bit dated now because it was talking about it in the context of ethereum 2.0 at the time but it still explains it quite well so essentially

what this model is and and this is how this relates to to l2s and how they relate to ethereum is that a cathedral is this massive kind of like monolithic building right it has centralized hierarchy if you're talking about it in the uh in the sense of like a religion right it has this very defined hierarchy in the cathedral it's top down and everyone basically follows uh you know the person above them essentially right so it's very rigid very structured very centralized whereas in a bizarre model it is very decentralized there is no kind of central well in the classic bizarre model there is no Central planning body there is no uh Central coordinator there is no there's no kind of like Central entity that tells you what you can and can't do and stuff like

that essentially uh you know people just come they set up their shops and they sell their Wares in this bizarre model right and and that's exactly what it looks like for L2 ethereum because we have L1 which is like the first ethereum L1 which is like the fertile land or like the I guess like shopping district or the uh the the shopping Court essentially uh that all these l2s can come to set up shop and display there where so to speak right display what they've got going on they've got um you know different uh execution environments they're doing different Innovations some of them are optimistic roll up some of them are ZK Roll-Ups and they do this all without anyone telling them what they can and can't do the ethereum L1 doesn't tell uh you which l2s can exist and which can't as long as you're

following the protocol rules which is basically the rules of of the universe in the context of ethereum just like a you know a shopkeep in a Bazaar they can't defy gravity right if they go for example like that's that's a rule that exists in that that Universe there on ethereum you can't defy the ethereum protocol rules but that's all you have to follow there is no Central coordinate the coordinator that basically says no you know optimism can't build on ethereum but arbitrim can so that's the difference between the bizarre and the cathedral model there in this context and the reason why the bizarre model is so much better for Innovation and expressiveness and and doing different things is because of that no of that kind of like flat approach rather than that top-down approach where you can do

anything you want you can do it you know it doesn't matter if it's going to succeed or fail no one's going to stop you whereas in a cathedral you can't do anything you want right in the cathedral model in the top-down approach model you can't do anything you want right because there's a defined hierarchy there that you have to follow and if you actually defect from that hierarchy and attempt to do whatever you want uh there are punishments for that you basically uh get kicked out of the the cathedral right if you try it depending on what you do or you get punished in some way whereas in the bizarre you can do whatever you you want within the co the rules that that are that are defined uh by I guess like the universe again in in the context of ethereum by the protocol

rules and and no one's going to stop you from doing that and that's why I as I said I've always been more bullish on the modular and roll-up Centric roadmap uh over the monolithic road map because the monolithic roadmap up in my eyes is very centralized right it doesn't matter about the technicalities it's very centralized on the social layer side of things and the social expressiveness and then the technological technological expressiveness that can be had from a blockchain ecosystem so yeah as I said really uh great that Eric Wall kind of I replied to my tweet here with something that I've been saying for a while because it validates my thesis and I love being validated by people that I consider to be smarter than myself so yeah thanks to Eric for doing that uh but hopefully that kind of expands on uh what I meant by this tweet for you guys

and hopefully uh you you kind of learned more about my model of thinking about these things uh but on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone