Holesky fails to launch, EigenDA going live soon - The Daily Gwei Refuel #658 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the other great refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Dennis the 18th of September 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so actually before we get into it today just wanted to give a quick friendly reminder that there will be no refuel for Wednesday Thursday and Friday this week of course I will be back next Monday with an extra long episode to make up for all of that but yeah tomorrow will be the last refill before uh there's no refills for the rest of the week and as I mentioned last week as well the episode with Eric that was going to go out on Saturday uh as as per the normal schedule will now be pushed to next week as as well but yeah you know it's funny I mentioned this

last week but I can just tell that something's going to happen on Wednesday Thursday or Friday something big and then I'm gonna have to wait till Monday to cover it and I'll get fomo as well like I I know you guys I'm sometimes say to me like you'd really miss it when I um miss an episode especially if it's like a few in a row uh believe me I miss it more than you guys do because I just love covering the news level covering what happens and I whenever I see something on kind of like Twitter or see something happen in the ecosystem and then I have to wait like the whole day until I can put the refill out to cover it I get like a bit of foam I'm like oh my God I really want to talk about it right so yeah it's just as bad for me as

it is for you guys but yeah just wanted to give a friendly reminder there that Wednesday Thursday Friday this week there will be no refuel but I will definitely be back tomorrow and of course I'm here today so let's start off with the news so I mentioned I think it was last week of the week before the new Geth version came out version 1.13.0 and I did mention at the time that I didn't think people should rush to upgrade their Geth versions because there could be potential for bugs since it was such a a major a new version and of course there was a bug so the goal ethereum or Geth Twitter account uh tweeted this out over the weekend and this was yesterday where they said we've identified an issue in Geth version 1.13 which rejects withdrawals from blocks I.E produces bad blocks as in produce

blocks when mining I think that was supposed to say staking here obviously um the issue was fixed on our Master branch and we'll also prep a release later today and they did of course release uh hotfix so if you are running Geth you can go upgrade to this hotfix and it'll fix the issue but the issue was basically that if you were running um Geth uh you weren't able to produce local blocks so you would produce blocks passed to you by the Mev Boost network but if you were not using Mev boost or if you were producing local blocks for any other reason then you uh basically wouldn't be you'd be missing that proposal of the blocks there so a pretty major bug I think but the thing is is that if you look at the amount of blocks that are being built locally it's only

seven percent of the network as 93 of the network is opted into Mev boost so it didn't really affect the network too badly and the fix was out like pretty pretty fast here there's one consensus layer client that actually um acted a bit funny around this because and that's prism so what prism does even though it it gets blocks from Mev boost what happens is that it will not propose a block because of the fact that it checks against a local block first it checks if they can build it more profitably locally first and if it can it'll build it locally instead of through Mev boost but yeah I think that and because of that I think if you get we're running a prism death combo then you wouldn't be producing blocks at all even if it was coming from Mev boost I think but the issue is fixed now so

that's all well and good but once again this shows us the importance of client diversity guys like you know gef is the majority execution layer client still I think and Geth is considered the most kind of like stable and the most reliable execution client but it can still have bugs especially around these new major releases and I I think I mentioned this at the time saying that it was such a big release that the the likelihood for bugs is is so high but because it was only a client release and it wasn't a um a release that had a hard fork in it or a um like something like Dan for example you had the optionality you did not need to upgrade to this new client there was no rush to do it if you were using Geth I hadn't updated my uh Geth I have an archive no

that I'm running that to get the archive note I didn't update that yet but I have now to this new this new version here um but yeah that's why I'm never really in a rush to update unless it's a required update like for a hard fork or something like that like with the upcoming dencoon upgrade of course I'm gonna have to upgrade my uh my clients if I want to be on the dencoon fork otherwise I'm gonna basically Fork off the chain and go into my own little world which uh which won't be very fun but yeah so I just wanted to explain what happened there and as I said if you are running Geth be sure to upgrade to the newest version uh 1.13.1 with the hotfix it's live on GitHub and I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out

all right as I mentioned last week the anniversary of the merge is on the 15th of September and to celebrate dining here who works at flashbots put together a report to provide a timeline view of how rapid the space has evolved over the past year covering notable events and behaviors and in the Mev supply chain so Mev has grown considerably since the merge and it's funny because the timing was basically um uh perfect for Mev boost because Mev boost existed before the merge and I believe that some people were using it before the merge but then as soon as the the merge happened Mev boost uh um uh uptake uh skyrocketed basically and more and more people used it and now we're at the point where as I said 97 of all blocks are going through the Mev Boost

network or you know all sorry 93 of all uh blocks are proposed by the Mev on the proposed built by the Mev Boost network here and you can see all the relevant data and stats is actually quite a detailed post here if you want to go and look through the history I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh but yeah this is what's super interesting because I if you listen to the uh podcast I think I mentioned it the other day um on coming on come on Uncommon Core uh with the uh a few of the um uh people talking about PBS like Mike noodle uh an Mev boost and all that you'll actually get an insight into why they actually built by flashbacks built Mev boost and how they saw that this was coming and how they've always believed that it was a temporary solution until

we got in protocol kind of enshrining of of PBS but that stuff's still quite far away so until that comes you know most of the network is still going to use Mev booths because it's the economically sound thing to do uh to build blocks because it's way more profitable obviously and of course when you're a staking provider especially like a staking pool you have to use Mev boost or as your yield is going to be significantly less than uh you know the rest of the network so you're kind of like forced into it even if you don't want to use it for whatever other reason there but anyway enough on that you can go check out this post for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below but yeah I mean you know the funny thing is I'm really excited about PBS and what

it means for the network and getting rid of the relayers specifically because the relayers are those centralized points of failure because I've said before that the builders being centralized is okay as long as we also get something like censorship resistant lists or inclusion lists where we can guarantee that it's basically a near zero percent chance that any of these Builders are going to engage in any form of of censorship but also at the same time the Builder being you know I guess like the building of blocks being concentrated into maybe five or ten entities at most building the majority of the blocks isn't actually uh too too big of a deal there whereas when it comes because because it's a profit game whereas when it comes

to the relayers traditionally the Mev boost relays don't actually make much money there's not really a business model there for them um and any fees that they would take would just basically make them lose their market share right so the relay our business is not a good business to be in and that means that it will probably centralize over time I know we've got a bunch of relayers live now but you know in the long term how many of those will still be around how many of those will just be be live I know you know maybe ultrasound money sticks around because that's that's uh that's definitely one that um is more is more kind of like altruistic and more ideological but the others that are just there for Pure business reasons maybe then they're not there right maybe they're not there they don't want to run

the relay anymore because it's too expensive it's too cumbersome maybe they they can't because Regulators come to them and say you're not allowed to run a relayer at all for some reason right so we want to get rid of the relay is which is what PBS aims to do and then on top of PBS we obviously want to do some things around the censorship resistance and making sure that we can essentially uh make it near zero percent chance that any of the builders want to or or or kind of like are economically incentivized to not censor uh that but anyway as I said you can go check out this post we'll link it in the YouTube description below but I think talking about censorship resistance as well Tim baiko put out an announcement over the weekend that EF Dev connect or Dev connect the dev connect conference run

by the ethereum foundation will host the first edition of censorship.wtf which is a full day dedicated to exploring censorship resistance across the entire ethereum stack from the mempool to front ends and the applications are open now for both speakers and general attendees this looks like it would be a really interesting day to attend as you guys know I'm not actually going to devconnect but if I was I would 100 be attending this event uh I don't think um I've been asked him back I said I don't think there's ever been something like this a full day dedicated to censorship and censorship resistance um at a conference uh so this is happening uh Saturday November 18th at devconnect you can apply here I'll link it in the YouTube description below but yeah as as Tim mentioned this is going to be discussing all things censorship

on the network and I think the timing of this couldn't be better as I said like work is ramping up on things like PBS and inclusion lists and and just making sure that we can make ethereum uh even more since you're persistent than it already is obviously since the ofax sanctions just over a year ago on tornado cash censorship has been a really big topic of discussion within the ethereum community but I think for a lot of us we felt generally quite helpless because when it comes to Mev boost and and the relay Network there's not much we can do as individuals like if you're running a validator whether that's as a solo validator or running it as a rocker pull node operator you can of course choose not to talk to these censoring relayers and just talk talk to the non-censoring ones

um but it just it brings all these subjectivity into it Ryan it brings legal risks into it too for for us-based uh persons and citizens so I totally understand why you know it's been a hot topic of discussion but it's also been something that people have felt helpless to to kind of change so I think that's what one of the goals here of this event is is to basically bring people together and show them that they do have the power to affect change not only at the protocol level with the Mev boost relay stuff but also with things like front ends like front ends was another big thing where essentially the you know SEC and other regulatory bodies are now ordering the teams that host the front ends to sense us certain tokens from those front ends right and we all know that on on unisop's front end if the

token's being censored on there it doesn't ultimately matter because you can use another front end or you can just directly talk to the contract because the uni swap smart contracts are decentralized and they can't be censored um uh the same way a front-end can they can technically be censored if for example the entire network was censoring it for some reason right as we saw with another cash where you know uh what is it like 70 of the network uh sorry 30 35 of the network is centering those transactions right now because of the relayers um but if you're talking about like front ends and having decentralized front ends that's another big topic of discussion and that's not something that I think is talked about enough especially because these teams should be motivated to decentralize the front end but I understand all the funding that

they run but I understand why they don't because for a lot of these teams it's actually a profit Center for them so for them it's basically well we want to make money off of people coming to and using our front ends so we don't want to necessarily decentralize it because then we can't actually get the the money from it so for example uh metamask right metamask has their swaps feature on on metamask swaps now if they were ordered to censor to certain tokens on there they would have to comply with that because they're a us-based company um and but then I don't think they're going to decentralize that feature out because they take a massive fee from that I think they take 0.8 percent off off of every swap they're not going to want to give that up so there is a kind of I guess like meeting between profit

incentives and the need for censorship resistance and for decentralized front ends and I think that's all the stuff that's going to get hashed out at this event and then beyond this event uh but really at the end of the day if the smart contracts are on ethereum even if they're not decentralized anyone can build a front end on top of them right and people have and it's not just front ends that are dedicated to the actual app itself there's front ends like zirion and Zappa that are generalized and can talk to many different protocols and something like defy saver and things like that so really it's just increasing choice for users and that's really what it's always been about to me where it's been I I accept the reality that there's going to be centralized front ends there's going to be decentralized front ends there's going to be centralized

smart contracts and there's going to be this decentralized smart contracts but as I said even with the centralized smart contracts you can still build on top of them yes uh it may change in the future where for some reason you won't be able to build on top of it anymore uh or it just isn't worth it because if the Central if the parties that are controlling the contracts have unilateral control over it and they change it and then your users get screwed over then obviously that's not good but for things like uni software it is actually truly decentralized there are so many front ends for it right now but I understand that for you know the everyday user as well they may only want to go to unisop's finance and only trust unisops Friday because that's another big thing with these front ends is that

if there's no way to curate which ones are trustworthy anyone can build one and then look like they're talking to the unisop contracts but in reality they're talking to some other contract that if you approve the token allowance for it'll just drain you so there is definitely a security aspect to this as well uh but yeah anyway you can go check out the event details I'll link them in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so all right so I mentioned last week that the whole Sky a test net was launching on September 15th well unfortunately we had a failure to launch now this was not a failure due to any underlying kind of issue with too many validators or anything like that being on the network it was a simple misconfiguration error in the extra data field which was

applied to the execution layer configurations but not the consensus layer ones which means that the whole ski test net a whole Sky test net did not initialize properly and there was no uh Genesis I I think so then uh the Tweet here from another mine continues and says the consensus has been reached among the EF devops and client teams to relaunch a week from now I think that may have been changed to the 28th I haven't actually seen any updates on this recently um originally they wanted to launch it on the 22nd of September um but it may be pushed out to the 20a so either 22nd or 28th is when they're going to aim to launch it again but thankfully yeah it failed to launch just based on something stupid honestly like if I'm being honest this should have been caught in in the testing they did

before uh before before they actually went ahead with um a kind of going for a mainnet launcher and it's obviously a Learning lesson for them but this is a test net right like it's not a huge deal that this didn't happen it's not it's like it's a main net fork or anything like that but still kind of a funny little thing that happened to you but as I said it is aiming to relaunch on the 22nd and 28th with the exact same specs that it was going to launch with on the 15th which was those 1.5 million validators um that I that I talked about because they want to stress test the network and people some people ask me you know does this have any impact on dencoon timing for like mainnet and I I initially said no and I kind of still think it is no

but it kind of may have a second order impact on it where you guys know that the typical kind of uh I guess uh uh release schedule for these kind of network upgrades is that they'll do the dev Nets first of which they've been doing them for uh I guess a few months now they're out to like devnet nine um and and then devnet 10 I think and then they'll do the test Nets and they'll schedule those then they'll do mainnet so I think at this rate like because we're already in mid-september or just after mid-september then crew may get pushed out to December now it may not happen in November anymore and as I've always said to you guys this was just me speculating and I said that anytime that I saw something that could potentially delay my own you know window of time uh I

would tell you guys and I wouldn't kind of try to sugarcoat it or anything like that so yeah I definitely think that there is a potential for it to be pushed out to December but really as I've said before in December there's only a short window there because it is the holiday period I highly doubt that it's going to happen I I feel like the latest data could happen is before December 20th I think after that it's not going to happen uh until the new year until like maybe mid to late January or something like that so I think that if it doesn't happen before then or um then yeah it won't happen this year but it usually gets scheduled about a month out in advance uh they may opt to do a faster kind of scheduling here but it's usually a month out in advance so I

think by mid-november we'll probably know for sure and that's still two months away mind you so we can still do all the test Netflix and everything and this and this is also assuming everything goes well if any of the test Nets have major issues with them then yeah it's not happening this year like I can straight up say that I'm here just assuming that things are going to go well there's not going to be any major bugs or anything like that on the test Nets and then we should still be good for a December launch there but honestly guys if it happens in December or happens in January or February I don't think it actually matters that much people make it out as if it's like a huge deal if it doesn't happen within a you know if it happens a couple months later than it originally did I don't

think so but I think that the core devs and researchers are definitely all aligned on making it happen in December um I haven't but there's actually another wrench that kind of might happen as well and and and might put a like a sorry there's another thing that might put like a wrench into this is that that uh EIP that I discussed last week 7514 the churn limit EIP I'm now starting to see more people talk about this publicly um I don't know if it was my video that did it I did tweet at the person who was leading this dapline who's in ethereum call Dev I did tweet at him today and basically said hey here's my thoughts on this with the link to my video and we had a bit of a back and forth um and it seems that people are in a

mostly in agreement with me that this was rushed and that it should have more thought should have been put into it so this could put a spanner in the works in that essentially this Erp could end up being removed from dancoon which may delay things I don't know why it would but it may delay things um but yeah we'll have to see I'll I'll keep monitoring that I'm not seeing any discussion about being removed right now I'm actually going to look and see if they discussed this at the next awkward devs call at all because as I said I really kind of waited I I I kind of blame myself for waiting too long to speak up about this there was only a short period of time for people to speak up about this but honestly I waited until it was approved because I didn't

think it would get approved for Dan uh but I should have spoken up earlier so I kind of feel a little bit guilty here but it's out there my thoughts are out there uh hopefully people latch on to them and understand what I'm saying I've had many private conversations with people about this as well and once I've talked them through it and got on my point across they seem to understand where I'm coming from and understand the concerns here that I have and that they're not technical concerns it's more about the the social concerns here the the potential hit to ethereum's Credible neutrality and that is the most important to me and and you guys know I'm not one to usually rock the boat with these things I like to make sure that everything's running smoothly but when something needs to be said it needs

to be said and that's why I I did my rant the other day about this and that's why I've tried to be a bit more vocal about it but I also don't want to be seen as someone kind of rocking the boat for the sake of it I always try to take a balanced approach and try to criticize things that I think should be criticized and this is definitely one of those things so we'll see how that shakes out but yeah as I said I I I I at this point in time I would say that it's more likely that that then could happen in December than November now just because um you know the maybe there's a second order effect here of the whole ski uh test net not launching on instead of the 15th launching two weeks later and also the test Nets haven't been scheduled at

all yet and hasn't been much talk about scheduling business for a hard Fork yet so yeah we'll see maybe it happens in November maybe I'm surprised but for now I'm gonna say December but we'll move on from that one there all right just a shout out here I've shouted out this newsletter before but I figured I shout it out again so this is the Rhino review which is an ethereum staking newsletter put together here by Armageddon uh and you can go check this out it's on sub stack I'll link in the YouTube description below but if you want to keep up with everything happening in the staking ecosystem I cannot think of a better newsletter than this one there is so much gold in here guys like I highly recommend signing up to it like I I if you want to keep up with anything or to do with staking you

will have a full view of the entire ethereum staking ecosystem just by reading this newsletter so I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to check out but as I said this is the 15th Edition of this newsletter so it's been going on for quite a while now um and it's being put together by uh by Armageddon here who's been doing a lot of great work he links this in the daily Discord Channel as well so if you ever kind of miss it you'll you'll find it there uh for sure but yeah I mean just look at how many links are here guys this is crazy I mean I for sure do not get to cover most of this stuff on the refuel I try to obviously stick to things that I can fit into the 30 minute time slot but all of this could easily

take you hours upon hours to read through to digest to understand and this is just the staking ecosystem of ethereum right this is just only one part of the ethereum ecosystem uh when you really think about it so this is why I always go on about the fact that I think that ethereum uh the ethereum ecosystem is just like Way Beyond where where uh where I can keep up with it now in terms of one person keeping up with everything happening but even like a team trying to keep up with everything happening it's impossible you have staking you have layer twos you have D5 of nfts you have social apps now with like friend Tech leading the charge there and fire caster and lens and all that sort of stuff there you have real world assets coming into this you have all the the Trad fire and how they're

getting um integrated with it there's just too much happening and and I'm gonna do my best as I usually do on the refill to try and keep up with all the most interesting things but if you want to dive deeper you have to go into the the specialized uh kind of news aggregators and that's exactly what this newsletter is here it's a specialized aggregator for everything happening in the staking ecosystem so I'll link this in the YouTube description below and you can subscribe to it yourself all right so eigen Labs is gearing up to launch their data availability Solutions soon so you guys know I've talked about this a lot on the refuel this is the eigen da solution uh that is going to be used by a bunch of projects actually at launch such as cello mantle fluent offshore and layer n uh and this is

obviously to use eigen da because um ethereum layer 1 data availability is still probably going to be too expensive for for their needs and that means they're not technically a roll-up there's layer twos they are like more of a validium construction where they obviously store their data off chain instead of on on ethereum but really it's a cost benefit analysis for for these um for these teams right because it depends on what you're trying to do like for example layer n is trying to build the best uh I guess like defy exchange on on ethereum L2 and you can't do that as cheaply as a roll-up as you can as a validium um at least not yet not until maybe we have full dank shining which is probably another two three years out or something

like that so so the interim solution would be to store your data on eigen da and then show your proofs on ethereum and you can still get those nice security properties and security guarantees but it's lesser than a full roll up and that's just the trade-off that these teams can make here but as I said before because eigenda is going to be secured by a restaked eth it to me is the most secure data availability solution out there out of the box really from that perspective now of course there's going to be risks of bugs because it's going to be very new and there's going to be other things in place like centralized controls but that's going to be true for every other data availability solution as well such as um Celestia and Avail and I think there's one more out there that's that's pretty prominent right now so when

looking at it from that lens yeah I do think a lot of project is going to opt for for eigen da here and you guys know I'm an investor in eigenlayer just just to disclose that there I forgot to disclose that earlier but I've been talking about it for so long now like I'm I'm definitely just talking about it because I'm super interested in it but yeah so they're getting up to launch soon I don't know yes it's so so soon means by the end of 20 23 so again this falls into the same things I think about when I think about the um dencoon launch where a lot of teams aren't going to launch anything over the holiday period because they're on holidays right so the latest this could happen is probably sometime in like early to mid uh December here but I also think that it

could happen earlier earlier than that it just depends on when they're ready to launch it here but and and there's still a cap by the way on the on the restaking too they haven't raised that cup again but maybe they raise it one more time and then they launch eigen da I don't know it remains to be seen we'll have to see how that shakes out there uh but that was an article from the Block that kind of put this out here so you can go check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh for you to do so all right so I've got a few minutes left here to uh just go back to my earlier discussion about that churn limit EIP there wasn't one other thing I wanted to say about that um and it was really about that ethereum's credible neutrality point

because some people have asked me what I actually mean by that like in a in a detailed fashion I don't have you know all the Time in the World to go through that right now but I will give a bit of a more detailed uh uh I guess like explanation of what I mean by this so what I mean by this is that there is a there is a certain social contract in place for the ethereum network right and specifically around ethereum governance and that social contract is basically that it's not easy to get an EIP into the network unless it's like a strictly technical thing because I remember I mentioned last week there was also another EIP that got pushed through really quickly that had to do with 4844 and um and blobs and and dangshiding but that was a strictly technical thing for

a new feature it wasn't altering something that already existed on the Chain so because it was a strictly technical thing for a new feature that isn't live on the network yet um I I think that from that perspective it doesn't really play into the social contract right but when you talk about something like the churn limit EIP it Alters the social contract that has already existed for years at this point the churn limit since the beacon chain went live on December 1st 2020 that's how long it has been operating under the same behavior now within a few weeks that behavior has uh well hasn't changed yet but you know the EIP went through to change that behavior so that's what I mean by ethereum's credible neutrality taking a hit here because if it can happen in this EIP what's to say it's

not going to happen with other eips and that's why I pushed back because I'm like you know what I don't want this to become a trend I don't think this is the way ethereum governance should be operating I think it's a danger a potentially dangerous Trend that if taken to its logical conclusion erodes ethereum's credible neutrality which in my eyes is its most valuable feature now as I said last week I don't think that it's a massive hit right as I said it's it's basically a um a kind of a dent essentially but we all know what happens as you get more and more dense right you say you have a car you have one dent on it you're like okay whatever but then over time you get more and more and it adds up right your car starts looking like it's like it's like really

even for lack of a better term right so the same thing happens with ethereum you ding incredible neutrality here you ding it there you ding it there and then and then before you know it it they're just holes everywhere right and I I or dense everywhere to continue on with the analogy so that's why I'm pushing back and that's why I said that I feel like ethereum's credible neutrality took a little bit of a hit here but as I mentioned before there's still time for this EIP to be withdrawn and honestly if it was withdrawn due to community pushback I would be really happy about that and that would actually strengthen ethereum's credible neutrality in my eyes because it means that the community um can still have this kind of veto power I guess but at the same time I'm not pushing for it too hard because it's

not something that I think is so so the AP itself I think is actually at the end of the day um probably prudent to put in because it's erring on the side of caution I as I've but as I've said I just don't agree with the speed and the reasoning behind it uh and and the reasoning fell into the speed you know if the reasoning was given on a longer time frame it would have been different but the reasoning inferred the speed which inferred how how quickly it got included into into the um into Den which is kind of my main issue there but at the end of the day if it goes in um it you know I'm not kind of I think it's a huge issue but I'm also not pushing too hard about it to video if I thought it was like a

critical thing that shouldn't go into the network at all I'd be on Twitter and other channels every single day telling everyone to rise up basically and and say we don't want this EIP you know this is not something we want in the network uh we want to veto it you know and basically threaten not to run the network upgrade right use our community power but for this one I'm happy being mild about it I'm happy being kind of like quiet about it and doing my own kind of chipping away sort of thing my own denting of the of the thing here and if if it's successful in making the core devs think harder about what they've done here and harder about this EIP in particular whether it's actually critically needed um and whether they they think we can wait till Electra to get it included

instead of including it in dencoon then I would feel like my my job is done but honestly I'm pretty happy to just see more people talking about it because that was my whole goal to begin with uh but yeah that was that's my whole explanation about why I think that it does have a little bit of a hit to ethereum's Credible neutrality not a major thing but still something to pay attention to um but yeah anyway on that note I'm going to end today's episode there so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone