Core dev updates, Base Bootcamp and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #676 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the dway refuel rap the latest news in the eum AC system I'm your host and this to the 23rd of October 2023 all right everyone let's get into it so I did go over this last week but just wanted to Quick give you an update on this uh the Invesco Galaxy uh spot e ETF was uh kind of put forward there was an application put forward last week and James gave an update about this uh shortly after that that I didn't cover CU it happened on the weekend he said that the final deadline is unknown for this but likely to be somewhere around the first week of July uh for the sa to approve this now you know there's no guarantee they're going to approve it by then of course and I discussed this last week about the chances of this

happening and stuff like that and how the BTC spot ETF still needs to get approved but I think pretty much like everyone in crypto at this point I I think is convinced that it's getting approved like sometime in the next 80 days I think is until the the Gen 10th deadline for the arc ETF and you know someone in the daily grade Discord Channel actually mentioned this as well and I don't know if I mentioned this last on last week's episode but the there was a holiday period right um where the US government um different kind of bodies run on skeleton Crews and things like that during the holiday period And I think that goes until Jan 15th so I'm not sure if that impacts the SEC because if it does it means the SEC would have to approve this or deny I guess uh this Arc ETF uh way before the

Gen 10th deadline because if the holiday period starts sometime in like mid December or something like that mid to late December they would probably have to approve it around there or or deny it I mean I'm saying approve because assume they're going to improve it but it's going to be kind of funny to see what happens around that like because I don't I don't know if if if there's like a deferral that happens because maybe one of you guys know where if the date uh if the deadline runs uh to where into a holiday period for example does it get automatically extended because of that I'm not sure but generally I mean yeah from what I've seen people think either the end of this year or January next year is when when it's kind of getting approved and and as I said before they're probably all going to be

approved at once here and then I guess like the The Narrative starts about around when eth is going to get its own spot ETF approved because there is already I believe I covered this last week but in james' tweet here there's already five uh issuers so far that put in an application um but really it's going to probably take Black Rock to to really get people excited about it and I don't know I can't imagine Black Rock not think already having thought about this and going to make their move probably sometime in the next few months around this um but as I mentioned last week I don't think they'd to do it unless they had relative certainty that it would get approved um because obviously e is a different asset to BTC there are different considerations here and it really begs the question about what the E eth ETF looks like because

obviously with eth you get uh you can get a native yield through staking uh so are they going to have eight staked atfs as well as just normal eight spot atfs because the spot ATF will technically be yielding less uh I guess like price-wise or I mean the price will be the same like you still get exposure to the same eth but returns wise technically it'd be yielding less than the staked eth so does every eth spot ETF just become a staked eth ETF I don't know I don't think so because there's different considerations different risks stuff like that and I don't even know if the legal apparatus is set up in the ETF world to allow for this to happen so we're going to have to see how that all shakes out there but that might be another reason why uh these issuers such

as Black Rock are waiting as well just to see some clarity there but uh yeah we're going to have to see it's probably going to happen sometime next year at this point but yeah figur i' just up upate you guys on the fact that the the deadline here for this uh for invest go is seems to be the final week uh sorry the first week of July all right we have a new allc court Dev update from Christine Kim today talking about all things uh I guess like all cor devs of course Dev Net 10 was going to be launched I think last week on Friday and I think I discussed this but apparently it's it's been pushed to today the 23rd so Monday the 23rd of October so we can expect to see devet 10 go live today so that's denune devet 10 um and also there was a bit of coverage

from the the core devs around gaj jinder's tweet that we that I I covered I think last week or the week before about the propagation of blocks containing blob style transactions uh there's a few other things in this write up as well and you can check out the full write up as usual uh Christine has it linked here I'll link that in the YouTube description below but yeah I think as I've said before devet 10s the final devet before they start uh looking at test net so I guess like the next all call devs call they're probably going to start scheduling or at least kind of talking about scheduling a test net which which will be girly first for a fork and as I said before that was targeting kind of like a I guess like mid sorry early to mid November for that that's probably still on target there

and then after that the other test Nets as I've discussed before so I'm not going to rehash that one uh there as well but yeah we're getting close guys like it's only a few months away now I mean not even probably we could probably see Dan in January I'm I'm hopeful at this point especially if the test Nets run well and nothing goes wrong there um it doesn't seem like there's any major blockers in place at at this point in time all right speaking of cev related things there was this interesting little tweet thread from Peter the team lead at go ethereum or gu today where he spoke about how nethermind and Basu have stopped storing historical ethereum data by default and apparently want to standardize this uh as as the kind of like the way to do it right instead of um serving up historical data by default

you would by default just um you know stop storing it and stop uh kind of serving it to the network here now Peter's pretty and admit uh pretty and kind of like understandably pissed about this or pissed off about this because what ends up happening is that NE mind and Basu are just leeching off of gu because gu by default still serves this data and still syncs this data and you can actually see here what this looks like he says allowing users to not store historical chains is a very disingenuous marketing trick because users can switch to you know another client because it's smaller they can still access the old data because gu serves it and users and gu devs are none the wiser uh and then yeah I mean you can read Peter's tweets I'll link in the YouTube description below but he goes on a little bit

colorfully here uh kind of uh uh um kind of saying that he's you know he's really pissed off at this and this is not the way to do things and I don't necessarily disagree with him here but I think this opens up the broader discussion that's been had in the ethereum ecos system for quite a while now around how far back in history are we expecting uh clients to store right or to serve essentially because at some point it becomes redundant like there like for for for most people out there there's no need for them to know what happened like let's just say a year ago or two years ago on the network right as long as you can sync the network and not have to have access to the historical data at that point in time as long as you can sync the network and have a a secure

full node that that's synced and and all well and good the actual historical data only matters for archival purposes or for I guess like tax related purposes but as I said this opens up a broader discussion around storing historical data not just at layer one but layer 2 uh and and how different kind of services can pop up around this as well like there can be Services that's that that literally just run clients that store this data and then serve this data to the network or or to customers and stuff like that and we already have things that like that in place um you know for example ether scan does it they they obviously provide a lot of historical data for people to to look out on their block Explorer um you know there other block explorers I mean block explorers are the perfect example here

of the the services that do this but if you want to kind of uh I guess like do an analogy here to web 2 and and what it looks like in web 2 for example in Australia I believe it's a legal requirement for banks to only have to store the data uh that they have of your transaction history for 7 years because that's as long as I believe the tax office has in the normal case to look back and go after you or kind of investigate right past seven years they can't investigate that data because it's considered just like too old too long in the past um and I and obviously in different jurisdictions it's going to be different there but I'm just speaking from the Australian perspective here so for banks it's like well if we don't need to store these past seven years and

our users aren't even requesting this because they don't need it unless they're getting audited by the tax office for example which is in that 7-year period or they're applying for for you know for kind of some mortgage which usually doesn't even take that like a mortgage application will take the last 6 months or something like that and I mean it can go up to 2 years but you see my point here is that when it comes to storing historical data especially when it comes to like financi ual data uh it it depends on the entity it depends if it's a company or an individual it depends on what they actually need the data for and when they'll need it and how often they'll need it it depends on the cost to store it of course like for the banks it's a cost thing for them like they don't want

to have to store this data uh on all of their customers past a certain point and then serve it as well because you'll notice that like um depending on the on the data uh for example in in social media websites they'll let you access all of your data going back to basically day one but it's not instant they actually have to dig that out because the way it works in in the back end is that they basically have hot buckets of data and cold buckets of data and the cold buckets are things that are not always online not always accessible because obviously having them always online always accessible costs money so in order to preserve that they basically have these things offline and they only access them when users request it to be accessed and they have this whole pipeline in the background that handles

this but users are not requesting access to their data uh all the time right they're probably doing it once in a blue moon If Ever I I I think most users probably wouldn't even um request access to it I mean I have before with Facebook I've requested access to I think I created my Facebook account in like 2008 or something like that so it's a lot of data to go back but I requested it CU I wanted to see if they actually had everything and they did they had absolutely everything they had all of my messages that I had sent from day one that had all of my Facebook statuses all of my photos absolutely everything and the social media sites will store this um for one reason or another I think like they like doing it for for data mining purposes but also it's just kind

of something that they they probably just don't want to delete um and if it cost them basically nothing to store there then they do that but it just depends on the service right when it comes to and bringing this all back to how blockchains handled this and how ethereum handles this well I mean if we want people to run full nodes then we can't make the full nodes be terabytes in size right because then it would just uh kind of like price people out of running them because if we want to keep ethereum as decentralized and distributed as possible then we need to keep the blockchain um size manageable right and I know that storage space is always getting cheaper over time but the thing is is that the blockchain is a perpetually growing thing right it it was always going to get bigger unless

you prune things like the actual chain nonp pruned um for for anything out there will always be get bigger right always um I think that an archive node for ethereum completely unpruned is probably up at like the 20 terabyte level and if you look at other chains out there that are um you know are doing are kind of like um not worried about constraining how much data is stored at layer one like for example salana I mean if you take the nonp pruned salana chain I'm sure it would be like thousands of terabytes at least at this point in time probably more than that um but as I said like it just depends on what who wants access to that data what you know do you actually need access to that data do what do you need to actually look at uh and this and this goes back to what

Peter was saying here about the fact that gu is still serving this but the the other clients are so the other clients are basically piggybacking off gu and basically cheating in in a sense uh and using it as a marketing trick so yeah I mean I totally kind of sympathize with his argument here but it yeah as I said it falls back to discussion around like how long are we actually going to store the data for and there are eips around this as well the most famous one is EIP quadruple 4 U which you can actually see I'm going to bring it up here because it was linked in the daily way Discord channel so this is the AIP here AIP quadruple 4 which is a pretty good EIP number right um but this talks about bounding historical data in execution in clients so basically prune

historical data in clients older than one year so if this EIP was implemented from my understanding what would happen is that all execution layer clients no matter what they do on the on the client level but all of them will by default prune historical data um that is older than one year so that's you know that's one year right that's not like seven years that's one year where it will prune that historical data and then it won't uh it won't keep anything older than one year here and this is basically the I guess one of the official eips around historical data uh and one of the ones that is is most kind of considered for inclusion so so yeah but anyway you can go read Peter's tweet thre and the replies to it to get a better idea here but this is an open discussion that's

been going on for quite a while now guys this is not something new this is I mean this EIP alone it was uh created in on on if I'm reading this correctly uh it's it's in 2021 but I don't know if this is American date format or Australia or or um you know non-american date format so it's either the 2nd of November 2021 or the 11th of February 2021 I I don't know maybe I'm reading that wrong there but regardless um it was talked about before then I mean if you go to the discussion link here on ethereum magicians uh so it was November 2021 yeah so and but even before then uh I believe there will discussions around this going far back as like 2017 I remember this being talked about so definitely not something new but definitely something that uh is going to be implemented into the network

at some point at I mean it's already implemented at the client level but like this is more at the network level um because obviously it's an EIP here um but yeah anyway moving on from that one just to a more positive tweet that Peter put out about clients over the weekend where he said been thinking about multic client of ethereum for me the most awesome is that each client mostly is written in a different language if someone's interested in contributing there's probably a project they can get into without learning a new language so that and that equals a very nice talent pool so for those of you who don't know it's pretty self-explanatory but gu is written in the go programming language um you know nethermind is written in javra I believe I may be getting that wrong I don't know if the top of my head

uh reth the new client is written in Rust um I think Aragon because it's a fork of gu is still written in go Basu I think is written in I think Basu is Java one of them is Java I I don't remember which one which one is written in that but as Peter says here they're written in different languages same is true for the consensus layer clients as well obviously um but because of that it's a very nice talent pool you get pool uh you get Talent from different uh areas and different kind of like schools of experti uh from people who are basically developing maybe in go you know they go they can work on gu or they can work on Aragon in Russ they can work on W in Netherland or whatever they can work in I believe it's Java or or C or anything

I mean it's listed here some of the languages but uh yeah I think it's really cool that the client diversification leads to developer diversification which leads to a wider Talent pull for ethereum to to kind of like pull out of for for core Dev because at the end of the day there's only going to be so many core devs ever like because because cev is very specialized field so the more uh I guess uh sorry the bigger talent pool that we can tap into the better it is overall uh I believe all right moving on to some news out of the polygon ecosystem so uh you can see here this is a long tweet from Harry Rook who works in governance at polygon here uh where he recapped the recent polygon governance call now normally I wouldn't cover governance calls for projects but the reason I I'm

covering this one is because this is all about the poll token so I've talked to you before about how the madic token is becoming the pole token well it's actually the pole token is launching a lot earlier than I thought it was so it's launching on October 25th which is this week it's like 2 days from now so they're actually going to launch this onto mainnet um this week there is not going to be a mandatory conversion or anything like that as I said before the the I guess like timeline to convert your mic tokens into pole tokens is going to be quite long um and I think exchangers will probably just do this automatically if you're storing your mic on exchanges or anything like that uh but with this this kind of like upgrade this is like one of the first uh um upgrades of polygon 2.0 right which is

that whole kind of um that whole road map that they're doing there but yeah I I I I think I said once that I believe that this would be happening in uh q1 of next year but it seems to be happening a lot happening a lot earlier than that but right now I don't think there's any action points for people I think that as I said like the mic and pole tokens will exist side by side they will have the same price they're not going to be different in price cuz they're for all intents and purposes the exact same asset right but eventually everyone will have to migrate madic to pole and there'll be like a migration front end and and contract and everything like that so it'll all be done there in the background for you and as I said usually with these token kind of conversions if

you're storing it on a centralized exchange they'll just do it for you they'll basically just issue you the the kind of they'll basically do the transaction on chain in the background on their own and then just issue it uh issue you the the new tokens um the exact same balance that you have uh on their front end there but yeah you can go check check out the full tweet I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so as you guys know with optimistic rollups there is that 7-Day withdrawal window and now I have said in the past and discussed this in the past about how this 7-Day withdrawal window it's not arbitrary but it's not a set in stone thing it was decided upon based on a number of different factors one of them and I guess the biggest Factor the

main factor is being safety you know how long do we give for people to submit fraud proofs and is 7 days long enough well 7 days is probably more than enough so uh let's let's make it 7 days and that that kind of became the the industry standard I guess but there's only really two major optimistic rollup I guess like platforms right now there's the arbitrum platform obviously and then there's the op stack which includes a bunch of other chains falling off of that but if you're talking about the actual code bases it's really arbitrum in the op stack and I guess like some smaller ones out there um but in this new post from Masa who works at offchain Labs as an integration engineer it's titled Fast and Furious withdrawal from optimistic rollups which covers three different ways uh that they're thinking about doing faster withdrawals on

arbitri optimistic rollup PR the first way is atomic swaps so swap your pending exits for eth on layer one tradable exits trade your exits directly on L1 before they're finalized and hedged exit exits combine tradable exits with prediction markets where L1 contracts can accept withdrawn tokens before the dispute period ends so these things sound a little bit similar to what we already have within bridging today where you can like bridge on a number of these different protocols like hop and connect and across where essentially the risk or I guess the withdrawal time risk is uh is moved to the LPS especially when it's like hop you know that people put up the lp and then the lp just represents the asset in the contract and it's not withdrawn from the contract there's not really any need to because the IOU is is collateralized by that essentially right

in the lp pool here so yeah this is very similar to that but I think that there's are trying to be uh solutions that are not just economic but also cryptographic where essentially you get the stronger cryptographic guarantees without relying solely on economic guarantees so if you want to read the paper you can I'll link it in the YouTube description below it is quite dense and Technical I believe um it's not that long it's about 17 Pages probably less than that if you get rid of all the citations at the bottom here um no yeah I mean there's not that many references here so yeah about 17 but yeah you can go give this a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below but as I've said in the past this 7-Day withdrawal thing I mean it's already a non-issue for most users or pretty much

like all users but but it can be brought down at the protocol level uh and it can be brought down in theory I've I've seen some work out of I believe maybe tarance has posted about this before but I've seen some work that they could actually potentially bring it down to the same block so a 12 you know 12C withdrawal Time same ethereum block here but that's probably a little bit further away or maybe within the finality of ethereum like a 12 minute or whatever it is 13 minute kind of finality period there but uh yeah anyway you can go give this paper a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so bass has introduced something called bass boot camp which is an 8-week program designed to turn experienced developers into smart contract developers Bas boot camp will

make learning interactive and collaborative with support from experienced engineers and dedicated mentors they continue with less than 30,000 onchain developers compared to 30 million software devs we need to empower more to build onchain bass boot camp offers dedicated mentorship access to Bas Engineers a gated Discord Channel and learning materials developed by bass uh so you can apply to this I think applications um close October 27th you have a few days to apply to this if you are a software developer out there that wants to learn learn all about smart contract development if you haven't yet of course and this is an 8-week course as I mentioned but this is pretty this is pretty cool like 30,000 onchain developers compared to 30 million software developers that's a huge pool of developers that aren't in crypto yet

and aren't I guess like an onchain developer yet right aren't working with uh uh uh languages like solidity and and Cairo and Noir that's from from Aztec um and other languages out there as well that are being built within crypto but also at the same time there are a lot of initiatives bringing people into crypto with languages that they already know obviously arbitr is doing it with stylus they're trying to make it so you can code up smart contracts in like C++ and things like that so eventually it's going to be to the point where we can bring those 30 million software developers in without having to retool them in the language but obviously there's a lot of crypto specific things there's a lot of onchain specific things that you have to consider there's different ways of dealing with things there different ways of dealing

with synchrony and asynchrony within a crypto context within an onchain context and I guess that's what something like bass boot camp aims to kind of bridge the gap between it's not just re re uh getting these people to learn a new a new programming language like solidity but also getting them to learn how to actually develop on chain so if this sounds like something that's interesting to you you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below as I said applications uh close on October 27th so you can go apply today all right I introduced this uh retro pgf Community uh account I believe last week or the week before on on the refuel but they've introduced something called the Retro pgf Community newsletter so this is a place for you to dive into a vibrant mix of community updates

engaging educational content in expiring project showcases all from the uh optimism kind of ecosystem here so if you're interested in in following along with the optimism ecosystem uh and all the retroactive public goods funding that they're doing and all the projects that they funding as well you should go check out this newsletter I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to subscribe to and I just wanted to shout it out because I figured it was another interesting newsletter for you guys to check out right finally here I have a tweet that I put out over the weekend that I wanted to rant a little bit about today on the refuel so I said it frustrates me when people say that ethereum only care about eth price and not and don't care about building if this were the case I wouldn't have been able to do 300 plus

hours worth of daily guay uh refu episodes and Counting where 99% of the content has nothing to do with the price of eth so if I actually count all the content that I've done on the Refuel on the drive-through episodes on all the Into The Ether podcasts I've done on all the bankers podcast I've done as well like whether it's filling in for the rollup or live streams and everything else in between it's probably easily over 500 hours I would I would have to say of of content um probably more you know probably more than that maybe 6 700 hours or something like that not to mention the newsletter that I haven't written in a while admittedly um but I used to write write it there not to mention all the stuff I've done on Twitter right so like what what puzzles me is that as I said 99% of that content

had nothing to do with the price of it this this isn't this isn't Bitcoin where the most interesting thing to talk about and focus on is the price of BTC it ethereum is so much more expressive than that so I don't understand why people or how people can say that etherians only care about the price of eth and maybe I should give some context here around why people say this and whether they're saying this as a genuine thing or maybe they're just trying to troll I think it's rather irrelevant but the reason why I believe they say this is because what that they see is they see Memes like ultrasound money they see people kind of talking about the eth burn and me burn oh sorry the the a1559 burn and me burn and they see Justin Drake on bankless podcast talking about this sorts of stuff and talking about value

acral for eth but the pro point is is that there's just one kind of aspect of ethereum as an ecosystem right and that's been talked about for years and it's not necessarily about uh trying to pump eth up as much as possible and to make everyone Rich what it's about is making sure that eth can ACR value so that the network can be secure so that people can build on ethereum with confidence and not just people building applications on ethereum layer one or users on ethereum layer one but layer 2 is building on ethereum and having confidence as a secure settlement layer right so when you kind of look at what uh what look at that kind of holistically it as I said it's not about trying to pump eth up to to get rich here and I hate when people kind of

imply that now the other kind of side of this is the people spending this message in a disingenuous way because they're doing it to to spread I guess like or to promote their own things whether that's another layer one chain out there or whether that's to kind of fud ethereum because they're into Bitcoin or anything like that and they and and there are certain communities out there that do this because they say well where the chain that people build on ethereum is just a chain that tries to make tries to gouge users high gas fees to pump eth in order to make everyone Rich which couldn't be further from the truth because if that was if that was true ethereum layer one wouldn't be being constructed in order to essentially uh help layer 2os scale and bring their fees down as much as possible which over

at least over the short to medium term will more than likely reduce the amount of fees that are paid on layer 1 ethereum until the the um I guess like activity picks up on layer twos and it flows back down to layer one which would in turn decrease the burn of eth which would in turn decrease the value capture of eth to an extent right so if all we cared about was uh AC crewing as much value as possible to eth we wouldn't be doing that right as a community so it doesn't even make sense when people talk about this but of course they do it for different reasons they they want to promote their own thing or they want to fight ethereum in some way and it's just utterly bizarre to me because we have these layer twos today that are incredibly cheap to use compared to

layer one and they're only getting cheaper over time as I said post 4844 you can expect um uh of these layer 2os to have sub 1 cent transaction fees and as I said as well because uh the fee Market isn't shared with on the 4844 blob style transaction uh fee Market is not shared with the normal layer 1 fee Market there's not going to be spikes you know layer 1 fees can be 100 gay for everything except blobs and blob fees could still be like one gay right so you're not going to see a spike so that means that the the user experience on layer 2 is going to be consistent it's going to be cheap and there's plenty of stuff on there for people to do now there's plenty of liquidity on there there's plenty of ways to bridge in and out there's interoperability there's

exchange Integrations so yeah I mean I I just don't understand where people say that there's there's no building going on and and ethereum is not about building it's just about pumping eth I don't know where this kind of bad narrative kind of uh came from um but yeah it just frustrates me seeing that because as I said in the Tweet as well there is absolutely no way I would have been able to do the amount of content I've done if all I was doing was talking about the price of eth could you imagine that like you know probably don't even have to imagine that what you can do is you can go look at the technical analysis YouTubers who only talk about the price of assets and see how repetitive their content is it's the exact same thing pretty much every day because the from day to day if they're

doing like daily content the price doesn't change that much the Outlook doesn't change that much the lines on their charts don't change that much and they repeat themselves over and over and over again and it's all about just talking about the price right there is absolutely no way way that I personally would be able to do that just from a mental capacity perspective I'd be bored out of my brain doing that um and but at the same time like the episodes of the refuel wouldn't be 30 minutes long they'd be like 5 minutes long right um so when you look at that and look about all the stuff that I talk about on the refuel 99% of it is all about the project stuff yes I sometimes talk about the price of eth and I talk about I have bullish rants from time to time but the

majority of content is not that and the reason why I use the daily gay as an example is because I believe the daily gay is really the um the the the the content that covers the ethereum building ecosystem the most out of everything I mean bankless covers a lot of stuff too but they focus on on other ecosystems as well not just ethereum and there's a few other others out there but in terms of the amount of content that I put out about ethereum every you know every day almost I know that there are some daily gay rug fuels that I do from from time to time but for the most part I'm pretty good right um and in that in that content just talking about the the building going on yeah just it's utterly bizarre to me that people can say that ethereum only care about the price of

eth maybe maybe if you're just on crypto Twitter and you followed people who only talk about the price of eth maybe that's what you get but hey all you have to do is listen to the refuel for even a week right and you get five episodes of for 30 minutes each of me just talking about the fundamentals of of ethereum and the building going on within the ethereum ecosystem but anyway that's enough ranting there from me on that topic 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 the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone