Beacon Chain metrics, Scroll mainnet now live & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #674 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the delway refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony s and tday the 18th of October 2023 right everyone let's get into it so kicking us off today is some ethereum core I guess ethereum protocol related updates first up is a new paper from Franchesco and Luca zanolini here who both work as researchers at the ethereum foundation now this paper is all about trying to expand the family of dynamically available consensus protocols with more practical ones especially in the ethereum context to get better candidates for the available chain of a future single slot finality construction now obviously a lot of words in there a lot of things that are very protocol related and this paper is definitely

going to be very very technical uh and really I would only recommend it for people who understand kind of the the technical side of ethereum's consensus layer with regards to proof of stake here because yeah if you read this paper you're probably not going to understand most of what it says I mean I wouldn't understand most of what it says it would go right over my head head but the reason I wanted to highlight it is because it's good to see and interesting to see that there's still a lot of research being done into ethereum's consensus model and it's not just like we you know did the proof of stake Beacon chain when we launched that in December of 2020 uh and then we merged those together in September of 2022 uh it's not like that's it right there's more to it than that we're gradually

going to be upgrading the U consensus protocol of of ethereum proof of stake in order to harden it make it more secure and get it ready or at least kind of like uh make it compatible with future major upgrades like single slot finality and ssle which is the the secret leader election as well uh and a bunch of other things like PBS and stuff like that like all of this is basically working together to make the consensus mechanism as hardened as possible now the funny thing about this is that as it exists today besides maybe the fact that having too many validators can cause instability on the network I think ethereum's Pro State consensus mechanism is already really robust and really good but the point of a lot of these upgrades is to basically get that last I guess 5

to 10% out of it like if you could say right now that okay well you know the current iteration is 90% of the way there to what we want then the last 5 to 10% are going to take the longest because they're they're hard to do but they definitely add a lot to uh to the chain itself in terms of stability and security um and and hardening it and also making it more resilient and reliable for the long term because as you guys know the ethereum network is being built to last centuries I've mentioned this before I know that might sound a little bit funny to maybe people who haven't heard it before but these networks are not meant to be built for like 10 years and then we move on to the next thing no they're meant to last for centuries if not thousands of years

potentially right and could you imagine being able to make something like that that lasts for that long and whenever I think about it in those terms maybe this is just a little bit of a detour here but whenever I think about it in those terms I think about it like all the architecture that was made you know a thousand years ago or thousands of years ago that still EX exists today right yes it's obviously um been weathered you over time and it's it there's there's parts of it that that have needed to be restored and things like that over time but really when you look back at things like the pyramids and the and the great Cathedrals and and and just old buildings in in places that have been around for thousands of years obviously not in Australia like in Australia we don't really have much of that the

oldest buildings um aren't that old in Australia compared to places obviously like Europe um and and other places around the world where they've got like really really old buildings there obviously the pyramids in Egypt and things like like that as well when you think of it like that that's the way I think about ethereum and that's way I think about public blockchains that are being built for that purpose where they want to survive for a very long time um but in the terms of obviously crypto networks they also want to thrive you know it's not like we were going to build ethereum today um and then oopy it right now and then ethereum can just be like this Relic that is left there for you know for people to discover in a thousand years no we would love ideally for the network to run as long as

humanly possible maybe it only runs 100 years and then humans wipe them themselves eles out right that's fine like for me I'd love to see I mean I'm not going to live to see it but I'd love to kind of um think about the prospect of ethereum as a network uh surviving and thriving for potentially thousands of years right and maybe potentially one day becoming a multiplanetary network because you could expect that not even a thousand years but like over the next hundred years say we could be colonizing other planets in our solar system uh and and if we're doing that then you could imagine a world in which ethereum becomes a multiplanetary network I don't know the technicals of that would work because obviously you're you're limited by the speed of light right and obviously um information takes a while to travel across even the even our solar

system but I I reckon you could still make it work right in some in some way you could do you could do relays um you could uh basically do defer block proposing I mean it it remains to be seen what that would looked like but I'd like to imagine a future where where you know humanity is a multiplanetary species and ethereum is still able to provide value to humanity in some way in that world and then potentially last for for thousands of years there or until humans WIP themselves out whichever comes first right but that is a massive detour from what I was highlighting here with this paper but again like all of these kind of things that are being built and being done to make ethereum more resilient and more reliable and and and give it more longevity is exactly for that purpose really and I know not

you know most people probably don't think about this when they're building ethereum but at the end of the day I think that having that as like the the ultimate Northstar goals like let's build this thing to be as robust as possible to survive for as long as possible then we can start dreaming about the fact that oh wow this could potentially last for hundreds if not thousands of years it could potentially out last for as long as Humanity lasts for and even become multiplanetary one day that sort of stuff really gets me excited even though as I said that I'm most likely not going to be alive to see it I say most likely because who knows you know I'm 31 now expected life expectancy of of what like 85 or something like that 83 84 so another 50 odd years of life left in those 50 years

maybe they discover a way to make everyone Immortal or or or reverse aging or pause aging you know it's we're actually not that far away from it if you if you've looked at the research um and by not that far away I mean it probably a few decades out but it's conceivable that it could happen in my lifetime and I'd definitely be for that I know there's a lot of philosophical discussions around that but even if I'm not I I just like the idea of that I like the idea of something like this being built to to last for a very very very long time there but anyway going to move on from that one cuz I'm getting into weird philosophical stuff there uh migal laabs has published a new website today called monitor. so on this website you can monitor uh various different metrics

around both Beacon nodes and Beacon validators so Beacon chain nodes and validators here so if we click into Beacon the beacon node section here I can actually show you what this looks like so once it loads up here and you scroll down you can see see things like client diversity and the total number of clients right now so Mega claims there are 12,940 clients uh or Beacon nodes on the network and you can see what the client diversity looks like of this with obviously prism and lighthouse being being basically equivalent and the rest of the clients being a smaller share here um and this uh um this this actually applies just to the consensus layer right now um and then you can scroll down you can see node hosting distribution uh it says 32% is residential 39% is cloud and 28% is unknown and you can keep going down I'm

not going to R out all the stats here you can look at the architecture distribution you know what architecture is it running on what client uh OS is it sorry what what operating system is it running on what client diversity looks like over time the the active nodes over time geographical distribution of validators which is obviously very important um RT distribution so latency distribution which is rtt stands for roundtrip time um uh more stats here I'm not going to read them out I'm just scrolling down here but you can go check these out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below but great to see another website live now that monitors all of this stuff because I think in the past we've relied on really two websites for this stuff client diversity. info which sources data from from very ious different sources and Ean

no.org which honestly Ean no.org I I mean it's it's it's definitely not the best site out there and and the reason why is because its numbers are traditionally very different to what you'll see on other websites uh especially around the number of clients that are online now obviously the we're never going to get 100% accurate data about um not just I guess like clients online but any kind of stats around clients and full nodes and things like that but I have SE I think two or three sources now claiming that we have at least over 10,000 full nodes on the network which is great right like obviously we want more uh we want as much as possible much as possible but I think that as I've said before it's not

just about the number of full nodes on the network it's also about how easy it is to spin up one because you know right now let's just say we have 10,000 full nodes on the network okay that's that's cool but how easy is it to spin up another full node how easy is it to bring someone another full node online well it's incredibly easy right like you can run it on a very very low powered device you can run it on a Raspberry Pi um and it'll work just fine on there and run a full node on there so as I said it's not just about the number of full nodes but it's about how easy it is to get started and how easy it is to run a full node on the network and add more to the network and because it's so easy

there are uh programs or kind of initiatives happening right now like project solo Staker um and other other such things like the the products that avado makes and dap node kind of makes there which just makes it really easy to run these full nodes on on Lower powered hardware and I'm sure there's going to be other initiatives that that kind of play out in the future but you know Hardware is definitely harder to scale than software um especially because you have like production costs and um it's much easier for someone to download software than it is for them to buy and and get shipped hardware and then plug it in and play around with it and all that stuff but yeah the dream is to just have as many full nodes as possible and and distributed widely as well as you can see from the geographic distribution

that's actually not an issue right now obviously it's heavy in the US here but according to to this graphic Australia actually bats above the average which is really really uh cool to see not above us of course but but above the average of of other kind of countries out there but you can see it's also heavy in heavy concentration in Europe uh and then the rest of the world has a has a has pretty decent representation as well um with some parts of the world not being as represented as others but yeah I think it all just uh depend it's it's all still good and it all shows that ethereums kind of full distribution is very distributed right now geographically wise so yeah you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so the first L2

coordination call uh camed roll call will be happening today I think uh so I I think it's may have already happened actually or happening very very soon after the time of recording yeah it's happening very soon um so the idea of this call is to supercharge L2 Innovation by providing a credibly neutral platform for rollups to coordinate on standards so this is very cool this is actually being run by KL beak who is a um researcher at the ethereum foundation and was also very heavily involved in the kzg ceremony coordination efforts there uh but this is really cool because the L2 ecosystem right now I guess like it's not fragmented but like a lot it can be siloed because each L2 team is working on various different um uh various

different things as part of their their solution here and we definitely want to keep the standard uh intact you know Port the ethereum L1 standards to L2 and then any new standards that created on L2 uh that on on one L2 can kind of um make sure that they kind of permeate into other l2s out there so this call just acts as a kind of shelling point I guess for L2 teams to come together and be able to coordinate on these things so just wanted to put that on your radar very very cool to see this uh and yeah you can go check this out I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right terance has published or Terrance from I guess like pry Labs or at offchain Labs has published a new post specking out something called forward inclusion list with dedicated

gas limits so you can go give this a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below but Terren has really been on a tear lately with the amount of research that he's putting out with regards to a number of different things right not just inclusion list but also EIP 4844 um and doing obviously client work at um at offchain Labs on prism so much going on here it's not just Terren of course it's also the the prabs team doing a lot of this stuff uh as well and and other researchers helping along but it's great to see that uh that research is just on this stuff is just being pumped out especially on inclusion list stuff because inclusion list is one of the solutions to censorship on the ethereum network and we definitely want to make sure that we uh kind of keep the

research up on this uh in order to get something implemented eventually maybe over the next couple years to make sure that inclusion level censorship is a thing of the past or at least it's uh it's kind of like overwhelmingly a thing of the past and there's maybe small parts of the network that censor here and there but really that's what this work is is all about here so I just wanted to put this on your radar as well you can go check this out for yourself we'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right rider. network has a new section on their website all about slashing on the beacon chain so you can see here at rated. Network slashings that's a bit of a mouthful to say a bunch of different stats around slashings on the ethereum network now I

think I've mentioned this before but as you can see here there there has only been 29 99 validators slashed on the ethereum network all time all time right so this goes back to all the way December 1st 2020 Beacon chain Genesis out of the uh I guess like how many validators do we have right now I'm going to get the exact number up so I can give some accurate information here out of the 863 th000 validators only 299 have been slashed in the entire kind of life cycle of of the bacon chain so far or lifespan of the bacon chain uh so far and I would argue that almost all of these I think are uh accidental slashers like double signing they're not

actually direct attacks I think there are a couple that were attempted direct attacks and some had to do with with me and things like that but yeah the the fact that like very very few kind of validators have been slashed just speaks to the fact that it's actually really hard to get slashed unless you're doing something uh like to attack the network or you've somehow uh let um run validated keys or run the same validator key in two different places at the same time and and then you accidentally get slashed that way it's incredibly hard to to get slashed here and I think that there was a misconception or probably still is a misconception around going offline on the network when you go offline or when your validator goes offline you're not slashed you suffer What's called the inactivity leak which slowly bleeds out eth and obviously the

more validators that are offline uh the more eth gets burnt out uh bled out because it's the quadratic inactivity leak kicks in but just the normal activity leak is is very very forgi forgiving and it's not a slashing event because when you get slashed not only do you lose a portion of your eth stake you also get kicked out of the validator set so you have to re-enter with a new validator that old validator that you were using uh is no longer as part of the active validator set and has been kicked out for doing something wrong on the network whereas with the inactivity leak it actually has to bleed out for quite a while um I can't remember the exact ether man it has to bleed out to before you actually get kicked out but again it's still not a slashing event it is known as the inactivity leak and

usually you can get your validator offline uh sorry back back online way before you would bleed out enough eth to be kicked out of the active validator set unless for some reason you have just not been paying attention and you don't care about your validator and you're just letting it kind of bleed out which I think is a bit silly but you know people do that right um I think we do see that from time to time on the network and you can kind of uh see how that plays out there and there's a bunch more stats here and they're actually showing like top operators by by time slash so which operators have been slashed the most uh and top operators by slashers reported you can see here that stake. us was the biggest slashing of all time at 91 slashes uh and launch knows was second at 20 so stake. us

definitely has a big lead there and you can check out the rest of them for yourself I'll link this in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so but yeah I mean crazy to think that that's that number is so low to be honest considering how many people were like slashing his um I guess like a huge risk for staking and I don't and I'm scared of getting slashed when in reality that that that's not the case it hasn't materialized at all and really in terms of individuals getting slashed I don't really think there's many individuals here that have gotten slashed it's mostly been the staking providers so the risk is even lower than that as an individual kind of solo Staker here um and on top of that the fact that slashing still exists regardless of this to punish the Bad actors is is a good thing right and it's

a good thing that it's basically working as it's intended where it's not kind of like hurting the good actors uh for the gross part sometimes it is but that's because the good actors have done something wrong on their own it's just working as advertised uh here so yeah I'll link this in the YouTube description you can go check it out for yourself all right hobby has up made updates to his eth staking dashboard on Dune analytics here so he says here he's added D.A staking commitments to his eth staking dashboard as you guys know diva is currently in pre-launch and he's doing a vampire attack on Lio so you can see here where they're ranked on the amount of e Stak in their pre-launch right now so over 15,000 puts them at rank 34 right now still early days we obviously hope to see them climb up the

list there but Hill Dobby explains that the the first commitment type is divas eth and St eth the early St of vaults an activated solo validators can also signal their commitment on chain um and he's tracking those as well and kind of like has a little bit of um criteria here for tracking those so yeah just wanted to point this out that you can now track Diva's uh I guess vampire attack on Hill Dub's dashboard which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right speaking of staking Igan layer is running a I guess contest to see which lsts they're going to be accepting next for reaking so they have a list of lsts here that they're considering I'm not going to read them all out but you can see them um on my screen here and I'll link the tweet in

the YouTube description below for you to check out as well but there are actually more LSS than I thought they were but honestly looking at this list I think most of these are not going to be relevant long term and in terms of the ones that I would want to see on boarded it's kind of hard to to say because I would rather see the ones that e that that at least have a plan to become decentralized lsts be on boarded something like swell and and stake wise and fracks rather than like binance's LST right because obviously binance has no plans to become decentralized I think aluvial is a Enterprise grade LST don't think they're going to decentralize I think they send all of their stake to to figment or coin I think coin they use coinbase so don't think they're going to become a decentralized one there I think

sta definitely is going to be decentralized but I think sta copies a lot of what rocket already has going on uh and R is already supported by the way that's not that's why that's not on this list here so really if I had to vote or if I had to kind of like uh choose out of this list which I don't because I don't have any of these lsts but if I had to I'd probably go like swell frack and stake wise and that's about it I think at this point I mean the the thing is is the way that the contest is being run is that it depends on how many people actually um put in their LS these lsts uh and and basically signal that they were would be willing to restake these lsts and that's the how the winners are going to be

chosen so that's going to be a function of I guess like liquidity and network effect uh wrapped bethia binance's LSD I think has the most liquidity out of all of these because it's binance but it remains to be seen if people actually want to to use that within reaking or if people are using that on chain because you can imagine a lot of that wrapped um binance eth here the LST eth is probably belonging to people who are staking with binance that don't even know that they have it you know because or or have it and they don't care to use it on chain they're just keeping it on binance as a way to maybe quickly exit their position if they wanted to so yeah anyway as I said I'll link this tweet thread in the YouTube description you can go check it out for

yourself all right a big day for scroll today there main net is finally live now I think their main net went live like a few days ago uh they just didn't announce it I think it was live in kind of like stealth launch here but it is officially live today you can bridge in and use a bunch of the different kind of apps and services that are live that is live on scroll today and as you guys know scroll is an evm compatible uh zkm s it's I guess like an evm compatible ZK rollup otherwise known as a ZK evm and their aim is to make it very easy for developers to basically just copy paste their code essentially going from like if your codes deployed to ethereum L1 or maybe some other evm L2 you could just copy paste that across to scroll uh

scroll ZK VM and and it's all there and it's all working and there's and there's no need for changes or maybe there's just some minimal changes that you would need uh to make here uh which is which is obviously very exciting now I should obviously disclose that I am an investor in scroll here but honestly scroll is one of my favorite L2 teams for sure they've been building for quite a while now and you know it's funny because I saw some comments today on Twitter where people said oh another L2 launching like we already have so many of these things and I think that's a bit unfair to scroll in particular because when you think about the l2s that exist today and the ones that are launching the way I look at it is that how long have they actually been building for because scroll I believe has been building for

at least two years towards this goal right and there's probably been um a building in research before that as well so just because they're launching their main net now doesn't mean they're they're some new kid on the Block they've actually been around for quite a while now and they didn't want to launch their main net until they felt they were they were completely ready to launch it they didn't want to launch it as like a half-baked thing but of course it's still centralized as far as I know it still has those training wheels on and things like that but that's not the point the point is that there are a lot of l2s launching these days that are very new and I wouldn't say that they're equivalent to scroll because a lot of them are just using things like the op stack or the polygon s cdk which is fine

there's nothing wrong with that but what scroll has built is something from the ground up they they're not using another kind of like development kit that someone else has built no Squall is a fully custom built zkm by the scroll team and they've been working on this for quite a while so I'm not trying to sh my bags or anything here but I want people to understand the difference between l2s that have been building stuff from the ground up for for a while now and ones that are just uh coming online recently or basically being created recently not just even coming online recently and using the existing Tech to achieve that where there's nothing wrong with that by the way like I love the op stack I love the polygon cdk I love all of those rollups as a service things or l2s as a service kind

of um kits out there but I I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare them to the things that are built from the ground up and this is this isn't this isn't to say that things built from the ground up are going to be more successful by default than than other things it's not about that at all and I I really don't make any comments about that uh in in this discussion but it's more about realizing that just because an L2 launches uh now doesn't mean they haven't been working on it for quite a while and that's exactly the case with scroll here so that was just my little opinion on that after seeing some of the rhetoric today on crypto Twitter of course but you can go check out scroll's main net launch for yourself there's a tweet thread here which I'll link in the

YouTube description below and you can also bridge in at scroll. ibridge and play around with scroll zkm uh and see what all the fuss is about all right speaking of layer twos I came across this Twitter account today or I guess like this initiative today called the super chain Eco which is a platform to accelerate the adoption and development of the op stack the platform provides an ecosystem overview guides news updates and events about the super chain and the op P stack so if you go to the super chain. eco eco website here you can actually explore everything there is to explore about the super chain so you explore the ecosystem you can see all of the um op stack chains that are currently being built or or or

live see what they're using uh see their tvl uh the the projects that are built on them the accounts that they have links to social medias things like that there's an analytics page as well I believe u which shows a bunch of different analytics for for different things here events and insights and a bunch of other stuff all about the op stack super chain here so yeah if you're interested in following along with the op stack and the super chain this would be your Bible going forward so I'll link this in the YouTube description below uh for you to check out there I think this is cool I think that every L2 uh that's that like that has like an a development kit like as I said polygon cdk and stuff like that should have a website like this just to keep people arised of

what's going on and make it easy for people to keep up to date with what's going on because we've just seen an explosion I mean as as I said if you go to the ecosystem page here there are 17 op stack chains being being tracked here a few months ago there was like four or five or something so this stuff's moving really really quickly and I wouldn't be surprised to see this balloon to hundreds in the next couple of years especially if we get like the bull market that that I've been talking about I I I definitely do think that there's going to be a lot of these l2s launched um and they're going to be launched using the op stack using the polygon cdk using arbitri technology as well and and and any other out there that are building those tools uh and we're going

to have to have a place to track them of course and I'm sure that there will be some lucrative opportunities during the bull market because everyone will be speculating and stuff like that uh but yeah if you're interested in any of that you can go check out the super chain Eco uh website and I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so finally here we have new farcaster channels now live on farcaster some so some of these channels include things like a gitcoin channel an ens Channel uh onchain gaming channel eaker channel and much more here now the coolest thing about channels for those of you who don't know uh is that they allow you to basically look at tweets from different categor so it's like an evolution of uh of lists that you would see on Twitter where instead of you

having to create it yourself you can basically go to the channel and see what's going on now I'm going to bring up warcast uh which is a farter client on my screen for you just to see what this looks like so if I bring this up and bring it over here you can actually see on my screen what this currently looks like so this is this is my kind of forecaster feed here so this is just my homepage then you got the trending page up here and you got an all channels page but if you click here on on the left so if I click into the ethereum channel for example I can just sort discussions of what's Happening uh in the ethereum ecosystem and people can post their casts to these uh these channels here of what's happening within the uh the ethereum ecosystem specifically if if it

wants to load it's not loading for some reason uh I don't know why it's not loading let me have a look let me the my ad blocker maybe that's uh that's screwing with things um I'm just trying to bring this up right now and there's also a uh I guess like a warp cast um desktop client as well which I'm currently using maybe that's interfering with what's going on here um I don't have that up and running right now but uh yeah okay this is uh unfortunately not uh not working right now let's see come on no it's not going to work right now uh unfortunately guys I can't show you what I'm talking about but yeah if you and that that's probably got to do with the fact that I have the desktop client running as well in the backgrounds it may be conf it may be

causing kind of conf conflicts here but you guys know what what I'm talking about when I say that you can go to the different channels you can explore what's being talked about on there um and yeah since uh farcaster went permissionless as well there's been a lot of of fresh faces on the platform so if you're not on there yet be sure to go sign up there and explore these channels for yourself if you haven't already but I think on that note that's going to be it 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 tomorrow thanks everyone