10 million ETH staked, Layer 2 news and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #323 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where you cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony and today the 25th of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so super fizz shared today that we now have a 10 million eighth staked on the beacon chain including the accrued rewards so you can see this on various trackers the one that superf's linked to is launchpad.ethereum.org and you can see down here the total each staked at 10 million or over 10 million total validators at almost 300 000 and the current apr at 4.9 percent now there are a bunch of other websites you can use to track this i like the beacon chain website beacon c-h-a-i-n um i really really like that website i use it quite regularly but

there's so many out there at this point i mean there's doing any licks dashboards for tracking e2 stuff it's just got a crazy amount of stuff going on right um but that's not what i wanted to talk about today what i want to talk about was obviously this is a massive kind of like achievement for the beacon chain but like what does it actually mean like why do we care that there's 10 million eighth staked on the beacon chain well there are first order effects and then there are kind of like second order effects which feed into the first order effect so let's go through kind of what the first order effects are well the most obvious is that the more ether gets staked on the beacon chain the more secure the beacon chain is because the more value and the more economic security the beacon chain has so right

now at current i guess like time of recording this works out to about 26 billion dollars of eighth staked on the beacon chain um which means it would cost you many many billion um many billions of dollars to attack the network now the thing is and the beautiful thing about ethereum proof of stake is that you can only attack once and when you do attack you basically uh are signaling to the entire network it's like hey you know here are my validators that i'm attacking with come slash me right come literally delete my eth right uh and kick me out of the active validator set which means you can't just keep attacking and that would be extremely costly like if you wanted to acquire even 33 of the network in order to kind of like censor people on the on the beacon chain

it would require you to to require like many billions of dollars worth of eth and you'd have to try and do this covertly and the thing is if you're buying billions of dollars worth of ether on the open market good luck good luck not pushing the price up a ton by doing that and good luck not getting noticed too that's the beautiful thing about the these systems right because they're so public is that the the um i guess like the social layer of ethereum would call this out straight away and be like well why are there you know all these validators suddenly trying to come online because obviously there's a validated queue as well of like a thousand or something a day and by the time you actually get to the point where you can launch your attack the network has already taken steps and the network

being kind of like i guess network of people the community all that sort of stuff has already taken steps to mitigate that attack or to at least make it so that the attack is is essentially thwarted altogether or the damage is minimized from this and as i said if the if you know you're the attacker and you go through with it you're pretty much gonna get slashed straight away and then all the effort you went through to get to that uh to that point where you could attack the network is basically moon so that is why we love the fact that more ethe is getting stacked it gives us better economic security guarantees and you know we're going to get to a point where there's going to be a hundred plus billion dollars maybe one day a trillion dollars securing the the beacon chain which is obviously a crap ton of value

right um but then flowing on from that i think you know you could say okay well the easier way to attack the network would be to take over existing validators then you you'd be correct right this is why we don't want valet validator centralizing within one group or or a small group of kind of like our companies or people so for example coinbase and kraken right now you know i i would argue they they do have too much too much of the validator share now i've kind of like talked about this before how i said that centralized exchange and service staking in in kind of like a vacuum is okay it's not you know it's not bad it's not good it's just okay and that's because i don't expect any of these centralized exchanges or staking service providers to ever attack the network like they

have too much i guess like um invested interest in just like making sure that they um do things correctly and don't attack the network there's too many other incentives that play for them it's not their eighth at the end of the day it's their users eighth uh they're fully docks like everyone knows the creators of coinbase and crack and everything like that but where it gets scary is that it's not in a vacuum like what could happen theoretically is some nation state probably the us government could go to coinbase and kraken and maybe a bunch of others and say hey we are commandeering your validators uh we are going to use them to do such and such on the ethereum network that's a real possibility guys like that's definitely what could happen but the thing is is that it's a very low possibility and if they did that we've

still got the in protocol kind of mitigations which is basically being able to slash those actors and yes it would be slashing real users with kind of like real eth on the line but i mean that's the risk you take like if you're sticking with a centralized exchange that's one of the risks i'm talking about that you take is that you don't control the keys to your validator you don't control what happens with it at all it could get slashed accidentally it would go offline you don't control any of that coinbase or kraken whoever else controls that and and you know you're just at the mercy of that for the convenience of course like the trade-off is that you get the the convenience of not um having to kind of like stake on your own but uh there is that added risk there now i want to talk about one of the

major second order effects of this and that's got to do with eth's price so this feeds into the first order effect obviously the higher the eighth price goes the more value the um the the more valuable the total amount of each staked the harder it is to attack the network now this is a really nice positive feedback loop because you expect over time as more and more it gets locked up in staking where it's literally just sitting there it's not locked as in it can't be unlocked i mean right now it is but like in in the steady state it'll be able to be withdrawn at some point but you know let's say over time it just keeps going up right so the more eth locked in staking more locked in d5 and more ethel is a story value more eth getting burned that over time pushes eth's price up and

the higher the price of eth goes the more economic security the beacon chain has and doesn't necessarily have to have more eth to gain more economic security that's the beautiful thing like if if right now the beacon chain just stopped at 10 million each staked uh but the eighth price went up to 10k it would have almost 4x the amount of economic security uh uh due to the price going up right in terms of kind of like usd value without having to have more eat stake and that's going to happen but i do expect a lot more eth to get staked over time i expect as we get closer to the merge is going to be more statistic there and as we get closer to withdrawals and when withdrawals are enabled i actually people people kind of like like to say oh there's gonna be

this massive unlock of funds again as i've explained before that's not how it works it's actually a queue or a validated queue or a withdrawal queue to get out so at most i think it's like thirty thousand eight ish a day can actually be withdrawn which is basically nothing right um in the context of the wider kind of like market liquidity but i i would also argue that because withdrawals are enabled because people know that they can enter and exit at any time um they're going to see even more eighth get staked so it's probably going to offset that and it might even offset that in a really big way i'm surprised we're already at 10 million to be honest like i thought we would we would taper out like five or six million ish um because withdrawals aren't enabled but we're at 10 million which is just

absolutely crazy to think about that's i mean it's not 10 percent of the 8 supply it's like 8 or something like that maybe higher a little bit higher than eight percent of the eat supply staked knowing that that it can't be withdrawn from staking you know for for a while now yes there are stake token derivatives obviously with um r8 and st and some exchanges let you kind of like have early liquidity but still you know there's a lot of people doing solo staking as well i mean it's just really really cool to see this so i just wanted to kind of like go through that uh when it comes to the beacon chain in terms of like economic security there are a bunch of other things obviously the beacon chain is um he's involved with and kind of like uh the more eath staked the kind of like

better it is but i think i'm gonna leave it at that i don't wanna i don't wanna fill the whole episode up with staking stuff because i've talked about that a lot recently uh but yeah i guess like a massive milestone for uh the the beacon chain just can't wait for the merge at this point guys like it's coming it's coming i can't wait till i say like it's done right i'm just so looking forward to it because um you know i want the ethereum network to be whole i i kind of like right now like there's two ethereum networks technically and i'm kind of like ah i can't wait till they hold because then we can just have like one unified ethereum layer and then we can go you know focus on the more important things so so yeah all right so actually speaking of

withdrawals on the beacon chain uh alex stokes here has put together uh basically a new eip or uh or i guess like some discussions around the aip that he had originally put together about uh withdrawals so if you're interested in how beacon chain withdrawals are potentially going to work you can definitely give this erp a proto lambda's in there with a bunch of other kind of like core devs and stuff which is really cool to see but just wanted to put this on your radar because obviously i've been talking about beacon chain withdrawals a lot recently and they there's an eip that's going that's kind of like um being worked on being reviewed being revised that that the core developers hope that we can get that into shanghai which is the first network upgrade coming uh after the merge happens so should be about six months after the

merge so probably end of year q1 2023 have to see how it shakes out but there is a progress being made on this all right so the ethereum on arm twitter account uh tweeted out today that their last gate uh gether sync on a raspberry pi 4 took 56 hours to sync the whole ethereum blockchain from scratch this is awesome i mean this is done on a raspberry pi 4. this is not done on you know some beefy hardware or anything like that and this kind of like really puts the bed all those people who are saying that's like impossible to run an ethereum full node and you might not hear it as much these days or maybe you will i just don't know because it was a popular talking point for bitcoin maximalists back in the day and because a lot of them had me blocked at this

point i've blocked a lot of them i don't know if they're still talking about it i'm sure they are in some capacity but it was a very very popular narrative that no one could run an ethereum full note and obviously that was false like i was running in ethereum full node i was i and i it was fine like i i set it up it was super easy to do um and now you have efforts like running geth on a raspberry pi 4. like i was running mine on just some some standard hardware not like this pc my main pc but kind of like another pc that i had just running it on that and now i'm running it on my staking pc as well right now my eth1 node uh or i guess like my execution layer node i should use the right terminology there

um but you know it's it's not an intensive thing to do it's super easy to set up and and it just kind of like runs just it runs just like my validator does on the um the consensus layer side but i haven't attempted this yet and i plan to because i have a bunch of raspberry pi's lying around that i like to experiment on but it's really awesome to see that you can sync geth in only 56 hours guys like that like you may think of 56 hours that sounds like a long time no it's not a long time um you know if you wanted to do kind of like a i guess like a full sync of geth it usually takes this long or longer the fact that they can get this down to 56 hours on a raspberry pi 4 is awesome and they're

using a a sync i guess method called snapsync which is the default sync which does have a little bit of additional trust assumptions baked in and stuff like that so if you wanted to do like a full full sync without any of these i guess trust assumptions baked in it would obviously take longer but it probably could still work on the raspberry pi 4 which would be really really cool to see play out as well but uh yeah great on the on the ethereum on arm team for getting this done and showing people that you don't need a you know beefy hardware in order to do this i mean they list the hardware here the raspberry pi 4 has got eight gig of ram they have an ssd you unfortunately cannot run if you're in full note on a hard drive but i mean ssds are pretty cheap these days like

it's not like i mean i remember if ssd's first came out it was so expensive to buy one you were like regarded as a god if you had 120 gig ssd now you can buy like a one terabyte ssd for basically nothing i don't know what it is in usd but in australian dollars it's pretty cheap relative to like a hard drive um so you do need an ssd but other than that like that's that's fine like you have the raspberry pi 4 with the ram you have the ssd you obviously have um the operating system on an sd card or a micro sd card that you slot in and away you go so very very cool to see this from the ethereum on arm team so the ethereum.org uh i guess um effects or a team i should say have translated the eth2 renaming blog into

10 more languages so this is the blog where they announced that they were going to deprecate the use of the term eth2 in favor of using the term consensus layer which refers to the beacon chain an execution layer which refers to quote unquote eth1 or the ethereum chain we all know and love today and we all kind of like use today uh so this has been translated into ten other uh ten more languages um and i think the languages are here yeah so i mean i'm not gonna read them all out here i'm just spanish french uh indonesian it seems like you know in a bunch of other some i think this is an arabic language here so i mean it's just awesome that this stuff gets done because you know not only should this be available in like the most popular languages it should be

available in in most of the commonly spoken languages in the world like i'm not even talking the most popular ones like even if there's only a couple million people who speak it it should still be done because i think that ethereum needs to i mean ethereum is global right and we can't claim to be truly a truly global and truly decentralized network unless we're appealing to more than just the english speaking countries and ethereum has has long kind of like done this done the translations done hackathons in you know non-western countries and things like that but at the end of the day this thing needs to be done more done here like i still haven't seen a concerted effort from the front ends powering things like d5 to translate two different languages out there so we're really just still stuck in being extremely westernized right now guys i mean you say it like

most of the people in ethereum in crypto are americans or europeans really at the end of the day there are obviously big communities in other in kind of like other parts of the world south america is actually batting above its average average there um definitely asia is very involved but really when it comes to kind of like what we you know what we can kind of like um see and whether where a lot of the growth is and and especially within ethereum it's definitely coming from the us uh you know eastern i mean probably more so eastern europe than western europe uh and you know i guess like parts of asia maybe the more quantum quantum quite westernized parts of asia but we need to appeal to places like obviously the middle east and africa we have been doing work there but especially the

languages because we can't expect everyone to speak english or speak one of the other popular uh popular languages um i guess like spanish or french or or or german or anything like that we definitely need to appeal to people that that speak a wide kind of set of languages and that's exactly what ethereum.org team does with all these translations so yeah if you'd rather read this this great blog post you can read that in the languages available here i'll link it in the youtube description below so the ef ecosystem support program has put out a blog post detailing the latest recipients of uh the local the latest local grants around japan edition so you can see who they're supporting here they're supporting i guess five different teams one of them is zk cream which is zero which stands

for zero knowledge confidential reliable ethereum anonymous mixer so another privacy mixer here they're supporting that second one here is ryodan system ag building a layer two with zk roll ups and zk cloud there's another layer two coming to market here i guess like zk based layer two star trail which records infrastructure for physical artwork uh w3a dot io which is smart lock authentication for physical devices and fami i think that's how you say it partnership certificates on ethereum so actually a pretty diverse set of projects here you know none of these are different projects from what i can tell um i think an nft project would be i guess like this partnership certificate on ethereum um and maybe i guess like uh records infrastructure for

physical artwork maybe as well but yeah not not really any d5 stuff vr mostly infrastructure plays it seems so very very cool to see this diversity here and what um the esp is supporting and as i said this is a local round in japan so these projects coming out of japan there's another country out there that is really i think batting above their average but we just don't know because obviously people in japan speak japanese right i don't speak japanese um so i've got no idea but there have been a few people i think from japan or living in japan that speak both japanese and english and they kind of act as a bridge in but for the most part i know there's a japanese ethereum community um but i just kind of like you know because there's a language barrier there it's very very hard to

kind of like get across that and you know i think people often bring up language barriers as being like a big deal which which it is to an extent then they also bring up cultural barriers you know to be honest guys i think cultural barriers especially when it comes to online networks like ethereum are completely overrated because you don't have to bring like you know i'm not saying you shouldn't bring your culture with you but ethereum has its own culture so it's not like you have to bring your culture your i guess like real life culture into ethereum and and you know you can only interact with people who are part of your culture no you mean we all are part of ethereum culture we're all we all are ethereans and we all kind of like understand what a theorem stands for and and kind

of like what we want to do with the network so i think that you know shedding your old kind of like not old but you're like a real life identity when you're online and when you're interacting with ethereum is a good way to go about it especially when making new friends but you shouldn't kind of like shed your identity and say oh you know i'm not this person or i'm not from here i think ethereum culture is also a mixture of all the different cultures put together but it does definitely have it's it's unique culture which i guess bridges those kind of like cultural divides that people bring up so i really don't think there's there's massive cultural divides um it's more got to do with the language barrier for sure because culture is one thing but language i mean like culture i think it depends it depends right like i mean

i'm not i'm not going to get into this now actually because it's going to take the whole video but i think it really depends on kind of like what culture it is like um you know what language it is and that sort of stuff but i think culture and language definitely are two of the biggest barriers but i would say that the cultural barrier at this point in time is not one that uh that is that is kind of like uh a big one i think the language barrier is definitely bigger there but besides translating things in different languages i guess not much else we can do um you know i you know i was i was hoping at this point in time uh in the 2020s we would have like a way to live translate from people and we'd all have like a little earpiece that we could put

in and and you know people could speak to us in their language and it would live translate with like incredible accuracy obviously we have google translate and stuff like that that work really really well don't get me wrong um but it's not kind of like ubiquitous where we can kind of just like seamlessly talk to someone in english and they can seamlessly talk to us to seamlessly understand us in real time and then talk back to us in their native language and we could understand them in real time as well maybe we'll get there eventually i reckon but uh but until then yeah we're gonna have to keep bridging those uh those kind of like divides there all right so barnaby from the robust incentive group at the ethereum foundation has published a blog post called understanding roll-up economics from first principles and this is all

about the pricing resources in l1 dependent economy so i guess this is talking a lot about or this blog post goes goes through a lot about kind of like how resources are going to be priced on layer twos in l1 dependent economy because obviously the l2s need to pay for security to the l1 and they need to kind of like interact with the l1 this is a lengthy blog post i'm not going to tldr it for you because i want you to go read it it was a really great read i learned a lot from it i think that there is uh you know obviously a lot of different ways that kind of like resource pricing can be done fees can be done it's up to kind of like the um l2 operators to kind of decide what one they want to do and then obviously once

they decentralize their networks out it's up to the kind of the community to decide what they want to do um but yeah i just wanted to kind of like highlight this blog post for you guys because i think it's a very very good read and it'll it'll teach you a lot about resource pricing on l2 which is something that a lot of you have asked about recently like i remember i i've seen it in the discord channel where you ask you know hey what happens if the l2s get congested are they just going to get expensive again or you know can the l2s be ddos like solana for example or can the l2s um kind of like get you know get super super expensive like ethereum l1 all extremely valid questions a lot of them are answered in this blog post guys so definitely go read this post it'll be

linked in the youtube description below speaking of blog posts optimism has put together a roll-up recap from ethe denver so if you weren't at ethedenbar like me or you weren't able to kind of get across everything optimism has summarized uh kind of like what they worked on at eth denver including the mini dank sharding with data data blob transactions uh with a bunch of different erps community projects talks and panels uh and this is mostly what to do with optimism but yeah if you wanted to keep up with what they were doing in east denver kind of like rewatch a lot of the stuff here all the links are available here in this blog post so i just wanted to hide that for you guys because i think it's important to get study this stuff like i mean you know at this point in time from what i gather

from the discord channel i think i've kind of like summarized what you guys are most interested in and it's ethereum core development specifically around the merge and and sharding and proof of stake generally and layer twos and uh i guess like a mix of define nfts those seem to be like the core things you guys are interested in which is what i'm interested in maybe that's maybe i'm rubbing off when you there but i think i've said it so many times before but the most exciting place to be right now the most exciting thing to be paying attention to right now is the layout to ecosystem seriously you can you know the funny thing is you can pay attention to nothing else and still you know have kind of like no time to do anything if you're just paying attention to the l2 stuff because there's just so

much stuff happening there so definitely go check out this post it'll be linked in the youtube description below all right so i spoke about orbit of finance the other day and i did confirm that the change that they actually um are supporting currently uh optimism arbitrary zk sync and polygon well today they are adding support for um stock net so i guess like i i this is on the test net i believe i don't believe this is on main net just yet i i think um but yeah they're teasing kind of like a stock net integration here awesome to see obviously all but our finances i've spoken about before as a bridging protocol just another one on ethereum and you know starknet i've said before starkness making waves guys like they seem to be a bit of a sleeper i don't think many people are paying attention

to them right now but they are definitely making waves and as i said before they're taking a different path they're not doing a zkvm they're doing their kind of like uh cairo thing where they where you can have but you can use warp to transpile solidity to cairo and then use um use stock net which is which is awesome which is all well and good you know and i'm actually liking the fact that all the major l2 players are taking their own path here the you know not all zkvms are created equal either and i actually saw a great description of the differences between the zk vms uh the other day maybe i can quickly bring it up for you guys now because it was a really great description so yeah so this is this is a comment from a friend who said there are different approaches

being taken to support solidity viper evm code on zk rollups transpiling to a zk friendly language is what stark net and polygon maidan are doing uh compiling to a vm that's zk ready which is what zk sync and polygon zero are doing and native op code support which is what polygon hermes scro and scroll are doing so there are you know not all zkvms are created equal not all zk stuff is created equal and um on top of that like not only do we have the kind of diversity in the zk space there but we also have the diversity in the optimism and arbitrary space they both use their own thing like optimism uses the ovm arbitration uses the avm optimism wants to be evm equivalent arbitrary is evm compatible and there's different kind of

like traders so both of those sorts of things and they have different kind of like things under the hood um beyond that as well so i love this guys i don't want every l2 to be the same but it's just completely pointless l2 is the experimentation layer that's what i've been calling it for a while now and that's what we're seeing play out obviously on l1 you can't really experiment because of the fact that to do anything on l1 to make any changes to l1 takes a very very long time has to go through the entire ethereum governance process and that's by design we don't want fast and loose changes on ethereum l1 but with these l2s as long as they're in kind of like early stages or intestinal phases stages with kind of like training wheels on you can move hard and fast you

can do plenty of things here you can do upgrades you can do major upgrades you don't have to worry about kind of like uh going through a decentralized governance process or anything like that and that to me is is absolutely awesome because it means we get to get that we get to kind of like get to the point of the best execution layer or l2 as quickly as possible and i don't think there's going to be a one-size-fits-all i know everyone just loves to say that oh you know zk robs are going to obsolete optimistic rollups look guys i actually you know i've said before that i think short to medium term optimistic wells are going to dominate longer term might be zk roll ups but look the jury is still out like i i don't like over promising things i don't like over hyping things too much um i know i

am a bit of a hype man but like i do kind of like um like to kind of focus on the reality of today and the reality of today is that both optimism and arbitrary offer amazing experiences for people the polygon pls chain offers a great experience for people zk sync um you know on zigzag exchange i've always had really like that's one of the apps live right now i've always had a really good time on there the stock net stuff that i've that i've kind of like seen looks really great at the end of the day users are going to use what they get the most value out of what that what gives them the best experience and they're all going to use the same thing there's going to be different opportunities on different l2s and we should embrace them all and use them all the bridges are

going to make it seamless to use them all you're not even going to have to bloody worry about anything in the near future you just be like okay well this app's on arbitrary but i'm on you know stocknet i'm just going to bridge that's it it'll be cheap to bridge you'll be able to do it all while in good and really really quickly and you won't even have to worry about this sort of stuff anymore so so yeah that's kind of like how i think about the l2 landscape but i guess back on topic cool to see orbiter finance supporting stock net here uh they seem to be marching along very very quickly with what networks they support all right so uh the new project got announced today are introduced today called astro astro drop shrines which is a new primitive that enables anyone to

distribute any amount of any erc20 token to a weighted list of addresses of any size all for a low constant gas cost 161 000 gas to deploy a shrine and 50 000 gas to distribute tokens so this is just i guess like a better way to distribute kind of like airdrops right um and this you can go check it out on github here and check out the repository and everything like that this is obviously for developers to use but i think this is cool i think you know the fact that it's low low gas cost as well is really awesome that that'll obviously carry over to the l2s uh but astrodop has this thread here where they kind of like go through their rationale behind it and they say yeah ever since the uni airdrop projects have been using airdrops to give tokens to early

contributors but in every case the list of addresses and and weights is discarded even though it contains valuable info trying addresses to reputation and off chain actions isn't that a waste so and then they go on in this thread uh to kind of like describe the rest of that there so very very cool new project here our new primitive i should say definitely go check it out i'll link it in the youtube description all right and finally just a shout out to zk sinclair that they kind of put out a tweet today where they said mata labs is looking for a rock star to lead our people ops team and we're paying 10 000 for any referral that ends in ohio even if you nominate yourself we're also looking for a senior recruiters the same offer applies the job description and referral instructions below which are in

the second tweet here so if this sounds like something that you can do a people ops director or a recruiter or or maybe anything else really reach out here go apply to to kind of like on these applications here i'll link them in the usual description for you i think that working for the zk sync team or the mata labs team would be absolutely awesome right like as i said guys like working for an l2 team is pretty much like at this point in time i think it's like the holy grail of where to work within the ethereum ecosystem because you get to touch on so many different things within ethereum right you get to touch the user layer you get to touch the bleeding edge kind of like research layer um the protocol layer and whether that be l1 or l2 and you get to kind of really make a

difference in scaling ethereum so definitely go check out these roles if you haven't seen them yet and i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks everyone