Beacon Chain Birthday, Obol Mainnet Beta live - The Daily Gwei Refuel #697 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delu refuel where up the latest news etherum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony Sano and the 1st of December 2023 right everyone let's get into it so kicking off today's episode we have an update on the eth ETF or eth spot ETF Race So James cart here said on Twitter has been long known that Fidelity entered the spot eth ETF race but this filing essentially starts the 240 plus day clock for their uh spot eth ETF just another step in the process we'll have definitive deadline dates in the coming weeks and this has been kind of an open question I think for people around okay well we know when the deadline dates are for the spot BTC ETFs obviously the earliest one is Arc which is genan 10th and then the rest of them

are in mid-march but really it's that genan 10th one that matters because everyone is expecting the atfs to be approved by for all the atfs to be approved by Jan 10th because of that deadline there and then people are asking you know when are the spot e ATF deadlines well they're not for quite a while after that honestly it's like Q3 Q4 kind of thing from from my Ral calculations here which is totally fine right and as I've said before it doesn't have to go right to the deadline uh that you know the clock doesn't have to run out totally for the sa to approve the atfs they can approve them at any point and I think that there is a chance that the spot e atfs get approved quite quickly after the BTC ones because of the fact that the entire process that's been going gone through with the SEC and

with with the issuers of the spot BTC ETF is the same process they're going to have to go through with the eth one and they can really just cop be paced because none of these ETFs are going to be Stak eth ETFs from what I know they're only just going to be normal spot eth ETFs so you can really just copy paste everything you did for the your BTC ETF over to your eth1 and then just change the asset I mean it's and and and basically everything Remains the Same right the custody would remain the same um you know the issuance of that uh ETF asset like in kind or cash uh it would be would be basically the same so that's why I think it could happen faster and it could happen you know within only a few months after the BT ones get approved because we don't need

to do that whole dance of back and forth of the SEC I say we like I'm involved in this well the issuers don't have to do this uh whole kind of dance with the SEC again because they already know what the SEC wants to see so they can just copy paste it over for their eth one so yeah I'm feeling pretty good about this I I don't think they're going to be denied to be honest as I said before the Futures e e Futures ETS being approved um just means that the spot ones are going to get approved because of the fact that the SEC already lost the court case to grayscale over this basically that the court said if you remember that the SEC can't treat Futures and spot differently uh they're basically the same thing so yeah I do think that the E

spot ETFs will get approved uh relatively shortly after the BTC ones um but you know if if we wanted to kind of push it out to the final deadline for these things then you could expect them in Q3 or Q4 next year but potentially we could see it in Q2 right it just depends on you know how fast the wants to move here but as I said I think the process overall would just be faster for eth because you can just basically copy paste what you've done with the BTC spot um ETF applications and just change the asset there so exciting times in the ETF space of course uh you know we're only I guess like not even what just over a month I guess 6 and a half uh no what is it almost 6 weeks out from from Jane 10th I saw some of these guys these ETF

analysts tweeting about they being a window between the 5th and the 10th of January where it it would be you know potentially all of them get approved but then they also pointed out that the fif I think I believe the fifth and and and sixth and 7th of January are actually a weekend so the fifth is the Friday the sixth is the Saturday and the 7th to Sunday so really you could say that okay well they might want to approve it on a Monday you know the start of the week which is the 8th of January so you basically really have a window of the 8th to 10th of January with a you know I guess like if you wanted to place a bet placing a bet on the 8th of January seems like a pretty good bet but again all of these ETFs can get approved

before the deadline they could get approved this month we don't know right it just depends uh and there's a lot of movement happening still there's a lot of communication stuff happening but if it gets approved between now and jan10th I don't think anyone is going to be surprised at all uh to be honest all right moving on so it is December 1st which means it is the birthday of the beacon chain and in particular it is the third birthday of the beacon chain so the beacon chain launched on December 1st 2020 it was the first time that you were able to stake your eth on a on Main net basically and of course it launched as a separate chain to the normal ethereum chain but you could stake your eth there you could send it to the deposit contract and you'd be staking your eth and a lot of

people did it you know I remember back then all the excitement around it and particularly back then around uh ask needing to meet a minimum threshold it was 500 and something, eth in the deposit contract at the time uh by November 24th a week before this date in order for the biging chain to actually launch on December 1st and it was funny because back then there was a little bit of fud where people were like you know actually there was a lot of fud because um a lot of the deposits didn't come in until like the last few days and people were saying oh look at this you know they can't even get half a million eth into this deposit contract to to launch the beacon chain blah blah blah and then within the the last few days before November 24th the eth came in uh and it

was you know it was more than enough there and it's kind of funny looking back on how you know at that time there was I guess I was a 500 and something I think I don't know the exact amount off top of my head I'm just going to say 500,000 eth whereas today there is almost 30 million eth staked right so a huge difference in in years of course but a lot of has happened in that time it's become easier to stake you know lsts came online because at the time really there were no lsts online or anything like that um I don't even think that any of the centralized exchanges had e staking set up just yet there was some centralized services that did like I remember Celsius was was pretty big on it but really it was just a lot of solo stakers at at the time right they they

were the kind of ones who bootstrapped this whole thing uh but since then obviously we've had a lot of other staking Services come online um for for better and maybe a little bit worse because cuz obviously some of them have grown uh too big for their boots I think but yeah just I'm amazing that it's already been 3 years since the beacon chain went live and obviously we had the merge last year you know over a year ago now where we merged the beacon chain with the normal kind of eth one chain that we used to call it and then it just became ethereum so yeah happy third birthday to the beacon chain uh and I think that uh you know I I can't wait to see what the East taking ecosystem looks like in another 3 years from now right it's changed so much in the last 3 years

what's it going to look like 3 years from now I don't think anyone can know it's so there's so much going on there's so many upgrades coming to staking so many things happening in the staking ecosystem I'm just super excited for it uh but yeah all right so as you guys know the girly test net is being deprecated now the original uh timeline for this would be that Gurley would be deprecated by the end of 2023 but because denune is still in testing phase and because Gurley hasn't even F to denune yet uh there is a extended timeline here now I did cover this the other day but there is an official blog post from the ethereum foundation here talking about this but essentially GLE will still be active for another few months I think that it'll be active for at least another four months uh from from my

reading or something like that but it is still getting deprecated so I think that what they want to do is obviously Fork it over to uh to denune make sure that's all running fine and then from there basically sunset uh the test net shortly after maybe like a month uh to I think month or three months after cuz they say here either 3 months after the girly denune act activation or one month after the denune main it activation whichever comes later uh teams will begin exiting their validators and girly as a test net will be shut down I mean it can't ever be like officially shut down because anyone can just run the network if they want to but it's not going to be supported anymore and it's basically just going to be deprecated in favor of our new test net which is Hol sky right

and obviously we've got seoa that's live as well there but you know I think this gives us a little bit of hinting over timelines for I guess like denune on mainnet I'm still saying March for for denune on mainnet hopefully um and I think that girly will be forked in January at this rate probably early January and then once that gets forked you know you got like 3 months from from that uh to like March of April when G will be will be um will be deprecated uh and obviously denune will hopefully go live on on Main net there but anyway you can read these short post for more details on that um but yeah girly is uh is definitely still being deprecated just being push out a little bit from here all right so I mentioned this the

other day but Tim boo put out a poll on Twitter where he asked you know what do people want to call the new uh Prague plus Electra upgrade name like what you know we have to merge these names into one like we did with chapella uh you know and like we've done with Denon so what what are we going to call it and I've been in big favor of calling it Petra because it is the easiest one to say out of this list he listed three options there's Petra which of course I voted for there's electr and then there's proctra now electr and prra I'm already having trouble saying it right there's no way I'm going to be calling it that I am just going to be calling it Petra and you know what if they choose choose a different name I'm probably still going to call it Petra because

it's so much easier to say than any of these other names here um you know Dan cred said prra that's harder to say than Petra like as someone who's going to be saying this like I I I would have to estimate hundreds of times before it actually goes live on the ethereum mayet I'm in big favor of of Petra here but you know let me let me know know what you guys think it should be named or go reply to to Timo here um but yeah electr and proctra there's just no way I'm not saying those things it's going to be Petra for me I'm a Petra Maxi right now uh but yeah I mean the fact that we're pretty much like at this stage just means that the core developers have shifted their focus mainly to and the researchers have shifted their focus mainly to the next upgrade now denune is

in like the late stages guys like I mean the most of the pretty much all the work has been done done I think for on the on the client side we had devet 12 go live I believe and that's all fine uh we just got to schedule the test net forks and then mayet so it's pretty much done that's why you know you're seeing the the core developers and researchers move on to this um uh to to to uh to Prague and Electra or Petra uh in order to get that onto mayet hopefully by the end of next year but we'll have to see what timelines uh look like there all right moving on to some updates around statelessness on ethereum so Josh Rudolph here has put together a pretty long tweet actually and and it's got like a lot of comprehensive updates here so you should definitely go check out

the Tweet I'll link it in the YouTube description below but the tldr uh and this is updates from the latest veral implementers call which is call number eight uh more clients have joined the latest test net and we now have five execution layer clients in active development on veral which pretty much covers all of them uh next up launching a new test net in the near future with a merel Patricia tree at Genesis this will allow the teams to perform a test run of the actual conversion from Merkel Patricia tree trees to vcle trees which will be a significant Milestone and unlock one of the biggest obstacles from the early days of vericle work finding an elegant solution for the conversion of ethereum State over to over to veral so I think if this goes smoothly you know I think that's going to be a huge

Boon to all the people working on this specific upgrade because as Josh said here it's basically the main thing right this is the main kind of thing that they've been working on and talking about since they started thinking about uh uh changing uh ethereum from Merle pit trees to veral trees is like how do we actually do the conversion on Main net because as far as I know you can't basically have uh both in parallel you have to like do the conversion and then we'll be on veral trees instead of uh Merle producer trees and you want to be able to do that as smoothly as possible with basically no disruption to anything on the network and that requires significant testing to do this now I don't know if this is going to be part of the Prague Electra upgrade or the Petra upgrade I I think it might be the

upgrade after that but it definitely just depends on uh kind of the work that's being done here and how client teams feel about it and if things go well Ryan the testing goes well it's the same with any upgrade I mean I don't think I have to explain how it works at this point uh but it's great to see that test Nets uh are actually being spun up for this it's great to see that there's plenty of work being done there's regular calls being had the client teams are all working on this uh right now uh which is which is great to see and we're getting regular updates from Josh here who works in uh the R&D department at the ethereum foundation here so yeah as I said you can go check out this tweet for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below but this work is

actually part of the broader uh uh roow map item for ethereum called The Verge and so you can just Google ethereum the Verge and you'll get a bunch of related stuff there uh it is as I said further out it may not happen uh until 2025 but it is definitely still a uh kind of like very significant upgrade coming to the network and it's been worked on for quite a while now now here and actually Jos has has a link here to verle doino if you want to keep up with everything happening on this front um there is an introduction on exactly what it is there there's an FAQ there's I mean there's so much information here guys you should definitely go check this out if you're at all interested in this this upgrade and what actually means for ethereum and what it actually means for users of

ethereum like I'm not an expert on this yet I still have to do more research on this to be able to I guess like explain it at a high level but from what I can tell with this kind of road map item here with statelessness with vcle trees what it will allow us to do is is essentially uh raise the gas limit of ethereum one a lot higher than it currently is now ethereum's gas limit is akin to bitcoin's block size or like ethereum's block size basically I mean just to use that as an analogy there which means that you can pack more transactions into a block than you otherwise would have been able to so right now the gas limit is uh is uh uh 30 million I mean with IP 1559 the target is 15 million but it's 30 million

so you could like get that up to like 100 million and you would get obviously x amount of of throughput there but that is not a in my mind like scalability solution it's more so it's kind of funny when you talk about this because like even if you go from you know let's say 50 million gas to 150 million gas um gas limit that's a 10 times increase right so you could say okay there's a 10 times increase in in throughput on ethereum layer one but the thing is is that that's not very much like when you think about the amount of demand there is uh for not just ethereum layer one but layer 2os as well a 10 times increase is is not very much right um so it's not really something of a scaling throughput

upgrade what it does though is that it basically gives more breathing room for uh for for things to be built on ethereum Main net right for things to be able to for more more complex transactions to be able to be fit into ethereum mayet blocks and potentially allows for uh more cool things to be done with l2s uh like specifically ZK related l2s but also just ZK related stuff generally now of course as I said like I am still very new at this stuff and I still have to do my my R research on this and more of a deep dive into it but that's from for my understanding uh is kind of like one of the main benefits of this uh and and as I said it does benefit l2s as well as just like normal L1 transactions but really I think going

forward and I said this in the daily grade Discord Channel yesterday I think going forward what people really need to do is don't not think of ethereum L1 as the as a user layer anymore and I've been saying this for quite a while but I think it's worth reiterating ethereum L1 is a business essentially and it is a business that sells blocks to other businesses and those other businesses are or say block space I should say to other businesses and those other businesses are things like l2s and l2s have that kind of like b2c or business to customer relationship where the L2 is a business but um they service actual end users and and and customers right whereas L1 ethereum they they can do that but it costs more like think of it like a you know you're going direct to a

a business and you're saying to them hey you know I want to buy direct from you uh you know direct to the to the manufacturer for example say you want to go buy something direct from the manufacturer and you say hey I want to buy direct from you the price that you're going to get from buying direct from them for one item is going to be worse than the price you would get from buying from a uh a kind of like retail store that buys the items in bulk and then gets a better deal because they're buying in bulk right so it's the same thing with l2s where they're essentially it's a rough analogy but I think it works they're buying block space in bulk essentially from from ethereum um and from ethereum layer one and they're offering it cheaper to their customers at layer 2 right so it's the same kind

of relationship there and that's how I imagine you know the kind of um stuff between the L1 and L2 and then obviously you know higher than that like l3s and things like that but really I mean I stick to L1 and L2 because while l3s are cool and you know I think they're going to be built it really is just an extension of what an L2 is which obvious which I think l2s are just an extension of what L1 is but an L3 is distinctly different I think because an L3 really relies on the L2 yes it settles ultimately down to the L1 but it doesn't like it relies on the L2 for its I guess security for its liveness because if the L2 goes Offline that L3 goes offline right because that L3 is built on the L2

it settles to the L2 and then if the L2 is offline it can't settle to the L1 and neither can that L3 so I just just draw the distinction between that like l1's and l2s and then higher than that's fine but I think that the most important is just discussing the l1's and and the l2s anyway I've said L1 and L2 enough go check out this verle doino page for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right a big announcement out of dap node today they've introduced a smoothing pool for solo stakers now this is not to be confused with smoothly which is another smoothing pool for solo stakers effort that I've covered on the refill before uh this is one that is built directly into the DAP node Suite so essentially you can uh join the

smoothing pool uh and uh basically take advantage of smooth uh uh uh e staking rewards just like you would uh with Rocka pool for example just like you would with smoothly uh when smoothly is is is on Main net here now uh while I think this is a really cool feature I do kind of find it funny that we now have two solo ster smoothing pools and we kind of like split up the rewards by doing that and we split up the the the solo stakers by doing that because there's not a huge pull of solo stckers to to to to pull from right like uh I think the the latest estimates put it at what around 5% or something of of St of validators on the network or stakers on the network are Solo stakers so it's not a huge pull to to pull from and now we

have two competing Solutions with smooth and smoothly um that are competing for like that little small kind of pie there so maybe I would have liked that node to use smoothly instead of their own kind of um their own thing here maybe they will in the future I don't know uh but still I think I think it's still pretty cool that that this is here it's still pretty cool that it's live and obviously it being baked directly into the DAP node uh kind of site here makes it easy for anyone running dap node software to just opt into this and and get started so if that's you you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but it's going to be interesting to see what you know this looks like versus smoothly and I really hope we don't get any more of these

things two is already too much I think um we don't need more more than that like there's like from a kind of perspective of network effect there's really not going to be much Network effect around more than two of these things I think two is the absolute maximum so I really hope we don't see more of these but we'll have to see see how it goes and it's not because I don't like seeing things being built uh and I don't like seeing competition I guess I mean I wouldn't even really call this competition I'd actually call this fragmenting stuff um because you don't need competition for stuff like this I think a smoothing pool for solo stakers should be a public good I don't think it should be something that is uh is monetized directly uh at the kind of um at the at the at the contract level

itself I think it should just be a public good but eh we'll see we'll see people want to want to check out we'll see what people want to do here uh but yeah you can get started with this I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so all right so the obal mainnet open Beta is now officially live so they say here this marks a significant event significant step towards decentralizing stake on ethereum now anyone has the opportunity to run distributed validators on mainnet and they have a thread here discussing all of this as well as a link to the Launchpad which is at beta. launch pad. oy. Tech and it's a pretty nifty Launchpad here you know you can see here what it looks like right now and you can connect your wallet to it and everything and then you can

create a cluster with a group so you can create a distributed validated cluster or you can create a distributed validator alone and deposit and activate uh validators now the whole process is is step by step you can just click get started once you've connected your wallet and you can go through the process here maybe I can connect my wallet and see how far I can get before I start running in into to roadblocks here but I'll just connect uh s. e to this and we'll see how we go here so I've connected my uh is it coming up yeah yeah yep metamask is uh is uh is saying here to connect uh yep connected the wallet there so yeah s there say I want to create a cluster with a group and then get started and then you go through the step by steps of of getting

started here of how to do it this is very similar to what I did when I first set up my DVT with the um the one of the first clusters on mainnet you know you go through gives you a bunch of stuff to to kind of tick on and accept and such and such you have to accept like the risks and and then it's beta software and so on and so forth right go on and go on and then you can start with like things like your cluster details you going what do you want to name your cluster how how many validators or sorry what's the size of your cluster so is it going to be four uh four or three or five or whatever I mean I think four is the minimum yeah four is the minimum for groups so four five and then you can go

up to I I don't even know if there's a maximum but you can do that then you enter the address of the the note operators you enter how many validators you're going to have and then withd uh and then um use your withdrawal uh sorry configure your withdrawal credentials here and then create the cluster configuration so a very easy uh process guys to set this up it's not very complicated uh and I think that uh you know you should definitely go check it out yourself and maybe this is something that you want to do with people because as I've said before this allows you to basically become a node operator so literally run the software yourself run the validators run the full nodes yourself on your own Hardware without having to have the 32 e so if we were to go to like 10 operators

right for example and obviously if you want to spin up one validator you need need 32 eth or each of you only need to bring 3.2 eth right to to be able to spin this up because uh you know you're splitting it 10 ways basically and I think 10's the maximum right now so you're spinning it 10 ways uh on on this uh and then 3.2 e each you put that into a pool and then you all get to run Val the validator uh instance and you all get to run full nodes as well and contribute here to the decentralization of the network and you all basically become solo stakers as well which is super super cool so this is the most exciting thing about DVT to me I I as I mentioned the other day I think DV is cool from like a you know potentially uh

uh kind of allowing people to reduce their slashing risk and you know increase their up Time stuff like that but the coolest thing for me is definitely the squad staking thing where you can split the the cost of staking but while still being able to run the validators in full node yourself and still contributing to obviously the decentralization of the ethereum network so yeah anyway you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so ion layer some I news today so sham announced today that there is a New Abs category alert so uh this is mouthful but he said here server serverless cryptoeconomic co-processors AI Linux databases game engines all triggered from ethereum um intelligent defi emerges Downstream there's an

article here posted by empera talking about offchain computation and co-processing so co-processing is definitely going to be a big theme going forward I think and there's different types of code processing there's ZK Cod process processing um there is optimistic co-processing and there's cryptoeconomic C co-processing and fream has actually explained these these uh in in his thread here so ZK co-processors are awesome but they're very costly right now optimistic co-processors are are awesome as well and and they're cheaper but they also uh obviously inherit the downsize of optimistic uh kind of like fraud proofs for example and then you have crypto economic co-processors which are cheaper but they're less secure because they rely on

crypto econom rather than cryptography right so we have these different uh kind of uh I guess like things here all enabled by different teams and all being able to uh I guess like be an igon layer AVS where essentially you can have the cryptoeconomic guarantees of a restake eat instead of just some random token or some random thing right uh but yeah anyway this is a pretty dense subject so I definitely recommend reading sh Ram's uh tweet thread as well as the blog post here which I'll link in the YouTube description below but definitely keep the term co-processing top of of mind because that is really the the future and end game of this ecosystem I mean I've been saying this to a lot of people for a while that I think that most things that happen or or most of the computations that happen in crypto are

going to happen off chain and then a proof will just be posted on chain that is the end game and that's why the modular thesis to me I mean that that's at the heart of the modular thesis and why the modular thesis is the one that's going to win the monolithic thesis just makes zero sense to me there there is no point putting things on chain when you can do it more effic ly offchain while still having the same security guarantees as onchain and I think that if you wanted to have the same security guarantees it would require ZK co-processing which right now is still very expensive because the generator ZK proof is is very expensive but that cost is coming down over time it's coming down both on the hardware side of things and also the software side of things and I've described before about how

different ZK teams are bringing those costs down uh but really if you you know if you think cost is the barrier here then you just have to wait a little bit uh and then we'll get there but in the meantime you have things like cryptoeconomic co-processing which kind of fill that hole there uh while not being as secure it still fills the hole and it's even better that you can use restake eth uh to to to be able to do this instead of just some random token because you get better cryptoeconomic guarantees there all right last upop here is just an update from L2 beat or I guess like a new blog post from L2 beat so they said you send a transaction on a rollup and see on the corresponding explorer that there is a green badge next to it but what does it mean in this article by

Dono we explore the problem of tracking transaction finality for rollups so essentially this is a pretty dense article but it explains what transaction finality actually means in the context of different rollups like when is a transaction actually final and when is it final based on if it's an optimistic rollup or based on a ZK rollup and so on and so forth now I'm not going to summarize this because I I highly recommend going and reading the the blog post because it's very very detailed and does a much better job of explaining things than I could so I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to check out there but that is definitely another big subject that I think more people are going to be talking about uh is about is is just finality generally of these l2s because we know ethereum has finality you know every uh twoo

Epoch we're going to try and get that down to single slot finality so every 12 seconds eventually in the future but when it comes to l2s they have different finality um properties uh depending on when they actually post things on chain but also uh post batches on chain and post proofs on chain but also on top of that it depends on like when it can be reverted like for example with an optimistic rollup uh technically I mean some people will argue and then and I think this post uh definitely alludes to it or it definitely kind of like argues it as well is that uh it's 7 days for optimistic RS because there is that 7-Day challenge period so yeah there are different kind of things here different trade-offs here but go read this blog post I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so but I

think on that note that's going to be it for today just a quick note actually now that I've remembered I know I haven't done it episode with Eric uh Connor on the drive-thru for a little while now it's probably been over a month I think at this point um he's traveling right now uh he is definitely not available to do an episode so whenever he's available I'll do one with him but yeah that's why we haven't done one uh we're not rugging you guys it's just that the schedules haven't really worked out uh at this point but hopefully we'll be back sooner rather than later but I think on that note that's it uh for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord

Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone