L2Beat DA page, MakerDAO endgame and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #747 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of Del refuel where C latest news eum ecosystem I'm your host St and today 13th of March 2024 all right everyone let's get into it so before we get into everything just a couple of housekeeping items to kick off today's episode first thing there will be no refuel next week on Tuesday and Wednesday which I believe is the 19th and 20th of March I am traveling to Sydney for some crypto regulatory policy kind of stuff that's happening there I was invited to an event that's happening there if you are in Sydney please reach out to me uh next next week uh we can probably catch up for lunch or something like that or or for a coffee because I will have some free time in between events but yeah just a fair warning that there'll be no refuel next week on

Tuesday and Wednesday the 19th and the 20th of uh March but I'll be back on the 21st uh hopefully I mean I fly back on the 21st so hopefully I should be okay cuz it's just Sydney it's like an hour flight away from me here so no jet lag or anything like that and the second thing just apologies to those who listened to the podcast last night within the first kind of hour or so that it was published because I accidentally uploaded the wrong episode I uploaded the episode from the 11th of March instead of the one from the 12th of March uh so you would have heard you know me giving the intro and saying 11th of March and either thinking that I've gone crazy by thinking it's the wrong date or you've gone crazy because you you're hearing things no it was my fault

apologies for that uh someone pinged me on Discord so thank you for them uh they pinged me about it and told me that I kind of messed up there uh and then yeah it was rectified there so yeah just just just to clar any confusion uh on that front but anyway 13th of March guys it is denune day so by the time you're watching this most of you uh from what I see on the on the on the statistics watch it later in the day or a few hours after I published the refuel so Denon has probably already happened hopefully it went well hopefully nothing went wrong you know it doesn't seem like anything's going to go wrong but the blobs uh finally here like we're only from time of recording right now we're like 2 to 3 hours away from it going live so I'm super amped for it going to

be on the live stream doing all of that hopefully a lot of you guys tune into that there uh but it starts a new era for ethereum guys like I don't think that people kind of understand what denune and what 4844 blobs kind of brings to ethereum it starts the era of dank shiding on on ethereum and it basically means that ethereum is is is hyperscaling from here we've had the layer Twos for a while you know we have more and more coming online they're growing their ecosystems they're getting bigger and bigger they're doing their own technical kind of upgrades and improvements and things like that uh but now we're focusing on the L1 with the you know the surge part of the L1 road map with RP 4844 with things that dat are availability sampling and with full dank Shing eventually and that is what

going to hyperscale and supercharge these rollups and yeah it really does begin a new era for ethereum so I'm very much looking forward to it I've got a few other things to talk about with regards to denune shortly but I want to start off with an update about The Verge today so obviously another road map item on ethereum's road map not the surge but the Verge so Josh Rudolph put out a recap tweet as per usual about the latest stateless client oh sorry verical implementers call which is number 14 so they've had a bunch of calls now so it's great to see progress being made here are and the week's agenda was client team updates testing updates dos Vector discussion and a test net relaunch so probably the thing that I I think that I like to focus on with these sorts of things because a lot of it is very

technical very C Dey I'm not going to understand most of it but stuff that I like to focus on is things like test Nets and Dev Nets and kind of getting closer to main net here hopefully next year because uh as I think I've discussed before it looks like none of the Verge related eips are probably going to go into Petra which is slated for inclusion I SL sorry later to go live on the network probably I'm going to say like early next year to be honest um but then you know we may see The Verge happen later on next year sometime or maybe early kind of 2026 that's the thing like the Cadence of upgrades has really been every kind of 9 to 12 months at this point but like it depends on the scope of the upgrade and there's a lot of other things that play into it but

regardless of that uh there's been a lot of work being done on the verge and a lot of progress being made and Josh Rudolph is probably the best person to follow if you want to keep up to date with all of that so I'll link his tweet in the YouTube description below but it seems like they're going to be relaunching the test net shortly uh I think they say here they want to get a a a test net launched every kind of like two weeks rather than having yeah such a long live test net as we've done in the past try to get it turn to turn around at least every two weeks so they're going to keep running these test Nets uh as time goes on there all right a big update from rider. Network today they have refreshed their entire website so they got a brand new

look here it looks awesome guys honestly I mean this is the landing page as you can see here when you first go to the website they currently support two networks ethereum and polygon with support for a bunch of other networks coming but you guys have seen me on this website a bunch of times before and obviously you can see their new look that they have here this is where I go to monitor pretty much everything related to the network uh health of ethereum's consensus layer specifically because you can see here they list things like the network Effectiveness um you know uh how many blocks we missed Active validators network APR so on and so forth and what I really like is how they've got the network APR here split into consensus layer API and execution layer API because if we go to the last 30 days you can kind of see what the

what the total API has been so it's been almost 4% so 3.88% and then what that's made up of consensus layer obviously is the new eth being issued and then execution layer is the uh tips and um and me related payments uh and the cool thing about this is you can see that uh you can kind of see that split in real time and over different uh periods of time here now of course they've also got on the left hand side here a menu which you can select a bunch of different things from they've got their pools list here so you can see what the staking market share looks like right now across all the different pools and and entities and so on and so forth they got a node operator section so you can check in on all the node operators and what percent each share they have of

the network because as I've discussed before it's not just the pools that you should be looking at because there are a lot of uh node operators that are part of multiple pools so really we should be looking at the node operators themselves and what market share they have and the biggest node operator right now according to r. network is Kiln who has 4.23% uh kind of market share here but I think that uh in this list they don't they don't kind of um include coinbase and binance as like single kind of note operators here which is I guess interesting interesting decision I'm sure they have a document have documentation on that somewhere uh but I mean obviously binance and coinbase and and Kraken are the biggest single uh kind of pool node oper single node operators uh out there but I guess that they're considered pools instead of node

operators here but yeah they've even got like um information about the different relays on the network so M boost relays and different Builders there's so much information here guys and it's really really beautifully presented as well so big kudos to rer don't Network for getting this update out there uh but you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so but there's just so much information here you can get lost in it uh and you can kind of monitor it as time goes on all right so Tony put out a really interesting uh little bit of data on Twitter yesterday where he said what do ethereum users do so he's got a kind of graph here showing what the transactions per hour looks like on the ethereum network this is just ethereum L1 and kind of how many transactions happen per

transaction type so you can see here that 20,000 transactions ascending e every hour there's 10,000 token transfers happening uh every every hour as well and execute is the second most executed solidity method after transfer and before approv now that will mean something to your developers out there um these are functions that are that are kind of used in in smart contracts in solidity here uh but yeah it's an interesting stat that 20,000 transactions sending eth every hour um I would assume that includes gas fees being paid um because obviously every every kind of um uh every transaction on the network needs to pay gas fees but i' I'd like to get um kind of clarity on that maybe if Tony's listening he can give kind of clarity on that um but like I'm not sure if that includes gas fees

paid or not but if we go to the ultrasound money website you can actually see that eth transfers is one of the biggest burners of eth I mean I've got the ultra sound money website here I'm just going to scroll down so you guys can see uh so if we go to the leaderboard over the last seven days eth transfers is second only to Unis swap Unis swap is actually pretty far ahead it's this is crazy unisoft burned 8,400 eth and second place which is eth transfers burned 3,700 eth so that's a pretty crazy difference there uh then you go to 30 days same thing eth transfers second since the merge and then since the burn went live eth transfers is actually number one since the B went live and Open Seas number two still uh just beating out Unis swap by 12,000 eth Bur

which is crazy because openc as a platform has actually uh you know I guess like lost a lot of market share over the past year or I guess like 18 months um and also nfts have not been in the Mania that they once were especially not on on layer 1 ethereum um but it's kind of crazy how much eth was burnt during the nft Mania because you remember that the nft Mania really was from like Q I guess like a1559 went live August 2021 nft Mania was happening then and then it kind of continued into the end of 21 and then into 2022 as well I think that a lot of stuff was happening too so that really speaks just how go like how much um gas was being burned or how much eth was being burned due to the gas fees just being you know really

really high during that period of time thanks to nfts there but anyway you can go check out this nice little graph from Tony I'll link it in the YouTube description below but yeah I'd like to get clarity on that stat there about if it includes gas fees um you know I'm going to assume it doesn't but like I don't know I honestly I'm just I'm kind of like gu guessing I'm not really basing that on anything other than kind of I guess like an intuitive sense that it wouldn't really make sense to include gas fees in that uh but yeah we'll see we'll see uh if if I get any Clarity on that all right L2 beat has a brand new page on their website that I absolutely love so this is their data availability page and on this page you can see each of the l2s uh listed here with along

with what type they are so are they an optimistic rollup a ZK rollup an optimium or a validium or you know any other such construction what data availability layer they're using what data availability Bridge they're using and the type of data that they're actually posting to the DA layer now the reason why I love this is because there's been this perverse narrative lately that um that that projects posting their data to like Celestia or nia or some other offchain data availability layer um uh is basically saving the money compared to posting their data to ethereum L1 now on the surface that is true obviously ethereum L1 is expensive even with blobs it's probably still going to be more expensive than and posting it to uh you know a a data availability layer like

Celestia but the point is is that you're basically not comparing apples to Apple because ethereum's da layer or ethereum I guess like L1 which is the da layer is like orders of magnitude many orders of magnitude more secure more decentralized more sensorship resistant and more credibly neutral than any of these other layers so you're not comparing Apples to Apples at all and it's it's a kind of perverse narrative and I really don't like it I think it's actually completely wrong to be equating those things as if they're the same thing like it it it kind of boggles my mind that people are doing this but hey I mean this is a Nuance thing I can understand but yeah and the reason why I like this page here on L2 bit is because it shows you exactly where the data is being stored and then you can make an informed

decision here about this you can see here that obviously Arbitron 1 and op main net two of the top uh l2s on ethereum are using ethereum L1 as a data availability So currently they're using call data but obviously after denune goes live they're going to be using blobs and their da bridge is enshrined and the types of data that they're sending are trans compressed transactions data which obviously we we already know now what's important about this is that the bridge is enshrined which means that you can exit to L1 without relying on the L2 like there's an escape hatch in place especially when it comes to arbitrum 1 which is a stage one roll up right now op main unfortunately is still stay at stage zero because they don't have fraud proofs yet uh along I mean the whole op stack is like that but if we're looking

at Arbitron 1 it means you can exit to L1 without needing the permission of the L2 because the bridge is enshrined right um and then you've got the the the da being posted to ethereum as well so you're not relying on da from another layer you can just rely on ethereum L1 for everything and that's why rollups are so awesome because it's just all tightly coupled and tightly contained in the same layer here but then we can look at other constructions that are posting their their data elsewhere so for example Manta is posting their data to a Celestia and the they don't have a DA Bridge uh none here so there is no bridge that can attest if the TR data has been made available so essentially what that means is that you're totally reliant on Celestia with Manta so if you wanted to do a force exit you would have

to get the data from Celestia and then you would have to hope that it was right basically and in order to kind of force exit from man in case something was to go wrong to get your funds back on on L1 ethereum so when you look at it from that perspective you can see what I mean by these things are not equivalent at all ethereum's da layer is just orders of magnitude more secure than any of these other da layers and especially if both the uh the um the the data availability uh of the transactions data is being posted sorry sorry the data of the transaction data is being posted to ethereum L1 as as well as the bridge being enshrined on ethereum kind of L1 here now all that is to say that uh is to say that not to say that validium and

optimums and other such constructions with da offchain aren't valuable but the point is or aren't kind of uh you know they don't have a purpose but the point is is that they have less security way less security like as I said orders of magnitude less security than ethereum L1 I mean just to put some numbers on it ethereum L1 has what $30 billion of Economic Security right now VI via e state it has the most decentralized and distributed note operator set of any network in in crypto including Bitcoin guys including Bitcoin H because I know that when it comes to to miners it's kind of hard to tell you know where the miners are how many how many uh individual miners there are but like you can look at pools as well and I know pools aren't equivalent to you know

people can change pools and stuff like that but the point is is that I very much doubt there are I know thousands of individual uh mining Farms right on bitcoin whereas there are thousands of individual nde operators on ethereum and it works differently because of proof of work proof of stake it's not an apple establ comparison to be honest but ethereum has $130 billion of economics security bya the stake thousands of of individual and diverse and distributed node operators right it has a very long track record of of um of up time and that very long track record is basically since Genesis 100% uptime you have sensorship resistant guarantees yes the sensorship on the network because of the Tado cash stuff uh and and me boost uh enabling that but the point is is that

you can still get get your transaction included because ethereum is censorship resistant and at the same time ethereum is being purpose built now for these l2s with things like like blobs so when you kind of take that all all together and you and you kind of look at it you get what I mean when it's not an Apples to Apples comparison when kind of comparing ethereum da to offchain Da here and I really hope that narrative goes away over time especially as ethereum da gets cheaper I think it's kind of a cost thing that people look at um but yeah I mean the analogy I use is that imagine you you just bought a $50 Android phone some you know it's obviously a really cheap phone but you can get it I mean there there there are actually brand new phones in some places of the world that

are $50 have Android running on it and it serves the purpose of of the person that bought it and it's it's fine there's nothing wrong with it but then it doesn't have like all the features of an iPhone so in this analogy ethereum is the iPhone the you know the latest iPhone iPhone 15 Pro um and then the the $50 Android phone it does the bare minimum and you know it will do like messaging things you download a few apps on it so on and so forth but it doesn't have like anywhere near the processing power for example of an iPhone doesn't have the camera of the iPhone doesn't have access to the iPhone app store and so on and so forth so when you look at it like that from from that analogy I mean I'm not a huge fan of reasoning by analogy but I think it's a good analogy

you can see what I mean about these things not being Apples to Apples at all and but there's still nothing wrong with it there's nothing wrong with the $50 Android phone you know there's nothing wrong with the iPhone but the thing is is that they're completely different products and you can't be comparing them as if they're the same thing uh because it doesn't make any sense to me at least that's my view on these uh things there but anyway you can go check out this brand new uh da page from L2 be it's great I'm uh I I really love that they've put this together all right so Denon today as you guys know and uh you know I I think that denune has gotten all the attention EIP 4844 has gotten all the attention with regards to lowering fees on l2s but as I've said for a long time now the L1 is

just one place where fees can be lowered for l2s the l2s themselves can lower their own fees with their own upgrades and improvements over time now offchain Labs the developers behind the arbitrum ecosystem tweeted out a thread today saying the blobs are coming this week but did you know that in addition to the Erp 4844 upgrade lowering costs there is also an active snapshot vote taking place in the arbitrum Dal that would reduce other fees for users on the arbitrum 1 Network and then they dive deep into what these fees are so basically uh they say here that uh on on layer 2 Chains SP zero combination of L2 gas which charges for use of resources on the L2 chain itself Plus data posting fees that pass on the cost of posting data to ethereum L1 as blobs roll out L1 posting costs are expected to be

dramatically reduced although the exact size is difficult to predict obviously uh but in addition to the uh those costs coming down ouros Atlas is also introducing major reductions in other fees as well and it expected to be activated on March 18 so they're going to be reducing the L1 Surplus fee so reduce the Surplus fee per bite from 2 gay to zero and the L2 base fee reduce the minimum from 0.1 gay to 0.01 gay here so they say here based on the last 30 days of data these two changes would reduce the above fees by about 90% from where they were previously and this is in addition to the uh reduced L1 data posting fees for arbitrum so the net result is the combination of blobs and the forthcoming reduction in arbitrum L2 fees are expected to dramatically reduce

transaction cost benefiting all users I'm surprised this didn't get more attention because this is huge I mean if you take blobs and what arbitrum is doing here and then you kind of get to uh to March 18th when this goes live on the network you can kind of see that uh I mean just doing R napkin math here there could be potentially up to a 90% reduction in fees on arbiton 1 uh and then that's that's huge guys like I mean I don't know if you guys have looked at the fees lately and it's kind of I mean the fees are going to are going to change from time to time obviously right now the fees are heavily influenced by um by uh the fact that they're sharing the same fee Market as normal L1 fees and then post blobs these fees are going to come down dramatically but right now

with gay at 65 So So currently gay is 65 on arbitrum 1 it will cost you 61 cents to send eth $164 to swap tokens uh now post uh Erp 4844 these are already going to these costs are already going to drop dramatically because blob The Blob fee Market is starting from zero gay essentially I mean not exactly zero gay maybe like 0.01 gay like the bare minimum it can start at and it and and the thing is is right now the the L1 normal L1 fees are 65 gay so we're already reducing that by a substantial amount 65 to let's say 1 so that right there is an absolutely huge reduction that these rollups are immediately going to feel as soon as they start posting their data to blobs instead of Co data now throw in what arbitrum is doing with

their own kind of fees on their L2 which is going to reduce it even further so we could see swaps on arbitrum from $164 down to you know I I'm not going to give like exact figures here I'm going to be conservative with my predictions but post when they go live with their own updates on March 18th we could see their fees drop down to like less than 5 cents or something like that for a swap from $164 like that's the kind of reduction we're talking about here guys but I don't want to speculate more on numbers here we're so close to denune there's no point me speculating we're going to see it all play out but just a reminder that um obviously blobs are going to be day one for arbitrum 1 op Main and a bunch of the other l2s but on March 18th is

when these changes come to uh come to Arbitron one itself so I'm going to be very much looking forward to that but really the north star of all the l2s right now of the ethereum ecosystem he's driving fees down on these l2s to zero basically or or to as close to zero as possible just get those fees down as much as we can because that's how we grow the ethereum ecosystem that is what everyone's working towards both at the L1 and the l2s and high the he ra as well of course uh but yeah anyway uh I'm going to cover the fee reduction on on tomorrow's episode it's going to be exciting so we'll actually get some some initial data on what the fee reduction is going to look like so there's probably no use me speculating right now since we're so close uh but anyway

moving on from that one so a tweet from optimism that I missed the other day so this is from about a week ago I tweeted out saying did you you know that three of the best ZK teams in the world are all working towards implementing a zero knowledge proof for the op stack and they said here we recommend peing the progress comments in the repo now I've said this before and I'll say it again two two things here first thing I said I said this years ago where I said that optimistic rollups aren't going to be obsoleted or the projects aren't going to be obsoleted by ZK rollups or by ZK proofs because they can just integrate ZK proofs into their stack and that's exactly what both the arbitrum and optimism ecosystems are working on right now and eventually that's going to be a thing and the second thing is that op

stack still doesn't have fraud proofs and I'm wondering I'm still wondering I've said this before but I'm still wondering if they're going to skip over fraud proofs and just go straight to Z ZK proofs uh and then you know just kind of like leap frog that because there's there's going to be ZK proofs ready to be integrated into the op stack I don't know I don't know what's going to happen there I mean optimism is taking so long with their fraud proofs right now it's kind of become a little bit of a joke to be honest I mean I wish there was more updates here but regardless of that you know maybe they come out in the next few weeks or maybe I don't know what the timeline is here but in in the near future let's say and they say okay guys well you know we worked on this stuff

but hey it we're going to give you the option of using either fraud proofs or ZK proofs have at it and and I by give you the option I mean like give the op stack Builders the option and then it would be very curious to see which ones the op stack uh uh which ones the different op stack chains go with because there are different costs associated with fraud proofs versus ZK proofs ZK proofs are still more expensive than fraud proofs but obviously they have the pro of you know the the various Pros that come with being doing a ZK proof such as like no need for that 7-Day dispute period and so on and so forth but yeah I mean there's all trade-offs at the end of the day but anyway you can go give this a read I'll link it in the YouTube

description below uh for you to do so all right so just the last thing on denune here I just wanted to give a quick shout out to Apex 7.e he actually shared this with me in Twitter DMS uh basically it's a frame on farcaster where you can mint a collection of blobs here that you can see just like randomly generated little pixels here it's only $2 to Mint it's on base um and you can just uh mint it it it mint it based on your your address your ethereum address that you have tied to your farcaster account it's really cool uh I I I highly recommend going in and kind of checking it out there I'll I'll link it in the YouTube description below and as I said it's only $2 and it's paid in eth and it's not much and it goes to Apex Triple

7 here and they've done a bunch of other stuff as well I think they did some dino thing I saw a few weeks ago but just wanted to give a shout out because I like on farar it's a fun little thing to do um and they passed it on to me so they took the time to to reach out and everything but also at the same time I want to show you guys something so I minted mine of course on here and mine my blob actually ended up looking like if I can get it up for you guys uh it'll be funny to show you what it kind of looks like here so where is it where is it um ah I'm trying I'm having trouble kind of bringing it up on on my screen here but uh just imagine one of these blobs uh looking like a brown potato my

blob ended up looking like a potato and for those of you who have been keeping track of uh the the memes that have been coming out of of Twitter recently um having a my blob be a potato is hilarious because one of the Bloomberg guys that tracks the ETF stuff Eric buunis uh basically called eat small potatoes and it became a meme and I just found it hilarious that my blob looked like a potato it's like the universe trying to tell me something but anyway you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right last thing to talk about today has got to do with maker Dow now makeer da that is an old project guys been around for a very long time now since the end of 2017 I remember when it

first went live end of 2017 I had absolutely no idea what it was I was looking at it being like what is this thing this is so complex I'll I'll I'll figure it out later and I didn't end up kind of learning about it until sometime in 2018 but the reason I bring it up today is because run the co-founder of makeal has another thread/ Forum post out today all about the uh future of makeup and the end game and what the goal is for 100 billion die and sorry what how they're going to get to the goal of 100 billion die and Beyond so you can go check this out for yourself I'll link in the YouTube description below there are a lot of things happening here guys I mean it seems like they're doing like a token conversion as well where they're essentially doing a a

token split where the new token splits I think 1 to 24,000 so for every one mkr token you have you'll have 24,000 of this new token and as you guys know there's a unit bias when it comes to tokens where if a token is really cheap in price price um and and you can own like millions of it or whatever for for a small amount people love that cuz they like oh my God I got millions of this token if it goes to $1 I'm going to be rich obviously you know the vast majority if not all of these tokens don't go to $1 because there just just so many of them and then people don't look at market cap and stuff but it's kind of funny that maker is going down that path here but that's not the only thing there are a bunch of other things

they're going to be doing a new brand reveal as well that's going to be interesting to see uh new new stable uh new new new stable uh they call it so the naming here is kind of funny they call it like new stable and new gov token cuz they haven't actually kind of given the names out yet or maybe they haven't decided on names yet so you'll see a lot of that uh there's a bunch of other features here I'm not going to try and break it down on on on the refill because I'd be here all day reading through this but I just wanted to put it on your radar definitely go check this out uh uh for yourself uh there are people on Twitter debating this whether it's good or bad because some of the stuff add centralization like adding more real world assets to the protocol

adding things like um Athena's ssde to the protocol as well which is good for I mean the growth of D and good for Athena but people kind of look at it and like okay well is this just making D even riskier because you're adding like this collateral that is is not is you know is untested it's very closely tied to funding rates across the ecosystem and to leverage across the ecosystem so on and so forth uh you know those discussions are happening on Twitter if you've seen them but you can go check out the foreign post as well because there are uh there there are going to be discussions on there uh too as well as replies to to runes tweet here but uh yeah I think that's it on the makeer front there just a last thing before we finish up this will be the last episode

obviously that I'll do before Denon goes live on the ethereum mayet just before it goes live I want to uh say thank you for to everyone for following along with everything and asking me questions about it and I'm following along with all my coverage of of of denune up until this point or 4844 up until this point it's been really cool to get DMS from you guys asking questions me being able to answer them for you and you kind of loving it and loving the fact that the who are getting cheaper and you kind of once you once you realize that once you realize what the blobs are going to do and what they symbolize and and and they symbolize the start of like the the real ethereum scaling uh kind of I guess like era uh people people really get excited about and I love that I love when people

get excited about I can feel the excitement through the text it's kind of funny how they get so excited that I can feel that there so just wanted to yeah thank everyone for following along with my coverage of it but the coverage of blobs doesn't stop as a reminder because as you guys know blobs are only the first step to towards full dang shotting blobs elves can be changed over time for for the better obviously increasing the size of blobs uh and potentially increasing the number of them but I think they're going to be sticking to increasing the size of them which gives us even more scalability and then we're finally at the point uh by tomorrow's episode where I'll be able to actually give you guys accurate fees on the l2's post blobs we'll be actually able to look at the metrics and look at the

early kind of fees that are that are on there and be like okay well the fees were reduced from here uh you know from what they are today to what they are then and then we can monitor overtime and see what happens there but anyway on that note that's going to be it for today cuz I got to get ready for the live stream which is happening in a couple hours from now 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