White House Crypto Summit, Pectra on Sepolia & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #831 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the Dead great refuel where cup latest news the ecosystem I'm your host and the 5th of March 2025 all right everyone let's get into it so I'm not sure how many of you are aware but there is a pretty major event happening on Friday uh the crypto Summit being put together by Trump's crypto Zar David Sachs and Donald Trump will apparently also be speaking at this Summit I think it's going to go for a few hours and he's bringing together ecosystem leaders from across crypto in order to discuss uh just crypto generally I think discussed things like the Strategic Reserve discuss things like how the government can build with crypto how businesses can build with crypto regulations uh uh legislation and so on and so forth so it's a pretty big deal

you could say it's a pretty big deal here and of course people were asking the question of who is actually going to be attending this Summit so there is going to be a bunch of people that you have heard of attending uh and you can find list of those online I'm not going to cover all of them but the ones that I wanted to cover were the ones that have close ties to ethereum because obviously everyone was asking is ethereum going to be represented there and I think they are and I think that they are I think ethereum is and in a really big way and I put a tweet out where I basically listed through almost everyone that is uh basically Pro ethereum and that is going to be attending the summit so the founder of um sorry the co-founder of world Liberty finance will be there uh

and they are building on ethereum layer 1 they've been stacking eth as we all know chain Link's uh Sergey is going to be there chain link is chain agnostic but huge part of their business if not most of their business is in the ethereum ecosystem so obviously they're very Pro ethereum uh Brian Armstrong from coinbase is going to be there uh as you guys know coinbase is building base the largest ethereum L2 right now and they have close ties with circle which is you which is the issuer of usdc the second largest stable coin and most of that lives on ethereum Robin Hood's CEO is going to be there Robin Hood are working closely with arbitrum Kraken uh Kraken CEO is going to be there as well they're building Inc in ethereum layer to and they've long been bull very bullish on ethereum I don't know how

many of you know this but Kraken was the first I believe centralized exchange back in the day to list eth for trading so the very first one to do it at least the first in the US maybe not first globally but they did it before coinbase did so very big deal there and they've been really bullish on ethereum for a long time uh and then I said in my tweet you know I'd love to have someone there from etherealized particularly Danny Ryan and of course um I think the community rallied around this the Ean Community rallied around this and Danny Ryan actually replied to me saying that he thinks he could do an excellent job broadly representing ethereum's interest in this kind of environment and I completely agree there and one party that I didn't call out uh on my tweet here was uh Paradigm so Paradigm is

going to have a presence there Paradigm uh the VC firm that are pretty heavily involved with ethereum uh they have an A a whole team that works on an ethereum execution client known as WTH they do a lot of stuff in the layer 2 space they just do a lot for ethereum so they're going to be there and they're definitely very Pro ethereum so ethereum has a lot of representation at this Summit I am not worried at all about ethereum not being heard there what does concern me a little bit is some of the other people going they're obviously from other ecosystems and we all know how much they love to FUD and spread misinformation about ethereum but I do think that because we've got such a large presence there that that works within the ethereum ecosystem that fed misinformation will be muted I don't

think it's really going to have an impact here and I don't think they're going to get away with just spreading this because they'll people there in uh to basically correct the record now I hope Danny Ryan's there maybe it's too late notice because as you guys know Danny only became the co-founder of etheral Li very recently uh so maybe it's too late to get him an invite we'll see I I know I do know that there's stuff happening in the background to try him get try and get him in the room there so I'm looking forward to seeing what happens because I think obviously he would be the best representative for ethereum for sure because he is directly building on ethereum he directly he's directly representative of ethereum has an ecosystem both on the community side but also on the on the on the uh the

cordev side as well and the building side there uh whereas all of these other organizations they're definitely or people from these organizations are definitely Pro ethereum but they've also got their own thing to worry about obviously Brian Armstrong is pro pro coinbase over anything else obviously Sergey is pro chain link over anything else so on and so forth so Danny would be Pro etherum over anything else obviously he's a co-founder of etherealized they have their they have some of their own goals that are may or may not be the same as ethereum's goals I think they're pretty tightly coupled there but yeah maybe they have things they want to do that isn't strictly e kind of like focused on etherum evangelizing maybe they want to commercialize some aspects of what they're building you know there are there are kind of different things going

on here but as I said I do think that ethereum has great representation here so I'm looking forward to seeing what the results of this first crypto Summit is which as I said is happening on Friday there so no need to worry ethereum is going to be represented there in a really big way and not just there like going forward I really do think that ethereum is definitely going to be in more and more rooms not just because of etherealized but we now have fresh EF leadership as you guys know talked about it the other day but we also have just so many major companies building within the ethereum ecosystem that it makes absolutely no sense for them not to be pro ethereum pro e and to be promoting ethereum because it's promoting their own interests you know coinbase has a huge vested interest in

ethereum through a lot of different ways but in particular through bass and usdc so they would want there to be things um sorry they would want to represent ethereum's interest in that environment as well because it closely links with their own interest same goes for pretty much anyone on this list you know chain link as I said most of their business uh is in the ethereum ecosystem Robin Hood is working very closely with arbitrum which is in the ethereum ecosystem Kraken same as coinbase you know so on and so forth yeah so looking forward to that I will keep you guys updated as best I can there not sure how much of it is going to be made public but hey I'm sure EXC there'll be a lot of excitement from those at the summit and they'll be sharing what they can there all right so we had sapoia upgrade

to Petra today so as you guys know sapoia is the other test net besides heski that we do uh testing on and we've upgraded it to Petra it went pretty well uh I wouldn't say it went like 100% smooth there was an issue with the deposit contract stuff again but it wasn't an issue that broke the network or anything like that it seems at least from the updates that I've seen this is only a few hours old news now but it seems that the network is going just fine it is proposing blocks there are BL like there are more blobs in those blocks everything's been tested everything's continuing to be tested on the test net here so we didn't break sapoia it's all well and good there I'm hoping that more information about what you know what kind of issues there were what small issues there were will come

to light over the next few hours and I'll probably cover that on Friday's refuel but for now sapoia seems to have successfully forked aetra which means mainnet is next now obviously the question on everyone's mind is are we going to do Petra in early April still on mayet or is it going to be delayed given that we had obviously a pretty big issue with heski and maybe some small issues with petraia h sorry with sapoia but they're not necessarily directly related to Petra so we're going to have to see I think this week's all call devs call Will Shine a big light on that which should be happening in the next couple days I believe and we'll see there I I am expecting there to be a slight delay here I guess for main net I would say that instead of like early April we may may see like mid to late

April which is fine I don't think it's a big deal but better to be safe than sorry obviously there but as I said the fork on seoa went through uh you know mostly fine but I'll get I'll get the updates to you guys probably on Friday's refuel about what went wrong uh uh with you know whatever the small issue was there because there just isn't that much information out about that uh right now all right moving on from Petra looking ahead to fusaka M here from the nethermind team put together a tweet going through nether mind's view on what they want to do in fusaka so they aim to ship faka in 2025 the faka scope should be finalized Ace up so that we can so that the cabs can proceed with scoping

glamsterdam which is the fork after fusaka pias is the most important feature of fusaka and serves as the key Readiness indicator I think that is widely agreed upon by pretty much every core developer and researcher as well as the community that I don't think is going to change at all and of course nethermind would also like to see eof in fusaka along with a few additional erps in this Fork now the core erps that marac wants to see are of course pias the eof eips and a EIP 7883 which is mod XP gas cost increase now I'll explain that in a little bit uh what that means but the other eips that M thinks should be considered are a few eips here that that are quite simple U more more technical EIP so I'm not going to go

over those right now uh but the reasoning around the mod XP uh gas cost increase is it's currently the biggest bottleneck to scaling up the gas limit and could hinder further gas limit increases so we definitely want to get that in in there uh as well as the other eips that suggested here in order to make sure that we can keep scaling up the gas limit there uh in in addition to obviously scaling up blobs with pias and then M moved on to what the focus of glamsterdam should be the primary focus uh he believes should be sensorship resistance with things like fossil uh and Slot organization improvements with Erp 7732 and epbs I remember I said this even months ago on the refuel that the fork after fusaka if fusaka becomes just

a pias and eof Fork should definitely put a strong focus on fossil and epbs and for those of you who don't know these are actually scalability increases as well because we we essentially get to um uh enshrine proposed Builder separation with epbs so we don't have to rely on uh on essentially this kind of relay Network that we have today and we basically say that well since most of the network is outsourcing their block building we can have beefy block Builders with very um I guess like conservative uh uh validators run uh sorry proposers and validators that check the blocks without needing to kind of up those requirements too much there and fossil allows us to do this because of the fact that it improves sensorship

resistant guarantees where it doesn't matter if most of the builders are are trying to censor they can't because of fossil it essentially allows you to get your transaction included in one block in in in one slot I should say there and also M says that they are Beyond fako camsterdam they aim to implement full history expiry in the upcoming Forks as it is a non-consensus change which I'm going to talk about in a sec and the nethermind team remains committed to advancing stateless ethereum which is a big road map item which I believe is going to come into Focus towards the end of this year and into next year there now speaking of History expiry storm here from paradigm I mentioned earlier about how Paradigm is pretty invested in the ethereum ecosystem and does a lot of

building here shared uh a kind of graphic here quote tweeting M about history expiry so M said that more than 80% of ethereum full node dis space is currently occupied by history so its data not needed to validate new blocks so if we do lower the storage burden of nodes by 80% via history expiry that will mean that the chain size will go down dramatically as storm cesia this will switch the chain size from the dark blue line to the light blue line on this chart and this will free up many years of runway for State growth which basically means we can increase the gas limit without worrying about State growth too much here and you can see the dark blue line which is quite big right now it's over 1.5 terabytes and then you

see the light blue line which is just eyeing it right now it's like 350 GB or 400 GB on this chart so obviously a dramatic decrease there which you can fill up with more stuff such as a gas limit increase so that's that's coming the first phase is still set to go live on May 1st I believe which is going to expire everything before the merge and then I think the second phase is things after the merge the merge happened over 2 and a half years ago now guys um September 15 2022 it's actually incredible that it's been so long at this point but yeah it's been it's been a while now and eventually we'll get to the point where ethereum has existed as a proof of stake Network longer than it existed as a proof of work Network that's going to be a quite a momentous

occasion to celebrate but not for another like 5 years or something like that um but yeah anyway you can go check out the graphic I'll link here in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so the ethereum foundation has introduced a new research organization called ZK KNX so this is an organization that's going to be at the Forefront of advanced cryptography which is backed by a grant from the EF and their mission is to provide high impact open source code that improves ethereum security and efficiency so essentially this is another organization that has spun out of the EF uh but EF is funding it and I'm sure there's going to be other parties funding this as well what DK nox wants to focus on is essentially in so many words practical Security on

uh the whole chain so on the whole ethereum chain here uh and and I think Beyond ethereum as well they want to just do things in in deep cryptography land make sure that the cryptography that we're using within the ethereum ecosystem remains secure and reliable such as tees hsms ZK stuff you know all the NPCs all the good stuff that you hear about a lot all the acms that you hear about a lot and I'm I'm pretty excited to see that this team has spun out they're going to have more autonomy here they're definitely going to get stuff done I think um and and very important stuff done as well because this is the stuff that is part of the end game of ethereum you know we talk about the end game a lot in ethereum but what I think is the main Blocker of

getting us there is uh safety honestly cost is obviously a blocker because ZK proving for example is still relatively expensive but I do think Safety and Security are the the top top thing there because of the fact that it could be like free right let's imagine a world where proven costs are basically zero the technology is is commoditized everyone's using it it's all well and good but then what is the actual risk here well the risk is of of bugs of course if we're using this for everything and it's very complex and advanced cryptography the chances of bugs are relatively high so the reason why we want to make sure that we have as many people looking at this as possible as much research uh done into the security of this as possible and making all of this

reliable and as I guess like and reducing as much complexity as possible is because we know people want to use this technology we know how how big of an unlock it is for the ethereum ecosystem how big of a part it plays in the end game of ethereum and and the core protocol and beyond that with l2s and everything like that that we need to make sure that it's safe secure and reliable otherwise a bug for example like in the worst case scenario a bug in a ZK circuit could lead to billions of dollars being lost like that's that's the kind of stuff we're dealing with here guys maybe potentially tens of billions of dollars so we need to make sure that we're doing this correctly we need to make sure that we're not overloading um the system so to speak so that we don't break anything uh and we

can use this technology in a safe secure and reliable way there but anyway you can go follow this new ZK KNX Twitter account I'll link this thread in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right speaking of endgame things Tao has a new research post here revisiting revisiting native rollups so as you guys know and as Tao says here native rollups are essentially a return to sharding but this time it's different they're Pro programmable execution shards that leverage the l1's execution environment creating infinite scalability while inheriting ethereum security they really are the Holy Grail of rollups and they're not exactly like what sharting was the original designs of of of execution sharding um they're a lot better obviously that's the reason

why people are so excited about it uh but they're also the main kind of I guess like holy grail of of Roll-Ups I think Bas rollups as I've mentioned before get us like 90% of the way there but native rollups you know ZK VM precompile in the core protocol itself is the Holy Grail but it goes back to what I was just saying earlier about the fact that bugs are a relatively High chance of happening on with these things so and and proving cost are still really high this stuff needs to go through a million different Security reviews and Audits and we still need to pick the circus that we're going to use so to get this actually live on the L1 as part of the core protocol probably a few years out at this point still like I I don't foresee this happening anytime soon just

because it's too risky to do it anytime soon it it's just it adds a lot of risk for obviously like a a pretty big gain but we can get you know we're already scaling with l2s rollups getting better every day we're doing things like base Roll-Ups so we're not at the point where it's like critical that we need native Roll-Ups right now that we sacrifice security we should never sacrifice security we should always value security over everything else unlike some other people in the ecosystem that think that uh shipping speed matters more than security there's a balance to that like and I I do believe security takes precedence here and takes priority especially with with ethereum which is home to so much and is securing so much value so yeah as much as I want to see native rollups live on network it's going to be a little while there but you

could still read this research that Tao has put together they're really at the Forefront of both based and Native rollups here they're doing a lot of great work there and they have um a Twitter thread here with a tldd but also a blog post that I'll link in the YouTube description below um obviously you can go read this for yourself I'm not going to go over or anything like that but yeah I generally am obviously very bullish on Native Roll-Ups I think that eventually maybe all rollups look like based a native Roll-Ups I honestly think they will I think based on Native Roll-Ups are going to be the default eventually I think that the way the Roll-Ups are today with their centralized sequences are going to go away I think that being interoperable with all the other rollups and L1 ethereum is just too big of an unlock in

directly inheriting ethereum security is too big of an unlock the worry about long confirmation times is basically gone you have pre- comps for that and pre- comps are maturing at a rapid rate so so really I I think that this is like a triple whammy we um I guess like uh uh we target or I guess we fix the issues around centralized sequences and multi and stuff like that or at least we make it better we don't there's no such thing as fixing the issue it's more like we make them unnecessary or make it better or make it like not as not as critical to use these these kind of tools in order to secure yourself here in order to to build things here we hit the interoperability stuff as well that's a big thing obviously making sure that we can get these rollups to be

interoperable with each other as well as ethereum mainnet here and also just like simplifying things for Builders too and simplifying ways for people to launch their own rollups in order to capture their own kind of kinds of value here as well as obviously making sure that the ethereum network is sufficiently compensated for the security that he's providing for these rollups but that is a long-term thing I think I said again on Twitter today that I find it bizarre that people that like to focus much on revenue and and just trying to extract as much revenue as possible from rollups right now that to me is still not the right play we don't have that many active onchain monthly say monthly users I mean if I was to say like how many people do we have that are monthly active onchain users right now it's less

than a million guys I'm talking like people that like that are active every month or even like every day or every week every month like they're just there they're active they're doing things all the time it it can't be that much more like yes there'll be pockets of time where things are like really hot for example with meme coins where so many more people will be on chain they'll like do a swap or something like we saw with the Trump coin stuff that happened right A lot of people got that moonshot app they had their first kind of onchain trading experience there and maybe we had like a few million or something I don't even know if it's that but maybe we had like a few million for a few days or a couple of weeks but I'm talking actual active users of on a longer time

frame here I I don't think it's more than a million honestly and that's a tiny fraction of the overall population of the planet even if you just include obviously the 18 plus uh population the ones that that have money right because like most of the things on chain that you're doing require money and you're doing stuff involving money so unless you have money it's not really much use to you there besides some pockets of things like uh like obviously farcaster and stuff like that but for the most part it's Financial it's defi uh but yeah in that world I just don't think it makes any sense to try and extract like as much rent as we can and I've ranted about this on the refu before I think that because that's the reality and because we expect billions more people to come on chain and like billions more

of these AI agents and Bots to come on chain we really need to make sure that we have the capacity for that before we try to milk them essentially I just I I don't know I I'm puzzled by people's comments around that I understand they think that ethereum L1 is getting a little bit shafted because validators aren't earning enough Fe revenue from blobs I get that but it's a it's the concept of a lost leader it's the fact that you give up Revenue now to get even more Revenue later and to grow the business and to cement your place in the ecosystem because if we charge too much people are going to switch off of ethereum rollups are going to switch off of ethereum so we need to keep them in the ecosystem that is the critical thing that we need to do that is the most

important thing we need to do and I I'm a strong believer in that so and I think that the core developers are align with that that's why they're making sure that they push blobs uh increases as much as possible we want to keep the ethereum ecosystem as cheap as possible uh for as long as possible and then think about value acrel uh later down the line there but anyway you can go read Tao thread and blog post I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right last up here obviously everyone's aware of the buy bit hack that happened last week $1.5 billion worth of eth was stolen I believe most of it has been sold at this point whether it's for dollars or BTC and it's been laundered through thorchain and a bunch of other mixes and and and other

places there so yeah that's that's over but the reason I'm bringing it up today is because grid plus has a great tweet thread here about uh the fact that if bybit was using a grid plus device uh such as a lattice one or um there maybe the upcoming devices that they've been teasing a little bit here they would have been able to avoid what happened with their hyri wallets because there is this concept of blind signing with Hardware wallets which is seems to be the norm which is really stupid where essentially you're signing something without being able to read what you're signing you so that's why it's called Blind signing because you're essentially signing a blind and I'm sure a lot of You Are familiar with this on your Ledger device for example you have something come up on there and you you you click through it to to sign the

message or sign the transaction and you don't know what you're signing or what you're doing here like it's not giving you all the information on the device itself it can give you the information on the front end but as we've seen with the bybit hack the front end of a website is relatively easily compromised so you can't trust that either but then when it comes uh down to the the device itself that should in a properly built Hardware Dev device that should show you exactly what's going to happen and you can see a comparison picture here of what's Happening uh you can see that on on the left hand side uh the safe transfer said that the transfer was going to the buybit hot wallet whereas on with um the the bybit attack you can see the actual uh address here that was

not the bybit hot wallet address so you can see the whole thing I mean you don't just see that you see the whole transaction you see exactly what's Happening Here the signer is the bit cold wallet the NS for it the gas the gas price the amount the contract that you're interacting with and the execution of the transaction that that's that that's kind of happening here so you get a more detailed um more detailed kind of look here with using uh the grid plus devices so I just wanted to to kind of shout get give a shout out shout out sorry I should say to grid plus devices here they're great you should definitely be using them I know that the grid plus lettuce one is is Big you can see it in the picture here it's a pretty big device it's not as convenient as Ledger

devices but but they are working on a new device you can see uh this is I don't believe this is what it's going to look like but I believe they're working on a on a on a new device that they're going to try and like have a a smaller form factor maybe in the in in the vein of what they're kind of um what they're showing here like basically a a phone form factor uh that we that we're used to here which would obviously be a lot better Ledger's actually gone in that direction as well with the bigger screens which is which is cool but there still blind signing for some reason is the norm of this ecosystem but it's just insane there but anyway you should go check out grid Plus's tweet thread I'll link in the YouTube description below I should actually disclose that I'm an

investor in Grid plus I've known the founder for a very long time he's a really good friend of mine um and I'm not Shilling because I'm invested in it I'm Shilling because they actually provide solutions to real problems here and I've been chilling grid plus even before I invested in them I've been telling you guys to buy them I have mine I like I I I love mine they work very very well uh but yeah you you should go check out this thread for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so there now last few minutes here um I'm not going to talk about the markets again I just wanted to follow up to what I said on uh Monday's episode regarding the markets one thing that that has kind of annoyed me a little bit uh and I understand like

emotions are flying right now and people are heated right now but one Trend that I'm seeing not just within kind of the daily Way community but like in wider communities is that people are blaming others for their investing and trading decisions and the reason why this irks me is because you have no one but yourself to blame when you make a trade or investment that you don't like for example if you buy something an asset and then the asset goes down but you bought the asset because you watched some video or listened to some podcast and and they were bullish on it you don't blame them like yes there's a fine line here where there are obviously scammers and grifters that are like basically pumping things up that they're not disclosing that they're an Insider of or pumping things up that are just complete dog and lying about it but

if you have made an investment decision based on information that is truthful coming from someone else and then you trade away those gains or the asset goes down and you've lost money on it like you've got no one to blame but yourself you can't blame the other person they didn't force you to do anything they're just relaying this information across and as I said there is a line here the line gets crossed when these people are doing things like not disclosing that they're an Insider and and just basically uh lying about what they're promoting here so totally needs to be a line drawn here but I think I'm talking about it from Maybe my perspective where obviously I'm very bullish ethereum obviously I'm very bullish e I've been talking about it for a very long time but I think I've been pretty clear in

that everything that I say and everything that I look at is is very long-term my eth Holdings are very longterm my investment in eth is very long time I've been buying eth since it was like $10 I bought most of my eth between $100 and $200 in the previous bare market like I and I've been doing that and and and investing a longterm because ethereum to me is a very long-term play and I've I've said that so many times before and I've also told you guys that you need to be taking profits whenever you can you can't just be fully invested all the time you can't just be waiting for arbitrary portfolio targets like that's just not the way to do it because all it does is lead to disappointment and it will lead to you being emotional about it and then it will lead to you lashing out and you'll

blame other people for it when in reality it was your problem and it was your kind of a mistake and I understand why people like to blame others because you don't want to take responsibility you don't want to admit that you're the one who made the mistake and I get that on a on a very fundamentally deep level because I've had lots of bag fumbles over the years guys I've had lots of investment fumbles over the years I don't blame anyone else I fully accept that it's my responsibility and I fully accept that I am to blame for everything that I think I've done wrong but at the same time it doesn't make me feel any better about it right it still sucks to feel that way but but but but the reason why I bring this up is because I implore you guys not to lash out at people you

can call out scammers and call out gri grifters please doing that I love when people do that I do that all the time it's good we need to keep the ecosystem honest but don't lash out at honest people don't push them away don't push them into uh places where they they don't want to be part of this ecosystem anymore it's not just me it's others like I feel this but there's so many others that I speak to they feel this as well they want to be involved in crypto they love this ecosystem but when they're attacked for things like uh people making their own investment decisions and they blaming others for for their screw-ups that's just not healthy it's very toxic and it leads to a toxic environment that no one really wants to be in but anyway on that note uh I will end it there for today so

thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet leave a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Friday thanks everyone