Staking from home, Optimism summer and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #434 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily great review where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host stan the new susan and it has the 24th of august 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so unfortunately the latest uh geth release uh version 1.10.22 that i talked about the other day had a buggy net that essentially i think corrupted the entire database uh which is obviously not good and obviously not good considering it was the mainnet merge release now this doesn't have anything to do with the merge as far as i can tell in terms of the code that led to this bug it had to do with a different kind of feature set that was being uh merged into geth but i mean there were some kind of concerns around this and understandably so people were kind of saying that why are these

bugs or these new features being kind of introduced before the merge like shouldn't we wait till after the merge to merge these things into the code base and i would agree with that i think that this was weird on on go ethereum's behalf here hopefully uh it doesn't happen again and hopefully the fix that they've brought out today version 1.10.23 uh is able to kind of rectify the issues here but yeah i mean i i do want to acknowledge that it's it's kind of like poor uh you know poor thinking to to kind of release that uh this close to the merge now the reason why i guess this is kind of like even worse is because the client diversity on the execution layer is really poor right now i mean if i bring up the client diversity website i can

show you what i mean by this basically the uh consensus layer is doing great i mean you can see here that prism and is down to 38 from a super majority a few months ago and lighthouse is 33 and then you've got the the rest of them here but on the execution layer side of things it's still predominantly geth by a large margin i mean get the 78 of the network error and aragon is a second at only 11.6 percent base to at five five point three percent and never mind at four point four percent this has been getting better over time i think a few months ago geth was close to 90 so it has been getting better but it is still not ideal obviously we want people to be using uh clients other than geth but geth is the most battle tested uh kind of like

hardened and and secure execution client that we have in saying that i have personally been running nevermind lately and i've had no issues with it i have my staking box running the other mind i have another my node on one of my other boxes uh and i've run eragon and basically before and had no issues with those either so i i think the risk at this point in time of running geth going into the merge could potentially be greater than running one of the minority clients simply because if there is a bug with geth used it's the same as if there was a bug on a majority consensus client where you would stand to potentially lose or get slashed as a solo validator because of this now in saying that i understand why people want to stay on geth until post merge

until things have just kind of settled down and more streamlined and and more secure and stable and then change this to another execution layer client which is totally fair but personally i've gotten off geth uh for you know multiple reasons i want to obviously contribute to client diversity i want to make sure that i'm protecting myself uh and we need to get guest down to i mean it's the same as the on the on the consensus layer side we want to get geth down to under 67 at least which isn't actually a far kind of uh or i guess like a big ask from here ideally we want guests to be much less than 67 percent but still it's not that big of an ass it's not like geth is at 90 plus percent at the moment which is which is awesome but we're gonna have to wait i think

until after the merge for the the kind of share of the network to come down a lot now it was kind of like some jokes being made in the discord channel and just generally that i saw that this was done on purpose by the geth team this bug was introduced on purpose in order to scare people into going to one of these minority clients i mean i think that's just the joke i don't think that actually happened but it is a good reminder like there is some truth to that there is a a very good reminder here that you should be losing a minority client if possible and if you're happy to to take maybe a little bit extra risk in that they're not as battle hardened and battle tested as geth but at the same time i think it levels itself out because you're not at

risk of there being a majority client bargain and being kind of i guess slashed here so that i guess like offsets those other risks at least in my mind so that's why people are concerned about it now if you want more details on what the bug actually was i think peter from the geth team has been putting out tweets about this on his twitter profile which i haven't got handy right now but you can go look at about all the details on that and also look at it on github i believe but if you were running geth this hotfix version if you haven't upgraded yet just skip .22 and go straight to 0.23 and all should be well with with your node there but as i've said plenty of times if you are running geth consider switching to another client such as aragon base or

nevermind as i said i've had so far the most experienced with never mind outside of geth and i've had no issues it seems to be going quite well very easy to set up so if you are a solo staking looking for another execution layer client to use at this point in time just from personal experience i would recommend never mind but you can choose from aragon uh basu and there are others out there but i think you know if you want to play it on the safe side going with the the majority i guess or going with the more well-known ones is probably the better bet here but uh but yeah i'll leave it at that for now as i said upgrade it to 0.23 if you haven't yet all right so speaking of execution consensus layout client staking all that good stuff uh summer eastside here

finally has his merge ready mainnet guides for lighthouse nimbus prism and teku ready now so for those of you who know who summer is he's been doing uh staking guides for quite a while now and not just for mainnet but also for test nets they're amazingly detailed guides like it's actually incredible how much how much detail he puts into these and you can see here that this is a guide for ubuntu lighthouse and it's linked here and it's a 45 minute read which means it is a very very in-depth guide this goes through everything you're probably going to need to know about running uh prism or sorry running lighthouse i guess in this guide on ubuntu and also how to get it all set up with command line everything like that on on ubuntu here so i mean there are guides for not just lighthouse there is

nimbus president and teku here and i believe they're all very similar yeah in terms of like reading and all very similar setups but just using different clients so i guess a very big shout out to someone here for putting these together i know this kind of work is definitely not uh an easy job to do definitely very time consuming and this isn't even his full-time job he works at uh he works at blizzard actually activism blizzard on overwatch as a senior engineering manager so he does this in his spare time which is crazy to me so i i if you are looking for a guide on how to get started with solo staking i couldn't recommend his guides enough like this is basically what you need when it comes to it comes to guides for staking i know there are other people out there who are

doing solo staking but they and maybe you're using kind of like dap note which is which is fine as well there's nothing wrong with that but if you want to do it all in your own because it's just something that you want to do then definitely follow summer's uh guides here they're probably the best that i've come across personally all right so speaking of staking superfish started off a little trend on twitter yesterday which got me super excited there's a hashtag called uh steak from home that basically has pictures of people staking setups and superfiz was tweeting a lot about it he was retweeting them and and tweeting them from dms that he got but essentially this is basically pictures of people's various staking setups so you can see that there's nux here little devices there are raspberry pi's there is whole server racks there are so

many different setups i mean i can scroll through them all here this one's pretty interesting on the right hand side is actually a mining setup with a bunch of miners in there being vented outside and on the left hand side in the you can see the knock there which is uh a staking with the same amount of value uh as the kind of mining setup has which is insane when you really think about it like that little knock replaces that entire uh setup and it reminds me of um of of these those old comparisons people do between computers 30 years ago in computers today like a smartphone the computing power on a smartphone 30 years ago would have been this massive mainframe thing now it fits in the palm of your hand so that's how i have you view this obviously it's not an exact

analogy but it's kind of funny when you look at it and you see that that the it's it's in a similar vein where you have like a tiny little nook having the same value uh in in terms of in terms of eat steak versus this big mining setup and the value in terms of mining hardware so i thought that was a cool little setup but yeah i mean this server actually cool here from lamboshi who who some of you will know from the staker community very active ethereum uh but yeah if you just want to scroll through this you can on your own you can see all the different setups you can see mine here uh which is the uh the staking box that i used to have behind me that you guys will be familiar with original daily gray viewers will be or i guess like long time daily gray

refuel viewers will know all about this setup and that's still the same box that i'm using it is not a high powered box it may look more involved than a knuck but the specs aren't that high i think in in terms of cpu it's just got an i5 in it ram i believe is 32 gig i i believe i can't remember exactly what the specs are off the top of my head right now and as you can see the motherboard is mini itx it's a very basic motherboard and i've got some cooling in there obviously you want to keep it all cool but other than that it's not super beefy like it really is just a standard setup and i run multiple validators on it with it's an execution layer client and everything like that so you don't have to have beefy hardware to stay which i just think is is absolutely

awesome of course uh but yeah you can just keep going through i actually surprised by the amount of knucks that people are running which knucks are these kind of small little bare bones pcs that you can add your own stuff to and steak on and people are using raspberry pies as well and have all types of different setups here which is awesome to see you can see this is a raspberry pi which is a rocker pool node which is which is awesome as well so if you want to check this out you can i just wanted to highlight it for you guys because at the end of the day ethereum ethereum staking uh has been made to favor solo stakes as long as you have that 32 ether that is the biggest barrier to entry if you have that 30 teeth which is a big

barrier attention don't get me wrong it didn't used to be as big when the eighth price was lower but these days it's a huge barrier to entry i mean it's 60 grand at current prices 60 grand us um but if you get over that barrier and i mean you can still do this with rockapool you can run rocketpool nodes with less than 32 but i'm talking as a fully self-sovereign validator the hardware requirements are very minimal and that was done purposefully because it basically shifts the requirements from having expensive hardware to having i guess like inexpensive stake and that means that you can stake from any kind of device you want to and then it also means that we can have decentralized pool solutions like rocket pool where you can stick with even less uh capital required but still be able to run nodes and and all that good stuff there so

definitely uh just think this speaks to the ethereum culture of decentralization and having all these people post their setups is really heartwarming i just loved seeing it personally all right so speaking of rocketpool this has been a discussion in the community for quite a while about how rockapool will be treating mev boost post merch you can see here the merge will enable rockerpool minipool operators to generate additional returns by capturing mev flashbots mev boost will be disabled by default but note operators can use it if they wish relay choice will also be possible once multiple relay options become available i think there's only one relay option still it's the flashbots relay but blocks route and manifold are both working on relays i don't know if they're going to be ready

in time for the merge i think one of them may be but we can expect a lot more relayers to come post merge and if you are a mini pool operator you'll be able to use these other relays because as i've explained before uh flashbots is a relay is going to be censoring their by default they're not going to be including transactions to tornado cache whereas other relays are not going to be censoring by default they may have an option in there and then some of them i think won't even offer that option at all so when it comes to i guess solo staking or being a mini pool operator you definitely want to choose the mev uh boost uh relayer that closely aligns with your own views obviously i will be choosing the one that uh that does not censor but at the end of the day i don't

think we should blame anyone for choosing the the censoring one especially if they're in the u.s where these sanctions actually apply to them and i've talked about censorship resistance on ethereum you know so much lately i'm not going to rehash all my arguments again um because people were telling me off in the discord channel before for being a bit too preachy i know i can be like that but it's kind of hard not to when you're doing this every day when i'm doing this kind of kind of every day and um it's very hard to repeat myself but i'm not going to repeat myself there i just wanted to put it on your radar that uh rocker pool is is committed to this which is very cool to see and if you are a mini pool operator you will be able to choose your own relayer uh probably post

merge at at this stage all right so connext is out with an update today so they said earlier this year we announced the amarok network upgrade overcome limitations in connects to v1 it introduces support for arbitrary message passing enabling developers to integrate easily into our network to build fully expressive cross-chain applications the upgrade modulizes the bridging stack instead of one system powering all the functionalities developers instead call into a single function that splits acro actions between a liquidity layer which is connects and a messaging layer after intensive research into the trade-offs of bridge security models we chose to partner closely with nomad the team then invented the optimistic bridge model a messaging system that relays data across chains using fraud proofs similar to optimistic

roll-ups and that was the bridge that actually i believe got hacked the other day uh yeah it was there was a nomad bridge there uh but connex is still still working with them uh and they still believe that nomad is uh one of the strongest and one of the best teams in the bridge space um but it will take time for nomad to recover funds and restarted system uh and the connects team obviously cannot afford to wait for this to happen as they have 150 routers over a dozen dap teams and tens of thousands of users waiting for the amarok upgrade to go live and they say here fortunately we were able to come up with an alternative approach that only modestly extends our timeline pending audits amarok will temporarily utilize existing ambs for roll ups and side chains to relay messages and a series of

connectors to plug into those so if you're wondering what happened to the amarok upgrade this is why it hasn't gone live yet uh or at least one of the reasons of probably the major reason why it hasn't gone live yet that nomad hack but seems connects has uh navigated around this and is going to be putting this upgrade live sooner rather than later and it's designed to be a temporary solution obviously there now bridges haven't been a topic of discussion lately as much i think obviously because it's been overshadowed by the ofac and censorship stuff generally but building secure decentralized censorship-resistant bridges is still a very difficult task and i've seen people shame bridges for being hacked and i don't think that's the right approach

here obviously i've i've gone on about it on the refuel a lot how a lot of these bridges are inherently insecure a lot of them uh increase a lot of extra risk if you're depending on where you're bridging to and even the i guess layer two bridges even the native ones have their own risks associated with them like for example they're centralized like that is a huge risk so when looking at bridges just generally i think instead of attacking the bridge and making fun of the bridge and everything like that it's it's probably better to focus on which bridges uh them are kind of uh taking security you know as seriously as possible not laughing at people that uh that suggest bugs or suggest edits to the bridge there have been teams that have done this in the

past which has kind of annoyed me because there's a lot of value locked in these things and also just realizing that no matter what you do on ethereum or any chain out there there is always a possibility of bugs even on bitcoin like the bitcoin code base yes has been tested battle hard and there's a huge bug bounty on it to exploit it but it doesn't mean bugs can't exist or can't be introduced either so you always have to be vigilant of that sort of stuff and you always have to realize that your risk goes up exponentially as soon as you uh interact with certain contracts and it can go up even just a lot interacting with the trusted contracts and it's not just uh risk of hack but it's also economic risk for example this is something that doesn't get

talked about a lot if you're becoming a unisop liquidity provider just as an example when you do that you have to account for not only the fact that there could be a bug in there that's that's part that should be part of your risk profile but you should also account for the fact that you're taking on the risk of impermanent loss now impermanent loss is probably the worst term that this industry has ever invented because a lot of the time it's not impermanent but what i mean is that you should be aware of the fact that you may not and a lot of the times get out what you put in the the fact of the matter is if the ulp on an eth usdc lp for example and the fear revenue doesn't make up for the the movement in price you may have just been

better off holding eth in that in that scenario obviously with unicorn v3 it becomes more complex but you can move your liquidity around and it's a it becomes a more of an optimized game there but there is always economic risks yeah and even putting money into lending markets if you put a piece of collateral into a lending market and then the borrower rate is at 100 of that collateral it means that there's none of that collateral left in the protocol and it means you have to wait to withdraw your collateral so so for example just as an easy example if you put eth into a money market and 100 of that eighth has been borrowed from the money market and there's no eight in there then you wouldn't be able to withdraw your eight even if you paid paid down your debt there are different ways around this

with i guess withdrawing different assets and stuff like that but it all introduces more risk so you need to be aware of those risks when interacting with things not just smart contract risk but economics economical risk as well because i see plenty of people especially on twitter they they are so confused why they've provided liquidity on uni swap i've rather declared another amm and they've actually ended up with less eth than they put in it's like well because the fact is the market moved against you it's as simple as that like just because it's automated doesn't mean it doesn't still suffer from the same uh perils of just general market making market making is not a free lunch it's definitely very specialized especially when it comes to v3 and moving your uh position around and concentrating your liquidity so it's good to be aware of

that but maybe i've got a little bit off of track there but i think bridges fall into the same same kind of vein here uh but also i i think you have to be pragmatic too and i'm glad knex is being pragmatic instead of just waiting for the the nomad uh kind of hole to be filled in the nomad team to rectify everything uh they're marching ahead with the upgrade that they want to put live which i think is is is the correct thing to do but i'll link this in the youtube description you can read their full thread and i believe there's a blog post attached to it as well all right so optimism has a thread out today where they said earlier this year we declared a summer of optimism we launched the optimism collective the op token and distributed grants to projects

on optimism to grow the ecosystem here's an update on op summer so you can see here some stats so since uh 12 of 43 season 1 incentive programs launched optimism is averaging 150 000 transactions a day up 43 versus versus the prior 90 days over 725 million dollars has been bridged from l1 to optimism and tvr crossed the one billion dollar mark in total 25.4 million op has been allocated as grants across these 12 projects now if we take the current price of op i believe that would be about 30ish million dollars or a bit more than that which i guess compared to the market cap of op is not that high so this has actually been quite a sustainable rewards program in terms of uh in terms of dollar

amounts but it just depends like obviously dollar man is going to fluctuate um but the remaining 31 projects approved projects have yet to launch their season 1 incentives so expect more explosive growth as they're saying here as well and there's also an op summer grants dashboard to keep track of everything it's on notion so you can see here you can keep track of which projects are going to have which incentives are they live have they already been done how much is being allocated all that good stuff i mean if i click into lyra here i can see all the details just listed here when it's starting when it's ending all that good stuff uh which is which is very awesome and there's a bunch of other things in this thread as well from optimism but great to see these layer twos growing as i explained the other day no point

taking just layer one metrics anymore and and drawing conclusions from that you also need to look at layer twos especially uh layer twos that have these incentive programs you have to look at them from a different lens and kind of be like okay well if these incentive programs don't exist anymore will the usage uh stay the same will it will it go down how much will it go down by will it grow you know we don't know it's kind of hard to tell we can be relatively certain that the usage will be higher with incentives than without just i mean it's pretty obvious but still there are kind of like protocols that don't have any incentives that have kept growing so it's always good to take the nuanced approach there all right so tom emma who is a

congressman from minnesota's sixth sixth district here has sent a letter to treasury secretary gallen regarding the unprecedented sanctioning of tornado cash the growing adoption he says here the growing adoption of decentralized technology will certainly raise new challenges for ofac nonetheless technology is neutral and the expectation of privacy is normal now this is a long letter i'm not going to re read it out on the refuel uh but basically he has asked a bunch of different questions about this and why this is done you know what what's going on here why ofac sanctions a set of smart contracts when they've in the past only sanctioned individuals and corporations or companies and similar entities i think this is amazing because as i've said we can't just fight against these sanctions with

the technology that we have in crypto we need to fight and meet these people where they are which is meat space so to speak which is the political arena because at the end of the day if we can do both if we can build better technology but also build also kind of uh get these regulators to not regulate us harshly or at least push them towards a better direction it is a massive win now i know i may sound optimistic towards these regulators uh uh seeing eye to eye with us or at least you know being less restrictive i'm not so that optimistic i i'm not like pessimistic to the point where i don't think it can happen but i also know that governments especially governments like the us they're very strict about certain things

and when it comes to the the sanctions that they put on other countries they're very strict about that there is especially places like north korea like there is not like they do that on purpose because they want people to to know that they're serious about it and when fighting back against these sorts of things it's very hard ofac actually has a lot of powers uh and it's it's basically viewed as an organization that i don't they don't have free reign but it's basically one that is viewed as something that is very important for the us national security now when you start venturing into that uh arena it it becomes very messy i think but still tom being a congressman is doing his job of putting forward these questions to ofac and getting them to uh clarify their position on things and getting them to

put more information out there so that we all can just become more educated on this because all they did was do the sanctioning they uh they put out a little bit of information around it but as far as i know there hasn't really been anything else besides the arrest of the tornado cash debt which is obviously uh poor but that's not on the us's behalf that is on the netherlands behalf but still we need more information to go on we can't just rely on the little information that we've gotten because it does affect real people it affects our real companies it affects the whole ecosystem and we've seen what happened over the last few weeks because of this so we need answers and i'm glad that tom is on our side here at least getting trying to get answers from from ofac and at the end of the day we can ask these

questions to them but they're not going to respond to us directly they're going to want these representatives to ask the question and then they'll may or may not respond to those uh questions from the representatives but you can give this full letter a read i'll link it in the description below for you all right so i just a quick shout out here i put out a tweet where i said appreciation post for anti-pro synthesis without his relentless retweeting i wouldn't be able to keep up with even half of what's happening in ethereum go follow him if you haven't yet and i highly recommend giving him a follow i think i've shouted him out on the refill before but seriously guys if i've been away from my computer or if i haven't had time to keep up with what's happened during the day i go to

his profile and i find all the stuff that i've missed and a lot of the time twitter won't even show me what i've missed it's twitter's algorithm is so trash for me i don't know why it's just so bad and it misses so many important things but i go to his profile and i'm able to find so much of it so if you want even more ethereum knowledge then i give you on the refuel and that you get from other places like maybe bank lists and other and twitter itself follow anti-pro synthesis he retweets so much stuff obviously uh like because you retweet so much maybe not all of it is relevant to you there are some trading stuff retweeted in there but i don't think that matters i think the fact that he retweets so much and it means that i can't miss anything i think that's a

really uh great thing and and great um value add to the community that he does and to be honest he does all of it for pretty much free there was a bitcoin grant that he had that got a bunch of money donated to but that was quite a long time ago now and since then his git coin grant hasn't actually attracted that much uh donations which is sad but he still does this he does this because he loves ethereum and he he does this as a public good which i think we need more of there's not many of the people that will do this i don't know anyone else that does as much kind of relentless retweeting as anti-pro synthesis does not even close so i just wanted to give a shout out to him and thank him for all his tireless work over the years because

at the end of the day we need more people like that as i mentioned they can't just be me i've said that plenty of times it has to be all of you uh and and i i know that a lot of you in the community especially in the discord channel uh you guys put together put out a lot of information it doesn't have to be on twitter it's in the discord channel as well there's a lot of great conversations happening i woke up again today and there was 400 unread messages and i'm just like you know what it's probably really important but i just do not have the time to go through 400 messages and i skimmed through it and it was there was a lot of great conversations happening there and i love seeing that happen i love not even being involved in it i love you

guys just talking amongst yourselves because as i've said plenty of times before you shouldn't just listen to me you shouldn't just take my opinions at face value and i don't think the delegate community is a bunch of of yes men or anything like that i think you guys challenge me on a lot of things which i really appreciate uh but yeah i i really enjoy watching those conversations happen within the discord channel on that one there but uh yeah i think this episode's gonna end a little bit earlier today uh because i don't have anything else to talk about right now i mean i do but i don't wanna kind of like go into and repeat myself again so i'm just gonna end it there for today maybe i'll do a longer episode tomorrow so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you

haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone