Ethereum Client Diversity, OFAC compliance down - The Daily Gwei Refuel #530 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel wary cup latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Dan this is honor and today's the 27th of January 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so apologies everyone for being absent the last two days I did announce in the Discord Channel that I wasn't going to do a Refuel on uh Wednesday and then I ended up I didn't end up doing one yesterday and I said it would be the rest of the week where I didn't do one but I'm doing one today right on Friday uh and the reason why I was absent was a couple of days ago unfortunately my grandmother passed away and now this wasn't a shock or anything like that she'd been sick for quite a while um we you know we knew it was coming but

obviously still a shock to the family it's still something that myself and the rest of my family are going to have to deal with and and go through but the thing that I kind of uh do whenever something like this happens I mean I've lost the I lost another grandparent a little while ago now but what I like to do is just keep the routine that I have rather than disrupting my whole life and trying to work around it and trying to uh kind of I guess like grieve in different ways and I mean everyone Grieves their own way right so for me uh I for me I mean the main thing I do and one of the things that I get the most enjoyment out of as part of my routine is doing the refuel so I just have to take the last two days off because

um you know obviously it was very fresh uh but I'll be doing the refuel just normally going forward uh anyway I don't think uh taking it I think any more days off is going to help or anything like that and it's actually better for me to do the refuels because I feel like that helps me more but uh yeah that's the reason I have been uh I've sent the last uh two days then but with that I think we can leave it at that for now I don't want to go into too many details of course but let's move on to the news from the last two to three days a bunch to get through here A bunch of exciting stuff actually so let's kick it off with a massive uh I guess like Improvement here to nethermine so Thomas from the Netherland team announced uh there are

massive improvements to the never mind uh a client in version 1.6.1 which fixes a lot of the memory usage issues and improves attestation performance too so if you were trying to run Wonder we're running never mind if we're having issues with it you know obviously highly recommend upgrading to version 1.16.1 to see if that fixes your issues uh I am did end up having running into issues and never mind myself particularly around memory usage so I'm definitely going to going to be giving this a go I'm running Geth on one of my setup setups with the rocketpool odown node um and my solo staking is running nevermind but I as I said I did have a I did run into issues there a little bit uh earlier on not not so much these days but still the fact that those issues

existed you know now there's this there's these improvements out I'm definitely going to upgrade there but I should change my Odell to never mind as well in the interest of client diversity but I have it as Geth because I wanted my Odell node to be as reliable as possible uh given that it is obviously a big responsibility to be an Odell member and I didn't want my um I guess my node going offline for whatever reason uh and I do have fallback clients installed as well just in case but yeah that's that there now speaking of client diversity I hadn't actually noticed this but it's gotten much much much better on the execution layer side thanks a lot in large part due to never mind of course but also Aragon and Basu so on the ethernodes.org website you can see that geff is under 70 market share this is

pretty crazy coming down from I think it was 90 just the six to 12 months ago uh and never mind is at 13 to Aragon is at 11.8 percent uh and Basu at 6.2 percent now this is from the ethernets.org website as I said but there's also the uh client diversity.org website which has similar numbers uh you can see here on the right on the execution layer side get this 67 never mind is 15.2 percent Aragon 10.7 and Basu 6.7 now this is looking real healthy guys honestly I mean I never expect these things to be equal I mean you can see on the left hand side on the consensus layout side of things they're not equal either the distribution is better there because uh not none of them are over 40 percent uh but I think we're getting much better on

the execution side of things and this is basically due to the fact that these other clients you know these other the clients other than Geth are getting a lot better people are having an easier time running it they're becoming less memory intensive uh with updates like I just spoke about so that's obviously very very good for for client diversity and as I said before if we get if we could get Geth to just below that 66 67 majority threshold that would already be a big step in the right direction and we're pretty much tethering on that now obviously and ideally we would love Geth or any one execution layer client not to exceed 50 of market share here but uh just that super majority alone at 67 accounts for or 66 counts for a lot I believe uh and I I I'm really glad that

between nevermind Aragon and Basu there's actually not much of a difference in terms of percentage on the consensus layer side of things we take the top four there isn't that much of a difference but I guess like Nimbus is lagging a little bit behind obviously prism and Lighthouse are leading there but if we can get to a point where the execution layer side looks like the consensus layer side that would be ideal you know get under 40 never mind that what it could be a 35 percent and ish and then obviously Eragon basically sharing in the rest of the market share there would be absolutely awesome to see now there are other execution layer clients uh that are being developed still like the one from uh Paradigm called wrath which is built in Rust I think there's one other one that I may be missing right now just it's got it

labeled as as others yeah it doesn't actually have what clients they are oh there are other clients here but uh yeah cooler as well I mean they're not really they're kind of rounding areas because only like a few people are running them and I'm gonna assume that's that's the Debs but I think if they gain market share even better right like it's it's awesome having four you can have this layer and execution layer clients which is in of itself a massive feat but if we can have like five on each side or even six on each side that have a decent market share that would be phenomenal I mean we don't need it it's a nice to have I think four on each side is actually more than enough uh and and equally distribute or not equally distributed but like fairly distributed is more than enough for client diversity

but we shouldn't stop there I think in the ethereum ecosystem our superpower is the fact that we don't just settle for uh you know more than enough we want to keep going we want to keep making things as good as they can be across pretty much every uh I guess vertical within the ethereum ecosystem which is awesome to see but yeah just something I wanted to highlight because I just noticed it today actually that the execution layer client diversity had gotten a lot better if you're still on Geth you want to do your part try out never mind it's it seems to be more stable and I've heard from other people that it is actually more stable now so if you've been having issues with it Now's the Time to give it another go all right so Lucas here uh has gotten a withdrawals devnet up and running with

15 techu nodes ready to rock so you can see here that the Techno nodes are all running uh in Docker here and this is part of the new withdrawals devnet uh that's that's up and running here and you know withdrawals I mean there hasn't been any major updates on the withdrawals front it's just coming along we expect it to be late March early April there's nothing changed there as I've said before we expect the test nets all the public test Nets to go through the withdrawal upgrade by the end of February not too long now you know a month or even less than a month away now and then we can expect late March to be the main net or early April to be the main deployment and then we can stop with this fight around withdrawals man it's getting bad out there the amount of low information uh people

uh in this industry uh is is crazy I mean it's always been crazy to me the the how many how much information gets kind of lost and how much bad information uh sorry how much of the good information gets lost and how much bad information just kind of Rises to the top somehow but I'm just seeing it more and more people saying you know everyone's going to dump their eth at the time when withdrawals are enabled it's going to lead to a massive sell-off blah blah and I've explained my reasoning before a couple weeks ago on the refill about why I don't think that's the case and I think you know out of all of that I've thought about it a lot the strongest reasoning that I can come up with about that is the fact that most of the eat that's currently staked is staked through lsds right now so if

someone really wanted to exit if they were desperate to exit right they would exit they would just sell to on the secondary market and they'd be out right obviously it doesn't withdraw either from the beacon chain um and you're not unstaking you're just selling your steak but yeah if anyone's like super desperate to sell and for quite a while if you've been like that you have had the option to do so right um and solar stakers are the ones that don't have lsds I mean 70 of the actual each staked are lsds I I actually saw this stat the other uh today or yesterday which means 30 aren't lsds and I think the majority of that would be solo stickers now there's solar stickers that I mean if you started staking from the beginning it was 500 I think uh when the beacon chain uh deposit contract launched and

would you think that you'd wait all this time and unlock your eth now if you're a solo Staker uh your actual 32 East not the rewards uh the 32 and sell now I just don't see the happening for the majority I mean of course there's going to be some but I just don't see that happening so when you take that all that into account just that point not even everything else that I've talked about before on the refill just that point yeah I don't see it and it's obviously people just trying to push a narrative just trying to I don't know either they've got a short on eth or they're hoping for a better entry price as I've said plenty of times before on the refuel uh there aren't any real actual Bears they're just bulls that want a better entry price right so yeah I've

just been ignoring that mostly anyway but I'm seeing it pop up more and more so it becomes harder to ignore over time uh but yeah just not something that I think is based on any real Merit there but yeah definitely looking forward to withdrawals uh obviously coming soon all right so speaking of test Nets Barnabas here announced that the ethereum foundation devops his largest test net in terms of validate account has launched successfully uh yesterday so the aim was to have a network run at mainnet validator set in order to test BLS key changes and huge thanks to the beacon chain guys for getting an Explorer up and running so you can see here that the active validators was over 600 000. which is actually more than what mainnet uh uh kind of like ethereum has as validated

CR and obviously if they are trying to test their BRC BLS key changes for the BLS signatures this should be a good way to do it there's a little thread here about their initial testing you can see they had a very Rocky start due to resources exhaustion uh their first attempt had too few nodes second attempt had two little CPU Ram the third attempt was to scale the machines up a bit and now it seems a lot healthier and more stable pictures show the CPU slash Ram utilization of 24 hours as you can see here there's two separate images um and then they just get a bit more information about what happened in withdrawal credentials but very cool to see this very cool to see this testing going on on this stuff as I've said before all these things that are inside ethereum right now are the core protocol

layer and especially with proof of stake in the consensus layer side of things they are subject to change like they're not set in stone in ethereum we don't really set anything in stone we are open to changing things as long as obviously the benefit is there to doing so but as I've said plenty of times before uh you know there as time goes on uh this the changes become harder and harder to do it becomes slower and slower to do it and you need to convince more people that it's actually worth the change right because the changes can be quite large but uh yeah yeah anyway cool to see this testing here just wanted to highlight it for you guys all right so something very very positive that I noticed today was that the quote-unquote uh ofak compliant blocks uh as tracked by mevwatch.info uh

are now under 60 thanks to the in large part due to the newer non-censoring relayers such as agnostic Boost from gnosis and the ultrasound money relay from the ultrasound Money Team and they quickly gained market share with agnostic boost at 7.45 market share of Mev boosted blocks and ultrasound money at at um uh 6.77 and this is the lowest it's been since October 2022 and this is only tracking from the merge so the merge was December 15th and this was late October so the merge happened after the ofak sanctions obviously so we we're actually getting to the point where we're gonna go lower than what it was uh you know a girl go to an all-time low post merch obviously before the merge uh it was

even lower than this and before the sanctions it was obviously you know even on this basically zero percent but as I said here you know ethereum is winning the fight against censorship ethereum is the only chain tackling these issues their only chain that's been targeted in such a way by the most powerful nation-state in the world right the United States government with with the opposite office of foreign asset control or ofac targeting tornado cashier so very very positive development now if we go over to the mevwatch.info website you can actually see the post merge of fat compliant blocks uh sorted by just Mev boosted blocks so not all blocks uh just about Mev boosted blocks is the majority it's about 80 of blocks but you can see that flashbots's market share has come down a lot it is at 57 right now uh and

uh obviously at the the biggest censoring relay up block native at about 6.2 percent blocks route regulator 2.5 and either Network at 2.26 now what's really cool about this is not only are the uncensored relays or the non-censoring relayers uh increasing in market share a lot but they're also much better distributed so you can see here that the top non-censoring relayer has 17.2 percent market share where and that's their blocks route Max profit uh and then 7.1 percent for agnostic boost and 6.8 for ultrasound money these three are a lot more distributed than what the uh the flashbots block native and blocks right regulated are which is very positive now what I would really like to

see is obviously flashbots fall below 50 dominance and all blocks fall below 50 ofac compliance yeah and it seems like it really is happening I mean there are other non-censoring relays as well there are actually more non-censoring rear layers than censoring ones now but the fact that we have ones run by really I guess um legit uh players like the ultrasound Money Team agnostic boost and blocks route here is very very positive so I'm I'm just honestly I'm over the moon that I came across this today I was like holy like we're actually getting this down a lot which is very very positive to see now you can see here that post merge daily offer compliant blocks in this chart is trending down down uh from the like I mean at time of the merge oh fat

compliance was at 93 guys which I think was like the peak pretty much no 97 was the peak and this was of all the Mev boosted blocks and that was obviously in large part due to the fact that flashbots was the only game in town and that was uh late October here of Mev boosted blocks right so but then if you go from there and you keep going down that goes from 97 to just 60 uh 68 and this is Mev booster blocks now if you include all blocks the trend looks really really cool you can see here that it goes all the way down to uh you know under under 60 here um depending on what time frame you look at obviously I'm looking at the one day time frame but you can look at the longer periods here uh but yeah the one

day time frame at times with the screenshot that I had was under 60 and you can see that the trend is just clearly down the the um the black or the dark Grays non-mev boost of which there aren't actually many oh there's only like 10 of all blocks that are non-mev is now that's actually grown uh and then of of not of fat compliant it's grown up to 30 and then oh fat complaint is at 60 so we are winning the war here it's been you know it's obviously not happening overnight there's obviously been a lot of work that's gone into this but we are winning and it's really really great to see this and as I've said plenty of times before no one has actually been censored on ethereum they have had it uh had to wait a little bit longer to get their tornado cash transaction included

but they have not been censored and if we get this to 50 of all over compliant blocks it means that you have an almost 100 guarantee to get your uh tornado cash transaction included in two or at most three blocks so you're not waiting very long at all to get your transaction included obviously we want to get that percentage down as much as possible but I said it before and I'll say it again the fact that flashbots has been so dominant uh means that their dominance was was quite was relatively easy to eat into uh and to get the and they've also helped with this as well by doing releasing things like Min bid and stuff like like that but getting this down has obviously been really great uh but yeah just wanted to highlight that for

everyone because I thought it was a really positive development in the in the Mev boost Arena and you can see here as well related to Mev boost Tony has deployed a bunch of new stuff to Mev boo stop picks we will now find a general metrics tab separate tabs for relays and Builders uh with validators to come a Sankey diagram with Builders relays and validators and many new charts including a racing bar charts so this is still my favorite website for Mev related stuff in terms of tracking basically everything got to do with Mev boost I do like Mev watch that info because it focuses a lot more on the I guess censorship relayer side of things but mov boost.picks has a lot more pretty charts a lot more data that you can kind of look at along with these very fancy

Sankey diagrams here and you can see where all the kind of our Builders are talked which built sorry which relays the builders are talking to and then which validators they are talking to and then you can sort up here by relays Mev boost dashboard and there's a bunch of charts with that with Builders and with validators so it's it while this is coming soon obviously but yeah very cool to see that this site is uh continuing to be upgraded continuing continuing to get a lot of love Tony's just been doing an absolutely amazing job keeping this updated and keeping this uh relevant and I think people are getting a lot of value out of this uh especially in the Wake obviously of the ofax sanctions where Mev boost or maybe in general became a much hotter topic so yeah you can go check this out for yourself it'll

be linked in the YouTube description below all right so a knock no rocket pool uh achieved 2 000 nodes over the weekend I think or no earlier this week not the weekend so a couple of days ago uh just because put out this tweet here where he said that uh there's 2 000 nodes now staked with rocketball now spun up with rocketpool which is obviously very very cool to see it's been growing very nicely you guys know I'm super bullish on rockapool generally it's something that took me a while to get bullish on because as you guys know I I'm very cautiously optimistic about what I put my weight behind but after spending a lot of time in the rockapool community after uh talking to a lot of uh core rocker pool uh members and community and

and community members that care about ethereum and rocketpool I can safely say that uh I care and am bullish on rockapool almost as much as I am on ethereum now obviously they are two different things uh but in terms of the communities and uh alignment and the values and what they're trying to do I mean I couldn't find a better place than rockapool honestly other than ethereum because I've I've looked I mean over the years I've definitely tried to find a community that wasn't just obviously the ethereum community but was really uh uh kind of dedicated to a project within ethereum that shared the same sets of values and the same uh kind of set of community alignment and I didn't really find one that I felt gelled with me until I found rockapool and I try to be

as active as I can in the community there it's quite hard for me because uh the community is quite large and the conversations move fast but I always try to pop in whenever I can and I mean an Odell member right obviously I own rpls just disclosures there for those of you who don't know but I only became an Odell member I only spun mini pools up and I only put my weight behind the project because of the fact that I truly believe that it is an amazing project contributing to the decentralization of ethereum making sure that ethereum staking becomes as decentralized as possible as healthy as possible and just keeping the beacon chain nice and secure QR and keeping uh and lowering the cost to entry for staking with ethereum which is obviously the number one goal of the

project at least that's what I think it is uh there's a bunch of goals but I think that rocker pulls guiding staff from what I can tell is making it as easy as possible for anyone to stake uh especially with things like lowering the minimum eth requirement you know they first lowered at the 16th now they're going to lower it to eight eighth and then four eighth obviously you still need RPL tokens as well on top of that but I think that the the mechanisms that they've come up with uh overall are very very good and honestly RPL I mean you guys know I don't talk about tokens other than ether I try not to RPL as a token actually like I'm very I'm pretty bullish on I I own a bunch of it obviously so that's the disclaimer there um but I am quite bullish on it because

it has an actual use it's growing with the protocol uh it is uh you know not stupidly valued it's not you know we're not in a bull market where things are getting ahead of themselves and it's actually one of the only tokens that has seemingly or seemed to to outperform eath over the long run now that's not to guarantee that it will do that in the future but out of every out of most tokens that I've looked at there's very very few that I'm long term bullish on for a number of different reasons uh but RPL will definitely be up there you know if I wasn't buying eth I'd probably be buying RPL now that's not investment advice please don't take that as investment advice and I only say that uh uh about RPL because I have put so much weight behind rocket pool and I

genuinely do believe that they are uh great Builders of in the ethereum community so I wouldn't be saying that otherwise um but yeah I mean you guys know that I've got the upper you can see it it's all public I have it on uh oh I had it on sasol.e now I have it on Rocket sasol.heath which is my oh download address and I have it staked as part of my um rocker pool node and I've got that staked as part of the Odell uh so you can see my RPL there I don't have any other RPL than that right now and if I buy any more I will definitely put it on that address you can monitor it but I mean I don't plan to sell that RPL anytime soon I don't know like it's just going to stay there right I'm happy staking it I'm happy earning additional

RPL rewards uh as they come to me through uh you know my mini pools I actually spun up another mini pool today and I'm just so enamored by the community now by the rockapole community I mean originally I kind of came in and I thought to myself I came into the rockapole community and started getting involved and I thought you know this could be something that I could support because it supports ethereum but now I want to support rocker pool because I'm just so in love with everything rockapool is doing yes it's good for ethereum but rockable has its own set of values its own Community its own uh kind of thing that it's doing and I really want to be more and more a part of that and I'm trying to be as a part of that as I can but anyway I'm going to leave

that one at that because I've done enough Shilling there as I said not investment advice the RPL that I have is fully public I don't have any others than that and you can go check that out if you want on chain but moving on to something else related to each staking with a new product out of the index Co-op called the Diversified staked index or the DSE token here so you can diversify your portfolio of staked tokens to help decentralize the ethereum network so basically what DS eth is it enables holders to diversify their e-stake using a methodology that promotes decentralization and competition amongst protocols so the initial composition of DSF will include rocker pulls Ahri lightos stf and stakewise's se2 and you can check out uh

the blog post for more information on this and the waiting and the methodology and all that behind it now the reason why I think this is really cool is because this product could be used as a obviously it is an index but it could be used by maybe people who are having kind of decision paralysis here and they're like oh you know I don't know what to buy do I buy re do I buy Ste do I buy you know se2 do I buy this do I buy that if there's other tokens that get added and they may not make the best decision because they're not well informed about which one to pick now with DSE they don't have to make that decision the the methodologist behind the index basically say okay well we're going to factor in all of these different things and we're

going to wait um weight these things at a different ways within the index based on the criteria here and we'll handle it all for you obviously they're going to take a fee for the privilege here you can see that they're only taking a 0.25 or 25 bips fee there's no mint or redeem fee so that's just a flat fee on it which is actually I think a pretty good deal considering that they're going to be managing the whole thing thing for you here now if this is something that you're interested in you can definitely go uh pick it up on a uni swap V3 here there are the liquidity pools linked in the blog post which of course I'll link in the YouTube description below but very cool new product out of the index Co-op I think it's going to appeal to those people who as I said have that

decision paralysis aren't entirely sure what to go with and they can just get exposure to the best lsds uh or eat steak lsds in the ecosystem all right so Ave protocol V3 is now live on the ethereum mainnet so I talked about this the other day how they were voting to put it live obviously on ethereum Mania and it's finally there I mean I didn't expect the vote to fail of course uh it's got all the great features of V3 that you may be used to from using it on other chains such as high efficiency mode uh isolation mode gas optimizations which is actually going to obviously be a big deal for layer one uh and decentralization uh as well here so yeah if you have been using Ave V3 on these layer 2's you'll know all about it if you've been using V2 on

uh on layer one ethereum well now you can use a V3 so congrats to Ave for getting this shipped to the ethereum mainnet very very cool to see this all right so Harpy's two-factor authentication uh for wallets is now alive and I talked about this last week or the week before I believe uh about how Harpy was releasing this Eagle RPC which adds 2fa to your wallet stopping rugs and hacks from ever being sent to the blockchain you can read this thread to learn more about this but I did explain how this worked last week where you basically changed your RPC uh and there's actually a nice little explainer here your wallet provider talks to the eagle RPC and then talks to the blockchain and it protects you from potentially malicious things now there was actually a high profile

um uh uh hack I guess you could say or rug recently Uh Kevin Rose who's high profile and pretty popular in the nft ecosystem had I think two million dollars worth of nft stolen after just signing a single message uh on openc I believe or on a fake open till something like that it was a phishing message message essentially and he had that two million dollars worth of nfts drained now something like the eagle RPC could actually protect you from this and because that's an RPC it does doesn't require you to install any new software or anything like that so all you have to do is change your RPC metamask to Eagle RPC and then you'll get all the benefits of this obviously by doing this you are still Outsourcing your transaction relaying to a third party it's obviously

not going to be as decentralized or self-sovereign as using your own node or anything like that and uh you know you don't know if uh what else is going on in the eagle RPC just like you don't know what else is going on on a bunch of the other rpcs but there's not really a a risky eye from what I can see in terms of uh you just using this instead of I mean it's probably better to use this instead of inferior or Alchemy because of the fact that they give you these protection features right if you actually are worried about accidentally signing the wrong message or sending the wrong or confirming the wrong transaction then Eagle RPC is for you you can check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so last up here we have fire who pushed a product update to uh

optimism so you can now use fire on optimism so just a refresher for those of you who have forgotten what fire is it basically is similar to Harpy in that it tries to protect you against doing things that may be potentially malicious what fire does is allows you to see exactly what's happening in a transaction so you can see here in the screenshot that if you are sending assets out and getting assets in so it's kind of swapping assets it tells you what they are instead of just coming up with some gibberish that metamask usually gives you and obviously the really cool thing about this is you know exactly what's happening on the uh during this transaction and not having to guess and not having to hope that everything uh goes well right uh but yeah I've talked about five before I've explained it a

bunch on the refill before I'm sure you guys remember what it is but if you are an optimism user which I'm sure a lot of you are you can now use fire on optimism and obviously not just the ethereum mainnet anymore but 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 them a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone