TDG's 2 year anniversary, Core dev updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #495 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where you cap the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this designer until the 25th of November 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so it is the 25th of November which means it is the two-year anniversary of the daily Way YouTube channel I put the first daily gray refuel out on 25th of November 2020 and it it's crazy that it's already been two years and so much has happened in those years right I've covered so many different things for in in both the ethereum and crypto ecosystems generally and if you really think about it you know two years ago November 2020 I mean it was really just the start of the bull market in terms of like the craziness of the bull market eighth was heading it to its all-time

high we were a few days away from the beacon chain launching on December 1st of of 2020 there um and it really was a kind of crazy time to launch the channel because then there's so much content as there was so much content to cover because we had all of 2021 and now all of 2022 and it's amazing going back and watching some of those earlier episodes I back and watched some of them today just every I guess like 20 or 30 episodes or so for uh uh for the first year I went and looked and watched them and I'm like wow we've come a long way as an ecosystem that's for sure and also the earlier episodes especially like the the first um the first few I was very quiet compared to what I am now so that's always funny and going back and seeing

how I gained more confidence I guess in doing the show as time went on and obviously as I gained a larger and larger audience with it so I guess I also want to extend a huge thank you to everyone for supporting me for two years now obviously there is no monetization or anything on the daily way so and and some of you have sent me donations on bitcoin of course that I've I've um I've thanked you for in the past but I think just supporting the channel just watching it and listening to it giving me your feedback you know commenting in the Discord Channel commenting on on YouTube I really really appreciate all that it makes my work feel you know very valuable it makes me feel valued as a content creator so so yeah thank you everyone for the last two years and I'm

not going anywhere of course I hope to be doing this for 10 years you know 15 20 years like I really have no plans to stop doing this and you know someone uh kind of asked me the other day or made a comment the other day about like when I would uh would stop doing this uh or or stop doing the refuel I guess and I said well you know when it stops being fun and I just can't see it stop being fun because ethereum is so fun I have been in ethereum since 2017 and I can't remember a day where I wasn't having fun even if there was lots of drama even if there was lots of lots of fun and stuff spreading around the ecosystem just grips me like nothing else in my life and I don't think I'm going to be going

anywhere for a very long time so looking forward to to continuing to do these every weekday for you all and having you all on the journey with me now in saying that let's move on to some exciting piece of news over the last 24 hours which was the all-call devs call that was uh had yesterday now I mentioned that this was happening uh yesterday and apparently it was very eventful Tim baiko has his usual update thread or summary thread that you can read here I'm obviously not going to go over everything that was discussed but I think there are two main takeaways from this the first is that uh EIP 4844 has been considered for inclusion now this doesn't mean that it's going to be included in Shanghai uh the next ethereum upgrade it's just mean that it's considered for inclusion so it's a

it's a maybe so to speak right so there was that which was obviously a very big deal and then the second the second thing which I think is an even bigger deal was um and Tim highlighted here that the guest team uh believes that they'd like to have a route have said that they they would like to have a relatively lean Shanghai which prioritizes withdrawals ideally includes eof which I've spoken about before it's a set of different erps and and goes live around March I actually think this approach is much better because I was giving some ballpark estimates yesterday about what what Shanghai would look like in terms of timing if 4844 was included and if it wasn't well how about we just do withdrawals and eof and maybe some other eips that are less are less intensive in March get that out of the

way you know get the most critical thing out of the way which is obviously withdrawals right now and then get 4844 shipped maybe six to nine months later which would still put us in net in 2023 for 48.44. I think that's the most sane approach here having two separate upgrades rather than trying to shove everything into one and adding more complexity and of course adding more overhead and more development time and all that stuff there uh I I really side with that because if we can get withdrawals as early as March instead of having to wait till something like you know late Q2 I think that's a it's a big plus so I'm all for that we'll see how it goes obviously we'll get a clearer picture as as time goes on here but if the guest team is saying this then it holds a lot of weight obviously because

Geth has been around the longest right they have uh they have a lot of weight on the core devs calls they uh they obviously are the majority client on the execution layer side still so their voice carries a lot of weight here um and you know 4844 may be ready I guess for for mainnet deployments it may have a spec that's finalized with devnets and all that stuff but if the core devs aren't I guess aligned on it being safe enough to deploy on it being ready enough to deploy and want to you know keep an upgrade relatively lean especially if it has something like withdrawals uh within it then I think that's the part that's going to be taken and as I said I agree with this path I think it's a better path than trying to shove everything into one upgrade um and it's funny because if withdrawals

come as soon as March it'll be hilarious to see what the um the floods there's pivot to next because you can just be like well you guys said withdrawals aren't weren't coming until 2024 or ever well here they are in March 2023 uh what do you got you know what do you got next I'm sure the car up with something else but it's it's kind of funny thinking about that as well but yeah a great little uh summary thread as usual from Tim here that you can go give a read to and also on the topic of erp4844 Terence from prilabs put out a tweet thread saying there have been made discussions on the erp4844 timeline so I thought I'd provide more color on what arbitrim and prilabs stands today now you remember that prilabs is now part of the arbitrim uh company here off chain Labs I should

say uh company so you should go give this thread a read it's not very long it's it's quite short actually just you know explaining it from terence's point of view on uh on on the kind of timeline here and as I was discussing the timeline of 448 44 being included is still up in the air it is considered for inclusion in Shanghai but that doesn't mean it's going to be included in Shanghai I mean uh Terence kind of says it in a in a tweet reply here saying CF CFI doesn't mean inclusion as I stated on the call myself and my team stances is to not delay withdrawal for 48.44 so it seems that like most of the core devs is gonna are gonna be aligned on this if not all of them eventually aligned on splitting these upgrades up and I I do think it's the better path forward uh

personally here in saying that I think that if it was a bull market where fees were more a pressing issue and where scalability was a more pressing issue it would have been interesting to see where everyone kind of um I guess like fell on this uh on the Spectrum here because for example let's just say we rewind the clock back to the bull market and we have 48 48 44 ready to go it's a few months till Shanghai goes live and everyone's looking at these 100 gray gas prices which are obviously pushing later two gas prices up as well and they're thinking you know this is crazy we need to do something now right we need to fix this now well would 4844 have been included in Shanghai because of this the the sense of urgency there I I think so and you know what the funny thing about

withdrawals is the reason why people have such a sense of urgency around them is one because obviously we want to stick to the promise that we made that withdrawals would be included in the first upgrade after the merge but two it's got to do with the censorship stuff which actually is a recent phenomenon it only started since the ofax sanctions in August so uh you know the only reason why people are pushing for well one of the major reasons what people are pushing for withdrawals so much is because of that because obviously we want to make it so that people can change who they're staking with so that we don't have entrenched staking providers is and we don't centralize taking the staking distribution more than it or you know already currently is or worse than it currently is uh so to speak and obviously help with censorship

resistance as well so it's kind of funny how depending on where the ecosystem is at the time will dictate things in a certain way it doesn't really dictate it to the point where it has a control over it so for example the merge was coming for a long time but there was no pressure to launch the merge in the bull market like no one was saying you know we need to do the merge now because it's a bull market you know get it get it done get it out of the way or we're going to miss the boat I didn't really see any of that rhetoric uh especially not from the ethereum community maybe it came from the I guess like mercenaries in the profit Maxis maybe they were saying things like that but definitely within the ethereum community it was like you know let's just ship this when

it's ready and we did and it went perfectly as we all know so I think that in another timeline where 4844 was ready and it was still a bull market and 100 great gas prices were were kind of the norm again I think that it would have probably been more likely to be included in Shanghai than it is now I would say that the inclusion chance of 4844 in Shanghai is is quite low at this point uh now that I have have kind of uh seen the summary from the latest core devs call and and the fact that they are signaling that they would rather just keep it lean yeah but that as I said like I I remember saying it was like a coin toss where the 4844 would be in Shanghai or not but I put a lot lower chance on that now I

would say if I had to put a percentage on it it's probably less than 20 easily uh of a chance of it going in but that's not a bad thing I actually think it's a positive thing that it can go into a separate a separate upgrade uh later on uh hopefully six to nine months after withdrawals probably even it could even be sooner than that depending on if it's ready if the clients uh have developed that if the clients have implemented it and if the the core devs in the community are happy with it to go ahead it could it could come sooner but we'll have to see how that shakes out uh there but yeah I'll link all these threads in the YouTube description for you to check out all right something I wanted to highlight here is a post from Dorothy who said here is my best attempt at

annotating ethereum's roadmap providing a quick summary of each item along with relevant links to dive deeper feedback is welcome and he links to a notes uh page here on notes.etherium.org this is actually amazing uh kudos to domothe on this because I've said before that you can Google each of those roadmap items that vitalik had and you'd find the relevant information well that's not very helpful right you can Google things and maybe you get stuck in different rabbit holes that you may not uh you know necessarily want to be down while Dorothy has gone and done done the work for you and basically put together all the resources that you need to learn about each of the roadmap items that vitalik has stipulated before uh with also a just brief explanation of what each of these things are so that if you're not interested in a specific thing or

something is it seems too alien to you you don't have to go down that rabbit hole you can go down a different one and then work your way up to it so I mean huge kudos to Domo theater this is just amazing and I mean domothe's an active daily way contributed in the Discord Channel as well but they are doing a lot of really great stuff uh with regards to ethereum work here and putting out content so definitely I mean highly recommend going going and checking this out uh like very highly recommend to be honest if you're interested at all in ethereum's robot which I'm sure you all are I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh and you know speaking of dominthe as well I forgot to have this linked here but he put out a banger meme today that I wanted to

quickly highlight and this goes back to the withdrawals fund so you can see here in the meme someone's shouting off of a cliff uh the merge will be delayed forever uh and he's said that this is an esteemed Bitcoin thought leader Shilling their paid subscriptions books or referrals and then you've got the NPCs on the right hand pane saying the merge will be delayed forever and then you know we had the merge proof of stake activated and the NPCs are like okay well what do we do now what do we say now and then their dear leader says eat stickers can't even withdraw yet and the NPCs go back to staying East takers can't even withdraw yet and this goes back to vitalik calling Bitcoin maximalist uh or Bitcoin thought leaders NPCs or non-playing characters where essentially they are all just drones and they all just follow their dear leaders

instead of thinking for themselves and that is obvious for anyone who pays attention to to the rhetoric on Twitter on on on on on YouTube uh on on Reddit or any kind of social media platform uh but I just wanted to highlight that because I thought it was cool but definitely uh the better use of your time and staring at memes is reading this uh this post from domethy which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right so I spoke a bit about the metamask infuro drama yesterday on the refuel and it the dramas continued over the last 24 hours and the tldr is that there was a change in the privacy policy of infuri saying that they were going to collect your IP address and people took that as uh metamask and inferior going

to be logging your IP address and essentially connecting all your wallets to that and being able to dox you and all these sorts of stuff the the thing about this is that like because it goes back to social media rewarding engagement uh like tweets or engagement bait or drama the truth of the matter is that the language and as metamar States here the language in the privacy policy was updated on November 23rd but nothing has changed in the way that metamask and inferior operate and they have a statement here on clarifying what they actually do with the user data and apparently it's nothing and I don't actually think that they store the um the data either it's difficult to kind of draw the lines between inferior and metamask because they're two separate entities and you have to I guess read each of the policies here but from what

I can can tell metamask doesn't actually store any of this and they only uh use it or kind of use the information in order to send back your balances so when you open up metamask and you want to query your balances they need to be able to do batch sends and cache that in order to show you your balances is there a better way of doing this I think there would be is there a better privacy preserving way of doing this there probably is but it's not as bad as you go as people think it is where they think that metamasking and fura are logging their IPs logging all their addresses uh you know harvesting their data and then doing something nefarious with that obviously you know you have to trust that they're not doing things nefarious with it and you have to trust that they're sticking to their word uh

and sticking to their their terms of service policy here but metamask is open source you can go check out all the code and all the underlying stuff that they do there as I said yesterday you can change your RPC relatively easily and you can also use a VPN if you want to maintain privacy there but the the fact of the matter is in the reality of the situation is that maintaining digital privacy is actually quite quite hard in this day and age and maintaining privacy on chain is also very hard now for example when you go to a an application front end a defy app front end you know most of the time that those front ends are logging your information just as part of their everyday um uh everyday operations like they're logging your IP address they're logging your the address that you're using to

sign in they're probably logging your behavior because they want to improve their product and honestly like it's not nefarious for them to be doing that but the thing is is that if you actually care about total privacy online and you want to be completely Anonymous you don't want any data to be harvested from you the only way to achieve that would be to run a VPN you know run your own node locally don't run a a wallet that collects anything on you so no don't use metamask right use something like frame.sh which is which is an alternative that doesn't collect any information on you right uh yeah run your own node is your own RPC run your own front ends locally and basically become a full self-sovereign ethereum that's pretty much the only way and you

have to be very Vigilant here as well about where your information gets leaked uh that's pretty much the only way to do it otherwise yeah I mean it's very very difficult now is this a bad thing is is this something that's going to stifle Mass adoption or anything like that I don't think so I think that if you really are privacy conscious and really care about your privacy definitely keep putting pressure on these companies to not store your data but I mean at the end of the day like they the thing is is that even if they say they're not storing it they could be whether that be accidentally maybe they they didn't know that was storing it there has been cases of this or they're doing it anyway because they think that it helps improve their product or maybe they're just doing it because they're nefarious and

they want to sell your data to the highest bidder or there's some scam website that uh that looks legit but is actually a scam and they want to uh they want to Blackmail you or something like that right so if you really want to preserve your privacy there are ways to do it but it's jumping through a bit of Hoops to do that there is no uh one-click solution for this and there probably never will be because that one click solution could also come with trust assumptions even if it was open source it could have an auto update feature where they changed the code and then you auto update and you don't even realize that it updated and then all your data is suddenly exposed to the this third party this isn't exclusive to web3 and crypto obviously this happens a lot in web 2 land I mean in web 2 land

the concept of privacy is pretty much like non-existent right um and there's not just your IP it's also your user behavior and things like that but the beautiful thing about crypto is that you can't you can run your own front ends like for example you can't run your own Twitter front end right like you can't talk to Twitter's servers without using a a Twitter client that's built using their API or or built using uh their infrastructure or using the official Twitter app whereas something like uni swap you can run your own interface locally or you can literally write your own interface and integrate with the unisoft smart contracts on ethereum using your own full node so the amazing thing is is that we can actually have full on-chain uh privacy in terms of of being able to keep yourself pseudonymous rather than

anonymous because obviously everything on change transparent but yeah you have to jump through hoops to do that which is just the reality of the situation but hopefully that clears things out for you guys about how these different companies collect data and the different implications of that you can check out metamask's blog post which I'll of course Link in the YouTube description below um but and this is I guess like consensus blog post but consensus owns metamasks or technically metamask but I guess that's just semantics but yeah go check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so you've probably been hearing a lot about eigenlayer lately and I've talked about them a bunch on the refill before if you're still confused about what it is Sri Ram uh one of the founders or at least the founder

of eigenlayer has a good thread out today and he starts off by saying eigenlayer what is it good for this is a thread that explains the underlying elements of trust in the eigenlayer network and how they can be put together to create powerful services with customized decentralized truss models the tldr and eigenlayer I mean you can read these three for yourself but the tldr is that it's attempting to take staked eth and use it for something else so for example their first product they want to do and I I don't know if they're going to do additional products but I assume they will is that they want to run a data availability available data availability layer using staked eth so essentially what you do is you take that uh that you know that staked eth and you reuse the economic trust

decentralization trust and eth validator commitments as SRI Ram says here in eigen layer and he says I'm gonna laser generic platform that allows Builders to mix and match these elements to create appropriate trust models and in the truss model one there's economic trust because ethi's restaked on eigenlayer there is a reuse of Economic Security without incur incurring New Capital costs in for enforcing economic trust requires programmatic slashing so that misbehavior is identical on ethereum um and so how does this differ from from fraud proofs required for optimistic Roll-Ups well latency if there is enough amounts staked on eigenlayer to make a particular claim then that claim can be instantly treated as correct and acted upon and later slashed if violated and then he notes a use case one like client

Bridges run like clients to other chains off chain and make State claims on ethereum the input is acted upon immediately without any latency and later slashed if wrong requires ebm implementation of like client run on fraud challenge so obviously as I said there's more than just the data availability a use cases like client Bridges there's uh there's oracles uh there's a super fast settlement as as SRI Ram says here uh for example one can run a super fast settlement chain on top of ethereum which gives fast economic finality and which settles eventually on ethereum this layer verifies DK proofs and arrives at consensus within one second for example and then he continues on I mean it's quite a lengthy thread I definitely recommend giving it a raid because it is very informative

um but yeah definitely go check it out I'll link it in the YouTube description but I can layer is something that you should all be paying attention to who should all be learning about it and and should all be uh kind of following along with because it is something that I definitely think is going to be a key Innovation coming out of this bear Market all right so Bert amila from the flashbots team shared interesting little uh table today where he said super interesting metrics on Builder profits from relayscan.io this is data for the last week build.0x69 which is the uh which is the relay or uh relayer seems to be subsidizing the medium block a little bit but taking profit on very large blocks several Builders are now profitable so you can see here a breakdown of each of these in the table

uh I think I'm not sure if this is directly due to the fact that flashbots open source their Builder which means that the builders can use that and be more profitable than they otherwise would have been I'm sure that has something to do with it um and then you know Bert says that profit is measured as the sum of the difference of in the balance of the Builder's address over all their landed blocks um as a positive value implies the Builder took more in fees than they paid to the proposal and negative value implies the Builder subsidized the block and you can see here that uh the total profit on uh you know the total profit column here and then the different builders in in the rows and then pintail makes a note saying you know wow I was not expecting to see Builder initiated

Mev smoothing and then Bert said who knew the solution for mev's moving was to introduce public dashboards and competition for the number one slot on those dashboards so yeah I mean it seems that the reason why that they've been doing this smoothing is because they want to build they want to um go up this dashboard and go up to and be number one here I guess like the reason they want to do that is because it's better for marketing and awareness and getting more people to use their Builder and you I guess you can go to relayscan.io and actually check out the the live view of this for yourself so you can see top relayers and top Builders now of course you know this is Builder 0x69 which is the relay or Builder uh they're at the top here so like it's just like when you

search on Google you only click on like the the first or second link you don't really go too far down the table well the same is true here you're only going to look at the first few right you're going to look at the top relays the top Builders and you're going to be like okay well I'm gonna uh I'm gonna use flashbots or I'm gonna use blocks throughout Max profit and then on the Builder side I want to uh use Builder 0x69 and you can see it when you hover over which um which uh relay support which Builders and which ones are integrated with them and you can you can do this by 24 hour 12 hour or one hour so I mean that's a no-brainer there that uh the higher you are on this list the better the marketing is so very very cool to see this uh cool to see that I I

think the effect of uh flashbots open sourcing their Builder infrastructure has actually made an effect here and it's really cool to see that uh the relay all the non because it's a non-censoring one is the top Builder uh you and you can see it's it's based on the payloads that it processes and the percentage uh on the on the top relay side and then on the top Builder side it's it's blocks that it um that it proposes and a percentage of uh those blocks or blocks that it builds sorry I shouldn't say shouldn't say propose there so very very cool dashboard that you can check out I'll link in the YouTube description below all right so finally here we have an update from a stock where this is a first look into Cairo 1.0 which is a fully open source this is a big step

towards open sourcing the starknet stack you can now get familiar with the new syntax compile and run simple programs locally stocknet support is coming soon so this is obviously for all developed developers out there you can go check out their blog posts and see what all the fuss is about I've talked about Cairo a bunch before it's uh the alternative to solidity or I guess like the native language on the stock net ecosystem and today it is open source but this is only this is only the first step towards open sourcing the starknet stack and they also give a a whole breakdown of everything happening in the blog post here for every everyone to check out if you want to do so but as I said this is more geared towards developers here all right so I've got a few minutes left here I did go over time

yesterday so I might cut today's episode episode a little bit short but I did want to make a note here about one thing in particular so the funny thing about where we currently are as an ecosystem and I know I've said this before but I think it's worth reiterating like if you ignore the market and ignore I just guess crypto prices in general and just paid attention to what's happening in the ethereum ecosystem you wouldn't even know it was a bear market like I can't believe I spent I went over time yesterday I did like a 40 minute episode yesterday you know I'm doing 30 minute episodes pretty much every every other day and I'm not covering everything either either I'm not covering every project I'm just covering the things that I come across you know my Twitter feed and what I find my most interesting

um but if you if you were to bring together like everything happening in ethereum each and every day and did like a whole list of it you obviously wouldn't wouldn't talk to it because it would take too long but like did a whole list of everything happening there would be so much on that list every single day so the bear Market only exists in the the prices the bear Market does not exist in the developer activity on ethereum the ecosystem activity the users continuing to grow the adoption of layer twos that's all up into the right like and the prices always lag these sorts of things it always lags fundamentals and it really has me feeling like it's the the the similar to to 2019 where the price just went sideways for you know for for basically the whole year it it started 2019 at 120

or 30 ended up at 120 or 30 but the amount of innovation that happened in that year was staggering and that paid dividends in 2020 when we had D5 summer because D5 summer was only possible due to all the infrastructure that was built out in 2018 and 2019 so I think the same thing is going to be true for the next bull market we're going to have all this infrastructure that we build out during the bear Market uh and I think layer 2's are going to play a huge part here and then they're going to pay uh dividends and going to be the thing that drives uh the the bull market to come back and the bull market to to to start again uh the next time it rolls around now how long that's going to take obviously is anyone's guess but really I mean if you

don't pay attention to prices it doesn't feel like a bear Market at all at least that's my feeling and I'm sure I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way but I guess on that note that that's going to be it for the two-year anniversary episode of the refuel so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone