Fighting for Ethereum, The Merge updates and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #427 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where he cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host the anthony's designer and says the 15th of august 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so a lot to go through today the weekend was quite eventful there is a lot of i guess you could call it drama a lot of uh things being talked about right now in the fallout of the tornado cash stuff that we saw last week now i did obviously touch on the tornado cash uh stuff last week but there's been a lot that happened over the weekend that i want to go over and i want to start with this tweet that i put out which is my main conclusion from all of this so i said i think the main conclusion i have come to from recent events is that

ethereum is more of a concern to governments nation states than bitcoin is the implications of this will define the next few years of this industry now i think this is a really important point um not just because i said it i've seen other people say similar things but i think it's really important to understand that bitcoin is no longer the battleground of crypto right i believe it's ethereum and this is obviously by virtue of the fact that ethereum can do a lot more than bitcoin can but there is no kind of like attacks or sanctions happening on bitcoin related apps for example right from things built on bitcoin because you can't build things on bitcoin there have been uh addresses sanctioned in the past and there has been kind of like mixes shut down and stuff like that but not in the way that we've seen

with tornado cash so a tornado cash built on ethereum is more of a threat to i guess like the us government's interests than bitcoin is which i think is a pretty profound uh thing to kind of like just take in there and take on board now because of this i don't think tornado cash is going to be the last thing that threatens the government's and nation-states interest i actually have never viewed ethereum as something that uh was kind of like like bitcoin where it's like oh you know we we kind of like really hate all the governments around the world we um we we we think the world's gonna we're gonna end fear it's gonna collapse all this sort of stuff i never viewed ethereum as like a duma network like what bitcoin kind of tends to position itself as i always viewed ethereum as a

more optimistic kind of network where we build things we build better things and we build things that give people more freedom now obviously that freedom is being challenged with all the censorship that we're seeing i think people really underestimate how important it is that blockchains uh i guess like keep their censorship resistant properties because if they don't have that and they're kind of useless right like if a blockchain just becomes somewhere where we have all these lists that have to be censored all these address all these applications that have to be censored on the whims of kind of like a government then it's really just fintech 2.0 or tradfire 2.0 it's not really what we're trying to build here but i also think that a lot of people are getting the wrong idea about things because they're not separating out the concerns they're actually bucketing everything into one

kind of like bucket and just because like a front end um senses something it means ethereum is not censorship resistant anymore at the protocol level and i think that's a wrong way of looking at it so there are multiple levels to censorship resistance in ethereum right obviously if you go from bottom to top it would be the ethereum protocol itself the miners and the validators obviously uh in a post-merge world that is the i guess like this first line of defense or i guess depending how you look at it at last line of defense right that is the bottom of of kind of like a list here and then you can go up a level to the smart contracts built on ethereum then you can go to uh the middleware that sits between the smart contracts and the front ends then you can go to

the front ends then you can go uh to the assets as well the assets that interact with these sorts of things uh the rpcs as well i guess like the rpcs would probably be above the uh sorry just above the protocol um before the smart contracts because you would need the rpc to interact with the smart contracts um but i think uh it's kind of weird because obviously i guess could be considered a middleware so you would have that like where the oracles are maybe on the side but i think i guess the ordering of it doesn't really matter too much it's just recognizing that there are multiple layers here there's not just one layer that you okay well if this layer got sensitive it means everything's censored no now what are the example of each of these things well on the ethereum protocol layer for there to be

censorship it would require miners and validators to purposely be blocking uh transactions uh or manually kind of like dropping transactions and not confirming them due to a government order so for example this would be the uh miners basically saying well we're not going to process any transactions that touch tornado cash because uh tornado cash is on the kind of like uh ofac list of sanctions in the u.s then at the smart contract level it would be uh the smart contracts themselves to having censorship built in so for example you could have a default app that basically has the smart contracts but says okay well we're not going to allow this address or this address to interact with our our smart contracts right our protocol so that's smart contract level censorship then you

have the rpcs themselves which are basically nodes you talk to really relay your transaction transactions they can do the same thing that miners and validators do where they basically say well we're going to drop your transactions we're not going to let you get them into the i guess like mempool because we uh because you uh you know you're sanctioned or we just kind of like don't like you or some whatever reason right they reserve the right to i guess like have their reasons there uh then you have the oracles of course so for example if uh i mean like chain link for example wanted to they could say well we're not going to serve our oracles to such and such or such and such right that's oracle level censorship there uh then you have front ends which i think we're most acutely aware of because pretty much all the

front ends seem to be sticking to this kind of like censorship that they're on the sanctions side of things um and that basically just means that the front end doesn't let you access uh access uh the kind of like back end that it's talking to so for example uh actually i have a perfect example here of uh myself actually sasel dot eth being blocked from the official fr ave front end um because i had eth sent to my wallet via tornado cache from that troll that was kind of like sending it to people so i wasn't able to access the rv front end which means i wasn't able to use the other front end to talk to the smart contracts now that doesn't mean that the smart contracts were blocking me the the rpc wasn't blocking me uh nothing else was blocking me it was just the front

end here and obviously you can use other front ends and you can even interact with the smart contracts directly as well so it's not like you're censored on every single level i i just got centered on one level and this has since been reversed i think they kind of like removed uh everyone off that list and aren't blocking anyone right now uh but yeah i mean this is example of a front-end kind of like censorship uh that that kind of like happens here so there are multiple levels here guys like it's not just the one one kind of like um one all-encompassing thing and i think that's where a lot of nuance gets lost the biggest concern people have when it comes to censorship is censorship at the protocol layout because there's no other layers right there's nothing else we can do i mean there is technically a social

layout that would come i guess like just below the protocol layer but the social layer itself only has so much power like you could basically say well uh you know you could condemn the action you could basically i guess like signal to them that you're not going to use the app you're not going to do this you're not going to do that right so that definitely plays a big part in it and i think i mean it all starts from the social layer anyway but protocol level kind of censorship is is really bad because it basically means that the the kind of like transactions no matter what you do will not be able to get into the mempool you won't be able to get those transactions processed uh because you've been censored either via sanctions or some other kind of like um or some other kind of entities is is um

censoring you so that is like the the end game right there and that's what everyone is very concerned about now there is a kind of like thing here that uh flashbots which is kind of like a relayer for mav related transactions uh they have a software called mev boost and they actually put the ofac blacklist on this software that basically said well if anyone is trying to interact with the tornado cache addresses then don't process those transactions now this is i guess like a middleware mev boost can be considered a middleware that bolts onto a validator or bolts onto a miner that allows them to do maybe related things putting a blacklist there especially if it's enabled by default uh and it's kind

of like an opt-out thing and rather than opt-in thing is really concerning because this is protocol level protocol layout censorship that's kind of like going on here now you can see here that microzoltu basically put together a pull request saying you know let's remove this blacklist because it doesn't really make any sense to to have this in there i think that if you want to have a blacklist in there you just should do it as like an opt-in thing it shouldn't be an opt-out thing so it should be a conscious decision of the i guess validators or of the um of the kind of like people that are using mev boost to opt into something like this so that's i guess like something that i'll link in the youtube description for you to check out the discussion here but that's another way that these things can happen where you

have these kind of like middleware protocols like mev boost that can affect protocol layout censorship and on that front as well there was a tweet here i believe from a one-way function related to this where they said you know the law around the sanctions is very simple it requires no u.s person or company to do business with tornado cash relaying transactions that you do not initiate is not doing business with tornado cash verifying that a transaction is mathematically valid is not doing business with tornado cash people are just freaking out for no reason and this speaks to a lot of what we've seen i guess over the last few days where the front ends especially have been going above and beyond to do things that aren't actually legally required of them to do as one-way function said here there is no legal

obligation for these front ends to be censoring like this they just have to basically uh not do business with uh well no u.s person technically do business with tornado cash the the sanctioned addresses but as you can see when i got blocked from rv it was because i had received uh funds from tornado cache it wasn't the kind of like address that was sanctioned because my address wasn't sanctioned by the u.s so why am i blocked uh and as one way function says yeah just you know relaying transactions uh that you do not initiate is not doing business with tornado cash so we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot here which i'm pretty disappointed in like i feel like there's a lot of fight at the social layout there's a lot of people who care deeply about censorship resistance and maintaining the values of ethereum but

then there's kind of like this push pull to it where we're pushing that kind of like uh that that info out into the in the world but the people that are kind of like running these front ends and stuff like that they're just going above and beyond now whether this is based on i guess advice that they're getting from their lawyers which probably are extremely conservative or whether this is just them being like well i'm in the u.s i don't want to risk anything i don't want to go to jail for 30 years because the penalties are quite steep right the ofac related penalties i mean it's up to 30 years in federal prison or it is uh massive fines or both right so you obviously don't want to get on the wrong side of that but going above and beyond like this is what i was talking about

last week with that chilling effect where all the ofac needed to do was sanction these addresses and suddenly they've been able to kind of like uh in a matter of a few days get people censoring the front ends get people talking about uh censoring at the protocol layer all right and get having uh flashbots put in an ofac blacklist like guys like this is as i said literally shooting ourselves in the foot so it's not something that we should even be entertaining and i'm like honestly if i'm if i was to say what i'm most disappointed about it's that it's not the sanctions themselves it's the fact that we rolled over so easily and i don't believe it's like a a kind of um a fundamental uh kind of like thing i don't believe it is a systemic thing i don't believe that it's something that

we can't recover from but i'm kind of disappointed and i think it's because up until this point we haven't really had any of this kind of like attention ethereum has existed in kind of a bubble the most attention that we've had is probably from the sec which is a different beast altogether and a whole different kind of topic of discussion altogether but i think now that the final boss is here now that nation states have shown that they'll make these moves well it's time for us to get serious about you know uh kind of like censorship resistance across all stacks like not just the protocol layer but the whole thing like the oracles the rpcs the front ends we need to be doing a lot more here to ensure that we kind of like uphold that censorship resistance that we all uh you know claim to care about

right because at the end of the day we can claim whatever we want but if the tech doesn't actually reflect the values that doesn't mean anything and there was a tweet actually a poll uh just before that i kind of like voted on that asked you know if there was protocol level censorship as a permanent thing in ethereum would that mean ethereum failed and i mean absolutely it would mean ethereum failed i would i would actually personally uh leave the ethereum ecosystem if that happened if it was a permanent thing because if as i said at the beginning if you don't have censorship resistance uh especially at the base layer then what the hell is the point of a blockchain at the end of the day like you could just use a database like i'm not here to recreate the traditional system i'm not here to create traffic 2.0 i'm here to

create something new something that gives more freedom to people so as i said like i would leave the ethereum ecosystem if there was permanent censorship at the base layout now thankfully this is something that's been spoken about and thought about for years this is not something new we've all been aware of the censorship risks um within kind of like blockchains for a very long time now because of that there are solutions so you have heard me talk about proposal builder or pbs uh separation or pbs before and this is a way to kind of like affect um or at least make it harder to do censorship resistance at the protocol layer and then this could be coupled with something like cr list which stands for censorship resistant list now i'm going to link both of these in the youtube description for you to check out

yourselves i'm not going to go through them uh today but the trdr is basically what pbs does is it separates the proposal from the builder so you have a specialized builder network uh and then you have a proposal so the the kind of um uh the the concerns are separated so the proposer just proposes blocks the builders just build blocks instead of uh the validators as they exist today doing both then you could have deniability over what you're proposing to but the censorship moves to the builders in that case and to rectify that problem you use something like cr lists which is basically a list of kind of like uh ways to do censorship resistance here so i mean i i recommend kind of like reading this uh for for more uh um for more information on this because it's definitely

a very nuanced thing but these are the things that we've been working on on top of i guess like the social layer the social pushing which i think is very important on top of our dvt or distributed validator technology to make it more decent make staking more decentralized on top of decentralized staking pools on top of the in protocol uh things such as kind of like slashing but the problem is is that you can't slash for censorship unless the network comes together to do it in a social way censorship is actually the thing that is hardest to defend against because of that like it's a subjective thing so for example if the at the protocol layout if the whole protocol or most of the protocol says well we're going to start censoring this address say they start censoring me for whatever reason they say we're not going to process any

transactions coming from sasel.eth uh and and they start doing that the base layer to kind of like get around that is extremely subjective because i would have to convince everyone to basically say hey i'm being censored can you slash these people that are censoring me so we can get the network back to normal so i can stop being censored no one's gonna do that like not even for i mean i don't even think people would do it for someone like vitalik right like obviously there are kind of like different people with different kind of like levels of um of kind of like awareness around them but like any censorship at all is bad because of this right so and as i said it's very hard to achieve this because you can't do um as far as i understand that you can't do objective slashing of

of um of censorship but maybe you can like i i haven't read up on this for a little while now i haven't checked the um the spec itself but from my understanding you couldn't do that and that was always the main concern that's why things like pbs came out that's why it's been so important to decentralize staking so that not not a small handful of entities has enough stake to begin censoring people so there's that and there's also other things um there's one here from martin koppelman who said there is something called the shutterized beacon chain which is a concept that allows uh people to optionally encrypt transactions and get them included into the chain before the content is visible to anyone it greatly improves sensitive resistance and reduces the malicious mav this is another thing actually that i tweeted about um i may have skipped over the

tweet i think it was yeah yes so this is related to what i tweeted about where i said i've been against base layer privacy for ethereum in the past but i'm slowly coming around to it if only to enable validators to have complete deniability over which transactions they process um so in this kind of like world if ethereum had base layer privacy where no one could see what the transactions contained um you could basically say to any authorities hey like okay yes i'm a validator i validated these these kind of like transactions in this block but i don't know what they are like no one can prove what they are like not even the authorities could say this is a malicious transaction because it's completely private there's no way to know what they are right so there is actual plausible deniability but the reason i've been against the base layer

privacy is because of the fact that it makes uh discovering bugs and exploits uh uh harder it kind of like um it it definitely opens up the attack surface a bit because then you have to worry about the i guess like the encryption that's backing up the privacy and all that sorts of stuff so you definitely kind of like introduce more risk here and more complexity into the protocol and then larry cermak actually replied and said you know he still thinks it's a terrible idea because it would have a drastic effect on liquidity many exchanges would be forced to delete it and also on institutional investability which are other points that i haven't hadn't considered yet but very very good points there um and then i think suzuha actually had a great reply as well saying you can add threshold cryptography to pbs without making

changes to the base layer this solves two problems at once builders don't get their bundle stolen by validators and validators don't know what's in a transaction until it's committed which i said was a good middle ground um and i asked if this is something that we can do in theory today uh and then suzuha said you know it's something we can do in theory today flashbots has done some work in this direction uh but the current idea is use is to use trusted hardware rather than uh threshold crypto and then there's all these issues with trusted hardware people pointed out so you kind of like have this cat and mouse game when it comes to this sort of stuff where you kind of like okay well you caught the you caught the mouse you're like yes okay we're all going to do it and then

the mouse runs away again because there's some other kind of thing you have to consider and all this sort of sort of stuff around it and i guess like that falls into what martin koppelman was saying here about being able to um not you know have base layer privacy but optionally encrypt your transactions so that they can be included in the chain before the content is visible uh to anyone so these are all solutions that have been being worked on for uh uh quite a while now and have been theorized for quite a while now so anyone that's kind of like out there especially um i've seen a lot of the bitcoin maximalists do this saying that like ethereum is dead or the us government controls ethereum or ethereums don't care about censorship resistance and all those sorts of stuff is completely wrong and some of them

even said that we didn't say this coming i mean of course we did like i think there is a point to be made that a lot in the ethereum ecosystem were maybe naive about it or maybe kind of like they thought it was coming much later but there have been plenty of people in this ecosystem that have talked about this for years and i've been working on solutions it's just that those solutions because of the fact that we thought this was going to take longer to play out um we're going to come later so maybe we speed up those solutions and maybe we get them to mainnet much faster now because of this because at the end of the day like a nation state has i mean i wouldn't say they declared war on ethereum but they've basically made their stance clear they are and they

will not hesitate to sanction addresses on ethereum and we have to work around that we have to route around that if we don't as i said we we the end state would probably be base layer censorship and that just wouldn't be interesting to me i would leave the ethereum ecosystem in that case so there's all of that i think there is two more things two more things yeah two more things before i talk about some merge updates um so luke youngblood here who set up uh coinbase's staking got into this thread with gabrielle shapiro here about coinbase staking or us-based validators kind of like doing censorship and things like that and luke youngblood said um one thing you might not know is that all of coinbase retail ethereum validators operate outside the us for tax purposes so not only will they fight censorship

to their last dying breath it is a stretch for u.s regulators to censor transactions now it's cool that the validators are outside of the us but keep in mind two things here one luke doesn't work at coinbase anymore right so it doesn't really have any say over this i'm surprised he's even allowed to say this like i i would think that coinbase would be against someone putting out this sort of signal um if they're not working at the institution anymore but he said it right and that's fine i mean and i like the fact that these validators are outside of the u.s but it doesn't mean that coinbase is going to kind of like not comply if they if a government came to them i i fully believe that they would if a government came to them and said hey you're running validators we don't care they operate

it's outside the u.s you are a us-based corporation you are publicly trading on the nasdaq um uh sorry on the on the new york stock exchange uh you need to do this they would probably do it or most likely do it i don't see them fighting that to be honest and maybe i'm wrong here but i don't think so and this is why it's so important to make sure that their staking is distributed like that we don't have a bunch of kind of like three or four pools that have the majority of the stake they can do whatever they want or get be compelled to do uh what governments want now there are there there's limits to what they can do like i just said censorship is something that they can do relatively easily because it's hard for uh at least right now because it's hard

for us to punish that but other than that i mean there is in protocol things and there's slashing and stuff like that to disincentivize that but i think also once withdrawals are enabled you know if kind of like second providers start doing this you might see a lot of people just pull out of that second provider and saying well if you're going to be compelled to censor things how can i trust you with my kind of like assets and pull out and go stick with someone else there's also a lot of solutions around decentralized staking such as rocket pool uh and and you have kind of like other other centralized taking providers trying to decentralize uh or at least trying to kind of like distribute as much as possible obviously as you guys know lido is not just a monolithic entity there are i believe 28

or 29 validator services that they use and they don't they only have like i think the most one of them has is a few percent of of the network but we want to keep distributing that out we don't want the like three or four entities to be able to i guess like be compelled by a government because i think at the end of the day i don't think that would collude i don't think it's in their business interest to do so but a nation state uh kind of like compelling to do something is the risk and i actually wrote about this ages ago in my in my one of my newsletters where i said that i i the only concern i have when it comes to centralized staking and centralized um our stake in service providers and centralized exchanges and things like that was the nation state

stuff the nation states compelling these uh services to do this i had basically zero concerns over these services doing it themselves because as i said is a bad business choice to do it on on their own but that doesn't take away from the fact that they could be compelled to do these sorts of things so that's why we need all those solutions that i talked about but we also need to make sure especially in a post-withdrawal world that we distribute stake as much as possible for the health of the network for the health of the health of ethereum just overall and especially for the health of ether as an asset because you know no one's going to want to buy eight if it just becomes a censorship chain at the end of the day so we have to uh really be kind of like cognizant of that and keep

working towards all of these solutions uh and just last year i i didn't realize i went for almost the whole episode on this today but i think it's an important topic to be fair um just up here there's a screenshot or i guess like a chart sorry i should say shared by albardo crypto here where they said six degrees of tornado cash is a thing even crazy out while only 0.03 of addresses received eight from tornado cash almost half the entire eighth network is only two hops from a tornado cash receiver and this is i think uh largely in part due to centralized exchanges you know a lot of eight hit centralized exchanges and kind of like goes in and out and all that sorts of stuff and that eighth would have you know touched tornado cash at one point and you can see here

92.66 of the network is only four degrees of separation from a tornado cache uh kind of like receiver so this just shows how like impossible it would be to police uh like things in terms of kind of like people that have interacted with a contract that is sanctioned or has some kind of like degree of separation but not that much degree of separation from that right so again as i described last week it is unworkable unpleasable and the front ends going above and beyond to do this is is really stupid i think and i think i think that we really need to keep putting social pressure on here uh to to kind of like reverse this as i said ave ended up unblocking i guess not just myself but like everyone after i socially signaled this um but and i didn't contact the team i

literally just put out that tweet i didn't contact the team i spoke with some friends about it and i think i put it in the daily grade discord channel where i was like what the hell guys but i didn't go to you know the other team and say hey guys like can you unblock me i didn't like do that because i know that i have uh kind of like that reach right like i can i can message them and and they'll reply to me but i don't want to do that i don't want special treatment i wanted them to i want that i wanted that social pressure to basically get them to remove it all together and that's what they did they removed it i even think they went as far as removing the um the sanctions addresses from interacting with um with with the other front end uh which

you know i guess like maybe they were going to put that back but that's fine i was more uh uh i mean fine fine is relative but like i was more concerned about the people who got who received 0.18 from that troll getting barred from using it because i was like what the hell like i actually felt like a criminal for the poor one of the only times in my life like i i i honestly try my best to stay on the right side of the law but i felt like a criminal when that happened i was like holy like i have been sent this uh and now the you know the other front end is blocking me it's treating me like i'm a sanctioned individual from the u.s like i i was just thinking about that i'm like this is crazy what the hell so i think that

the fact that people are being made to feel like criminals because of this is really bad as well and we need to keep fighting back against it but i think that's it on that topic for today i've got a bunch of other things i want to get through but thank you for listening to all of my rants there if you agree or disagree with anything that i said please let me know in the discord channel there's a lot of cool discussion that's been going on in there over the last few days but i'm going to move on to some more positive stuff and that's merge related news so we have the postmortem on what happened with girlie and why we had that kind of like participation rate drop off there there were i guess like multiple issues here i think the issue with nimbus accounted for uh most of the

validators being offline so what happened with nimbus is that the nimbus knows we're using an older version of geth on sepolia that's still allowed for the engine api to be exposed without a jwt token they reused the setup but with the latest version of get that doesn't allow engine api communication without a jwt token this broke their setup the nimbus node should slowly come back online once the port and jwt configuration is fixed the status is partially resolved some stump some nodes still need the update participation rates climbed above 80 as a result of the fixes uh some nodes are still attesting sporadically the setup would definitely need to be monitored closely so i think that uh this was basically the um the cause of a lot of the network going uh kind of like offline or not validating correctly uh and yeah as you said as i said here this

was just due to some outdated software so it wasn't anything kind of like critical it wasn't something with the merge itself uh so it's great to see that and there were a bunch of other things as well uh lodestar had an issue base you had an issue never mind i had an issue eric had an issue right this is what's going to happen with client diversity is that like because we have what 10 clients across both el and cl uh there is going to be more of a chance of these things happening just by virtue of the fact that we have more clients to make sure are are kind of like okay and maybe you're interested in what happened with the reorg so the real was due to beisu so it says yeah adrian and the consensus teams have worked on a comprehensive document found

here if you want to kind of like go look into uh i guess under the hood technicals of it but i guess like the summary of the tldr is a base you incorrectly invalidated the canonical chain transition block and the taku node uh pro teku node sorry proposed on its own head as expected ateku restart reissued all its requests and this time basically responded correctly allowing tekku to reorg onto the correct chain um and yeah i mean again like that was just another uh a non i guess like critical thing and not something to do with the i guess like merge itself uh and then there's a bunch of other things here which you can read yourself you can read this whole postmortem but i think this is encouraging i think this is positive i think the fact that we got back up to over 80 i think within a few hours uh i

80 participation rate which was really good it's not on these test nets it's never going to be like what it is on main net with a 99.8 percent or whatever it is i think i've mentioned this before so don't take that as any indication of what it's going to look like on mainnet i think we're going to just have to see like i mean we obviously scheduled it it's about a month from today or pretty much exactly a month if it happens on the 15th um we're just going to have to see how it shakes out on may now my guess is that we will have some participation drop off for a multitude of reasons but it's those those dropped off validators will probably come back online really really quickly i don't think like i'd be very surprised if we saw enough validators drop off that would

get us below the 66 threshold which is needed for finality i'd be extremely surprised if that happened but even if it did i believe the network would recover just fine just like girly recovered because gurley went under 66 percent it was actually a really good test of that we hadn't seen that on roxton or sopolia so it's good to see what it looks like when the network goes under 66 it functioned as normal we didn't finalize like they never kept producing uh blocks or i guess slots and kept proposing and validating all that sort of stuff but we couldn't finalize until those validators came online and then once they did and we got above that 66 threshold then uh we had fun finalization again so yeah i think it just goes to show like how the beacon chain is a self-healing system how it can repair itself uh without the need

for like a hard fork or anything like that uh so yeah we'll have to see how that shakes out on main net but i expect mainnet to be a smoother process and i expect us to recover much faster from any issues uh on mainnet than we have on the test nets and danny ryan published his latest edition of finalized which is the 36th edition here which is all about i guess the merge timing around the main net merge and everything around that so if you want the dates if you want the details this is the blog post to check out it is very very short so it's just got all the media details that you need i'll link that in the youtube description as well for you to check out and i guess like uh ben eddington has another what's new and eth2 newsletter out as well which i think is worth uh

definitely worth reading because it's got more commentary on the mainnet merge more commentary on girly and a bunch of other things that's usually in his newsletter so definitely check this out i'll link it in the youtube description and below all right final updates here rainbow wallet now uh makes creating and customizing your ens profile fun and easy you can upload a profile picture and cover photo add your handles and links and organize your nft showcase web 3's linked a link in bio easier than ever with a rainbow so i guess that sounded like an advertisement but i'm just literally reading the tweet guys that's not a sponsored spot um but yeah you can see how the interface looks here in the screenshots which is really really cool you can create your ens profile find your name add your cover add your profile everything like that i think they teased

this a few weeks ago and i covered it on the refuel but i kind of like i believe this is now live in the rainbow wallet app so you can go check this out for yourself if you're using rainbow you'd have to i think update the wallet uh uh kind of like app on your phone but you can go do that if you're a user or if you're not a user you can check it out as a new one all right finally i guess like in on the topic of privacy lately with with the tornado cache stuff aztec did a thread which is i guess like a recap or a highlight of one month in production for aztec connect which i spoke about when they launched it a month ago which is this kind of like private d5 relay at layer 2 where you can essentially uh

yank or yank i guess tap into layer one ethereum liquidity and do your transactions all privately from uh aztec connect network here now i believe aztec put out a tweet saying that they were gonna come out with their stance on everything happening with tornado cache i don't know if i've seen that yet but i'm looking forward to kind of like reading that as well but you can go give this thread a read all about aztec connects first month and kind of like a summary of what happened there i think it's going to be very important to pay attention to what happens with these other privacy tools tornado cache still still works right it's on ethereum it can't be stopped it's it's immutable whatever um but like these other platforms like aztec connect for example it's centralized because it's very early

it's like a layer two it's it's centralized this i believe there's kind of like admin keys i believe aztec are the only ones who run kind of like the software for these sorts of stuff so it's very different to autonom to tornado cache if if for some reason aztec was sanctioned like tornado cache is then their whole network would basically go offline it would you you would probably have a chance maybe to withdraw your assets um and i don't know how they're kind of like um escape hatch works on layer 1 ethereum if it's constructed properly you should be able to withdraw from layer 1 ethereum even if they were to go offline um but yeah there would be an easier target because of the fact that their smart their kind of like system isn't uh as far as i know decentralized and immutable yet it hopefully will be in the future

but not yet same goes for pretty much i think all the other privacy tools um i believe like polygons nightfall would fall into the same bucket so yeah but i don't know that's the thing like i think as i talked about last week tornado cash i believe got sanctioned specifically because of the north korean connections um because there was so much volume passing through there especially from from north korea does that happen to something like an aztec if there is a lot of volume with you know going through there from north korea i don't know i don't know what this is going to look like i think it's going to be a very interesting next few years to see what gets sanctioned what gets kind of like attacked what can resist these attacks what can keep being censorship resistant in the face of them um and it's yeah it's going to be a real

test of ethereum's decentralization and ethereum censorship resistance and as i've been saying for the entire time i've done these videos and for many years in crypto guys this is why decentralization matters this is why what we're building right in ethereum this is why we haven't sacrificed decentralization for scale this is why we hold it above all else because if you don't have decentralization you don't have censorship resistance you don't have anything compelling all you have is tradfire 2.0 on a blockchain who gives a about that i'm not here for that i'm here to change the world improve the world and give people so much more freedom than they have today especially people in oppressive regimes or people that aren't in kind of like western democracies that get to enjoy a lot of

the freedoms that we do because ethereum is for everyone it's not just for people people in the western kind of like society it is for everyone everywhere in the world no matter what country you live in no matter you know who you are no matter anything about you it's for you right and you should exp have a reasonable expectation of being able to access privacy preserving tools as well on the network which is what we're fighting for with the censorship resistance with the decentralization so take that on board think about it just doing it come have a discussion in the discord channel with me always love to chat but i think i'm going to end it there for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe the newsletter join the discord channel

and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone