EigenLayer whitepaper, Verkle tree update and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #543 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we cup the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is honor and today's the 21st of February 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so we have an update here from a core developer who works at nevermind uh that the Netherland client is now fully synced with the Beverly Hills vertical trees test net so Beverly Hills now becomes the first multi-client vehicle tree test net with Geth and nevermind nodes in consensus also never mind is running with the new experimental flat DB layout now those of you who are remember I guess like a few months ago maybe I was talking about vertical trees and about how that's going to be the next thing especially after parodang sharding goes live that's going to be a

major upgrade for ethereum it's been on the ethereum roadmap for quite a while now it's something that a lot of people are very excited about um and the main reason well I guess there's like a few reasons but it definitely helps with uh with scalability that's that's that's uh that's that's the main reason I think uh because it will allow us to potentially uh increase the block size as well as have um as well as uh I guess like um add features that work with like clients as well uh which is obviously something that people consider the Holy Grail of running uh nodes uh being able to run them as a light client so that's very very cool uh but yeah now that we have this progress that there is a multi-client kind of devnet or a test that I should say up and running here

between Geth and nethermine now this sort of stuff is definitely I guess you know I wouldn't be surprised if it goes live maybe late next year early 2025 it could happen sooner than that I think Erp 4844 if it happens this year it'll probably happen by the end of the year maybe November is probably the latest that we could probably do it um and then uh in terms of vertical trees yeah it just it just depends right because we things can kind of like get delayed per or get kind of removed from one upgrade and go to the next like we saw with 4844 not being included with Shanghai a bunch of other upgrades won't include all erps I should say weren't included with Shanghai and have been pushed out to uh to dencoon which is the um the upgrade that hopefully 4844 on those upgrades will be in but generally

yeah dates are kind of very hard to give for these out more out there things but that doesn't stop the core developers from working on it of course and that's what we're seeing here which is really really awesome so if you want to give it a try yourself and join the testing that you can there's a GitHub repository there that you can go check out but I just figured this was worth highlighting because it is a major upgrade coming to the ethereum network uh hopefully in the next one to two years uh even though it's so far away it's great to see that the core developers are working on it uh even today all right so speaking of 4844 Jessica from the uh he works as a core developer as part of the Nimbus team I believe yeah I think it's I think it's a nimbus

team uh shared something about how they that uh the people working on Erp 4844 have been able to uh put forward a proposal for or not a proposal I guess like a pull request for a significant improvement over the status quo of 4844 so far so simulations of this Improvement shot 50 reduction in Block dissemination latency which is a rare feat and then uh just set continues uh and explains how this works and links to a GitHub uh uh kind of comment thread here that you can go check out as well or pull requests I should say that you can go check out so this is super cool because the fact is as I mentioned before 4844 is hopefully going into the upgrade after Shanghai it's definitely something that is still changing like

the spec hasn't been frozen or anything like that there are devnets and there are test Nets plans and things like that and a lot of people are working on it but there are still significant improvements that are being discovered and being made here now from my reading of this obviously I'm not the most technical person in the world but from my reading of this uh block dissemination latency to me just just kind of um looking at it and doing a high level overview here it means that uh blocks can move around the network a lot faster so basically uh there is a so yeah I don't know what block dissemination latency means on the technical side of things I definitely uh

I'm not technical enough to understand that uh but the fact that there's a 50 reduction in this lazy I mean I know what latency means of course but I don't want to give the wrong information so I'm not even going to try and guess what this is but the fact that there has been a 50 reduction and we're you know we're pretty far along with 4844 so far is a huge feat it just shows that there are still massive slash major I guess improvements that can come to 4844 and we'll be coming uh before it goes live on on the network and uh that might push it out to next year maybe you know who knows right the thing with these upgrades is that yet we have a you know we want to get them done as soon as possible but then what ends up happening

is that people find better ways of doing things this is actually what happened with ethereum improve of stake a lot of the time people found better and better ways of doing things and they knew that once it was in the on the live Network it'd be very hard to change it when it was live so they would rather get the changes in before it went live and that happened quite a few times so the same thing happens with all upgrades but obviously the more important they are the more important it is to keep to test that to make sure it's all you know make sure it works as advertised sort of thing uh which is exactly what uh what what erp1559 went through right I mean that was a change to the way the ethereum fee Market worked that was obviously affecting every single user on

the network it's affecting a big part of the network it had to be right that's why it took two and a half years plus for it to come to mainnet because we need to make sure that everything was sound the mechanism was sound and it would work and obviously it's worked wonders and we all get a lot of value out of it same is true for things with ARP 4844 there's a lot of extensive testing being done on this because even I mean even if something goes wrong like we can obviously fix it but the ideal case is that nothing goes wrong I mean that's always the ideal case with with these things and it's funny like how many months on are we from the merge right now like five five months or something from the merge September October November December January yeah yeah five five-ish months on and just

over five months there since the merge and there hasn't been any issues with that which is just huge it's still a testament to all the work that went into that but the same I guess he's true for every every upgrade we want to make sure that there are we're not introducing any obviously bugs any critical issues or anything like that and we want to make sure that we deliver the best product possible and by way I mean the core devs obviously not me I'm not there developing this stuff or researching this stuff uh but yeah great to see this and and thanks to Jessica for sharing this if you want to dive into more about how this works there is a thread which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right Yi Zhang here from the scroll team put out a blog post where they

captioned it on Twitter by saying zkevm has arguably become the gold standard technology for scaling ethereum in this article I want to share some of the lessons we have learned while building the zkvm and how I've been thinking about different trade-offs along the way the Wii obviously being scroll here now I highly recommend giving this post a read or you can read the Twitter thread here but the overarching philosophy that Scrolls seems to be going with and I think I mentioned this maybe a couple months ago was that they're trying to be a community first uh you know project essentially now they distinctly call out one aspect of that and that's the aspect of building everything out in the open from day one so they say that you know sometimes there'll be teams that build everything in-house you won't know what they're building you won't be able to

see it it's not open source it's not public and then once it's ready to go live they'll put it publicly open source it and there's nothing wrong with that approach right that's that's totally fine um and I don't think uh yay or the scroll team is trying to say that there's anything wrong with that but they're taking a different approach a radically different approach where they actually want to mirror what ethereum is doing which is essentially developing out in the open from the get-go like none of this private development and then open source things no everything's open source from day one everything's developed out in the open from day one all the research and development is done out in the open which I think is a really cool way of doing things in saying that and saying that there are obviously trade-offs yeah trade-offs being that you may end up with too many

cooks in the kitchen so to speak or in reality it may just be the the scroll team doing a lot of the work for a couple years and then more more people coming to the ecosystem and are able to to contribute which is totally fine that's what happened with ethereum uh so yeah there are there are trade-offs here and there for these sorts of things but still I think it's a really cool approach here and that really does speak to being Community First because you can say your community first but if you're developing everything privately and the community only gets to see it once you're ready to share it and put and put it live and everything well are you really Community First right that's debatable so I think Scrolls approach here is really great now that's not the only thing that yay says in this uh in

this post and in this thread here there's a bunch of other things that uh that fall off of that but that basically is the overarching theme which I think is really really cool now disclosure I'm an investor in scroll uh as you guys know um but yeah I'm super excited about them I'm excited about their zkvm excited about their development philosophy excited about the fact that they really care about the the community here they are more on the quiet side of things they haven't done as much marketing I guess as the other teams like ZK sync and polygon obviously do a lot of marketing around their zkvm um but scroll hasn't really and I think that's fine because honestly like I actually prefer teams doing marketing when they're either close to launch or have something live um because I mean unless you're an already established team it's kind of it

burns people out if you keep talking about it right um and it sets people up for disappointment if you over promise and then under the liver so I do like the approach of you know still do marketing from time to time still do community awareness and things like that but don't go you know really really hard unless it's a few weeks out or a few maybe a couple months out from launch and then once you've launched you obviously want to do as much marketing as possible to get as much attention as possible but it's a process these things aren't something that is kind of flash in the pan these these platforms they're definitely a process it's definitely something that happens over longer periods of time we've seen that with arbitrary and optimism I mean arbitrim launched in August of 2021 and I'm actually going to talk about their

growth in a little bit but they launched uh uh back then optimism launched I guess technically in July but that was it was permission so they launched a bit later than that but still it's been you know 12 to 18 months I guess or will be 12 to 18 months soon since they have launched been live growing and they you know they they do their own forms of marketing they have their own way of doing things but it is a marathon not a Sprint I think is my overall point there but uh but anyway you can go read yay's uh article and tweet thread I'll link them both in the YouTube description below all right so eigenlayer has released the first public version of their white paper so it's on the Forum and at the website here of course I'll link it in

the YouTube description for you guys to check out they're also going to be doing a Twitter spaces on the 22nd of February at 5 PM UTC which is 9 A.M Pacific time here and you can set a reminder for yourself if you find the link in the YouTube description uh but this is really cool I mean I haven't gone through it just yet uh uh it is quite dense I mean it's 19 Pages it's not the longest white paper ever but it is it is about 19 Pages Worth or not no not even 19 pages I guess like uh taking away the references and everything it's about 15 pages there of um of things and there's an appendix obviously but yeah about 15 pages worth of stuff to read through here about eigen Lane I've talked about eigenlayer a bunch on the refill I mean

for a very long time now so obviously I don't need to go through it again but the white paper is there for you to go check out now John here had a really great uh uh expert well highlighted a really great part of the white paper here which was section 4.4 which says eigenlayer can incentivize ethereum Staker decentralization and then in these paragraphs I'm not going to read them out they go on to describe how this would happen so essentially how this would happen is that Services could use eigenlayer and then say okay well we only want uh nodes as part of our Network as part of our service we only want re-stake nodes that are not part of the big staking pool so they can basically say we don't want coinbase validators we don't want binance

validators and these are ethereum validators we don't want Lido validators right we want solo validators and we want rocker pool validators for example now obviously solo validators is a harder thing to identify because I mean unless you really dig deep it's it's it's it's that difficult to identify there but rockapool is very easy you can see all the mini pools right you can see all the node operators so it's very easy to to identify those and then what that does is it basically allows that service to inherit a lot of ethereum's existing decentralization through that restaking mechanism and only some subscribing to the validators that they actually want to be validating on their Network which is funny because this would actually as the title suggests incentivize ethereum

stake a decentralization because let's say a service sets up uh uh sets up something and needs validators and that's okay well we're only taking validators from uh restate validators from the uh from rocketpool and then they're paying out all these rewards and people are making all this money while people on centralized exchanges and on coinbase or binance or whatever they're going to be like wait a sec why am I sticking with coinbase on finance when I can't restake my eighth with these Services when they're paying out more I'm gonna take my eat from here from coinbase or binance or whatever and I'm going to put it in rockapool so that's how it you know obviously incentivizes the the distribution of stake and the decentralization of stake which is something I hadn't thought of before but it's really cool I mean there's a lot of implications there of these things and

it definitely depends on how you think of things as well because a lot of the people I imagine staking on coinbase and binance are probably the the noobs so to speak right for lack of a better term and they're probably not going to be too aware of eigenlayer but there are a lot of people staking with lato for example which I would consider to be not as Noob as the centralized exchange takers and they may be paying attention they may see that like okay I'm Gonna Leave Lido and I'm gonna go stake with rockapool because I'll be then I'll be able to restake with uh with an eigenlayer service here so that's really really cool and I actually hope that these um that these services do this I think it's uh I think it's great for not only their own project but obviously great for

ethereum because at the end of the day they're getting restaked validators which means that the more value they drive to ethereum the more value is securing their own chain uh and the more decentralized their own chain or service I should say uh could become which I think is very very cool but yeah something to to digest to sit on to think a lot about but definitely something that uh I I think is going to turn a lot of heads especially when this stuff goes live I mean eigenlay has already gotten a lot of attention it's gotten a lot of hype uh since I first spoke about it many months ago it's it's definitely one of the most hyped up projects these days but I think it's for good reason honestly I really do think that eigenlayer can it's not yet because it's not live or anything like that but

it can potentially be a zero to one Innovation for the ethereum ecosystem I've talked about these before how I don't see that many zero to one Innovations anymore uh whether that be the protocol level the app level doesn't matter what it is I just don't see many zero to ones and that's just by their nature there's not going to be many zero to ones but when I do see them I get very excited about them or when I do see the potential for something to turn into a zero to one Innovation I get very excited about it and as time has gone on I've gotten more and more excited about eigenlayer and the possibilities for both what eigenlayer can offer as part of the services but also being able to help the ethereum ecosystem from a decentralization perspective and also from a Distributing stake perspective

which obviously as we all know the state could be better distributed um than it currently is and obviously post withdrawals we're going to see what happens there as well uh but that all excites me and that all points to eigenlayer having a relatively good chance that being another zero to one innovation in the ethereum ecosystem which obviously makes me the most excited but anyway as I said we'll link the white paper in the YouTube description below for you to go check out all right so I did mention before that I was going to talk about arbitrim's uh growth and and just layer twos in general so Hunter here from the arbitrim team highlighted that uh arbitrim daily transaction chart has been mooning recently it's almost at a million transactions uh per day now and as you

can see the trend is up it's not just a spike I mean it is a pretty big spike recently but it has been trending up over time here now I've spoken about this a bunch before about how layer twos are definitely growing a lot and and things have definitely spiked up a lot here uh and I don't know what's driving this I haven't actually Dug Dug into it myself but I think just generally these layer 2 whether they be arbitrum or optimism or or the other generalized ones I mean l2b shows which ones are the biggest TR really I mean in terms of generalized platforms it's just arbitrary and optimism right now but it really speaks to the fact that obviously still the bear Market obviously people are getting a lot of value out of these sorts of stuff on arbitrim there's no liquidity mining

because there's no RB token uh there is liquidity money for for various projects but there's no liquidity mining where arbitrim pays out uh RB tokens for example to to the projects or anything like that there is probably airdrop farming but honestly I don't think it would account for something like this um and obviously there will be times where projects do their own kind of thing that incentivizes transaction usage the clearest example of this actually was optimism recently where if I can bring up the optimism block Explorer here uh yeah I can actually I bring up the optimism block Explorer you can actually see their chart on The Daily transactions it spiked up a lot right and it was going quite steadily and then it came back down and it's kind of been going going sideways now this Spike I think was due to the optimism quests

thing that they were doing and then after that was finished it kind of spiked down from there and then they did their airdrop 2 which actually didn't give any tokens to people that had been um doing the optimism quests which I think disappointed some people but there was never any indication that that was going to be the case so I guess uh that depends what your thoughts are there but they've remained steady and they're at about 200 or just you know just below 200 000 transactions uh per day now not all transactions are created equal as well it just depends how it's counted for both from the data source point of view but also from the chain point of view so don't be comparing this to arbitrary and be like okay well arbitrim is doing five times as many transactions per day as optimism that's not exactly

how it works and it depends on what you define as a transaction what you allowed to be a transaction it's kind of like what happens with Solana where they say they have all these TPS but the majority of it is just validated messages that are being passed around uh which aren't counted in any other blockchain as as transactions so I think there is something similar in Arboretum I'm not sure how much it accounts for the activity here and I'm not even sure if etherscan or RB scan I should say filters for this so don't don't quote me on that but I know that there is differences there so don't look at these as just raw numbers and and and draw any conclusions from it uh my main point was just to show you that things can change quite quickly when uh people are either incentivized or they think that they're

incentivized to do something and what we want to see and what I've been going on about for for many many uh uh I guess like years at this point what we always want to see is organ organic sustainable growth and I think optimism and ecosystem has been organically and sustainably growing just fine uh same with arbitrim evidently and I think it's not just on the transactions chart you can see this you can see this from the developer activity from the apps that are on there from the users that are onboarding from the exchanges are supporting them like for example coinbase supporting arbitrim right uh the other day and they're obviously supporting optimism as well Finance supporting them like that that all just it adds up right it all accumulates and makes that these things grow and allows them to to grow their communities as well now of course tokens play a part

two I mean optimism has a token right now um and arbitrim I mean people are speculating that they're going to have a token of course um but we you know we don't know if they will or won't at this stage but I think that regardless of that over the longer periods of time you can still see which things have organic growth and which things don't and which things have sustainable growth as well and which things don't especially over Market Cycles because right now as a bear Market still guys like I don't it doesn't really mean anything to me that some things have pumped and you know Ethan btca have gone up a little bit that's that's not a bull market that's like still a bear Market it's just things going up because they got so brutalized last year a full-blown bull market is things that new all-time highs

things just going crazy every day uh you know all these on-chain metrics going ballistic all these new users flooding in the coinbase app being number one on the app store or you know the top 10 on the App Store those are the kind of bull market things that you would see uh we're not we're not near that we're not we're not even close to that yet I I think and I've said multiple times on the refill that I will tell you guys when I feel like we were we were close to starting a new ball cycle but right now we're just in as I mentioned the other day what I think is an accumulation range people who are around right now are either Traders or they're long-term investors just buying and the Traders are the ones that are causing this this ranging to happen because

they'll be like okay well I'm going along here and then 50 later on eth I'll just sell they're back okay I'm taking profits yeah they'll just scalp uh and that's totally fine that's what Traders do but long-term investors uh are buying they're DC staying in and then eventually it hits a point where the price uh goes up and then it's reflexive from there the price keeps going up and people get uh fomo and they're buying in all the Bears are sidelined like oh my God I need to buy in now and I mean just generally that can that's why we see so much volatility as well but anyway that's that's enough on the markets there I just wanted to highlight that arbitrim has been seeing some great growth recently uh but always good to contextualize that growth and understand that not all growth are created equal so

not all growth is created equal but anyway I'll link this in the YouTube description for you to see the chart for yourself uh last thing here on arbitrim Stephen goldfed are one of the co-founders of Chan Labs the developers behind arbitrim put out a tweet where he said evm Plus on arbitrine will be a game changer opening up the evm to millions of new developers and industries for the first time ever rust C and C plus plus devs will be able to access the biggest FIFA ecosystem in crypto and I can't wait to see what they build now this was what I talked about the other day which was called stylus and I think they're calling it evm plus now because I guess it's a it's a more catchy name than Style Wireless yacht but it's basically the ability for people to develop uh smart contracts for

the evm uh in Ross C plus plus and other languages uh so not solidity which obviously opens up smart contract programming to so many more developers out there now obviously arbitrary isn't the first to do this there are other blockchains out there that have been uh adopting their own language and doing their own thing that's not solidity but they're really cool and Innovative and important thing here is that this is being done on the evm right this is not being done as part of a new virtual machine a new stack it's being done as part of the evm and the evm is an environment that a lot of developers are already familiar with so the fact that they're already familiar with that is really cool and already has like all the tooling developer Network effects and and liquidity and all that good stuff there it just means that developers can

come in but okay well I don't want to learn solidity uh but I know rust or I know C plus plus and I'm going to develop on the on arbitrim on the evm and I'm going to build my app there because I can do it using these languages and there are other there are other projects focusing on this sort of stuff as well I did talk about how uh stockware has been focusing on being out are people being able to migrate their solidity contracts to Cairo contracts or transpile them to Cairo but also uh starkware being able to to have Cairo as the native language of of Stark net so there are multiple attempts happening across the um the Spectrum here uh and all the layout ecosystems I think are making their own play uh but yeah just something very exciting I think out of

the arbitrim ecosystem and I can't wait to see the first apps go live uh if they aren't live already in these languages all right last up here we have a big announcement out of the git coin passport ecosystem so after months of hard work uh they said yeah we're thrilled to announce the launch of the gitcoin passport scorer API which makes it 10 times easier than before to quote passport gay end quote your web free project so the API stuff is definitely uh obviously only relevant to developers here but what developers will be able to do is basically use git coin passport which is a simple defense Tool uh to uh to basically prove that whoever's interacting with their apps aren't trying to uh to assemble the the app or are you know potentially a uh not a real

human so it's such as a bot or something like that and and and and with the launch of this um this kind of like tool today with this score API it's as I said gotten much easier to integrate this into an app now so yeah if you're a developer this is definitely something you may be interested in but this speaks to I guess like The Wider Trend that we're seeing lately around identity and decentralized identity and and being able to verify people who they are say that our own chain being able to filter out the Bots being able to filter out the the Sybil uh the the the the the siblings so to speak or all the cyblers uh so to speak here and I have been talking about another project uh that I came across the other day or a few weeks ago called the ethereum attestation

service which I actually got a nice overview of a I went on a call with the um with some of the team there and I got an overview of what they're doing I think it's really really cool and I'll be talking more about it as time goes on but they're not the only ones doing it there's been other other attempts over the years like proof of humanity which was integrated into Bitcoin there's uh that dystopian one that people talk about world queen uh there is uh sign in with ethereum uh and and that whole effort as well so there are multiple efforts on multiple fronts yeah ens I guess is an effort too yeah um and there's there's plenty more out there but I think that we're finally getting to a point especially with some of these uh more mature Services of where we kind of are getting a good idea

of how to do this civil resistance and how to do on-chain identity uh in in a privacy preserving way as well and there's of course mode which I've talked about a lot before they give ZK badges to people and people can prove that they've done something on chain without having to reveal where they've done it so for example you can prove that you have X amount of tokens on your cold storage address without having to reveal that you uh without having to reveal that address and that's cryptographically proven you just get an ftzk badge for that which I obviously think is really cool but uh but yeah as I said this one out of good coin passport is for developers so if you're a developer you should definitely go check this out if you haven't yet I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right I've got a couple minutes here

just forgot to mention this yesterday I was talking about East Denver and about how next week there won't be any refuels but uh I I can't remember if I mentioned this exactly yesterday but uh if you're going to East Denver please just uh kind of find me and say say hey it's going to be very hard for me to organize anything with people my schedules already pretty much flat out I've already kind of uh filled it up with events and things like that so if you want to catch shop will have a chat will just meet me I'm in real life just find me at a conference or a side event or of course the daily way meet up if you were lucky enough to get a ticket to that I'll obviously be there I'll be at the bank list Meetup as well I'm gonna be at shelling Point

um I think I'm gonna be at the wallet day as well uh I'm gonna be at the Denver main event too I'm going to be there from um technically I I arrive on the Monday but I'm gonna be jet lag this house so I'm probably not gonna do anything on the Monday but the Tuesday onwards I'm going to be around uh basically in Denver doing things catching up with with uh with different people with with friends and stuff like that at the more public events so yeah if you do see me I'll I'll be wearing my hat I'll be easy to spot you guys know what I look like I do came up and say hello because I mean the main reason I go to these conferences is to meet my friends meet people that listen to the show meet the community just get amongst the ethereum

culture uh so yeah don't be shy come up and say hi I didn't mean to rhyme there uh but yeah anyway on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter to join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone