Ethereum acceleration, Based and native rollups - The Daily Gwei Refuel #818 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of daway refuel where cup latest news e maker system I'm your host Dan the 27th of January 2025 all right everyone let's get into it so there's been a lot of discussion around accelerating ethereum development recently particularly over the last I think couple of weeks and I've talked a lot about this in the context of the ethereum foundation uh and related things to that and if you have noticed with my Twitter name over the last it's had have to be maybe over a year now I've had like eth slac or eth slac in there and that means ethereum acceleration basically like I want the ethereum ecosystem to be pushing forward faster to be shipping faster but there are different parts to the ethereum ecosystem obviously there is the core development at layer one there is all

the layer 2 developments there is the de development infrastructure so on and so forth right so we're just going to focus on the core development I think in today's discussion for the next uh kind of few minutes I just wanted to talk about this because it was prompted by a post that Georgio here from Paradigm put out called ethereum acceleration so this wasn't just Geor it was also Dan Robinson Matt hang and Charlie no from the Paradigm team that put this together but essentially the spirit of the post is that that thing that I just mentioned you know we should be moving faster with ethereum development in particular moving faster at the core protocol now as I said I spoke about this a lot in in the past before and I always go back to the fact that you know we we we always try to move faster in quarter B and I

remember when we were trying to do like smaller faster Forks but the problem becomes that we can't throw any more money at it like throwing more money at it is pretty much diminishing returns at this point throwing more people at it is probably even more diminishing returns at this point because of the fact that there is already a lot of people working on it you know Georgios isn't just putting this out there because he wants to or likes to it's because he actually works on an ethereum client called WTH with a bunch of other people an execution layer client I think they're going to be building a consensus layer client at some point as well I might be confusing uh teams there but I I I heard something about that um but but the the reason it can't move faster or that it hasn't moved faster historically not

that it can't move faster I shouldn't say that it hasn't moved faster historically and think comes down to coordination at the end of the day coordinating a distributed set of uh people from the different client teams as you guys know we have more than 10 client teams across the globe to agree on and then uh code up and then test and then you know audit review and then deliver it on mainnet uh is not easy especially when mayet is securing so much value and only continues to get more important and continues to secure more value both main net directly but also with the layer twos that secure down to to main net themselves so that's that's I think the the top reason why we haven't been able to move faster but in saying that the tides are shifting a

little bit and there does seem to be a lot of appetite to revisit the fast Fork kind of concept that was floated a couple of years ago in particular when it comes to scaling now as I've been talking about recently there seems to be a consensus among core developers of delivering the pias feature or pias EIP in its own separate Fork before delivering the rest of ips that we're going to go into fusaka which is the the tentatively the next ethereum upgrade so maybe we essentially make fusaka just pias and maybe eof because eof as far as I understand it is pretty much ready to go pias is pretty close to ready to go so e eof would be just like a nice little thing that tags along with pias but the fork would basically be for pias

and the reason why we would do this is so that we can deliver this faster and by faster I mean like Q3 or Q4 year because if we don't do that and we do the normal stuff that we've been doing for the last few years we won't be getting faka until probably March next year and that means we won't be getting pust until March next year and that is just way too long especially given that the demand for blobs just keeps going up and for those of you who need a refresh and what pias is essentially it is a order of magnitude increase in Blob scalability due to the fact that we will be uh sharding the blobs now so basically what that means is that not all nodes will have to carry all blobs or serve serve all blobs it will be a subsection of of nodes or I should say

not nodes like validators or or or node operators will be serving those blobs up so essentially we're kind of shutting them out and that gives us an order of magnitude increase in scalability on the blob side of things it doesn't increase the scalability of L1 as you guys know that is to do with things like the gas limit uh which is also in motion I believe uh we're almost at 50% on increasing the gas limit the 36 million there uh but yeah essentially we want to get P di delivered as fast as possible and I do think that if we can coordinate around this as I said it's a coordination thing we can get that delivered in Q3 or Q4 of this year probably late Q3 to be honest it wouldn't be early Q3 because if you think about it if we deliver um Petra in

March which seems like we will like mid-march then they've only got like April May June July to like finalize everything code it all up Speck it all out you know make sure nothing's going to break it's not that long long time so I would say you know if we can do it it would probably be like late Q3 early Q4 sort of thing but this is still very act a very active topic of discussion right now but as I said it is not a money or people issue uh in terms of like throwing more money and people at it it is a coordination issue it is just prioritizing things and I think that as I said the tides are definitely been shifting over the last few weeks especially because we want to prioritize scaling and that is the in my opinion the thing that we should be prioritizing

the other stuff that we're working on at the core protocol is really important but it's not things that I would consider to be like absolutely critical we need to have them right now ethereum is going to suffer some kind of like great loss I think that when it comes to scaling that is I mean it's not critical but it is like extremely important you know I I kind of separate these things out critical to me means that if we don't do it right now something's going to break like I don't think that's the case at all but the thing is is that it's so important uh right now to scale uh blobs because the layer 2s well blobs have been at the limit for quite a while now and the layer two cost will keep going up and we don't want these layer 2 switching off of blobs and using some

other da so it is critically important for us to scale up that but also it's important for us to scale L1 as well scale up the gas limit and and and do different tricks around that not just the gas limit but things like epbs which will hopefully come uh uh next year if we do like that fast Fork that'll be in the next Fork which I believe is called glamsterdam so we we might be getting some EIP shifted around there but yeah from from my perspective we need to do a blob kind of scalability like as soon as possible and if it means kind of pushing out other features to other Forks or other eips to other Forks I'm actually totally in favor of that given that those other features they're they're important but they're not like really really important we need them right now

like something like blobs are or something like just general scalability improvements are I think they're much more important than the other things you know even something like fossil which is the inclusion list implementation to harden ethereum sensorship resistance like that's not critical right now and and a lot of these things fall into each other like fossil falls into epbs and then the scalability from epbs kind of um falls into blobs right uh sorry I guess like falls into the wider scalability road map here but you know fossil is really important but it's not like we need to have this right now or you know some or ethereum is going to kind of like lose to the competition or ethereum is going to lose his competitive Advantage we still have uh relatively good relatively nice censorship resistance on ethereum but fossil uh for it to be like uh sorry

fossil itself like fos it's not fossil as in like a fossil it's f c i l just for the those who may be getting confused here but that to me is not like as important as blob scaling like as much as I want to see that go live if it means that it has to go live next year instead of this year with that fast Fork I'd rather have P Das live this year so we'll see how that goes there but if you want to read George os's blog post here you can I'll link it in the YouTube description below there were a lot of uh discussions around this on Twitter that you probably saw uh and it was good to kind of get across those but that's my general view on all of that all right so speaking of E upgrades Petra is coming around the corner and I

put together a thread that I I think I teased this thread on last on the last refill that I did but I put together this thread all about Petra and it was quite uh quite a a popular Twitter thread here as you can see from all the engagement that it got which is which was pretty much the whole point like I don't care to engagement Farm but I do care to educate and that's what I wanted to do with this tweet thread I wanted to educate as many people as possible in that this upgrade is coming right it's coming in like less than two months it is ethereum's biggest upgrade as measured by eips in included and I wanted to essentially break down each of those eips uh for people to kind of get a feel of what they mean for them as users so just wanted to shout out this

thread you can go check it out I'll link it in the YouTube description below if you haven't seen it yet but I go over pretty much all the eips except four and I go into detail about what what what what features or what I guess like um what what things each of these bring and the four that I didn't go into detail with are basically things that are streamlining and cleaning up things on the network that really don't have any user impact at all at all so yeah you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so there was some very very bullish based and Native rollup news over the weekend so as you guys know or maybe don't know there is a sequencing call that has been running for quite a while now uh and Justin Drake leads this

call I believe and it was it's basically a call where all of the relevant people within the L2 ecosystem can jump on and talk about how to make things better from from an propability perspective from a usability perspective from a standards perspective uh and and and particular sequencing obviously cuz it's called the sequencing call uh uh for all the different altitudes for the different rollups out there now the reason why I wanted to uh bring up I guess like this call in particular this is call number 17 was referencing this Justin Drake tweet here where he basically uh uh put out this this long tweet which I'll link in the YouTube description below talking about how 10 rollup Founders have shared their support for based and or native rollups and he basically put together a bunch of

quotes from each of the uh I guess people or each of the rollup Founders that have um have participated in these calls and why they're excited about uh Native and based Roll-Ups now this goes back to what I was saying before about based and Native rollups don't require I guess like any more money or any more people on them right now what it requires is coordination and the thing is is for them to work at scale for like the based and Native rollup Vision to be a reality at scale it needs Buy in from all of the major players and needs buying from the major l2s because if you have like arbitrum uh uh Bas and op main net being like well we don't want to be a based rollup we don't want to be a native rollup and then just go be in

their own silos but then you have all these other kind of Roll-Ups that are being based rollups you essentially still have that fragmentation there and given that arbitrum one and base are the two biggest rollups here you have massive fragmentation because you essentially uh have I guess you could say the United States and China basically saying well no I don't want to be part of uh the the economic zone of the entire world I only want to be part of the economic zone of myself like being arbitr Min or being bass for example and not kind of uh being part of the Bas and Native rollup Vision here so Justin has been doing actually a lot of hard work on this over many months now and basically aligning these teams around becoming based and Native and basically trying to tell them that

you're better off being based and Native which is I think very true uh just is the foremost expert or one of the foremost experts on this so it was really bullish that he got pretty much buying from all the major players here and that's what you want to see as I said it's a coordination thing if you get buying from the major players you get buying from the smaller players because at the end of the day if you're a smaller player you're not going to want to lock yourself out of the bigger economies just like in the world economy if you're a small country you don't want to lock yourself out of the the uh uh the I guess like World Trade because of the fact that you are a small country to increase your wealth as a nation to increase the quality of living and

standard of living of your population you should trade with other countries this is just like a no-brainer thing that we do in the real world so that's exactly what's Happening Here the rollups need to be able to I guess quote unquote trade with each other they need to be able to interoperate with each other they need to be able to interoperate with L1 ethereum where most of the liquidity is and that's what Bas and Native rollups give you now I've been talking about Bas rollups for quite a while now years at this point I started talking about Native Roll-Ups a little while ago they used to be known as enshrined Roll-Ups but I guess we're calling them rollups now there are some differences between them they're not exactly one to one uh but the reason why I didn't talk about Native rollups more was because of the fact that I knew how

hard it would be to coordinate teams but also to get this actually delivered on Main net like a a proper native rollup it it seemed like it was much further away than what it is even a like a year ago or even six months ago I honestly thought that we wouldn't get native rollups till at least 2028 and people have been asking me for timelines on this stuff because I've tweeted a lot about this I don't have a concrete timeline for anyone on this but from what I know and from the people I've spoken to a lot of them are very confident that we could see this within 12 months and inside of 12 months now it does require a hard Fork to get like true native rollers because you need to basically have a zkm pre-compile in the network so maybe it becomes part of

glamsterdam if faka is the upgrade that goes live in Q3 or Q4 this year glamsterdam might be the upgrade that goes live in late q1 next year maybe it comes with that I I don't know but regardless of that just making these rollups based before they become native is a huge step up anyway because they'll get better interoperability between themselves and L1 ethereum so for everyone wondering you know how do we fix these issues with fragmentation and with the ux issues of l2s on ethereum this is pretty much our best shot at it there are other ways of doing it I've talked about abstraction before that's still all happening at like the wallet layer at the interface layer but this is at the protocol layer this is the Holy Grail based the native is it's it's the Holy Grail of roll and it's the holy gra

honestly of ethereum's modular and rollup Centric Vision if we can deliver this if we can get buying from most of the rollups especially the big ones into becoming based and Native we win like that as simple as that like I am very confident in saying that we win because as I've always said for I mean I've said this since for many years now think pretty much since the start of this show the to me you cannot scale uh to the world on a monolithic chain and I think we see more and more proof of that as time goes on the modular approach is the right approach but we're in this awkward phase where the modular approach is the right one but we've basically fragmented things in the short to medium term because that was just the path that needed to be taken given that that's

what modularity leads to but it doesn't have to be that way if we can coordinate around a shared standard around based on Native rollups if we can get buying from all the major teams we can realize the modu of vision while also keeping everything as you know as nice as possible from a user experience perspective and also keeping the liquidity interoperable with each other and the rollups interoperable with each other so it just all feels like one ethereum chain again that is the Holy Grail here guys like that is what we are working towards as an ecosystem and I actually called this ethereum's Manhattan Project and Justin Drake is out Oppenheimer right we're basically getting together to create this uh uh this massive movement around based and Native rollups in order to both compete

with the other chains out there but also to make the ethereum experience uh you know in a vacuum a lot better than what it is today just imagine a world where you can be on base and you can have your all your assets there and you can uh and that's that's the rollup that you use most of the time but then you're like well I want to go try this app on arbitrum 1 or I want to go check out the new abstract chain uh the abstract L2 which I believe is launching today right or I want to go do something on um on uh on on ZK sync or I want to go do something on starnet whatever it is right imagine that you didn't have to bridge anymore imagine that you didn't have to uh make sure that you had gas or or enough asset for gas on this other

chain imagine not needing to switch chains or switch rpcs in your wallet right or or even for the wallet to do it automatically for you as I said this stuff is abstracted away already in large part at the wallet interface level but imagine it all just feeling like one ethereum one ethereum chain and given that we're got account abstraction is is a huge thing right now uh and we have EIP 7702 going live with Petra it's going to be even more seamless than that because you won't even have to do like approved transactions anymore because another big problem that I think is UND uh is is not spoken about enough is that yes you may be able to hop between chains very easily but if you want to trade the same asset it can be a different asset but even if it's the same asset on a different chain you have

to approve again so you have to approve that token again so imagine just having that all bundled so you're just doing one transaction here for a swap right you don't have to you just do the approv and swap in one transaction you don't have to do two separate transactions yes the fees are cheap but like it still takes longer right we shouldn't have to do that just imagine doing everything as if you were on ethereum L1 that's actually maybe a good analogy you know for those of you who still on ethereum L1 and still uh still use it because you don't care about the fees just imagine that whole experience where you can just do everything on on layer one uh but like across all the different layers out there across all of the different layer twos as based in Native rollups that is the Holy Grail that's what we're working

towards as the ethereum ecosystem and I really do believe we'll deliver this much sooner than people think as I said timelines are a bit up in the air right now we'll we'll see how it goes if I had to give my own estimation of when we would get a ZK EV pre-compile into L1 which is what's required for the native Roll-Ups look I'm going to it's a coin toss whether it gets into glamsterdam if if glamster Dam ends up being the fork that we do next year uh like in in March of next year but yeah I mean I don't I don't really have a good estimate here yet I will keep updating you guys as I have better estimates as time goes on but right now I've just got the information that's available to me but if you want to read all those quotes

that I was talking about that Justin Drake uh posted about I'll link his tweet in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right we have a new e that's been put together by a bunch of ethereum rock stars here that you can check out for yourself but this is basically an EIP all around hardware and bandwidth requirements for full nodes and validators now this has been a hot topic of discussion for a long time now within the ethereum community but it really over the last few months has become a core Focus because I've talked about this a lot in the refi before so I won't rehash all of my points here but and I think I talked about this on the last episode but the main point here is that we need to Define some well understood hardware and bandwidth requirements I think Hardware

is generally defined as like a you know Raspberry Pi or probably above a Raspberry Pi now like a rock 5B or something of an like an Intel knck or something like that something relatively like low spec low power but can still run a full node can still run validators as the minimum Hardware requirements but we've not really defined recommended Hardware requirements uh either uh and we've not really defined bandwidth requirements which is the bigger issue so this that's what this IP aims to address here so you can see here that the proposal Bas the proposed I guess like changes are basically two to four times the previous requirements post merge so essentially you have like a recommended uh uh RAM requirement of 64 gig CPU from 4 to8 core and storage from

1 tby to 4 tab as well as bandwith requirements I believe are 50 megabits per second as recommended 25 25 megabits per second as uh as as um required or minimum I should say sorry uh for uh upload speeds download speeds is not too you know obviously the same download speeds or more but it's really upload speeds that people kind of struggle to get here so yeah we're essentially trying to define a baseline of minimum and recommended uh requirements here so that we can essentially uh uh Define how we're going to scale ethereum going forward because I think a lot of what's held us back from increasing the gas limit and increasing blobs faster is the fact that we haven't defined these these specs yet now that we're basically working on a definition and basically

setting this expectation within the community we can say okay well if you don't have these minimum requirements uh then you you know you're probably not going to be able to run the full node software you're probably not going to be able to be to to validate on the network you're probably not going to be able to propose blocks and then when it comes to the recommended specs I think the the way they're thinking about it is that if you want to locally build your own blocks you're going to need the recommended specs because right now most people don't locally build their blocks they Outsource it the meev Boost but if you do want to locally build your blocks then you should have uh you know some recommended spec which is a lot higher than what it is today but the minimum specs are for people who don't locally

build their blocks which as I said is like 95% of the network it's probably going to remain like that and then once we get epbs in we're pretty much going to like not kill solo block building but make it so that solo block building is a thing of the past you can still do it if you want like I should say epbs and fossil you can still do it if you want but it doesn't it becomes something of a I guess like altruistic Endeavor or hobbyist endeavor I'll still locally build my blocks I I'll have no problem doing that uh but most of the network will not do that so that's the reality that we live in so I'm glad that there's more movement on this I'm glad that the definitions are being made here if you want to join the discussion you can I'll

link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right so speaking of contributing to ethereum uh core development or I guess like uh ethereum core generally something called contributor was uh launched today by the eth panda Ops Team this is a lightweight Beacon node uh companion that allows you to essentially install this I guess sidecar software on your beacon node so if you're a home steaker a solo steaker or even just like someone who runs a full node you can install the sidecar software that essentially it's very Lightweight by the way uh and essentially allows you to anonymously send your data back to the eth panda Ops Team to get a better understanding of for them to get a

better understanding of what the overall Network looks like Network Health know different metrics around that so that can inform decisions uh both at the research level and at the core development level here as well so if you want to check that out for yourself and get it installed it's super easy to get installed guys you can see the instructions here not many instructions right it's basically like downloading the script inspect the contents and then make it executable and then uh and and then away you go essentially start the service and then you're you're ready I'm going to be putting this on my beacon nodes I haven't done it yet but I plan to do that very soon uh because I want to help as much as I can but if you are a home or solo Staker or anyone who runs a full node uh you can do this as well

so uh I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you guys to check out all right so over the weekend there were three uh eth uh I guess like micro strategy clones that were announced now I teased one myself this is called uh e strategy I mean I think two of them have the same name which is confusing but this is the one on Twitter that is the handle eore strategy I got invited added to uh the telegram group for this only like a week ago and I've been talk but I know the people behind it I know them quite well actually I've met them in real life many times um but essentially uh I was made aware of this and as I said it's basically a micro strategy clone but for eth for those of you who

don't know how the micro strategy I guess like uh BTC strategy Works where sailor essentially issues more shares of uh of the of micr strategy stock uses the proceeds to buy BTC and then and then does some kind of like weird thing where he kicks back the yield to to Holders of that of those convertible notes that he issues uh that's essentially what's happening with e strategy and with I guess like all three of them and but for the purposes of this of the video I'm only going to focus on the one that I'm uh not directly involved with but like indirectly involved with with which is the one called eore strategy and they've got a description about what they are and they've got a white paper you can go check out I'll link it in the YouTube description below but essentially what

they're trying to build is a completely open and permissionless defin native version of the Sailor kind of strategy I guess you can just call it the Sailor strategy right um and the way they're doing this obviously is on chain uh they're going to be doing it on ethereum Main net they're going to be uh doing it in a way that extends on what sa has been doing where it'll still run the same Playbook of like issuing these convertible notes buying eth with the with the proceeds here uh and then you know continuously stacking eth but it wants to make that eth productive it doesn't want to just black C the eth it wants to make the tokens that it's issuing productive uh and you can read this in the white paper uh and it also wants to be integrated across defi so that demand for the products that

they're selling goes up for those convertible notes goes up uh and people can earn yield on them or trade them or LP them or do whatever they want with it I think it's really cool that this is being tried here look I don't know if it's going to blow up I don't know if you know what the what the kind of like um uh what what the I guess like chances of it blowing up are I don't think it's going to blow up because from my understanding of how the uh salor strategy works is that the people who eat if something goes wrong are the kind of convertible note holders or the micro strategy kind of stockholders it's not sailor with his BTC uh he wouldn't get liquidated and he wouldn't have like a debt to cover at least if you trust what he's doing is all above board but

the nice thing about this e strategy is that you don't have to trust anyone it's all going to be on chain it's all going to be transparent so it's all fully auditable and it really I guess embodies what we try to build on Within on on ethereum here so I'm super excited about it but as I said you're you're you're probably going to want to read the white paper probably going to want to check out e strategy tweets I have been pretty kind of like vocal with the team about the fact that because these strategies are inherently complex people to understand there should be very easy to understand Graphics that describe to people three main things how is uh how where does the money go that's the the first thing uh I'm just trying to think of what I said to them because there was

three main things that I said and I kind of like simplified it but yeah where does the money go how do people make money and how do people lose money I think if you hit on those three things everything else falls off of those but those three things should be explained in the simplest terms possible because no one's going to I mean people will ape into this but a lot of people especially bigger money probably won't ape into it and stay in it if they don't know how it works if they don't know how it works under the hood if they don't don't have confidence that it's not just going to all all going to blow up so yeah that's that's basically what I um what I want to talk with regards to this eth strategy thing but as I said this is in the context of just this one the ethor

strategy one on Twitter I believe that there is some effort to merge the eth Strat this one and the one that was launched by Joseph dong and Justin Bram uh because they having multiple instantiations of the same thing especially all launching at the same time kind of defeats the purpose I don't know anything about the third one by the way I don't even remember what it's called but the the I think those two that I mentioned are the are the Front Runners right now the ones that people are paying attention to so if they were able to merge in some way and not kind of I guess like try and vampire each other or try to get Market ship from each other that would be a lot more bullish than what we currently have but I'm very bullish on this idea I think it can work I think it can drive uh a

demand for eth uh and I think it can work as a way to show just even to trafy uh more of the power of what defi gives you or what ethereum gives you what permissionless and open L uh gives you uh if you're trying to build these Financial products here all right last up we have a feature called swige that has gone live on infinex here so you guys know that I invested in infinex in their Patron nft sale which was open to everyone uh hopefully you guys got a few patrons there if you're bullish on infinex but what swige is is essentially a layer of abstraction above chains for swapping and bridging so they say here you can swap and bridge over 1,000 supported assets across networks without gas and

with just a few clicks in app this launch Al includes several key improvements which you can check out in uh in this thread here but the uh the improvements are no fees only pay the network gas costs uh priority mode improved of execution in busy periods uh this applies to salana and auto slippage improved settings to reduce slipping um uh related issues faster quotes on your trades asset selection so you can there's more assets available here um and switch is as they say here still in beta so they recommend trades of less than 100 ,000 at a time uh I was talking about this before when I was talking about like layer to introp and Native and based Roll-Ups and how I said that these layers that sit on top of all the

chains are still critically important to this Vision where essentially it's like an upstream thing where if we have basally native rollups and they're all interoperable with each other and interop is being done at the kind of protocol layout then all of everything above it inherits that and including something like infinex which basically inherits the the fact that okay well now that we now we don't have to worry too much about bridging and now don't we have to worry about assets being um fragmented they will have to worry about that when they're going across l1s of course but if we're talking about like ethereum L1 and the l2s above it and they're all based in Native it becomes a lot more seamless there for the infinex of the world for like the wallets of the world uh like rabie for example uh and so on and so forth so yeah anyway if you

haven't checked out swits yet you can I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so but I think that's going to be it for today's episode so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to sub to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subcribe to news L join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Wednesday thanks everyone