Zhejiang public testnet, Sovereign announced & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #532 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this designer and says the 31st of January 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so uh Barnabas here has put out a tweet talking about the jijang public test net that is going live tomorrow the 1st of February at 3 P.M UTC so this is going to be the test net for Shanghai and capella uh which will be triggered six days later at uh the epoch 1350 uh you'll be able to deposit validators practice BLS change and exit without re risk and all the links are here so I did say that we would start getting these newer test Nets spun up before we hopefully by the end of the month get uh

the existing test Nets uh forked over or beginning to Fork over here uh and this is just the usual process that we go through when we do upgrades on the ethereum network so like any upgrade you can I guess um participate as well if you want by following this link here I remember I talked about this even with the merge and other upgrades that have come prior but just know that at any moment the test net could fall over or something could happen there could be a bug in it I mean that's the whole point right of the test net so don't expect anything uh long-lived here the long-lived test Nets the two of them that are currently live um Gurley they will be forked over eventually but obviously not now we've got to do these kind of uh I guess like um these new

public test Nets first which are short-lived then we'll do the long long-lived ones and usually start starts like that right there are like private devnets and then like semi-public devnets then there are these more I guess like private Standalone test Nets and then you've got like the public test Nets the new ones then you have the the long-leaved public test Nets forking over and you have Shadow Forks all in between so there's a lot of different testing that can be done that that is done obviously withdrawals don't need as much testing as the merge did nowhere near right but it's still good to test as much as we can to make sure that everything is running all well and good and all smoothly so as I said if you're interested in participating in this you can follow this link here which I'll uh I'll link in the YouTube description

below for you to do so uh and you can go check it out for yourself all right so Tony from the Mev boost.pics website uh I talk about him actually quite often on the on the refill when it comes to Mev boost things has put out a new blog post talking about Builders uh in the Mev boost ecosystem here now Builders are I guess like one part of the Mev ecosystem that isn't talked about enough I think I talk a lot about the relayers I talk a lot about Mev in general obviously censorship and censoring relays and uncensing relays and teams within that like flashbots and blocks route but the builders themselves are obviously a crucial part of the whole Mev boost ecosystem and I think they may be one of

the least understood parts of it and now if you are like uh like I guess like most people and even me and you don't know much about Builders then this is definitely a blog post for you to give a read it's probably going to give you one of the best overviews of the Builder ecosystem as it currently stands you know how it all works what Builders actually are you know what consequences they have for the network and all that good stuff there let's tldr is basically that Builders are the entity that essentially puts together these bundles uh or kind of like builds these bundles so to speak um and uh they're built by the proposers right so you can see here in the uh the builders section here uh Tony writes blocks can be built by the proposers validators themselves known as vanilla

building or by specialized entities that can extract Mev from the blocks they built and now this is obviously what happens with Mev boosts uh and validators have the profitability from the Mev in their own blocks by participating in The Proposal Builder separation mechanism and Outsourcing their block building responsibilities for some compensation uh the block Builders are specialized parties that have access to sophisticated transaction bundle ordering algorithms and proprietary order flows which are transactions that are exclusively submitted to a single Searcher Builder and search is actually another I guess um a thing that's misunderstood and searches and Builders obviously overlap a lot and they're pretty much the same thing but that's another term you may have heard of when it comes to uh Mev so you can see here this is the key part

validators can choose between vanilla building and using Mev boost the latter provides that them access to the external block market and for more information on Mev boost you can uh you can refer to this recent blog post which uh this is is what it's hyperlinked um and then yeah there's more of an explanation here about how this all works so highly recommend giving this blog post a read if you want to learn about this you know and how Builders affect the censorship resistance of ethereum and how some of them sensor some of them don't the reasons why they do all that good stuff there with numbers to support it you know data to support it so a nice little graphs and things like that as well so yeah definitely go check this out I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so nixo here

put together a tweet with two screenshots of two different Forum posts so well two of the same foreign posts on different forums slash community so the first one is the vote uh that was I guess proposed back in July or June July of 2022 and it was titled should Lido consider self-limiting now this was basically brought on by the conversations at the time about how lydo had grown really really quickly became a really massive share of the ethereum network uh or I guess like the ethereum staking Network and people were asking them hey or telling them hey you should soft signal and say that you'll sell you're basically self-limit to a certain percentage uh and and basically keep to that word now at the time I described

this or talked about this a lot on the refuel and I basically said that I think that self-limiting while while it is a strong social signal while it is I guess like a healthy social signal it's not something that's really enforceable and I also didn't think that lighter would go for this because of the fact of the matter is that Lido is obviously a for-profit business um and they are definitely not going to give up any potential future growth or profits just because we asked them to so to speak now I'm not going to talk about the implications of that when it it comes to Credible neutrality the ethereum network the community you know just general feelings on that but you can see how against the community was I mean There Was 80 million ldo that were

against this and only 156 000 that were for this now I don't know what the distribution of votes looked like here I don't know if they were whale votes I'm sure they were but essentially uh Lido voted not to self-limit uh and as I said like the main reason was because it didn't really make much sense to do that given that lighter is a for-profit business uh and yeah that was that there but then nixo also shared the same I guess like post on the rockapool Forum which is self-limiting rocket pool now this is a very different Vote or I guess like very different um result here so this was posted only two days ago on January 29th and we'll run until Feb 12th but basically the current results are 1 500 votes in favor no against and no abstaining now there are a couple

reasons for this and I think that one of the reasons is fairly obvious and I that is the fact that the rockable community is extremely different to the Lido Community they definitely are more values aligned with ethereum they definitely care about the health of the ethereum beacon chain and they care about decentralizing it as much as possible obviously because they took the Hard Road of building out rockapool to be a decentralized stacking pool instead of creating a centralized one so that's the more obvious I guess reason and we can all understand that but in saying that and you guys know I love rockapool but I think that we have to be a bit objective here so the second reason that rocket pool the rockable community can have an easier time saying that they're going to self-limit to some percentage I

think it was going to be like 15 or 20 or somewhere around there is because rocker pool is not actually at that limit right and nowhere near that limit they're at two point something percent right now of the total e-staking market share so it is in turn much easier for rockable to say that they're going to self-limit now given that they are way below the actual limit that they're imposing whereas Lido is and was above that limit like if let's say that later said okay we're going to self limit to 20 well they are well above that limit they're they're still around 29 30 and back when the vote was happening I think they were around 33 34 so obviously for them they would have to either actively uh uh try and kind of um reduce their own market share or basically limit uh

deposits and just pause deposits until the market share goes down and they can re-enable them now that's obviously not a very great workable solution it's not great for their business and you can see the reasons why they voted against that whereas rocker pool they don't have that issue I mean I'm hoping rocketpool grows to 20 right I mean not really I I should say I'm hoping rocketpool grows as much as possible but I don't think any one provider should have 20 of the of the market share anyway but obviously I'm hoping rockapole grows but it is much easier to say yes to self-limiting when you aren't even close to the Limit right uh and I I wonder what it would be like if rocketpool was in lydo's shoes like if if rocketball had 30 market share would they still be still be open to

limiting themselves to 20 or even to 30 and just like cutting out deposits would the rockable community want that because that would mean that the RPL token would be limited in its growth as well just like the ldo token would be under the the the the Lido uh kind of context there so would that actually happen I don't know like I have faith at the rockable community definitely has a more longer term Vision in place and they're definitely not uh definitely values the line with ethereum of course but at the same time you you just have to make assumptions there's no way to know for sure there's no way to know what discussions what uh what discussions would happen you know different community members have different views on things so while I think it's really positive that rockapole is signaling that they're happy to self-limit until

they actually get to that limit or get anywhere near that limit then I think it's a bit of uh uh what how how should I say it a bit of an empty promise so to speak right but anyway as I said at the start this is all just social signaling this is is not something that can be done at the kind of like smart contract level because I mean you okay I should say that you could do it at the Smart contract level right you could do it where it's automated but it would require an oracle input to know what the market share was at any given time and that would and that would actually introduce more trust into things and that would become a centralized point of failure so it kind of gets messy when you try to automate it uh and kind of

like codify it I should say so it's definitely a subjective kind of soft signaling thing and there's nothing I guess preventing the community from voting on a different percentage so what what would happen if they voted and said okay let's limit rockapool to or any service provider to 15 market share and then you reach 15 you're like oh wow okay now we have to pause and let other let our competitors get gain market share against us or we could raise that ceiling to like 20 they could basically say well we're going to self limit to 20 instead and we're going to get that five percent growth uh in order to to keep growing here and you see how this conversation these conversations has become quite murky and they can become quite difficult as the the further down you go and they can actually lead to

divisions in the community so I'm curious to see how that plays out over the years I don't know what that's going to look like I'm just kind of talking about what could happen or what potentially could happen and why these things aren't clear-cut especially I mean as soon as you introduced subjectivity into things as soon as you introduce humans uh decision making into things it starts getting extremely subjective and it's not really something that you can reason about without having to make some pretty massive assumptions about how humans would act in those certain scenarios but anyway I'm going to leave that one at that I'm interested to hear your opinions on this actually if you want to share them be sure to do so in the Discord channel it's much easier to have a conversation there than it is in the YouTube comments so head

over to the Daily grade Discord Channel there's a link in the YouTube description if you want to discuss this stuff with me I'm always open to uh to discussing this because I think it's quite important all right so some big news out of the Ogle Labs project today or the opal Network project today so they launched two key initiatives for their Community the BR test net which is the second test net to stress test their DVT technology with more than 5 000 validators globally and an ambassador program to scale contributions to the opal Labs Mission or the oval Network Mission here now just a disclosure I am an angel investor in Opel here but they are definitely one of the teams that I'm most excited to see grow this year because they'll be

going live with their mainnet implementation post withdrawals and they are going to lead I believe to a lot more security and decentralization of the ethereum staking and slash beacon beacon chain ecosystem which is going to be good for everyone so as I said this new test net has launched already and the goal is to test scaling deployments of this DVT so scale it up as much as we can to over 5000 validators obviously we want it to be able to work with as many validators as possible but we kind of scale it up as more test Nets uh roll out here and there's also an ambassador program that has gone live uh where opal is looking for contribution to the adoption of DVT and the future security and decentralization of proof of stake

there are opportunities in content and engagement Technical and localization with full details on this notion dock which I'll link in the YouTube description below so again another call out here if you are looking for something to do whether that be you know casually part-time full-time in crypto there are always opportunities these Ambassador programs I mean Obel isn't the only team that has this ambassador program there are plenty of other teams that do but if you're someone who's passionate about if ethereum staking passionate about everything got to do with staking and and even potentially DVT technology while this is definitely something that you may be interested in so as I said I'll link all this in the YouTube description below but great to see the opal project uh making progress here and I can't wait to see them go

live on mainnet all right so I think the biggest news of the last 24 hours was this new project that came out of stealth called Sovereign so they are calling themselves the internet of Roll-Ups and they say here Sovereign is an ecosystem of interoperable and scalable Roll-Ups that can run on any blockchain and then they have a whole thread about why they are building this now this isn't something that is exclusive to ethereum they do call out other data availability layers like Celestia uh in their blog post and obviously anywhere that they can settle their data on they're probably going to be open to doing so but the reason why I think this is really cool is because it's something that I've been uh excited about and keeping my eye on for quite a while now and there are a few projects

doing this I've mentioned stacker Network before and I've mentioned um optimism doing their optimistic chains before but it's basically this idea of making it as easy to spin up a new roll up as possible and doing it in a modular way where these teams can basically spin up their roll up choose where they want to put their proofs their data availability be able to spin up nodes be able to choose if they want to be evm compare edible or not or want to use another language or another virtual machine or anything of the sort so that's why you know seeing this come out of stealth today I was like okay this is this is very cool this is very exciting um and there's going to be an SDK that they release out there for developers to play around with and and I guess kind of

um kind of get get used to and this is basically a direct Challenger to a the cosmos ecosystem because the cosmos SDK is uh SDK stands for software development kit it's basically a kit that developers can use to build their own Cosmos a sovereign I guess like app Chains It's got another technically it doesn't have anything to do with with Cosmos they can connect to Cosmos if they want to but usually it's it's a standalone chain that people build something like Kanto you may have heard of that one uh it's basically a layer one blockchain and the reason people do this is because the cosmos SDK allows them to do this allows them to spin this up all relatively easily now as it currently exists there isn't something like that for Roll-Ups right now but there are going to be as I mentioned

mentioned two projects already I think there's more than the stacker Network the optimistic chains I believe there's going to be more than that and there are actually more I can't remember the names of the other projects but now that there there is Sovereign as well so this area is going to heat up because I think as more and more time progresses as layer 2's on ethereum become more and more popular and get more and more adoption people are willing to fund these new I guess like Roll-Ups and layer two teams in a really big way and then developers are willing to build on this because developers want to build where the activity is right they want to build on something that is not going to collapse underneath them like what happened with Terror obviously it's front of mine for a lot of developers now they're thinking

okay well I want to start my business I want to build this thing so where do I build it I can't build it on ethereum layer one because ethereum layer one isn't very scalable gas fees are high unfortunately um you know users are priced out there okay well how is ethereum scaling while it's scaling via these Roll-Ups all right I'm gonna go build on an arbitrum or an optimism but then people will say well okay I don't want to build on those because I actually want to create my our own app chain and then they're stumped after that they have to basically either talk to one of these teams and get a bespoke solution done sort of like what some teams have done with stockware uh or hopefully in the very near future they're going to be able to use one of these platforms whether it be stacker

Network or Sovereign or an optimistic chain in order to build their roll up out and have really great certainty and guarantees that it's going to be long lasting because you know they can choose where they want to settle their data and their proofs and obviously if you want to choose something that has already proven out uh success has a network effect has all the the tooling and everything you need you would do it on ethereum now as I said before it's not just limited to ethereum you could use Celestia for data availability or you could use another solution for like eigen layout for example for data availability um but if you are serious about I guess longevity for your project ethereum is the obvious First Choice yeah and you know what's funny there was a lot of hype around Celestia last year and even the year before and I I've said this I

believe on the refuel that these things they tend to get a lot of hype and then they still take a very long time to launch I don't know when Celestia is going live I do think that Celestia is a competitor to ethereum even though they're only trying to focus on data availability ethereum is also focusing on that with dang shining right even with proto-dang shining so it is a competitor so if we can allow people to store their data on ethereum in a really really cheap way then that kind of makes Celestia I wouldn't say obsolete but definitely kills a lot of the the momentum there for them and brings it into the ethereum family now I'm not going to give my opinion on whether I think that's a good or bad thing it's just just is basically but obviously I want ethereum to keep winning I want

ethereum to be the premier place that uh these Roll-Ups store their data on store their proofs on because that to me is the most scalable most secure and most sustainable way of building Roll-Ups but yeah anyway enough on that tangent you can go check out Sovereign for yourself there is a blog post there is a tweet thread I'm very very excited about this new project and can't wait to see what they are that what they build here all right so this one's for the developers out there or at least anyone who is interested in searching blockchain data I should say um this is something called lasso that was introduced today which is the natural language search engine for a blockchain data you can search the chain get data and find Alpha in your own words no SQL or complex smart contract

understanding needed so this is actually for more more of the mainstream audience I should say here where essentially you can just use natural language such as what's in this video here where they ask who are the top five Milady maker holders by wallet value and then it'll spit that out for that data out for you here now this is currently in Early Access and you can sign up at lasso.gg if you are interested in this sorts of stuff but this is something that I'm definitely interested in and I have signed up to the Early Access list TR because I am not an I mean I don't okay excuse is taking me back I did do SQL stuff at University but I haven't kept up with it at all I'm nowhere near an SQL expert I mean I probably couldn't even do the most basic of things anymore

and I definitely don't know how to how to code up smart contracts or read them so having natural language uh I guess like processors or search engines for this sort of stuff helps me a lot I'm sure it helps the majority of you a lot as well because it allows you to do things without having to go and learn these I guess uh these skills now not saying that learning the skills is bad but not everyone is going to learn SQL not everyone's going to learn smart contract development I mean that's me I'm not going to learn these things but I would still like to be able to search for things uh using natural language and be able to dig into things so that's why I am definitely excited about lasso here and I'll link this in the YouTube description for you to go check out as

well all right so another project that was announced today was something called Axiom which is a ZK co-processor for ethereum so Axion provides smart contracts trustless access to all on-chain data and arbitrary expressive compute over it like gpus do for CPUs Axion augmented blockchain consensus with zero knowledge proofs you know I find it funnier and funnier just how many projects have ZK in their name these days um some of them Justified a lot of them not I feel like we're going to have this ZK wave over the next couple years where we see a lot of these projects end up being funded but a lot of them actually aren't ZK and they they just throw ZK in there to raise money they throw ZK in

there to get hype but I don't think Axiom is one of those projects they definitely are a very cool project here and they're definitely working with some of the Giga brains uh like uh like Paradigm I believe or at least working off paradigms work here and they have a GitHub that you can go dive into if this is something you're interested in but uh this is definitely on the more technical side of things I haven't fully digested it yet I just came across it earlier today I wanted to share share it with you guys but this seems pretty exciting and some of the like smarter people I know are talking about this as well so I'm curious to see how this all shakes out but I could also be wrong I mean as I said I'm not up to speed enough I'm not smart enough to know if this is uh

as legit or as uh I guess like living up to the hype as they as they hyping it up here but I'm going to keep an eye on it and uh you probably will want to as well so definitely go check this out I'll link it in the YouTuber description below all right so to round us off a fort today I put a tweet out and I wanted to talk a bit about this so I've left a bit of time here where I said the layer one was over the years have been incredibly boring and noisy mostly a waste of time and energy the layer 2 roll-up Wars are going to be much more fun and I've already learned a lot from watching the debates play out on Twitter over the last six to 12 months now this tweet was spurred on by the things I was talking

about yesterday where Stephen goldfed are from uh the arbitrim team put out a tweet Thread about how he thinks zk's evm stuff is essentially over hyped right or I guess it's it's over promising a lot of things and why he's still very bullish on optimistic Roll-Ups and there are a lot of debates that happen because of this but these aren't the only debates there are so many debates going on all the time when it comes to layer 2's and Roll-Ups now the reason why I think that the layer 1 Wars uh have been boring and noisy and a waste of time and energy is because most of them if not the majority again if not pretty much all of them never really Optimum for the right thing they always went after the cheaper and more scalable angle obviously obsercating the fact

that they achieved that by sacrificing decentralization and becoming very unsustainable uh from an economics point of view but for me personally all of that was very boring like I looked at these layer ones I'm like okay what are you doing that's actually novel here what are you doing that's getting us from a zero to one moment that ethereum was to bitcoin because you know I think the reason why most people got excited or all people all the people got excited about ethereum in the early days was because it was a massive Step Up Above Bitcoin it wasn't just Bitcoin like what Litecoin did or what Dogecoin did and you know slapping a different Supply on and a different hashing algorithm or whatever else it was literally a massive Paradigm Shift zero to one for blockchain technology now have we had anything since then in the

layer one uh I guess Arena I don't think so uh you can point to some of the most popular layer ones out there I mean the funny thing is the most popular layer one beside the theory room is actually Finance smart chain which is literally just ethereum but of the non-etherium forks and they're on evm chains I think it's safe to say that uh Solano is probably at least in terms of the noise that the Solana Community makes um the the the one uh the next one running there but have they actually done anything that's done a zero to one moment for blockchains I don't think so they are I guess or they can process more TPS uh and they can't process more transactions than ethereum layer one can but they sacrifice decentralization to do that as you guys know but at the end

of the day like that's still not zero to one okay cool you can do transactions cheaper than ethereum and I'm not going to get into why those transactions are actually not equal to begin with but let's for the sake of argument just just say that that to me isn't cool it's not Innovative it's not something that's zero to one it's not something that actually pushes the industry forward and then people will say well Solana has this unique consensus mechanism uh it has like these really fast finality blah blah all this stuff I'm like okay cool but that is again not a zero to one moment for me the Solana consensus mechanism is nowhere near as interesting as what ethereum did with proof of stake with the theory of mistake mechanism it has a lot less moving parts to a theory as ethereum proof of stake it's very it

actually works very differently and at the end of the day it's still dpos right delegated proof of stake which I find very very boring right so that's just one example there but then all these other layer ones besides I guess like the the more scalable and lower fees things they do tend to talk about their consent their new consensus that they have that's supposed to be more secure or they'll talk about the the fact that they've got a new smart contract language that people can use to instead of solidity and all these other things that I still don't consider a zero to one Innovation now okay in saying all that what do I consider zero to one in the blockchain space there's only really been one other thing and it's ZK stuff right I know I just went on about how ZK has a lot of hyper behind it right now

and it's gonna it's gonna be pretty overhyped for years to come but zero knowledge stuff not just when it comes to scalability but also privacy is a zero to one Leap in blockchain right and where did that happen while that happened on ethereum right like it and and so did D5 which I consider to be zero to one as well so when looking at all this stuff why would I look at the other layer ones why would I study them why would I spend time there if at the end of the day they all boil down to being just very very boring they're not doing any Innovative stuff they may have some apps on there that are doing Innovative stuff but I'm talking about the chains themselves not the apps the apps at the end of the day pretty much all the apps are going to be multi-chain

anyway so it doesn't really matter if the app is on uh on Solana first and then comes over to ethereum later uh all comes over to an ethereum Layer Two later later I I more focused on the actual chains themselves and for me the only zero to one over the last few years in the blockchain space has been zero knowledge technology now what do I and zero knowledge technology what is it enabled well not only has it enabled things like ZK Roll-Ups which are obviously very scalable uh and and very secure but it's also enabled privacy via things like Aztec Network right it's also enabled privacy via things like tornado cache and it has become so disruptive that the US government thought it prudent to put sanctions on

tornado cache because it was so effective at doing what it was saying was going to do which was mixing funds right um and then Aztec network has been really effective with being able to tap into layer 1 liquidity and do Layer Two uh private transactions and then obviously all the ZK Roll-Ups and ZK VMS and stuff like that have become very uh popular and have become very hyped up because it's very cool to be able to do something like that and settle back to ethereum layer one so that's why I put this out here and that was the context around this Tweet now you can disagree with me if you want maybe something in the layer one space uh is is cool to you and you consider it to be zero to one but me personally I have not seen anything and I have studied all the

other layer ones believe me I have actually looked at them I don't just say say this stuff because um you know people consider me an eighth Maxi or whatever I have actually studied them I've looked for something that has been a zero to one moment and I just didn't find it now maybe I should Define what zero to one is basically zero to one is is another way of saying Paradigm Shift where the the power the the current Paradigm is shifted so much that it creates a new paradigm that people hadn't really thought of before and it opens up a new world of possibilities we had that with ethereum uh when you know when it first came out obviously it opened up a world of absolutely amazing and massive new possibilities that Bitcoin didn't enable and now we have that with ZK Tech as well uh Slash layer

2's generally because that opens up another whole world of things that weren't possible before where you have can have a super scalable chain that is secured by a super secure chain like ethereum and can inherit those properties and still be compatible with the uh parent chain via evm compatibility and things like that but anyway on that note I'm gonna end it there for today so thank everyone for listening I'm watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone