Validator freedoms, GameStop marketplace and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #479 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where I recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony sassano and since the first of November 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so a little discussion here spurred on by Tim baiko today on Twitter where he starts off by saying proposals true to address Mev censorship resistance often remove degrees of freedom from validators EG forces them to discriminate on profitability to process Mev Etc this is often a tangential point though it'd be good to know uh to to think of what validators rights should be for example should a validator be able to prioritize their own transactions assuming uh Max fee is greater than base fee should they be able to ignore Mev completely should

they be probabilistically guaranteed to propose a block every n slots to compete in auctions Etc there are obviously trade-offs EG if I can choose to include my own transaction then I can also choose to reject transactions from others easier censorship and then Tim continues on a little bit here about this topic and I replied basically saying you know maybe this is a controversial opinion but I don't think validators should have any quote unquote rights because it's an opt-in role and they are paid for their service so I've always had this opinion of both Miners and validators and and as basically these kind of for lack of a better term dumb pieces of software so to speak uh or a kind of like dumb actors within the network where I don't mean dumb as like

a derogatory term but I mean you know they do a task right the you know and they and they get paid for that task now how much freedoms and rights should they have uh for getting paid for that task well it's debatable right that's why Tim has put out this tweet thread here and I just don't think that they really should have any rights because as I said that it's an opt-in thing right like you opt in like it's not like um staking on ethereum is something that you have to do uh it's not something that uh that Mo that people uh who are I don't know struggling to make ends meet are gonna do right it's not like it's like it's not like a job in real life where you have to go get a job if you don't want to end up homeless or

something like staking is a privilege really when you when you think about it and you get paid for that privilege and obviously in return You Secure the network you know you put up that collateral which is obviously 32 if you're a solo validator um and you know you you get paid for for that service there now right now validators do have quite a bit of power right because they get to order transactions in a block uh and due to that due to this power there has been the blossoming of the Mev relayer um or maybe General uh mmv generally and Mev relay infrastructure over the past I guess 12 months 12 to 18 months or so uh and then on top of that we've seen the effects of that such as censorship as well which is obviously where this

discussion is kind of spurring from and then Victor Boone in here uh uh kind of um replied to my Twitter and said you know it's not really right in the traditional sense he means more like what uh facets they have control over and then I said sure in that case I think there's a minimal viable control principle that we could follow here the protocol should minimize the ways in which validators can adversely affect the network such as direct attacks censorship Etc and also allow validators some freedoms such as picking their own clients there's a pretty important delineation here that I want to make so what I meant by this was basically there are in protocol things that validators can do right such as censorship right and these are things that affect the the entire network in in a in you know in more ways than one obviously uh and it's

things that they can do directly with their validated power no matter what software they're running if they're running prism Lighthouse doesn't matter they're still able to do that that's uniform across them all but when it comes to allowing uh the validators certain freedoms I'm all for allowing validators to choose whatever client they want to run right we have a multi-client architecture I'm all for allowing them to choose those uh those clients and more for allowing them to have other similar freedoms to that but as long as they're not directly in protocol and not directly affecting the network in negative ways which obviously in a direct attack would do and also censorship does so it's a quite a wide discussion space here and that's why I think Tim is soliciting opinions from The Wider Community generally and you can go give your own to him if you if

you feel like it but I think just generally the principle I'm following with validators is that we want them to be as neutral as possible and we want to take away as much power as they have as possible from them to Auto transactions because we've seen that does not end anywhere good like even though we have the Mev really infrastructure that's getting better over time and then we have things like PBS coming uh I still think that we should work you know over the longer term as much as possible to just remove as much power from validators as possible because as I said they're getting paid for their work they have a job they get paid for that job that's it we shouldn't allow them to have all these uh all these kind of powers to adversely affect the protocol

and you know there's not really analogy that could be drawn here between say a validator and a normal worker in the real world obviously workers in the real world have rights and those rights are respected and those rights are obviously needed but as I mentioned before like validating is an opt-in thing uh it is not something that you I mean it's really a bonus on top of um on top of what you've already got anyone using validator using validated income as their main source of income will have uh other other Investments that they've got that that acts as kind of like I guess like a safe haven for them or a safety net I should say for them and at the end of the day if they're a solo validator they already have 32 each or more right if they've got one solar value they have

30 teeth which is not uh you know chump change so there is a very big difference between uh being you know required and forced into needing to get a job because obviously you need to survive you need to survive and and staking your eighth for a supplemental income so to speak from uh you know uh supplemental income to your other to the other income that you generate sorry I'm going all over the place tonight uh but yeah I hopefully that gets my my point across about how I view these things but uh as I said Tim is looking for opinions on this so definitely go give a reply in the um the Tweet thread if you do have an opinion on this and I'd also love to get opinions from you guys in the daily Discord Channel or on the YouTube comments wherever you want to put them

uh there are a lot of great things you can read through here as well and there's actually one reply uh from my collage here that I wanted to to read out where he said you know validator control is actually a legal liability some degree may be worth keeping despite that but it will be hard to convince policy makers that both and he quotes two things here where he says validate validators are just like neutral SMTP slash tcip routers and that they should be able to profit from deciding which transactions to include and this is I guess like in line with what I'm saying about we need to get validators to a neutral place as possible not just from a health of the network perspective but also from a policy or regulatory perspective because at the end of the day it's gonna be really really hard to

convince these Regulators that validators are neutral players when right now they're not right they're not at all I mean most of the network is using a Mev boost that is not a neutral thing to do they're going out and making the decision to uh Outsource their block building to a relayer that is opinionated because some relay sensor some relays don't either side of that is an opinion so really at the end of the day we want to remove that completely uh for both health of the network and for I guess regulatory reasons as well but yeah I thought that was a good little reply there but you can go check this out now a couple more things about Mev before I move on on mevwatch.info they are now tracking the new relay or relay which I've spoken about over the past

few days so really awesome to see that you can see over the last day it has proposed 0.3 percent of Mev boost blocks and my calculation yesterday where I said it would account for about one percent of um of uh of relays that are using Mev boost right oh sorry I should say one percent of all validators using a relayer that's just a flat thing that doesn't mean that it's proposing one percent of all blocks within with within Mev boost uh competing with these other relayers because that takes time to build up it's a probabilistic thing uh and it depends on profitability as well so you can see over the last seven days as well uh what they've been proposing that'll grow over time you can see the last seven days it's less because as I said I think I don't even think they've

been live for seven days yet but over the last day they're at 0.3 already and you can see blocks around Max profit is over seven percent as well so we're really getting uh a better diversity with these um relayers uh slowly over time now I'll revisit this from time to time obviously it's going to take a while before we get uh better diversity here but it's great to see that it's actually happening and another website that I came across today that gray stroke in the daily Discord Channel shared is this one that allows you to uh monitor the uptime of different relays so this is at mev-release.beaconstate.info you can go check this out I'll link in the YouTube description as well well but I'm not sure how reliable it is I've only seen this today but basically it shows you the uptime of these validate of these

relays I should say are per day and you can see here it goes It goes back I don't know how far it goes back but it goes back pretty far uh and then you can see uh all the relays listed here as well and they're up time and uh how they're faring on the network all right so speaking of resources you should check out superfizz has a new resource here uh where he says I didn't find a great listing of ethereum related information dashboards so I started cobbling one together please feel free to point me to something better submit PRS to this one or just tell me what's missing so this is basically a list of of resources all about ethereum so ethereum dashboards and resources it just got started obviously today I just saw it today oh yesterday I think I believe I might have missed it uh but if you have

resources that you want to add to this you can definitely go uh do that on GitHub I'll link this in the YouTube description but this is a good good start I think it's got a lot of the the resources that I've used on the refill before obviously you guys know about things like ultrasound money and raider.network which I've been using a lot uh project Sunshine node watch all these things here that I've uh that I've used so you can go check that out and actually I just want to check what I want to check out is raider.network which is actually oh maybe I should tell superfuze this it's actually linking to uh the Dune analytics dashboard here instead of raider.network the link is uh is uh not work not um correct there but I want to bring raider.network up uh in here because I want to see yeah so I've

been discussing this kind of phenomenal not phenomenon but like this trend that coinbase has started using Mev boost recently and uh they're up to 4.4 of flashbots and 1.0.7 of blocks throughout so it seems that they're not pointing to any one uh relayer and just uh forcing their validators to use any one relayer they are using multiple here so it's just two so far but I'm hoping to see that grow into a nice little diverse set of relays but yeah coinbase is definitely switched on Mev boost for their validators they they weren't doing this until recently I think maybe a week week and a half ago they started I started noticing this uh but they're definitely in the game now and now in terms of other ones that haven't actually done anything yet Bitcoin Swiss has uh Swiss I should say sorry has two

percent of the network they're not running any Mev boost relays right now and if I keep going uh I mean you can see here I mean if we go down to vitalik yeah vitalik's um uh 0.05 of the network and he's running 100 Lighthouse but zero percent Mev boost so I guess like the the biggest uh um entities that are running the uh I guess like all flash but not all flashbots but mostly flashbots you've got Lido here uh which and then you've got uh binance uh you got rocket pool steak fish and then it goes um it goes down from there it's funny seeing the the difference in I guess distribution between these different relays obviously as I've mentioned before it's going to depend a lot on profitability as well like how

profitable each of these relays are will determine how many uh how many blocks they've seen how many blocks they propose uh but yeah I'm glad we have dashboards like this to track it obviously we need this sort of stuff and I'm really glad the Mev watch dot info has added the relay or uh relay here it's very very cool to see all right interesting tweet out of uh from David Hoffman today where he said the op stack is going to modulize every layer 2 into little L2 genes and then the L2 genes are going to fight just like Dawkins predicted this is pretty cool because it aligns with my thinking about how layer 2's generally are going to evolve and work within the ecosystem I've always had this thesis

that and I've mentioned this on the refill before that because ethereum layer 1 is and is basically cementing themselves as just a settlement layer and and Outsourcing execution to these layer twos it means we're going to have such a blossoming ecosystem of different layer twos out there and then within those layer two projects they're going to have their own uh different implementations of that that are going to be both supplementary uh and and uh complex sorry so both supplementary complementary and also competitive with each other so an example here is arbitrim Nova and arbitrim1 very complementary but very different things arbitrim1 is a roll-up arbitrim Nova is not a roll-up right it's in any trust chain uh and then with within op you also have um the optimism uh optimistic ethereum roll up and then

you have uh that Minecraft clone that I showed the other day the op crafting which I don't believe is actually a um a roll up but it's using the op stack so and then within that right there's going to be like l3s and l4s and all that sort of stuff built on these things so because we have all of this I guess uh competition uh happening at Layer Two it's not just between the different layer two teams but also within them between their own implementations and then also above that with the layer 3s and layer fours we have such an incredible ecosystem developing that the other layer ones I just look at them and I'm like how can they even compete with this because not only do they have to compete with ethereum layer one first and foremost then if for some reason they're able to get to a point where I

don't know they've kind of you know gotten to the point where they're they're basically on the same not the same pedestal as ethereum but like broken through that that uh I guess barrier right there's a certain barrier to break through but then you have to compete with all the ethereum layer twos it's just in my mind it's basically impossible and people will say oh well that's like a monopolistic attitude I'm like no no I I don't believe that things shouldn't compete with layer one right layer one ethereum and obviously we've had plenty of things competing with layer 1 ethereum but nothing's even come close and it's actually quite quite sad how pathetic the competition has been so there's been competition it just has been inferior to ethereum in every way it hasn't been able to Dethrone ethereum at all and now we have uh layer twos

which are all comparing with each other but they're all so competing with different layer ones uh especially the ones who are the monolithic change right we've talked about this monolithic modular architecture before they're competing with all these monoliths and they're already bigger than most of the alt l1's like and there's and there's just so many of these l2s that are out there right now and I'm only talking about the the top two right now arbitrum and optimism right I should say and and optimism's Main roll-up network uh so because of that uh I don't think I don't think it's monopolistic just because ethereum layer one is that sediment layer for all the layer twos doesn't doesn't mean ethereum is a monopoly ethereum has to compete in the free market just like every other layer one does and ethereum has been able to compete in such a way where it's

beat back all of that all of those attacks so to speak and I used to say and I actually said this uh quite a while ago I don't know if I've said it on the refill before but basically the way I rank different layer ones and I should say smart contract layer once because I don't include Bitcoin in this but the way I rank smart contract layer ones is that there's ethereum and then everyone else is fighting for second place right because there's no in my in my mind right now there is no second place I know I sound like Michael Saylor right now where he said there is no second best I don't mean it in terms of nothing can compete nothing can even come close to ethereum but when you look at the landscape of other layer ones out there uh even if I had a gun to my head

it'd be really hard for me to just come up with a with something that's in second place because you asked me a few months ago it might be one thing you asked me today it might be another thing you asked me in a few months it might be another thing again right so there's ethereum then there's everyone else fighting to be number two and then there's all the ethereum layer twos which are part of the ethereum ecosystem anyway so they don't need to compete with it with all these other things they get to inherit ethereum uh you know ethereum's place in the in the ecosystem so to speak so yeah I just that's the way I think about things I know people call me an eighth Maxi for thinking like that but hey at the end of the day ethereum has faced so much competition

has gone through so many trials and tribulations it's still here it's still improving it's still the biggest Network by far if it has to be doing something right and then now we have all these layer twos which are just adding even more utility to the ethereum network adding the scalability of course and privacy and all that sorts of stuff it's just it's going to get harder and harder to compete with ethereum now and as I said I don't want ethereum to be a monopoly it's not a monopoly because it really can't be when the Market's this free at the end of the day like there's no central body protecting ethereum ethereum is not um government uh sanctioned or protected by by government it doesn't acquire other networks it's not a and it's not centralized in general but uh you know it's able to compete because its Community is so

strong uh it's uh alignment around what it wants to be from the community is so strong and I believe that's going to continue as as time goes on all right so uh speaking of I guess like scalability in general uh immutable has announced the GameStop nft Marketplace is now live on immutable X so immutable X as you all know is powered by stockwest technology uh and an event and this advances the next generation of web 3 games on immutable X now you guys know I'm an investor in immutable xcr one of the only nft related Investments that I've made because I believe in investing in nft related infrastructure but that's not investment advice this is how I play things but basically this has been uh in the works for a little while here so

it's great to see that this partnership has uh has materialized into the marketplace being officially live but immutable X generally has been killing it lately in terms of uh who they're on boarding right they're on boarding a lot of different games you guys know that I've been kind of bearish on web 3 games in general but I think when it comes to gaming I view it the same way as I view like just businesses in general most of them are gonna fail but the ones that succeed will be really big uh so maybe 90 plus percent maybe even more more than that fails but the ones that succeed are going to be big they're going to find a nice player base and they're actually going to go on to be profitable because at the end of the day these things are basically still businesses they need to be profitable

they need to be generating uh Revenue uh you know doesn't and obviously they have tokens they have nfts they're different ways to to do that and some of them might do governance and things like that I mean obviously there there's it's on a case-by-case basis but still we have a lot of these things coming to market now are some of them scams and grips I mean maybe most of them are scams and grips who knows right I haven't looked into all of them but I've been seeing immutable X talk about all these Partnerships that they've been having and all these games that are that are being onboarded and I think that's uh that's pretty cool there but yeah cool to see that this Marketplace is now live you can go check it out at nft.gamestop.com all right so connects has an update on their amarok upgrade which I spoke about

a few months ago and I remember saying that they delayed the amarok upgrade uh but now they are ready to deploy it so this is a network upgrade for the connects Network and it's finally complete and it's ready to be launched into beta in the coming weeks so yeah we can expect this maybe in the next week or two or maybe possibly three uh but yeah I've been talking about amarok for quite a while and there's a thread here that you can read which I'll link in the YouTube description below and there's also a new blog post talking about I guess the next wave of applications uh on connects and what they're enabling with amarok and I believe yeah connects has also announced that they're doing a token the next token which I don't think is live yet uh but uh that that seems to

be I guess going to be coming after the the amarok upgrade uh but yeah if you want to read about this you can go check out the blog post and the Twitter thread but great to see that the bridging infrastructure is still making strides I remember I said to you guys that I think that there's a lot of bridges but I don't think like I think it's gonna be like a parallel distribution it seems the front runner right now at least uh it seems to be hot protocol from what I've seen Connex is either a close second or maybe equal in terms of that uh and then there are aggregators like uh lee dot Phi uh or li.fi um and then there are a bunch of others out that I mentioned before I can't remember remember top my head but yeah it's always going to be a power law

distribution here because of things like liquidity and brand awareness and and all the usual stuff that I've spoken about before so yeah I mean I should mention I'm an investor in connects TR I'm not trying to not trying to Shield them or anything I'm not investor in hot they actually didn't take any investors from from what I know which is was actually pretty cool but yeah credit where it's Drew they've they've grown their um their bridging infrastructure to place to a very nice place they've got a lot of liquidity running through them I believe they actually did uh achieve three billion dollars worth of um liquidity running through them that Milestone today so congrats to them on that um but yeah I'm very much looking forward to this major upgrade coming to connect in amarok I think it's going to be uh is going to be awesome

all right so alien protocol announced that they are now live on arbitrim so this is a permissionless fundraising platform which is now available to more users many protocols have expressed interest in aylin and we're excited to be in the infrastructure protocols used to raise needed funds now this is a protocol that I believe spun out of the synthetics ecosystem or at least came out of Kane Warwick which is obviously the founder of um of synthetics and it was live on optimism uh and now it's live on arbitrim as well so very cool to see this and as I said they're a fundraising platform permissionless fundraising platform trying to I guess take icos to the next level so to speak because you know I have a love-hate relationship with icos I understand why

they failed and why they didn't work in 2017 but there are actually a fair few projects that came out of doing an Ico in 2017 that went on to succeed yes most of them failed yes most of them were on money grab but we still got some successes out of it so I don't think the notion of like fundraising via the public is necessarily bad I actually think it's a pretty cool thing but it's all about the implementation and alien protocol is trying to bring a new implementation to Market to do this and you can see actually on my screen right now what that what their kind of um implementation actually entails uh but there have been other attempts as well like idos but I actually think idos were more predatory than predatory than icos because the Ido was basically just the

exchange being sorry I should say um ieo initial exchange offerings it was just basically the exchange running it and the exchange being the the house so to speak um and a lot of them were extremely predatory um but when it comes to permissionless fundraising that's done in a decentralized way I think there's still a lot of ways that we can iterate on that and that's what alien protocol is doing so go check them out I'll link it in the YouTube description below I finally hear a discussion about the Devcon uh in the Defcon 7 location so proposals to uh there are they're taking proposals for the Devcon 7 location right now but only till today basically so that's the deadline for uh for putting through proposals here and there

has been quite a few proposals for the location obviously Devcon 6 was hosted in uh Colombia in in Bogota there but uh there are a lot of different uh places that have been suggested for for Defcon 7. I think the most popular ones are Vietnam uh turkey uh Israel um and I'm just going through the list here and uh and and Portugal maybe I can just you can see the most popular ones here the ones with the most views so there's there's Vietnam there's uh there's Taiwan oh Taiwan as well uh there's turkey and then there's Portugal turkey seems to have the most amount of views in Istanbul and turkey which will actually make a lot of sense because uh one of the um one of the ethereum hard Forks was called Istanbul I don't know

where I sit on this I honestly haven't been to any of these countries yet so I would love to visit like really any of them that I listed out uh but you know what I actually think that uh it's kind of a toss-up between these these four right now and I'm not sure exactly where they're going to uh where they're going to to land on here I'm curious to know what their um their logic is for selecting a location and there's also like in these proposals there's a bunch of questions that get asked around you know uh things like uh is there more are there modern venues how is transportation how can people get there you know what's the I guess City like generally and people put forward these proposals with all these sorts of uh all the answers here for this but yeah I'd

be happy with any of these locations honestly I've never as I said I've never been to any of these Vietnam turkey Israel uh Portugal never been uh or even even Taiwan as well maybe I prefer it to be yeah or maybe in Asia because it's closer to me to to fly to uh you know what Israel and Turkey wouldn't be too bad either um uh and uh what else is there Portugal eh Portugal probably be the worst in terms of uh traveling uh but yeah if it happens in Vietnam I'll be happy but anyway I'm I'm definitely rambling now if you want to propose your own location you can uh you know actually I ideally I would love to be in Australia one day in Melbourne or Sydney obviously I'm biased towards Melbourne since I live here but I would love Devcon to one day come to

to Australia I don't think it would because honest honestly I get it because like I I understand what it's like to travel from Australia to basically anywhere else in the world it's it's a long travel time I mean I think the shortest travel time overseas quote unquote is um is probably uh where is it maybe New Zealand which is about three and a half hours uh or or um Vanuatu which is a bit closer but other than that yeah it's it's not it's not an easy travel time uh and especially to to Europe uh and and the US not not very easy especially East Coast us and in Europe generally so I get why they don't they probably wouldn't want to do it in in Australia but I'm hoping for more australian-based 8th conferences anyway

uh in the future but with that I'm going to leave it at that 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