Verkle tree updates, Puffer now live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #723 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the delway refuel where C latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony Sano and today the 1st of February 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so kicking us off today we have a fresh update from the latest veral implementers call here so Josh Rudolph uh usually does these updates and I've covered him a bunch of times on the refi before so it is quite a lengthy update I mean you can go give this a read uh for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below but as you guys know the Verge or kind of veral trees or statelessness has been on the ethereum road map for quite some time now uh you know it's been a long time coming you know there's been a lot of discussions recently about the possibility of getting the I guess like

vocal related eips into Petra the next ethereum upgrade after denune I don't know if that's actually going to materialize because it seems like the agreed upon um kind of a stance right now at the C devs is that if we did aim to get some of these eips or vocal related eips into Petra it would delay Petra to probably next year and I so I think they want to keep Petra as like more of a a lean kind kind of narrowly focused or narrowly scoped fork and then obviously push the other things into into next year there and that's always the kind of thing with when it comes to ethereum network upgrades things get pushed around you know just based on the fact that uh they probably not going to be ready and they require extra work and then we want to avoid as many I wouldn't

call them delays but we want to avoid like going you know too long without an upgrade because obviously if denune goes live in March it'll have been almost a year since the last upgrade which was chapella back in April 2023 and that was supposed to you know we thought that it would go live in no Denon but it didn't it's going live in March now I mean it's only a few months here and there in the grand scheme of things it's pretty meaningless but I think that when it comes to just wanted to keep on trap and track and keep uh you know in scope that's what they kind of aim for here in saying that I mean vcle definitely it seems to be coming in 2025 alongside statelessness which is going to be a pretty huge unlock for ethereum guys like I've explained before about how

with these two things verle trees and and statelessness and and potentially State expiry as well uh we can essentially increase the gas limit of our one a lot now that would not only help L1 scalability but it would also help uh obviously L2 scalability now I I say scalability but I mean that kind of loosely because as I've explained before increasing the gas limit on ethereum L1 is kind of inducing demand it's not a long-term kind of sustainable fix but the thing is is that uh we're able to do it because of the fact that we're going to have like statelessness or state expire where we could have proper light clients that can fully verify the chain without having to download the chain and not having to trust uh you know who they verifying the chain from and full node for example and then we can basically

cap the growth of a full node so and and by doing that we essentially are able to increase the size of things like blobs uh because obviously blobs already do kind of expire after 18 days but we can increase them even more like I I think that if you actually look at how much extra space it takes after 18 days it's not that much uh you know as it's currently spec but if we in increase the size of blobs and increase the amount of blobs on the network and then we do obviously full dank shotting which increases it even more um we want to get to that stage where we can actually do you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of of TPS across the l2s with ethereum L1 dat availability remaining relatively cheap for these l2s and we want to keep obviously scaling from

there so veral and statelessness are a big part of that and you can check out the latest updates of that in this tweet which I'll link in the YouTube description below but current timeline seems like this stuff will start kind of getting rolled out next year into 2025 Petra seems like it's probably going to have inclusion lists as the headline EIP uh and a bunch of other eips around it maybe ones that were kind of pushed out from from other upgrades uh I'm still on the fence about whether max effective balance is going to act all that the max effective balance EIP is going to be included I explained why yesterday so I'm not going to rehash that now but obviously I'll keep you guys updated on everything happening there all right so a few things on IG layer that I came across today so

they've published something called their risks FAQ so there's been a lot of talk around Ian layer related risks over I guess like the last few months but especially since basically Igan ler came onto the scene because obviously it was or is a brand new primitive of restating that hadn't been implemented before within ethereum and still hasn't really been implemented yet I know that IG layer has been open for deposits for quite a while now uh for reaking but the none of the Igan layer technology is actually live yet like that that eth that's being kind of quote unquote restak isn't actually doing anything besides farming a potential airdrop or you know farming points or whatever whatever it is these days right so right now it's not live none of ABS is are alive You Know igen da isn't live none

of that stuff there but when it does go live obviously there are kind of risks post here uh and this risk FAQ runs through I think the risks that have been talked about the most and like the the biggest risks but it's not going to be an exhaustive list just yet I think they're going to keep adding to this but you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below and there's also an accompanying little tweet thread here as well explaining more of this but you know some of the I guess questions are like does does Igan Le reuse the same Economic Security as a ethereum you know uh questions around licensing uh is a re hypothecating stake tokens so on and so forth so it's a pretty plain English view on the risks associated with Igan layer and I'm really really proud that

IG ler published this because I think we need to encourage more of this because it's all I'm all for like the you know Community highlighting the risks risks of different protocols the risks of different projects but it's much better when the project itself highlights it for two reasons one it shows a lot of Integrity that the project is willing to put themselves out there you know completely trans apparently and willing to highlight the risks themselves and two it allows the community to actually look at these risks and then have a debate about them or basically have a discussion around them and it it improves the I guess like Risk analysis for everyone across the ecosystem so there's no need to just rely on what I guess like Igan layer says or what any other project says about the risk associated with them uh you can have

your say here and it can be incorporated into the FAQ and we can have a discussion as a community so I mean when it comes to igl I've been nothing but impressed with how they've handled all of the critiques and all of the kind of I guess like worries around it Shri Ram U you know one of the founders of Igan leer is is a rockstar I mean if you've listened to any podcast or watched anything that he's been he's been doing any interviews he's been doing you know that he's really in it for the tech and he really believes in what he's building and he understands the risks and he understands that you know there are obviously uh potential things like black swans and stuff like that and he's always open to discussing them as transparently as possible he never tries to hide anything that to me is a sign of

a really really good leader uh but also of of of a really great project like I've always avoided the projects that have one ego ego Maniacs at the helm like that's the number one thing that I avoid any projects that have egomaniacs at the helm like completely avoid and it's served me quite well you know I didn't get involved with Tera because of Doan I haven't got involved with a lot of the other layer ones because of their leaders to be honest but also I mean you guys know I think that that most of the other l1s are completely pointless but you know generally these egomaniacs at the helm they they kind of destroy things because of their ego Mania right they don't care about anything but themselves about their own personal power and net worth and things like that and they end up destroying themselves I

mean we call them main characters in crypto a lot of them have blown themselves up and that's because they have giant egos um but yeah I mean generally I avoid projects like that but I also avoid projects that try to bury things and and and and try to kind of like hide things and and and aren't as transparent as you would like them to be and Igan L to me has been none of that they've been completely transparent I don't see anyone within the Igan L ecosystem that has a huge ego definitely sham does not have an ego at all like he's definitely a just a giant nerd like the rest of us um but yeah anyway enough gushing over IG layer there you can go read the risk FAQ for yourself I think it's critically important that this is out there and I think it's important

that we continue the discussions around the risks associated with I layer all right the second tweet about IG layer I wanted to highlight was actually a tweet from a Community member zerox Allen here so he's put together a nice little graphic explaining about how IG lay actually works and how it uses eth to essentially export ethereum security now uh this graphic isn't comprehensive it's not going to show you absolutely everything that's happening but it's a good high level over overview of what happens now I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out the graphic itself but this is for anyone who's still confused about how I layer works and how it actually how reaking Works generally and how all these other protocols work within it because obviously now we have this thing called a liquid reaking token uh which uh uh projects like ethery and swell and

puffer have tapped into and are essentially growing based on uh uh putting your LST or or basically I guess like mutating an LST into an LRT and farming igen layer points uh and being able to kind of like Get yield in the future from IG layer but also getting e staking yield also on top of any potential points that you get from you know eat the fire swell and and puffer and stuff like that uh so that's all explained in this graphic here and how it all interacts with the different abss such as Igan da you know different Bridges other rollups etc etc uh so you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but kudos to zerox Allen for putting this together I think we definitely need more Graphics within the ethereum ecosystem to explain things because everyone loves you know

to things seeing things visually and Visually is just a a really nice way for humans to kind of conceptualize things and I I hope to see more of this uh as time goes on now last thing on IG lay was just an update about Igan da so Brian here who works in strategy at IG layer put out a tweet saying IG da is gearing up for its main net launch soon here's what IG da is bringing to the table Jewel staking with eth and rollup tokens 2 billion plus in restak eth on mainnet awaiting the launch unique cost structure allowing long-term reservations and payments in your chosen token incredibly fast 10 megabit megabits uh right throughput at launch built on the concepts of Erp 4844 and dank sharding so I've talked about Ian layout for quite a while now and about

how I think that it is going to be the premier data availability layer because of the fact that it inherits ethereum's Economic Security because it's using restake ethia but also that I believe da is a Ras to zero so when you're thinking about where to store your data and and if it's AAS to zero and the fees are basically negligible between da layers then you'd probably much rather go with the da layer that is offering you you know cheap fees but also offering you stronger security guarantees and to me that is I da I mean ethereum L1 is obviously the gold standard but you pay for that right and 4844 is going to alleviate some of that but it's still not going to be as cheap as these da layers so a lot of these kind of layer twos are going to want to go to these

Services um and and definitely going to happen but yeah e L1 is still the gold standard for for da then it would be I da which isn't like yet obviously but I think you know once it goes live um and it has those those cheap fees there as long along with ethereum's economic security it's definitely number two Celestia would say he's number three at this point but I mean I'm not going to say I'm bearish on Celestia but when I look at the kind of landscape of Da layers the celesa is really the only one that's out at the moment I know Nia pivoted to it recently and I know that there's data availability committees which are like these kind of centralized offchain things that uh that kind of people have put together because there were no da layers but when I look at the

landscape you know eth L1 da Igan da Celestia I mean I know there's a veil coming out there's probably some others out there um but then I look at what each of them offers as I've said before da is a commodity it's going to be a race to zero like the only way you can compete On Da is by racing to zero because there only reason people are using offchain da is because it's cheaper than eth L1 so obviously it's it's a Ras to zero there in that respect in that respect and then okay well then what isn't a commodity here well Economic Security isn't ethereum's economic security is greater than even Bitcoins if you if you want to do the math on it I mean Justin Drake has done the math on this a bunch of times and that he's not commoditized because it is

extremely hard to get that Economic Security but then you can extend past that and look at okay well what does the actual non-economic security look like such as the node operator set and ethereum's node operator set is the strongest in crypto by far especially out of any proof of stake Network it has an extremely robust node operator set and that Noe operator set is also going to be doing duties for Igan l i mean it's opt in of course but there are going to be a lot of them that do this that do do the duties for igen lar in order to to to tap into those rewards so then you can look at okay well in that case you have ethereum's not operator set you have ethereum's Economic Security uh that you know through restake eth and then you have the cheapness of a DA layer so why wouldn't

you go with Igan da right like why would you go with something else over IG da uh when when looking at that from that perspective and on top of that as well if you want to go even further than that and look at the tokenomics of these things eth doesn't have any unlocks eth doesn't have any VC unlocks it doesn't have any testing it has none of that stuff right all of the E supplies out there uh that exist today and then any new e that is issued goes to the validators obviously through proof of stake there and that's it so when you look at the other da networks Celestia for example there's a very small circulating Supply right now a veil will probably be the same thing with their token Nia I mean I don't I haven't looked at Nia recently but I know that

obviously they had um vesting for a while because they they were VC backed and so on and so forth so that even further increases I I think the economic security there because you have eth a really really strong asset doesn't that doesn't have this overhang whereas these other things do I think that you know Celestia went up to what 15 20 billion dollar fully diluted value um when it's circulating Supply is very very small so you know the fact that it's already that high to me screams that over the long term that's going to get priced in as things unlock and and and kind of potential upside there over the long term not talking the short term in a bull market anything can happen but over the long term uh the potential for the valueable crew there is really minimal but with E the potential for the your

career of the long term is is is huge and by using restake e to secure IG da you tap into that Ergo security is much higher with IG da in my opinion here from the economic security St standpoint but also from the node operator standpoint and I know there are disagreements about this with people that people have disagreed with me saying that you know Celestia Tech's really good you know they have novel approaches to things uh they're you know they're already live so they've got a network effect going and as I said like there's nothing wrong with Celestia or anything or or any of it Tech or anything like that I actually think it's a really cool project I think what they've built is really cool but I'm trying to look at things objectively here I'm not I'm not trying to look at things uh from the lens of you know uh

bias I mean obviously like I um I really like IG ler and probably more biased towards that because it's using eth restak eth for its Economic Security and that is obviously good for ethereum and eth but if I'm looking at it objectively out of all the arguments that I just outlined I just don't see why you would use anything but igen da um if the costs are comparable in terms of Da costs uh when da is definitely going to have strictly stronger security guarantees than any other da layer out there except eth L1 da it's a closest you're going to get to eth L1 da right um in terms of Economic Security uh and then also the node operator set which in my opinion is even harder than getting that Economic Security is getting a robust decentralized distributed uh and you know Noe operator set because ethereum

has the gold standard right now and it's still not good enough I I think it should be a lot better than what it is today but ethereum definitely has the gold standard there in terms of um in terms of a not operator set and again I leer gets to tap directly into that for their uh you know the people who run abss or people who kind of validate on these things uh so yeah anyway enough of a a ramble about that but let me know if you disagree with me I'm always up to chat chatting about this in the daily grade Discord Channel but in saying everything that I just said I think that obviously the ecosystem is still uh you know uh very open right now there's no clear winners or anything like that I'm just placing a bet and I have a thesis

that Igan da is going to squash the competition based purely on the fact that if the costs are comparable uh for storing your your your data uh but at at the same time you get more security with Ian da it's only logical for people to use Ian o over something else but we'll have to see what what how that shakes out there uh but yeah that's my whole kind of like take on the da Wars going on right now all right so puffer has begun its campaign or I guess like its points campaign uh today so you can deposit St into the uh puffer protocol here and you get issued Puff eth now the reason why it's only St is because they're basically doing a big vampire attack on slider so what the eventual plan is is to basically unstake all of that St from the Lio system uh directly

and then restake it within the puffer e system so that uh you know essentially vampire attacks lighter now of course puffer isn't the only one doing this there are other protocols doing this as well but it's great to see another option out there and I think that uh they launched today I believe and I think that they're already at like 70 million TBL or something like that so the hunger is really there guys like you know I remember I've discussed this before on the refu but I remember it was a while ago now people said that oh well Lio is going to swallow the whole LST space because of the fact that liquidity begets liquidity uh and it's just easier for people to go with Lio than go with something else um so on and so forth but if we actually look at and I'll actually

show you this I think I've showed it on the review before but I want to show you show you guys this again so this is the eth2 staking dashboard from uh hild Dobby here if you actually look at what the inflows are like yes Lio gets a lot of inflows um still because I mean why wouldn't it of course liquidity begets liquidity you know so on and so forth I understand that but if you actually look over the past month and look at where most of the E has actually flowed into Lio has 204,000 eth that went into it over the past month but then you look at the other providers so mantle had 178,000 eth because they staked all their e that's with their L2 and they're not doing that through lier they're doing that through uh I don't know who they're doing it through I think it's through

their own but it's definitely not through Lio uh you have ethery which is 173,000 eth number three here with mantle so that's already more combined just between mantle and ether fire that's already more than Lio by like a ton right but like almost double I think um and then you go down the list and swell Kil consensus so on and so forth you add all of those up and it's probably like triple or quadruple the amount of e that has gone into Lio here from these other other providers and now not all of them are going to be decentralized you know obviously uh something like um like a like a consensus or a binance is or pp. they're not decentralized services but it doesn't matter as long as it's something other than Lio because we don't want Li's dominance to keep going up that is

the main thing here um so yeah I always thought it was insane that people were saying that lier just have all the market share No ler having such a large market share is a function of the market being inefficient and it's also a function of ler having a first mover Advantage During the non-withdrawal period as well and as I've discussed that on the refuel uh before here but I I do think that L's market share is a huge opportunity for other protocols and if you actually look at the combined TBS tvl between eify swell and puffer I think it's like $1.1 billion or something like that already and they haven't been around for very long whereas L's tvl I re I believe is around $18 billion or something so obviously a lot more but keep in mind l l has been around a lot longer right uh and to to

to build that up and also um uh the thing is ether fire swell and and puffer I mean they haven't been around for that long swell has been around the longest I think ether fire a few months buffer one day like when you look at it from that perspective you can see how L's dominance is going to come down and it's it's definitely not going to in my opinion stay where it is today and you guys know my opinion on Lio generally I don't think it's the big evil that everyone makes it out to be but generally we don't want to see any big sorry any staking uh provider be too big of an entity on the network uh for obviously decentralization reasons uh and everything that falls off of that there but anyway back to puffer if you're interested in getting involved you can go to

quest. please click the link in the tweet that I'll link in the YouTube description below uh and make sure you got you're on the right puffer site there are tons of scams around these things guys like tons of fishing going on here just please be vigilant with these things uh when it comes to puffer or any other protocol out there but that's the URL to go to and obviously disclo just a disclosure here you guys know I'm an adviser to puffer here but I'm not telling you to go put your money in I'm just telling you hey this is something to check out if you want to if you want to farm some points here that's up to you but yeah you can go check that out there but as I said you bring St right now only and that and that is that proper vampire

attack on lighter which is great to see I mean I remember I talked about DVA a little while ago and how they were doing a vampire attack but it seems like they're falling out of the spotlight recently I'm not sure why I think there was some internal team drama that I didn't really pay attention to uh but there are others picking up the the kind of slack there which is really really great to see so yeah you can go check out puffer for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so and also speaking of uh I guess like staking eth ethery have announced their Mega week which is officially open today so they're Distributing 3 million igen layer points from their treasury to new and existing e holders over the next 10 days and the details of this is below

here so if you are one of those people who are like a power air drop farmer Farmer or power points farmer like gr attack is in the daily way Discord channel that dude is all about the the points guys he complains about the points constantly saying he hates points but like that dude is a proper professional farmer like he's an industrial level farmer and he's been rewarded for it he's made a lot of money from Air drops recently um but if that's something that you guys are interested in and you want to be part of that you want to be doing that then this is the stuff that you need to be checking out like for me I'm past this but I know that a lot of you guys are obviously in your maybe first cycle maybe even your second cycle and you want to keep

increasing your bank roll here so you can potentially roll any any of this money into eth and increase your e stack and maybe become a solo Staker and start validating on your own I'm all for that that that's my whole thing right so if you want to do that I I highly recommend farming these things as a way to do that now but in saying that the Nuance here or I guess like the asteris here is that you need to understand that you're risking Capital when you're doing these things there is smart contract risk involved there is uh I guess like um opportunity cost risk involved uh there is the risk of uh of kind of like deegs of these lsts and things like that maybe just temporarily but there is still those risks there so please understand the risks before you do any of this but

if you are someone who wants to go down the risk curve you want to earn a little bit of extra money here you want to farm some points and some some aird drops things like that I mean eify has already announced they're going to have a token in April right then you can go check out ethery check out Puff all these other ones out there and as I've always said for a little while now the airdrop hunting channel in the daily grade Discord channel is uh Elite honestly there's a lot of alpha in there so definitely go check that out if that is your thing there and I should also disclose that I'm an adviser to e thei as well here um but yeah anyway you can go check out ether Mega week I'll link it in I link the details in the YouTube description below uh for you to do

so all right so ethereum.org has published their yearin review for 2023 everything that they kind of accomplished in 2023 everything that they've been building and man you know I still can't get over how cool these images are these hero images on the ethereum.org so you can see them on my screen right now this is just some really cool art and it really encapsulates exactly what ethereum is right from the infinite Garden to like the infinite City to kind of just people mingling in the open Bazaar because I've always talked about how ethereum is an open bizarre model rather than a cathedral model where it's basically a flat organization rather than a hierarchy top down kind of thing and I think the ethereum.org website perfectly illustrates that in all their their really really cool art here and you know what I think one day I'm going to get

some of these things framed and just hang them on my wall because they're just so cool uh and maybe if I find some room I mean with all the figurines around me I don't think I have room to hang things on walls right now but yeah I just I've always love that but anyway enough of me gushing about the artwork here you can go check out their yearend review for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so a a layer two that I came across uh I think a few weeks ago and I'm going to disclose this here I'm an advisor to as well uh is called movement so what movement are building is something called M2 which is the first ZK move evm L2 on ethereum okay that's a lot of words there it's a lot

of buzzword there what does this mean well what this means is that movement is bringing the move programming language the one that I think Aptos users and the one that Facebook uh basically created when they were doing their Libra thing they're bringing it to ethereum as an L2 and they're also trying to build kind of basically this ecosystem of modular move based blockchains um when I saw this I was like yeah hell yeah I want to get involved with this because I'm all about the non evm stuff you guys know I'm an adviser to fluent as well which is doing ZK WM stuff I think that this is kind of like the next unlock for ethereum over the next you know few years because as I've said before the thing that excites me most about the l2s is not the scalability because the scalability is

table Stakes like if you're if you're an L2 and you're not more scalable than L1 then why are you even building an L2 but what excites me the most about this is the experimentation of different programming languages different virtual machines different ways of doing things that you just can't do on ethereum L1 and that you can't do with EVMS either stocket definitely started this trend we've got they doing with their own kind of like KIRO language and things like that and uh and and projects like movement and fluent and even arbitrum you know kind of moving the needle forward here uh on on different ways of doing this so if you want to learn more about movement you can go check them out and you want to learn more about M2 you can go check it out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but I'm

definitely very excited to see where this nonm ecosystem goes and what it actually looks like in a few years because I think that the evm is here to stay solidity is here to stay it has a massive Network effect the biggest L2 right now Arbitron one runs on this and there you know and it's with like op uh Bas and op main net run on this polygon posos chain runs on the evm so the evm is not going anywhere but we shouldn't be limited by the evm and we get to bring the best parts of the l1s which I think the l1s the best parts of them were always the fact that they were doing nonm stuff because it was was true experimentation and I always View that as like kind of a research project and then eventually we just we just bring it into ethereum uh you know if it actually

proved feasible and that's exactly what we're doing here you know move there's a move L1 called Aptos WM there's already a WM L1 I think Nia and and and polka dot um I think um cardano has like a e utxo thing which it has its uses but it's like not as broad as these other things I I think it has its uses sometimes but not for the most for most of the time so it's more of a niche thing uh and then there's you know countless other things out there that were're just bringing home to ethereum as L2 so that's always been the main bull case of l2s for me because T because scalability for them is table Stakes if you don't have scalability you're just a pointless L2 so then where do you go from there well you start experimenting with all these different

languages uh and so on and so forth so yeah you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right and just last stop here I saw lemonade here tweet out a great list of ethereum related analytic site sites and resources today and some people added more in the replies here so just wanted to highlight this resources such as you know l2b dude analytics ultrasound money website uh super fizzers staking dashboards and so on and so forth so you should go definitely check these out and U bookmark all of these sites for yourself if you want to keep track of all of the growth happening across the entire ethereum ecosystem not just l2s not just anything kind of like that but basically anything happening across the entire uh ethereum

ecosystem whether that be staking or or l2s or other wise uh but I think on that note that's going to be it for today a slightly shorter episode uh but that's all I've got so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone