Core Dev updates, Polygon AggLayer and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #720 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the delway refuel where cup latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this and T the 26th of January 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so apologies for missing yesterday's episode I just wasn't really feeling myself yesterday and I figured you know instead of doing an episode where maybe I sounded low energy or not as bullish as I usually do I would just skip the episode you know just one of those days I'm sure you've all experienced that before uh but there is a lot to get through today actually I mean there was a lot to get through yesterday and now there was a lot that happened today that I need to get through so it looks like today's episode will be longer than 30 minutes we'll see how long we go for and we'll see if I

can do it all in one take uh like I usually do sometimes there'll be edits but you know uh we'll see if I can do it all in one takech but anyway let's kick things off with a news about the spot eth ETFs so of course uh you probably seen this by now but a couple of days ago the SEC uh delayed black rocks spot eth ETF filing now of course this is totally normal we expect these delays to keep keep happening until the final deadlines the first of which are in May uh as you know and then Black Rock I believe is in August but really the odds are at like what I think 70% as I've explained about them getting kind of approved in May there uh but yeah I just wanted to clarify for people here that these delays are completely expected

there is nothing uh kind of surprising about this there's nothing to worry about it is definitely just the SEC doing what they did with the BTC ETFs uh obviously for the eth ones here but there is that final deadline period which as James ccii mentions here is May 23rd and that's the next date that matters so anything between now and May 23rd doesn't matter in terms of if the SEC delays these things or not but what does matter is seeing the same thing play out for the eth ETFs that we did for BT for the BTC ETFs where we see all back and forth with the SEC and these filers you know updated filings like the um the different F the forms that they have to file stuff like that I mean as I said to you guys we get to do this all again very soon you know we did it all

with the BTC ETF we get to do it with the eth ETF and you know really most of the I think like uh action around the BTC ETF happened in uh I guess you could say late October November and December uh so around what like two and a half months or something into Jan 10th obviously when they were approved so if the same thing was to play out you have two to three months worth of um worth of speculation around this and worth of action around this you would basically say that it's February April uh sorry February March April which is three months right into May four months so you could expect this to start maybe late Feb early March we start seeing the circus play out again as I like to call it because it was a circus for BTC but I'll keep you guys updated on all of

that of course but yeah just to reiterate the next important date is May 23rd anything between then and now doesn't matter if you see any delays or anything uh it doesn't matter because they aren't denials they're delays and we've all been through this before so there's no for me to explain that any further anyway moving on from that so there was another all cord devs call uh today I believe or yesterday uh and Christine Kim has a nice summary on this call so apparently the cevs agreed to prioritize a CP couple of EIP so EIP 6110 and EIP 702 so 702 you'll know is the execution layer triggerable exits for um for for stakers for validators uh and IP 7549 so two of these IPS I guess like are more uh technical than 702 and

and not as user facing as 702 uh but you can read about those I me you can just Google the EIP numbers and read about those um and they've also agreed to remove two eips from consideration for the upgrade one of them is e P 6914 which is reusing validated indices which is I guess like a tech debt thing um what it's not like critically important or anything like that it basically means that if an a validator exits and they have like an an index assigned to them that right now can't be reused so the indexes just kind of go n plus1 whereas if you were to reuse them you could actually reuse the the old ones and you know a fun thing about that is that that means that the early IND indices can can be auctioned off essentially in a roundabout way where essentially imagine

you're like one of the first one ,000 validators on the beacon chain because you going in at Genesis you could say okay well I'm auctioning off this this index here once this EIP actually goes in which maybe it happens next year or something like that but you could say hey I'm actually auctioning off this index here uh you know what what are you going to pay me for and then someone else could exit with that index as a validator there but that's been removed from consideration for Petra uh and Erp 7547 which is inclusion lists has also been removed which is kind of sad to see because I was really looking forward to seeing inclusion lists included in this upgrade but obviously there needs to be more work and research done on that before it can be considered for inclusion uh and devs of course are

still debating uh whether to prioritize 7251 which is the max effective balance increase IP 7594 which is pias uh and ssz related IPS for uh for petrick here and regarding denune of course I me I'll give an update on denune in a sec there's a separate kind of tweet that I want to talk to here um I think that uh and then poto here one of the core devs basically replied saying I think it's an overstatement to say that we agreed to to remove from consideration any EIP in particular for anyone listening to the recording there will be one or two remarks from Danny Ryan this is not a death sentence the fork is in flux so yeah even though they kind of maybe were more earing on the side of hey you know these probably should be removed from consideration for the for the upgrade uh

maybe they get added later for one reason or another so yeah things are definitely still in flux and it's too early to tell but uh yeah I guess like just early signs of what the core devs are kind of prioritizing here with regards to that uh and of course as I said uh 7251 uh and 7594 are my two favorite dips as part of this upgrade but you guys know all about that now of course with regards to denune there was some updates as well I mean nothing new you guys know that denune is going to activate on seoa on gen 30th and hsky on Feb 7th and if so if you're running a node on ether Network now is the time to update it there is a blog post here which I'll link in the YouTube description below and then of course assuming both of these go smoothly as

Tim boo says here main net is next and I'm still sticking with my like mid to late March uh main net date there you know it could I've seen some people say early March I don't think it would happen in early March because uh as I've said you need like at least a month lead time here and after hsky goes live so I'm more thinking mid to late March if I had to put money on it um which I technically do by buying eth but you know if I had to like make a bet on it like an actual uh kind of bet with um with a with a counterparty here uh then I'd probably say it's more midh than Lish March but but that is based on these things going smoothly you know if these things don't go smoothly then uh it definitely won't won't probably

happen at those timelines because there might be a a delay in order to make sure to fix what went wrong there but it just depends you know it depends how big the bug is depends how hard it is to fix if there is a bug things like that so yeah but that's the timeline are currently on those things there all right so there's a new post here all about the kzg ceremony so you guys know I spoke about this a lot while it was ongoing and I'm sure a lot of you participated in this uh so this was started nearly 2 years ago now man time lies but Trent uh shared a kind of blog post here today uh basically saying titled wrapping up the kzg ceremony uh going over the you know everything that happened with it so if you are interested in learning more

about the kzg ceremony and everything around it you should definitely go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so there but yeah I mean I hope at the time you were able to contribute to this because I remember I did mention uh uh the ceremony a lot of times on the refuel and you can see here i' actually ran for 28 days from January to August 2023 so you had plenty of time to contribute and in total there were 141,000 contributions uh which was really really cool to see and I remember saying to Trent at the time I'm like hey I bet you there'll be 100,000 contributions and this was like when it was zero and I think that was like a moonshot bet at the time and and Trent was like yeah I don't know like that

seems pretty moonshot and I'm like yeah it is moonshot but hey let's aim for the moon and we went way over that we went to 141,000 which is really great to see there and of course as I mentioned before you know a lot of this was probably people for some reason or another airdrop farming you know it's it's kind of funny because I said at the time that even though there's no token associated with this at all uh people would probably just take the chance of hey maybe another project air drops a token to kgz kzg ceremony participants at some point and essentially what we did was is we harness harnessed that speculative DJ energy and we used it to uh make the kzg ceremony absolutely massive which is the largest setup of its kind as is noted here in the blog post but yeah anyway you can go check

this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so uh proposer Builder separation has been discussed for quite a while in the ethereum ecosystem now I mean for years at this point and is definitely something that a lot of people are interested seeing go into the network now the reason I'm bringing it up today is because there is a new research paper out from uh uh from a few people here one of them from a16z oh two of them sorry from a16z uh research uh well actually all three from a16z research I forget so you guys will remember Tim roughgarden he has has been in uh uh been doing research papers on crypto for a little while he famously did one on EIP 1559 he actually ended up joining a16z as their head of research

so yeah it's all three people that are doing research at a16z here published this paper talking about PBS and the conclusion is that PBS BBS is basically good you can see here tldr results formalize the forces towards centralization in Block building and the push back provided by PBS we hope that other researchers develop their own models and results to help the community better understand uh PBS and its pros and cons versus alternative designs and then it says our main result in this model of PBS is a positive one under a common distribution uh distributional assumption uh PBS ensures that no validator earns much more than another from a given block production opportunity so yeah I mean it seems like PBS is the way to go uh to and it seems like it addresses the concerns that it's being created to address so really great

to see that because I mean uh I I really trust uh uh Tim Tim Ruff gard's analysis on these things because he's been doing it for a while he did one on IP 1559 which for those of you who who remember after his report came out it actually got some of the core devs that were on the fence about 1559 on side because it was such a detailed report and it actually showed you know that it would that 1559 would work as advertised and here's another one from Tim and and colleagues on uh PBS working as advertise which is really really uh great to see so yeah you can go check out the full report for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so uh I've been talking about the some researchers at the ethereum foundation uh basically working

on changing the issuance curves of ethereum so which is basically a monetary policy change in order to basically strengthen it now there was a really long post a while ago about this um that I highlighted on the refill and there's another really long post for you guys to check out I'll link it in the in the um uh in the YouTube description for you to do so but yeah this is all about basically making it so that uh we never end up in a position where it's not economically rational to be a Staker on ethereum anymore and I mean as I said this is a real really long post so it's very hard for me to summarize this uh but you can go check this out for yourself I'll link in the YouTube description below but what I want to do is basically set the tone and set the

Baseline now about this is that there is likely to be some monetary policy change based on this re research at some point in the future because if we are trying to harden the protocol to the point where we can eventually aify it you need this to happen in terms of in terms of uh uh making sure the issuance curve isn't able to be gamed isn't an issuance curve that doesn't serve the best uh the best um I guess like uh the best uh what's the word I'm looking for here the best interest of the network such as security and reliability and making sure that I mean we're sticking to our Mantra of minimum viable issuance which basically means that we issue out the minimum viable amount of eat that we need to in order to achieve uh some set

of goals as I just outlined there and in order to do this we need riged and very detailed uh uh Research into uh a change like this because it is a monetary policy change which is one of the biggest changes you can make uh to to ethereum here and actually if you scroll down on this post vac has actually attempted to summarize it for you in a in a reply here so you can check that out and and and the discussions that are ongoing here but this will probably take a while before it makes it into the network I would say that it's it's probably going to be something that maybe happens in 2026 if it happens from from my reading here uh because of the fact that it needs a lot of research that to go into it to make sure that we're dotting all the eyes Crossing all

the and it touches on pretty much everything in ethereum right and monetary policy changes should be this difficult to to make because technically the last one we had was the merge right in 2022 uh September 2022 so if this takes until you know sometime 2026 that'll be a 4-year journey and as it should there you know it should be extremely hard to change the monetary policy and it should only be done uh when absolutely necessary so we'll see how this all shakes out but yeah I do think that eventually something will uh will be changed here because all the research that I'm reading on this basically points to the fact that it definitely needs to be altered in order to achieve certain goals uh but yeah you don't need to listen to me ramble on about this you can go read the post for yourself I'll

link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so ethery has started its vampire attack on other lsts or other staking protocols so they're not just vampire attacking Lio they're also doing it on uh CB e which is coinbase's LST and wrapped uh binance e which is binance's LST so it seems like they're going after all the uh I guess like centralized um lsts or ones that they consider to be centralized I know there's debate around whether St is centralized or not I'm not going to get into that debate here because it just going to turn into a holy war uh but the tlda of this vampire attack is that if you have IG layer deposits of St e CB or rap uh Beth you can instantly turn them into liquid e uh with points without the

7-Day withdrawal period uh and then basically they describe in this thread the goals of doing this and why they're doing this and who can participate uh and how damp is C at only 1,000 eth to start so a very low cap but that will also that will of course grow over time here so yeah if that's something that you're interested in doing if you have I lay deposits of these things you can withdraw without this 7-Day withdrawal uh kind of period here so this might be of interest to you I know that eif fire has been on a on a real big tear lately uh along with some other protocols out there like swell uh with basically taking in eth and reaking it as solo validators with igon layer so it's uncapped reaking there and then you're able to farm points because both eifi and swell have announced that they're

going to do tokens obviously and I think e ethi even said they're going to do their token in like April or something their tge I think swell uh I don't know if swell has announced their date yet but it will will be relatively soon and I should dis disclose here that I'm an adviser to to both ethery and swell here um you know it's kind of funny because like there's so many projects that I'm helping out now uh either as an advisor or an an investor um and it's it's it's sometimes I forget to mention that but yeah I mean I am for these guys here but everything that I'm telling you is public information I'm I'm not sharing any private information or anything like that I don't actually get much of that information because I don't ask for it and I purposely do not participate in

any of these things uh in order to farm any kind of token because of conflicts of interest I mean you have to trust my word on that obviously but I think I'm a pretty trustworthy guy uh at this point um but yeah I mean me being an advisor to these teams and an investor in them basically just means that I'm trying to help them with whatever they're trying to do here it doesn't mean that I'm using it as inside information to to do anything here um and I definitely not I'm not participating in any of these things I mean also you guys know that I I I just solo stake my eth or stake it with Rocka pool I'm not staking my eigh with anything else just as a as a thing that I do here but at at the same time like I feel like these Protocols are

exactly what I wanted to see happen with regards to chipping away at lios dominance because I did say uh a while ago now that I said that lios dominance would only come down with competition I think I've been saying this for one year plus at this point at least saying that lios dominance would only come down with competition and and all this competition has so far basically stagnated Lido's dominance in terms of relative market share I think it's almost been two years since lios has been stuck at 32% um and then over time the the hope is is that they Chip Away enough and they grow enough themselves and they offer enough of a compelling product in order to reduce that dominance over time there so that's why I'm excited about these uh these projects and I'm and I'm excited about the fact that we have a lot more

competition in the LST space and the LRT space which LRT LRT stands for liquid reaking token you know obviously because of i l entering the game now uh but and as I've said before I think I've been saying this for for just as long doing anything like this uh is is doing anything with with staking is a slow moving ship right getting people to move over and stuff like that it's it's a very slow moving ship it's like turning a a cruise liner around it's going to take forever it's not like turning a rowboat around but that's just the very nature of uh kind of what we're doing here that's the very nature of uh how you kind of chip away at at the dominance it happen slowly over over time here but anyway you can go check out ether's devamp attack I'll link that

in the YouTube description below for you to do so and just I just wanted to share this as well puffer Finance another liquid reaking protocol uh is uh has shared on Twitter that the wait is over next week you can earn double rewards with them so you can earn puffer points and IG layer points uh so you get your eth St usdt usdc ready now and stay tuned and I should again disclose that I an adviser to puffer this actually happened recently with E the fire and puffer I signed on as advisor I don't think it's um been announced by the teams yet but I don't want to keep talking about them with without disclosing that to you guys um but uh but yeah they're uh they're um obviously announcing here that they're going to be doing something very similar to what

ether Finance has been doing so this might be of interest to you so keep an eye on puffer's Twitter account there all right so continuing on the theme of staking hobby has updated his dashboard or his staking dashboard and he's just tagged two 2.5% more staked Ethier and as you can see there are new entities entering the the game here and you can see here mantle or meth or mental staked ethar has entered the game with a lot of eth so 330,000 eth that's a huge amount which basically means that they have 1.1% uh uh market share right now but then you can see there's a there's a long list of other staging providers that Hill W was able to tag and you can see on the on the column here it says newly tagged share um and even like big

stakers like binance uh and and coinbase we newly tagged here so it's good to see that hobby continues to find all of these stakers lurking on chain uh and basically tagging them for us all to to kind of look at and this E2 staking dashboard on Dune analytics that Hill Doby put together a long time ago now is still the best staking dashboard out there that I found in terms of monitoring things and and keeping keeping track of things so you should definitely go uh check this out if you haven't yet I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so all right so I remember covering this a while ago when rated. Network put out a blog post basically discussing a research that they did into home stakers uh and being able to tag how many kind of I guess solo home stakers there were

and I think they came up with a number of uh 7% including Rocka pool uh mini uh node operators and there's been a bit of debate about terminology around this and I think that it I think that from now on I probably going to start using the term home stakers rather than solo stakers and the reason being is that Technically when you stake with rocker poool you're not solo staking right it is not technically like by strict definition solo staking because it's part of and it's not strictly part of a pool either as a node operator it's a bit of a funny kind of uh distinction there but I think the term home stakers covers people better because you could make the same argument for something like uh DVT Tech right if you're running a a squad staking setup where there's 10 of you as

part as part of it and you're all running the the software uh and you're putting 3.2 e up each you're technically not solo staking right you're Squad staking so to call them solo stakers would not be uh would not be um accurate to call them home stakers would so I think the term home stakers just cast a much wider net and captures all of these people who are actually meaningfully adding to the decentralization of the ethereum network uh but but just defining them in you know in in a in a better sense yeah so from now on I'm going to be calling them home stakers uh but the reason why I'm talking about this today is because rider. network uh open sourced the ethereum solo Staker mappings that they've been in that they've been curating internally now this is only up to indices 1 to 500,000

so this is only around half of the network that they've been able to tag so far and you can go check this out it's on GitHub here I'm really curious to see them tag the whole network and then uh essentially open source that and also open source the methodology that they're using because I don't think that's open sourced yet um and the methodology that they're using is basically how they're they're tagging because it's easy to tag Rocka pool node operators CU it's all on chain you can see that but how do you tag like actual kind of solo stakers for example right as part of the home home home Stak umbrella um that is difficult it can be done but you know it's difficult it's not easy and I think people want them to share how they're doing this but at the same time they're

probably hesitant to share it maybe because it's a it's a kind of like competitive Advantage for them right it's it's something that they've put a lot of time in effort into and if they open source it then other their competitors can just copy that so I but I'm not sure I'm just I'm just speculating there I'm not sure exactly what the reasoning is here but um I'm looking forward to seeing uh more of that information come out and more of that stuff go live here um but yeah we'll see how that kind of shakes out but you can go check out the GitHub I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so we have another couple of entities that announced uh how that they're getting off gu so obviously client diversity is still the Talk of the Town um and still something that is

top of mind for a lot of people so you can see here that p2p.ie something per of the network which is great to see and then also all nodes has announced that they've got that they're completely gone away from gu onto bayu as well and I'm glad that these operators are going to bayu instead of nethermind nethermind is great but like bayu is also great so that and bayu has like Le less market share than than nethermind TR but I think that uh all noes accounts for maybe 2.5 or 3% off total validators on the network so these are like obviously they're small numbers but when you add them together they get really big and I

mean as I've said before like it only takes a few of these like relatively larger entities to move the needle here and especially when you add them up so I actually put out a tweet today and I didn't highlight it I don't have it here to highlight but I put out a tweet today saying that ethereum is is kind of winning this war with client diversity where essentially in a couple of months gu will will be below 66% if both coinbase and Lio follow through with their commitments and Kraken as well follows through with their commitments to get off gu then we're just going to see that that issue evaporate completely and then of course the battle remain of keeping these operators accountable and making sure that they don't go back to gu but honestly like I I I I don't see a reason why they necessarily would go

back to gu I don't see a reason to switch off if you're getting the same performance or potentially even better performance from other clients then there's no real incentive to go back there and then there are other Solutions in the works for client diversity I remember highlighting one that Peter from gu shared where essentially you could run uh all these clients um as a big operation and then just like have uh I think it was signing Witnesses and then if some one of them had bug uh then uh it would basic it would basically not sign it in some way I can't remember exactly what it was but it would basically eliminate this issue altogether and I think that also there is something called vouch that attested uses uh that basically eliminates this issue as well but I don't know how that works I don't have a very good

understanding of that but I have seen some people share it with me and wanted me to highlight it so I'm I'm highlighting it there so vouch as in v u c so if you just type vouch attest in in Google it should come up with what it is maybe you can learn more about it but yeah there isn't just like one thing happening with client diversity guys where we're basically getting people to to stop running gu there are multiple things happening with it and there are probably going to be more in the future so so yeah I mean but the easiest short-term solution is just to encourage all these operators to get off gu and to you know to make sure that no client reaches super majority so that we don't have that worst case scenario because yeah that worst case scenario um is is

is really bad as I've described before it's not something we want to uh we want to see happen and I'm glad to see that there's been a lot of positive changes happening around this all right so iglay has updated uh has has put out a major update as they're saying and they said here as we near the main net launch we're shifting gears our next cap rise is delayed by a week ushering in a new phase for LST so yeah I remember telling you guys that the original uh uh uh you know removal of the cap was going to be I believe on like Jan 29th uh now it's going to be on Feb 5th uh and and it's going to go from the Feb 5th to the 9th uh instead of uh Jan 29th here so just a week delay uh and then also the reason why they did

this is because I think that they wanted to align their launch with the new the arrival of the new lsts of of fra eth m e and LS eth um and they're saying here that they're lifting the deposit cap per LST offering you more reaking choices uh previously we had a 200k e cap but now we're embracing an uncapped approach from Feb 5th of Feb 9th so it's going to be quite insane to see like just how quickly this fills fills up because I I mentioned um I think uh a little while ago that I thought that it would f it would fill up but it would be slower than than previously because of the fact that when you think about the available eth that there is or the available kind of like staked eth or no not even just staked eth but just the available eth

that he's willing to risk going into igen layer the pool just gets smaller and smaller each time they uncap it but at the same time I'm curious to see like once they actually launch something and once the protocol is actually live it der risks it a bit and then it we'll see how much more eth goes in right how much more eth gets restak especially with um you know puffer Finance going live soon ether continuing to do their vampire attack swell continuing to do their stuff there I'm just very very curious to see how that all happens and also as I mentioned um me e or or mantle eth or meth I mean I I'm going to avoid saying meth because it's just hilarious but um that has actually grown a lot recently and that isn't part of Igan lay yet and I I mentioned just before there's

300,000 of of uh of uh of me eth tokens so how much of that is going to go into IG right so I I I think that a substantial portion might go into it so then we're going to see that just balloon there so yeah I mean it's going to be crazy I'm going to keep it close eye on it but just wanted to highlight to you guys that yeah the um the the uncapping will be delayed by a week so Feb 5th is the new date to look out for all right so I should have mentioned this earlier because it's got to do with uh cev stuff but you guys know that the cev teams have been putting out their long form thoughts on what they want to get included into the Petra upgrade so they're putting out their longterm long-term thoughts long form thoughts on

each of the eips that are considered for inclusion as part of the Petra upgrade so the latest one to do this is offchain Labs who as you guys know um acquired prabs quite a while ago which develops the prism consensus layer client so this is basically uh prabs talking you can go check this little thread out and and the blog post I'll link it in the YouTube description below but not only did off offchain Labs publish something so did Sigma Prime which you can also uh read about and I'll link those both in the YouTube description below but I'm liking this new trend of devs being uh not so much more active but more like I guess like and and and open but more methodical in their approach to these things where essentially they're saying here's what we want to prioritize here's what we're going to bat for and here's

what we would like to see in the upgrade and explaining their logic around this because there are you know 10 plus teams I think at this point across both the execution layer and the consensus layer um and the thing is is that they're all uh they all have an equal sale at least all should have an equal saying these things because they're developing the clients and they want to prioritize certain things over another based on their own opinions and essentially what we can do is we can we can coate all this stuff all these different opinions and we can arrive on a set of eips that the cevs are all aligned on getting included in in Petra and then of course it would go to the community to basically veto any of them that they think are damaging to the network or shouldn't be included in the network so

it's great to see that there's a lot more kind of openness uh going on here not that it hasn't really been open before it's just we're like formalizing the openness here which is honestly great to see so you can go check both of these out for yourself I'll link them in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so of course you guys are well aware of one of the I guess like popular narratives that that kind of has poisoned crypto Twitter over the last few months especially and a narrative that I really hate and that's The Narrative of that l2's fragment liquidity right now the reason why I hate this narrative is because while it's kind of relatively true on the surface and you make and and and you can make like strict arguments that yeah okay it's true on the surface it misses

a lot of nuance because I remember in 2021 everyone was going on about like the multi-chain thesis and the multi- chain thesis back then was all about multi l1s like having like salana teror Avalanche Phantom all these other l1s and back then no one was talking about liquidity fragmentation and suddenly now that's an issue because instead of multi chains being multi L1 it's more like multi L2 on top of ethereum so it's just like some kind of fud that people have come up with in order to to f fight ethereum now on top of that to do unified liquidity or to do aggregated liquidity on l1s across l1s is basically impossible because the l1s all have their own consensus mechanisms all have their own uh kind of um security

mechanisms and they don't have enshrined Bridges like you have where the bridge actually with l2s the bridge exists on ethereum L1 they all exist there right whereas the um the l1s there's a bridge on ethereum to the L1 but it's an IOU essentially and it's not secured by ethereum once your assets are on the the bridge is secured by ethereum mind you but once your assets are on the other chain that chain now has control over that as part of its consensus right so you can't I mean I'm not going to say you can't do it but it's very complex to do it in a trustless and permissionless way do like uh and and do it by do it I mean like uh cross chain uh liquidity and unify liquidity and atomic composability and stuff like that whereas when it comes to l2s much easier

to do there's multiple Solutions in the works right now such as Shar sequencing and the reason why I'm talking about this today is because polygon actually announced a new uh uh a thing that they're developing which is basically called um aggregation or aggregated liquidity and they're going to be going live on mainnet in in Feb for with this you can see here what this looks like on this uh little picture here basically you have ethereum layer one then you have a unified Bridge contract that has all of the assets in them and then you have this aggregation layer and then you have every polygon cdk chain on top of that and they can all talk to each other and all share liquidity with each other and all communicate with each other through the aggregation layer which obviously is very beneficial uh and it's not just polygon cdk Chains It's also L2

chains that can communicate through K and now they explain how this works in this blog post and in this tweet which I'll link in the YouTube description below um but the cool thing about this as well is that other l2s can actually opt into this it doesn't have to necessarily be built on polygon cdk or be built as a polygon L2 other l2s can opt into this but it depends if they want to or not because they from my understanding they would have to basically run the um run as a zkm or I guess like run with ZK proofs so a ZK rollup and they would have to run the same ZK architecture that polygon runs as part of this aggregation layer in order to make that communication possible but this is something that again is another solution to that I I I I say issue in in air quotes because I

actually don't think fragmented liquidity is that big of an issue especially because I believe these things play L out in power law effects and we've already seen that I mean only a handful of l2s have most of the activity right and one of them is far above all the others and that's arbitrum right now like arbitrum is arbitrum one I should say is very very I mean if it doesn't matter what metric you look at I think arbitr one is is pretty much killing it right now uh and and it's far above but the other ones are still succeeding too but the point is is that it really is a power LW effect here and honestly I I haven't really seen anyone complain like any actual users complain about this it's more so people just trying to FUD ethereum now in saying all of that I'm not saying that we shouldn't

aim to solve this I'm not saying that we shouldn't aim to to to make sure that we can unify the liquidity again because that's obviously a net benefit to everyone I'm just saying that I think that the fragmented liquidity narrative uh is is overplayed and he's fud because I mean the number one reason for me is the fact that I and the reason why I know it's fud from a lot of people is because these same people were not talking about this in the context of a multi-chain world with with multi l1s they're only doing it for l2s because they're trying to FUD ethereum so that's why I say it's fud I'm not saying it's fud just because I you know I'm biased towards ethereum it's it's just extremely hypocritical for them to to to say this and it is the same people I know these people I mean I I I you know

they've been around for as long not maybe maybe some of them for as long as I have but I've seen them on Twitter and everything and they flip-flop just based on the fact that they don't want to admit that ethereum continues to win ethereum l2s have more activity than the l1s uh and ethereum l2s continue to grow at a much uh bigger much faster pace and they are the long term sustainable solution to to scalability they just don't want to admit that so know it's their loss I guess but yeah that's why you see these bad narratives kind of propagate there but anyway you can go check out this thing from polygon I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so last up here just a couple of updates so starnet is ready for blobs so you can see here abdal

shared that this is our first starnet state diff blob sent on girly uh EIP 4844 we are ready so yeah it seems that uh uh Stark is ready for Erp 4844 and you can actually see the transaction on the blob scan.com website yourself if you wanted to I'll link that in the YouTube description below but great to see that one of the top l2s on ethereum is already ready for blobs I remember I did say to you guys that we weren't really sure about the timelines around uh blobs in terms of uh sorry around which l2s would be ready to use blobs uh at specific times but now it's becoming clear and clearer because you've got starnet saying this and also you have op lab saying it as well so you can see here that see here that op Labs successfully activated the ecotone hard Fork on the girly Dev Nets

and today enabled posting of batches of EIP 4844 blob so they're all doing the test Nets and Dev Nets and then they are going to be doing um main net deployments obviously once uh once it gets to to main net uh once 4844 gets to main net and this means that all op stack chains will be able to use blobs as you know as they see fit as they choose and that includes op main Nets it includes um obviously bass and a bunch of other chains out there so just really really great to see that uh these l2s are ready I believe arbitrium is also um going to be ready in time as well so uh I mean yeah it's it's just going to be a a pretty seamless switch over I think once it's live on mayet I think you know it might not be an instant switch over

for these l2s but they're going to switch over pretty quickly uh and then the fees will or should drop and obviously it's still hard to tell exactly how much the fees are going to drop by it's going to be different for all the l2s it's going to be uh it's going to be uh uh while before we actually see the long-term effects because as I've explained before people might try and spam blobs with inscriptions or something just because they want to speculate on it or something like that uh but yeah generally most of the l2s should be ready for uh blobs on mainnet which I guess as I said before should come mid to late March there but yeah that's it for today I think everyone and I made it uh the whole way through without editing the episode today so kudos to me for

that I mean 35 minute episode did well there uh but I think yeah on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone