Client diversity chat, OnlyFans buys ETH and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #647 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of dailyway refuel I recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host the internet 28th of August 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so just a couple of housekeeping items before we jump into the episode for today uh there will be no refuel this week on Thursday and Friday unfortunately so sorry about that but of course I'll be back next Monday with an episode I might do an episode on Saturday to catch up uh on Thursday on Friday it just depends because I know I've also uh got um Eric Connor back for uh the drive through episode potentially on Saturday as well I might postpone that to next week and just do a refill on Saturday I haven't decided yet but yeah there just won't be a Refuel on uh Thursday and Friday but there will be

one uh on Monday Tuesday and Wednesday of course I mean Monday to being today of course is a refuel but yeah so there's that one and also I finally have uh the daily way refuel live on Apple podcast so for a long time the daily way did exist as a as a podcast but not on Apple podcast so you could find it on other podcast apps but on Apple's one I just wasn't there because I hadn't enabled it to be there but now I have so it's there you can go I check it out I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so and you can leave a review as well if you're so inclined I think the reviews on Apple podcast really help help the reach so that would be great but yeah that's available to uh to go check out I'll link it in the

YouTube description below alright so on to some ethereum news now of course I need to talk about this because I put a couple of people have asked me about this uh and I need to kind of explain some of the Nuance here so the client diversity.org website recently got updated with a new data set for the execution clients uh here which you can see on the right hand side the data set is called execution Dash diversity dot info which is a website that I've shown before on your screen here and I've talked about before but that's the new data set now of course it's a bit of a sticker shock for people because that data set shows that Geth actually has 84 dominance over the network compared to ethernet's data source which shows that Geth only has 44 percent um market share now I need to explain

exactly how each of these data sources uh gets their kind of numbers so ether nodes is basically just an automated crawler of the network uh it is not 100 accurate I mean no data source of this kind of kind is ever 100 accurate but it is definitely not 100 accurate but it does the whole network every single ethereum node that is out there uh or that is reachable uh gets kind of pinged by this and then it gets tallied up and and this data set is created now there are a few issues with this because it can depend on a variety of things like some clients uh use more default peers than others and they may be over counted or double counted or counted more than something else uh but generally it's an approximation it is not an exact kind of uh uh exact science here but that's how

ethanodes gets its data whereas execution diversity.info is completely different it does not scroll the network it is not an automated uh or I guess like a a script based data source it is all manual and what I mean by that is that you can can see on the website execution-diversity.info that they have the biggest staking pools on ethereum all listed here and they also have listed what clients or what execution layer clients these entities are using so starting from the top you can see that attestant is uh using uh uh uh they're not using Geth for attestations uh and there's no super majority uh client risk but they haven't disclosed exactly what clients they're using

ifpool is using 100 never mind stake wise is 42 Geth 29 never mind and 29 Basu rocker pull 45 gath and and so on and so forth I'm not going to read them all out but you can go to this website and check it out for yourself but this is all self-reported it is not automated this is reported uh uh pretty much like all of it I believe all the data that's actually here um is is um has been collected by the East taker uh folk going to these entities and asking them what they run now of course there is a bunch of data here that we don't know for sure what they what they run you can see the question mark here that there is no data to support this source and some of them will say like a hundred percent or maybe

a hundred percent get right so under binance and coinbase and and bitfinex it says maybe 100 get because we just don't know what they're running we're just assuming they're running Geth because they're big staking operators uh and they definitely want to be running the most robust client out there now because this data is a kind of like manual process to get this data and because they're only getting it from the biggest staking pools and not everyone on the network the data only has 56 network coverage but the reason why um I guess like Eve Staker or um I believe it's honeyaboo the the person who who manages these websites uh and and has organized um this initiative considers it representative is because these staking operators are the biggest

on the network and we know that they are staking with these uh clients so there's a difference here where if you're running a full node but not staking the risk of you running the super majority client is a lot less than if you were staking because obviously if there's a bug and you are running the super majority client as a Staker there is the slashing risk but if you're just running the full node on its own there's no slashing risk there right if you're not running any validators on it then there's no slashing risk there so that's where the distinction comes from and that's why people will argue well this data set the execution diversity.info data set is more representative and more important even though it doesn't have 100 network coverage and you know what I don't necessarily disagree with that but at the same time I I personally don't

think these two data sets the ethernodes one and the execution diversity one should be on the same uh I guess like section here because they're so different right they're basically completely different data sets they show different things about the network and that's why you get such a large discrepancy between uh Geth being 84 on on this data set and get being 44 here uh now of course a positive about this and even though death is obviously such a large part of the staking providers is that these taking providers are easy not easy to reach out to but just one of them making it a kind of like change and changing from like 100 Geth to 50 get and 50 never mind it makes a big impact on the network so let's just assume for

example that coinbase is using 100 Geth well they account for what 10 of the network right now in terms of uh sorry I should say 10 of the stake you're not 10 in the network but 10 of the stake on the network if they were to change to 50 um uh uh Geth and 50 never mind then instantly you have a five percent impact there so the impact is a lot bigger than individuals um and it's not just coinbase obviously it's these other big ones that crack in and and binance and and Lido's share of Geth is actually at 78 so if they were able to get that down to like 30 um get that would be a huge uh uh that would move the needle in a really big way right um now in terms of execution clients themselves and what ones to run I think

and I think it's generally agreed upon now that never mind and get are pretty much like path for number one spot I mean they're pretty much like as reliable as each other for the number one spot or as robust as each other so I always recommend the people if they're running Geth they could they can run never mind and they'll get the same kind of robustness and reliability or at least as at least close to the same um and they'll be contributing to the client diversity of of the ethereum network which is obviously a security risk um because of the the slashing risks that are posed there but if I had to rank them I would say yeah get another mine tied for number one Basu is second aragoni's third and ref is fourth now keep in mind that wrath is very new as a client and it is also still in

Alpha so it is not recommended to run that with validators attached to it just yet um Aragon is has been around for a while but I mean it's not as up to scratch as the other clients if I'm being honest and from what I've heard from people people uh Basu is getting there still I would say it's still behind gether nevermind but it's getting there so that's why I say that it would be second so if you are a a Staker out there and you're not a staking provider you can run never mind or Basu just fine if you're a stadium provider maybe you just want to run never mind obviously you're running Geth because it's been reliable for you uh and it's worked for you but if you are someone who has the ear of a large staking provider out there let them know that hey you know for the sake

of client diversity for the sake of the security of the funds that you that you're staking um just just make sure that you're not using 100 Geth like you can start off slow you can go like 90 get 10 never mind and then as as you know you get Lindy with that and you keep running that you can change that you can go okay well now I'm gonna do like 70 get from 30 of the mind and you can slowly get that down uh get that get percentage down and improve the diversity of the whole network yeah so that hopefully that explains to you that new data set that was put on client diversity.org and how it differs pretty pretty substantially to Ether nodes and why that kind of I guess like big discrepancy exists between the two data sets there but I'll link this all in the

YouTube description for you to check out yourself and I'm very open to conversations around this in the daily wear Discord Channel give me your thoughts on this do you think that there should be a more obvious explanation as to why this these data sets are so different I personally think that there should there is information if you click like read more and stuff but I do think that it should be more obvious to people so they don't wonder hey like why is ether notes 44 Geth why is execution diversity 84 Geth um because I just explained it but it took me like what five six minutes to explain it maybe even more than that seven minutes to explain it um so and you know probably people are probably still confused so I think that just having a nice explainer there on on the site would go a long way so yeah

that's my little feedback there but but can to discuss with you guys if you want to you can check that out uh you can discuss it in the daily gray Discord and check out the links in the YouTube description below all right so a funny little thing from uh only fans of all companies out there so uh for those of you who don't know what only fans is I mean I'm sure all of you do but just for the sake of brevity here it is basically an adult entertainment platform where essentially people can subscribe to various creators on there and they get some spicy material I'm sure you can imagine what spicy material means there now this company is huge they uh I think release their financials for the first time ever recently um and apparently users spent a combined

5.5 billion dollars on the site um in in 2022 with over 50 million new users signing up to the site so it is not a small thing guys the simp economy as uh people like to call it out there is huge uh people will pay for this stuff it's it is what it is I think that when you talk about the merits of it and you talk about like the insanity of it at the end of the day people will spend their money on what they think is going to give them value and this is this is very valuable to people out there so definitely not here to moralize about that or anything but the reason why I bring up only fans is because apparently the only fans of the company is buying eth so um they actually had when they disclosed their financials uh an each position

worth I think they they purchased 18 million dollars worth of eth or something like that and it's currently worth 10 million dollars so maybe they bought the top or something or the local top and that's why they're down uh I'm but yeah they hold eth which is pretty cool because I think that companies putting Ethan their balance sheep is definitely something that I want to see more of um I think that uh when it comes to kind of like adult entertainment and and that sort of stuff crypto has tried to build applications for it for quite a while I mean ethereum has done it a few times probably the most infamous one is something called spank chain uh which originally was doing like State channels and and got pretty involved with layer 2 scaling for a while they are not sure on the status of of what that of what

that's doing right now um but it was it was being built because essentially a lot of these adult creators were being de-platformed by payment Pro processes like Banks and PayPal and stuff like that so the idea was that well crypto you you know you're doing crypto payments you can't be de-platformed because it's decentralized so I actually think that we have the infrastructure to enable this now and I go back to friendtech because uh the funny thing about friendtech is that some of the creators that were on only fans some of the biggest creators actually went to friend Tech right and what they did was they uh signed up and they they started going to the top of the leaderboard on friendtech even though the content that they produced was available for a much cheaper price on their only fans than it was on their

friend Tech now the reason why it got bit up on friendtech is obviously because of the speculative nature of it where people were like um buying these shares in the influencer or in the in the Entertainer because they were speculating that someone else was going to buy it for more and they'd be able to sell and make a profit obvious they weren't necessarily buying it for the content all right so whether you believe this is a positive or negative I don't think it really matters what I think matters is that uh I I think that crypto and the infrastructure especially in the ethereum ecosystem could finally potentially be there to build at scale apps like this where essentially people can do their thing without the risk or without the fear of being uh deep platformed or anything like that so I think that's that's incredibly positive uh for the ecosystem

and I think it's pretty cool that the uh only fans of the company is is buying eat even though it's a small portion of their overall I guess like revenue and profit here it is still great to see companies putting eth on their balance sheet which I do think is going to continue to be a narrative even for like BTC you know putting eighth and BTC on on the balance sheet the the BTC thing was was a big thing in actually in 2020 2021 that kicked off with like sailor and then Tesla bought BTC and there were a couple of companies here and there and there's actually a whole website dedicated to the companies that hold BTC and you can actually look it up at a Bitcoin treasuries I'm going to bring this up for you guys just to illustrate my point here so if you go to

bitcoinetreasures.net you can see all the companies um and how much BTC they own basically um which is which has always been pretty fascinating to me because obviously microstrategy sailor is the biggest holder he currently holds 152 000 BTC uh which is just massive guys like that's that's crazy A crazy amount of BTC right um and uh and then you keep going down the list here and you can see that other companies like Marathon digital Holdings which I believe is a mining company uh Tesla coinbase of course and then a bunch of other companies here and then you can scroll down and look at uh private companies so those are the public companies the private companies get pretty crazy as well so block one the issuer of EOS uh the EOS kind of project and Ico for those of you who

don't know what they did with all the money they raised from EOS with all the eth they raised from EOS they sold it all for BTC and they currently own 164 000 BTC which is more BTC than microstrategy holds crazy right uh and then Mt gox obviously holds 141 000 BTC but that is not theirs that obviously belongs to their customers uh tether owns a healthy chunk at 54 000 and so on and so forth and there's a there's actually a few countries here that own uh btsc as well but obviously like the US the BTC that they own is is seized from the from Silk Road and other such things uh I believe and then the grayscale Bitcoin trust whole 624 000 BTC but that is owned by I guess the shareholders of of um of of the the

trust here and so on and so forth so this website's pretty cool I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out but I think this is going to be a main narrative going for there's more and more companies holding BTC holding eth obviously with the ETFs going live these companies are going to be holding a lot of BTC and eth because they're going to be custodying it it's not going to be theirs but it's going to be their customers uh and you're going to see that in real time because they're public companies right and they have to disclose this stuff and you can see it in the ETF itself so that's going to be pretty exciting uh going forward there but yeah cool to see that the that only fans the company uh is is buying eth all right so Terence from prilose put

out a bit of a teaser tweet today about something he's I guess like code named EIP 4844 plus so this would include three slash six blobs plus Erasure codes all gossiped via peer-to-peer a bit P2P I should say client store any half of the data client processes the block with half of the data and new data recovery Network so this is basically looking into the future of I guess uh like a full dank shot in because EIP 4844 as you guys know is Proto dank sharding which is like just the first step of towards dangshotting but then shouting is much bigger proper dank sharding includes things like Erasure coding it includes a data availability sampling techniques includes the whole Gambit of things and and this is very topical in

saying that you can actually learn about what all of that means as well by reading this blog post from indomothy so this post explains uh 4844 uh it explains uh dank sharding generally and everything in between it is by far the best thing thing I've ever read on dank sharding uh because it is so accessible it is not very technical it explains the history of how we got here how we actually got to um 4844 and dank sharding and why we abandoned execution charting things like that it explains how it all works under the hood explains the end game there is a bit of technical kind of mathy stuff going on but really you don't need to understand it to understand the post so I highly recommend giving this blog post to read it is not too long it will teach you

from a higher level everything you need to know about ethereum r1s uh well a big part of ethereum L1 scaling row map which is dank sharding and you'll come away feeling a lot smarter I actually learned a couple of things in this post that I didn't know before for some reason so first thing I learned was that um blobs are actually going to be expiring after 18 days uh not a month now um so that is obviously a change over time in the spec the spec actually changed so many times uh in the spec here and I also learned that the data doesn't automatically it doesn't have to automatically expire on your full node so you can actually set it up where you retain the data after 18 days so it only expires as the default basically the I

believe the default of each of the the nodes will say okay after 18 days discard this um these blobs right uh and then uh and then just continue on but you can I'm sure there's going to be a flag that basically says when you run your node hey I don't want to discard this I want to keep it and I think that the calculations based on the current size of blobs would be it would add an extra terabyte a year to your full node if you were to keep the data now if you have the space for it then you you know you may as well keep it if you if you want to serve it to the network right but you don't have to there's no it's designed so it can be discarded but for me I mean I have 100 100 terabytes worth

of Nas storage most of which is unused right now what I can do is I can basically just keep it running and then every year archive it and put it on my ass and then it's just there and I'm not going to be the only one doing this there's going to be companies doing this charging for access to the data and I'm just doing this as like a hobbyist thing I'm not doing this for any particular reason I'm not planning to charge for the data or anything like that and as I said before you only need access to that data if you want to see the historical state of of the blobs um you don't need it for security or anything like that so uh so yeah I I think that um even if if even I am learning stuff this late into the 4844

cycle um from blog posts like this you're definitely going to learn a lot so definitely go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description for you to read all right so some updates on dencoon testing from the latest all-core devs call which Christine Kim has summarized here so um all the El and cl clients have been on board to devnet8 uh there are two Al clients that have not yet been spun up to run validators but they are on the network right now I think that's one of the major upgrades the other major upgrade the other major update is that parathos has presented a dencoon testing overview document detailing specific areas of testing for the dencoon upgrade that will be developed over the coming weeks uh and also Danny Ryan confirmed with other

client teams that the only major change in the code spec between devnet 8 and devnet9 would be the deployment strategy of erp4788 uh which is an EIP that is obviously um outside of 4844 but still included in the dead devnet 9 uh specs yeah and for those of you who may not be aware these devnets aren't just for 48.44 they are for every AIP going into dencoon and I I don't think there's going to be many devnets many more devnets from here there'll be net9 which I don't think is live yet I think it may be going live very very soon maybe we get a 10th one uh but as you guys know the the holeski or whole Sky test net is going live on September 15th so uh once that's live I'm sure that's going to be upgraded to to zencoon um relatively shortly after it's it's

stabilized there then we'll get sapolia upgraded uh in kind of like October I don't know if we're going to run the upgrade on girly or if girl is just going to be shut down before it upgrades because obviously um uh holeski is is replacing girly but it still feels like we're well on track for November I even maybe late October but you know November kind of uh uh dencoon deployment to mainnet I don't see anything that has changed my opinion on that so so yeah just wanted to get you guys updated on that but you can read the full uh recap here from Christine Kim I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so you guys know about the L2 sites that I mainly use to track

activity uh l2beat.com and growthepie.xyz I've showed these sites to you guys a number of times on the refill before but what I posted I guess like over the weekend was a tweet where I said that ethereum layer 2 activity continues being up only what bear market and you can see from my screenshots here on L2 beats the scaling factor of l2s as composed as compared to L1 based on TPS is over 5x so l2s combined are doing five times more TPS than L1 and that has been just up only that has not stopped going up for for pretty much like the entire chart here as you can see right and it's the red part of the chart now if you look at growthepie.xyz and their layer 2 user base and the unique users

per chain uh you can see that that's also been going up only look at that look at look look look it's just literally up only for the entirety of this year um and you can see it's split by the by Layer Two it's color code it and I actually have to bring up the site in order to show you each of the layer 2 so I'm actually going to bring this up right now for you just so I can point this out so this is if you go to grab the page.xyz go to the layer 2 user base sectioning and click users per chain you can see the breakdown here so most of the user uh the app I mean these aren't actual users like actual people these are addresses obviously we don't know the amount of people um and we know one address uh sorry one person can have

multiple addresses but you can see here that the majority is on ZK sync error almost a million um uh addresses uh arbitrim is at 400 000 based at 215 000 op Mainland at 200 000 immutable X at 25 000 polygon ZK VM at six thousand and multiple meaning people using the same address using multiple chains is at almost half a million here so yeah just up only growth for layer twos generally uh and it's great to see that especially in a bear Market because guys you guys know what happens in a bull market demand comes roaring back we have just like an influx like 100x demand and what do you think the layout shoes are going to look like in that environment I mean layer one is going to go nuts layer twos are going to go nuts we're gonna have

such an epic onboarding experience for layer twos there is going to be so much liquidity injected into layer twos it's going to be insane so I'm personally very very excited about that as you guys know but yeah I'm going to be keeping a close eye on both of these websites to track that growth over time right an update on farcast.v3 so the rollout uh 4v3 starts Tuesday August 29th which is tomorrow of course and you can see the tldr of what that is here so far Caster V3 is coming soon and anyone can sign up and start using the network existing users don't need to do anything uh the first year of storage is free and you'll keep your forecaster username so new users uh will be will have to pay five dollars a year to use the network so this is something that I discussed a

bit in the the refuel and maybe sorry in the Discord Channel maybe I've mentioned on the refill before but firecaster is not like your typical uh I guess like uh decentralized social media platform that doesn't charge its users because traditionally what had happened with these platforms is that they were funding themselves via token inflation Now flycaster does not have a token and the platform that I'm talking about was steemit where it didn't cost anything to be on on steemit from from memory I I don't think it costs anything um and all the rewards on there and all the kind of like payment for the infrastructure was paid out of um of token of tokens right so podcaster is taking the different approach here where they basically said well we want to take a minimally viable approach to funding this infrastructure

um in order to run the protocol but we know that it incurs costs so what's the lowest we can do well five dollars a year and being able to pay in crypto I think is going to be an option definitely is so cheap I mean that is dirt cheap guys for for a social network I mean I'd pay five dollars a year for uh for Twitter and I mean I do I pay like what is it like eight dollars a month I got it for for Twitter right now that's US dollars I think in Australian dollars it's like 15 something like that I mean I'd probably pay a lot more than that to use Twitter and firecaster just because I get so much value out of both of those platforms but that is a still at five dollars per year especially if you can pay with crypto where

essentially you can just pay with your like your eth or whatever um and and it's just like really easy to to pay on chain right so so yeah I think that it's totally justified to charge for the service and especially because uh you know you need to be able to run the infrastructure I don't know what firecast is approach are two ads long term I I think the goal might not that might be to just not have ads at all but it depends infrastructure costs can quickly spiral and and and it just depends on how many users they have you know say they've got like a million users paying five dollars a year that's five million dollars a year okay is that enough to run the network means to be seen it depends on you know what the users are how active they are what what

the infrastructure costs are all that stuff there but yeah forecast to V3 roll out starts on August 29th um which is tomorrow and also I believe that uh flycaster is going to be open to the public uh in the over the next couple of months so you will no longer need an invite to get on firecast stuff all right so chain link God has shared that uh channeling staking version 0.2 is on track to launch in Q4 of this year now the tldr is that there is a pool expansion to 45 million link tokens in the staking pool so obviously raising that tvl cap there there is a pro I'm already migration for version 0.1 stakers the unbonding mechanism for unstaking is going to be in place a dynamic variable reward rate and modular

architecture for future upgrades now of course I'll link journaling God's thread in the YouTube description below because he does a really really great job of explaining exactly what's happening in this upgrade and very very detailed as well so I'll link it there for you guys but there's also a bunch of Graphics that he shared too but explain this uh so yeah just wanted to highlight that for you guys uh for you to check out because I know a bunch of you are big fans of chain link myself included and it's great to see them continuing to execate on execute on their staking roadmap here all right so last thing to talk about is this little poll that I put out over the weekend where I said what do you think 2024 is going to be for crypto and the options were bullish bearish neutral or

don't care slash results now this poll is definitely not going to be representative it's definitely going to be completely biased and skewed and whatever but I figured it was a fun little exercise to do so out of the the all the results bullish it came in you know well ahead of the pack so 57 of people uh and there were two and a half thousand votes on this poll so 57 of people said that they are bullish for next year 10 said bearish 20 said neutral and 12.5 said that they don't care or selected the results option here so I'll I'll discard the don't care results option and just focus on the top three so the reason why I say this is not representative is because obviously a lot of people in crypto right now of

course like in the depths of the bear Market are going to be bullish bias because they want a bull market I mean who who doesn't want to bull market right um maybe the results here would have been different at the top of the market in November 2021 where you people would say Well they're feeling bearish because the market is already so overheated but I don't know because I didn't run this poll back then but of course people are bullish biased in crypto right now because uh they're longer term investors and they they um you know they look at things like the four year cycle and they see things playing out similarly and they're like okay I'm bullish so yeah that one of course because of those reasons I think but then you have like the bearish and neutral which I think is probably the like the neutral take is is

a lot more understanding than the bearish take I don't really understand the bearish take too much because in my mind there's not really that much to be bearish about going into next year if you discard the I guess like the macro environment which I do to be honest and honestly I think the macro environment is nowhere near as bad as some people think it is but let's ignore that for now the in crypto context is not bearish we there's no tourists around right the prices of most assets or pretty much all assets have completely reset themselves Ethan BTC went down 80 90 already everything else went down 90 plus percent and he's still down 90 plus percent we washed out pretty much all of the froth we washed out all of the bad

players or most of the bad players um you know valuations of private markets have come down substantially and the market has just been trending in this crab range for such a long time now so I don't understand the bearish Outlook to be honest I'm not just saying that because I'm bullish biased I just don't understand why you would be bearish going to next year unless maybe you're looking at the macro environment and thinking okay well we're gonna have a major recession inflation's gonna tick up again everything's going to zero blah Great Depression 2.0 whatever you want to call it right then okay I get it but it's it's good that only 10 of people said they were bearish because it was the majority I'd be like yeah this is crazy like I don't I don't think that's right I do think again being bullish biased myself I do think that the

bullish people are more likely to be right than the bearish or neutral people but the neutral people as well could just be neutral in that maybe they think next year is going to be climbing up to like 3K East or 4K Ethan not like the full bull market which is totally fine as well but I would still consider that to be bullish so anyway I'd love to get your thoughts on what you guys are either on in the YouTube comments on their Discord Channel what are you for 2024 bullish bearish neutral or you know just and again give your reasoning as well I think that's one thing that I think that uh not only people gave there are a few comments explaining um the reasoning here but the majority didn't didn't give any reasoning so I'm kind of making assumptions here but yeah if you

want to comment and and leave your kind of I guess like bull or bear case I'd love to to see it you guys know that I'm very very bullish obviously um not not just for next year but just generally I'm a permeable I have a long-term time Horizon it's hard to be a permeable considering things like the layer 2 growth I showed you guys before just the general growth of the ecosystem and everything in between so yeah let me know how you're feeling but I think for today that's going to be it so I thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone