The Merge updates, Ethereum Protocol Fellowship - The Daily Gwei Refuel #440 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily great refuel where i cut the latest news in the theory of ecosystem i'm your host the anthony susana and 25th of september 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so hal press here shed a screenshot from the uh kind of like um ethereum discord here that shows that mainnet shadow fork 12 went perfectly there were zero issues found so this was basically a perfect shadow fork or or a perfect merge you can actually see exactly what was said here by parathos who said main shadow fork 12 merged one hour ago this was on the 31st of august we used versions advertised in the ethereum foundation blog post so far we've found zero issues there are no misproposals assassination rate didn't change pre to post merge and the network seems really stable great job to all the

client teams this is a massive milestone as you guys have probably know as you've been following along with the shadow forks with the test net forks or i guess like the test net merge transitions you'll know that none of them have been 100 perfect right there are configuration issues here there were attestation issues here the validators being offline here and there and you know some clients would just wouldn't produce blocks or produce invalid blocks and and things like that but apparently with maintenance shadow fork 12 that is not an issue at all it just went completely perfectly which is crazy to me because i mean when you really think about it it requires all the clients to work together to talk to each other for there to be no issues during the merge transition and we haven't seen that before and you know even i said that i expect there to be at

least kind of like some issues with some clients um with the mainnet merge transition just because there's so many kind of moving parts to it and especially when it comes to configuration issues especially for people who may not have configured correctly because they haven't done it with the test nets and they haven't done it on the shadow forks or anything like that i'm expecting some kind of turbulence with that with the main net merge fork in terms of some of the validators but in terms of like it going smoothly i expect it to go smoothly we're probably going to see a participation drop off um of a few percent or even potentially more than that i'm not you know 100 sure how much it's going to be obviously i don't know but i think that the fact that the shadow fork has gone perfectly means

that there it wouldn't be an issue with kind of the clients or anything like that it might be an issue with the configurations or with people's you know their own setups right if they're a solo stake or maybe they've set up something wrong maybe they haven't actually set up the execution client right maybe they haven't set up their jwt token correctly and all that sort of stuff there which is easily rectified and quickly rectified once the uh the merch transition happens and their validators stop uh kind of attesting and they start losing rewards um and you know on that note as well i actually got all of mine merge ready the other day and it's actually pretty easy pretty straightforward and i'm doing it all manually i'm not using dap note or anything like i'm doing mine totally manually on my own setup so but a lot of

solo stackers i know are using dap node which makes it super easy to do and also super easy to change clients so i don't expect there to be any major issues there and we are so close now to the merge guys i mean what it's like ten days like if you go to baldell.wtf here it says that the uh merge is expected uh around september 15th at 2pm or sorry 2am utc uh and then yeah i mean even the other website that i was showing you guys last week seven nine seven dot io still says september 14th it's set at i guess like 5 pm utc but because the hash rate's been going up and down it's it's kind of hard to get an exact measure but it's going to happen on september 14th or 15th basically so around 10 days from now which is just insanely close like i

actually took a little bit of a break over the last few days um as you guys know i didn't i missed a couple of refuels last week so i've just been taking a break because i think that leading up to the merge and around the merge is going to be a lot of insanity um not not particularly with price but just with like a lot of information out there a lot of celebrations a lot of things happening and you know i'm kind of like thinking that this merge call because there's that merge call that we're doing mainnet merge call that we're doing myself um bankless and e-staker it's gonna end up happening at like 4 a.m 4 a.m my time or something like that right like just it's just gonna happen that way uh right now i don't think it's scheduled for that i think it's

scheduled for around 1 pm depending on which scheduler you look at but as i said it's hard to kind of know exactly when that's going to happen but we're close we're very close and it's just amazing that this maynet shadow fork 12 was a perfect run there wasn't any issues with it now i haven't checked back in since this tweet i don't know if there was other there was any issues that sprung up later on but at the time of the merge transition uh there there wasn't kind of like any um any issues with it and uh it seems like everything went perfectly but if you want to keep uh up to date with the merge time you can go to these two websites boarddel.wtf or 797.io slash the merge i'll link them both in the youtube description for you to check out as well

so speaking of the merge there's another update here on the merge nft so you can see here from the state full works account another week brings us closer to the merge and the new home of the heart exhibition go live alongside jpeg sophia garcia uh we can't wait to share with you all 14 uh share it with you all 14 artists contributing work proceeds to benefit the protocol guild core devs that made the merge possible and you can see here that the the um artists are listed on the right hand side and the art exhibition of benefits uh you know all the proceeds from that are going to the protocol guild here i just wanted to remind you guys that this is still happening this is still coming uh and these are the merge nfts to get your hand on if you want to be part of

history here i think i don't i think that these are the main nfts and i think there will be other ones out there i've seen some floating around that a fan made but in terms of kind of like um i'm minting something i'm missing an nft that's part of the main nft set i think this is it and this is the uh the funds are going to go towards core devs here as well which is which is very awesome uh and last thing about the merge is i'll be doing a twitter spaces with super fears and uh itamar from arjun here in less than 24 hours from when this video goes live so this is happening tuesday 6th of september 2 p.m utc i'm very much looking forward to it we're going to be talking all things the merge and you know i can't wait to to

talk alongside superfiz and itamar here two people that have been around in the ethereum ecosystem for a very long time here i think they'll have a lot to say especially superfiz i mean i talk about him a lot on the refuel but that guy is awesome when it comes to everything the beacon chain everything ethereum staking so i can't wait to do these twitter spaces in less than 24 hours i'll leave a link to that in the youtube description below for you all right so mario haval here from the ethereum foundation announced or at least shared a blog post announcing the ethereum protocol fellowship this is the fast track to becoming an ethereum core dev and it's now open it's a fellowship program for anyone who's interested in diving deeply into the core protocol research and development uh and you can kind of like check out this blog post

here to see all the details now i believe they've done uh one or two of these in the past the ethereum foundation i remember covering it on the refuel and you can see here the past cohorts that they've kind of uh worked to uh yeah they've hosted two successful cohorts and past cohort members have gone on to work on alternative method of documenting and specifying the ethereum protocol researched how we can modify or remove the self-destruct opcode helped build zk sync built out new peer-to-peer networks for the portal network which has got to do with statelessness wrote their own implementation of the evm and 10 cohort alumni and now work full-time on core protocol development and five others work in adjacent areas of the industry so if that interests you if you want to be involved with things like this and

you want to be able to work on some of the most interesting and bleeding edge stuff within ethereum then this is the program for you you should definitely go check it out i should definitely go apply if it if if it's something that you're interested in i mean honestly from kind of like my point of view i i'm not a developer or researcher or anything like that but if i was this is the thing i'd be going for i don't really consider there to be anything else as interesting as working on the ethereum core protocol maybe the layer twos because they're closely related i think to to um call protocol work and they can kind of work alongside the core protocol but for me personally app level stuff like i don't know it just doesn't interest me the same way protocol level stuff does even though i've been a big advocate for

the app layout i'm obviously a big advocate for us having better app layered products being launched because of the fact that there's no point building on the core protocol stuff if the app layer is lacking i just personally am much more interested in the core protocol stuff but i'm interested in it as an educator right like i haven't done any research i haven't published any research i haven't uh done any uh uh kind of a core development itself i haven't done really any development as i'm not a developer but i do a lot of education around it and that that's just personally what i find uh most interesting but there are a lot of people out there who are the complete opposite of me they don't really you know care for for educating but they definitely want to get into the weeds propose new research or do

research help with core development and be part of the ethereum history that way and that just speaks to how many different ways and how many different opportunities you have to be involved with ethereum because you don't have to just settle for one small corner you can do everything or you can just do you know something that really uh it really resonates with you like i consider myself a generalist as an educator but you can just dive head first into ethereum called protocol development and spend all your time on that or call protocol research and not really have to pay attention to anything else right like you don't as a core protocol researcher and developer you don't have to concern yourself too much with the app layer like what you're building should just allow the app layer to proliferate but you you yourself don't have to get into the weeds of every

single project right you just work on what you work on and that's it so if if this if that sounds like something you love doing or want to do you should definitely go check out this fellowship i'll link it in the description below for you to do so and you can go get all the details there so the ethereum foundation blog has had a major overhaul and is now available in 16 languages i've spoken about my view on the ethereum i guess like uh language support generally across the ecosystem i've often talked about how i think that it's kind of weird that we still don't have a lot of multiple language support on the app layer but the theorem.website has a lot of different languages supported there and now the ethereum foundation blog has been translated into 16 different

languages and i'm sure there's more ongoing there isn't all the blog posts from the ethereum foundation blog translated i think it's a kind of like an ongoing effort here but this is great at the end of the day i've said it before and i'll say it again we way over index on english in the ethereum community even though we're supposed to be a global distributed decentralized community we over index on english just because that's just the way it is right english is a very dominant language it it has incredible network effects and there definitely is a divide between i guess west and east as there traditionally is just generally and it's funny because i was looking at uh kind of uh i guess like the alt l1 space the other day and i was thinking to myself what's the most successful alt l1 after all the dust is settled what has

actually had staying power and funny enough it's bsc right binance smart chain and i think this is for two major reasons the first reason is obviously binance support like the world's biggest crypto exchange putting all their weight behind the bsc allowing people to bridge in and out very easily you know very cost effectively and not caring about decentralization at all and just basically having like a centralized on-chain casino essentially for people to play with right the second thing is that a lot of the people using bsc are actually not from the west they're not english-speaking they're more so from the east because binance has always had a very big presence in asia i mean it was born out of asia cz himself is from from asia so that is a huge kind of driver of their

traffic there and i think the ethereum community has i mean intentionally or not ignored that whole cohort there because we don't have a lot of language support at the end of the day yeah you can do like auto translations and stuff like that but with language comes the culture too and i think in the ethereum community we are very westernized and very us and and and europe-centric whereas bsc bought you know binance uh and i think there was a couple of other chains out there up you know i tried to appeal to the asian market i remember the there was uh neo in 2017 and 2018 called the the um the chinese ethereum that never caught on but it's funny because bsc seemed to seem to catch on as like the asian ethereum so to speak

because bse really is just an evm chain at the end of the day but it is appealed to a completely different cohort and also a different uh cohort in terms of uh people being able to afford to use the chain right so in saying all of that we definitely need to keep pushing on more language support not just for obviously asian speak uh the different languages in asia but also in the middle east uh you know in eastern europe as well like all these places that we've traditionally not appealed to and not actually been in we need to do that because ethereum can't call itself a global network if we're just appealing to english speakers like yes okay english is spoken by billions of people but it regardless like we're still leaving billions of people excluded from it

because they don't speak english and they have no plans to learn how to speak english and they shouldn't be expected to learn how to speak a completely different language just to be able to use the things that we're building so i think that the ethereum foundation has done an amazing job on both the ethereum.org site for language support and also on on the blog now and i just wanted to give them a big kudos for doing that because i think it's extremely important i wish more of the app layer kind of projects did this on their front ends but yeah i mean we can't force them to do it right they have to do it on through their own accord but it'll happen probably slowly over time some of them do have it but i i think i'm surprised it hasn't happened more i think that's

just maybe because a lot of them don't realize how much uh of their user base they're living on the table by not supporting the uh the non-english speaking countries and maybe they just haven't really thought of it at the end of the day so so yeah but anyway kudos to the ethiopian foundation for pushing along here all right so sam kolder mason here announced something called checkpoints with a z uh over the weekend so this is an ethereum beacon chain checkpoint sync provider so what the features that come with this is that it reduces the operational burden of providing a full checkpoint sync endpoint web ui for users to cross-reference against and a light mode for home stakers so what can you use this for well because the mainnet merge is quickly approaching and the window to get your beacon node

synced in time is closing this checkpoint sync let your node download download a finalized checkpoint that is close to the head of the chain and then once complete you verify that the sync went as expected so in reality it's hard to find an endpoint for you to use the initial download and just as hard to find somewhere to verify your sync checkpoints aims to help with both of these problems and it has two modes of operation light mode and and full mode and you can read the rest of the details in this thread here um but yeah i mean if you are a solo staker and you need to or if you want to become a solo staker before the merge comes around and you want to sync the beacon you know your beacon node you can i guess like sync from scratch which is very i guess

intensive and very time consuming or you sing from one of these checkpoints and i mean in the future or at least even even these days like exclusively there's you'd be thinking from a checkpoint because there's something called weak subjectivity where it the the chain will become too heavy it'll take too long to sync that you need to be able to you that you will be using these checkpoints always to sync but the reason why you can have guarantees around these checkpoints is because you can actually check and you can see here you can actually check the the state route and the block route to make sure that you're on the right chain and the reason it's called weak subjectivity is because it's still subjective where you're getting the head of the chain from you're choosing it from either checkpoint or some other provider but it is not a

strong subjective because sorry it's not strong subjectivity because of the fact that you can actually verify it yourself with the statement and the block route here and have pretty good guarantees that you're on the the right chain right you're on the you're at the the right head of the chain so yeah i'm this is really cool i think this is just in time obviously for the merge here so if that is you if you are someone that uh is merging or i should say syncing from uh from uh scratch for the merge as a solo staker or if you're changing clients and you accidentally crafted your database or or you're kind of like uh you deleted your database something like that then this is something you should definitely check out and i'll link it in the youtube description below for you to do so and

just on that note as well uh just a friendly reminder i kind of mentioned before but i want to remind you again if you are a solo staker if you're running any kind of staking software b make sure like this is the most important thing going into the merge that you essentially run a local execution layout client it can be geth it could be nethermine it can be basu um maybe aragon but eragon's that's the kind of like similar to get if you're going for client diversity you would go for nethermind or baysu uh and also you need to get your jwt token generated and link all that up now the easiest way to do this is go to go to the merge readiness checklist you can google that and it walks you through it all and then there's the optional extras like mev boost and stuff like that which

you can do as well but just make sure that you have all of that synced and ready to go for the merge because if you don't if you're not running your own execution layer client you will not be able to go through the merge transition uh from and from my understanding your validator will just simply go look offline to the protocol and you'll start inactivity leaking out uh after uh not you know after a few kind of like mr missed attestations there there's another reminder for people out there that are running these things running validators for solo stakers if you are staking with a third party provider like if you just bought st or if you just bought r8 then you don't have to worry about that the people running the nodes will have to worry about that it i mean you can have relative certainty that

it's all fine on their end but you would probably want to i don't know double check for yourself and maybe asking the discord and the rocketpool discord uh if everything's up to date and i expect it to be fine even the lighter discord but i expect all of it to be fine and as i said if it's not they're gonna quickly course correct because if they don't they're leaking value and it's not good for anyone so yeah but anyway you can go check this out i'll link it in the youtube description below all right so ens announced over the weekend that in collaboration with cloudflare they've set up another alternative gateway on ether.domains meaning you can add either domains or dot limo to your ens name to reach it via the web and they're continuing to work on recovering access to ether.link now for those of you who

don't know ethe.link access is currently in limbo because the name is earned by owned by virgil griffith who as i guess like ian s dao said is currently unavailable which is putting him lightly he is in prison right now right he was prosecuted for his uh involvement in um going to north korea and uh and been breaking u.s sanctions so obviously as he owns f.e.t.link he's in prison he can't access that so right now it's it's unable to to to be accessed and i'm unable to be obtained to renew the uh the name f dot link here so as an alternative you can use domains or dot limo for your e s name to reach it via the web just wanted to give a shout out there

for that in case you were confused as to why eighth dot link isn't working and why it's offline this is kind of i guess a really shitty situation here i wonder how this is going to go like will virgil be able to give instructions to someone he trusts to get that domain kind of transfer oh sorry that that that no ma that domain name and transfer ownership or renew it or anything like that i'm not sure we'll have to see how that goes but that was august 26th when that was uh announced there so maybe something has been rectified since then but i haven't seen it but there are still these alternatives that you can use regardless and you can see them on on the screen here um and it's dot domains and and dot limo for you there all right so an announcement out of

ingonyama today they've introduced something called cloud zk which is a toolkit for developing zero knowledge proof acceleration in the cloud tldr today we're in open source a new way to accelerate zk using fpga in aws cloud easy accessible cheap read on or check out the blog post thread so there's a thread here announcing exactly what this is for a refresher for you guys england is building zero knowledge asics and i am an investor in them i just want to disclose that there but this is the kind of bleeding edge stuff that we want to be seeing in the zk space that is on the hardware side of things uh it is a piece of software but to power the hardware that will be able to generate these zk zkps or zero knowledge proofs because without

i guess speedy generation zero knowledge roll ups are quite limited because the the cost from my understanding the biggest cost of a zero knowledge roll up is the time and the resources to generate the zero knowledge proof now if we can get them down as much as possible then we i kind of get get for get um what's the word i'm looking for get closer to realizing that reality of uh the holy grail of scaling solutions for ethereum which is full zk roll ups with cheap zkp uh proving here so you can read this blog post for exactly what this is this is more geared towards i think developers and more technical people of course but it's great to see that there are a lot of things happening in the zk acceleration space here and the zkp

proving space because as i said it is definitely very very needed and ingonyama is completely focused on this this is like their whole jam and i'm glad that there is a company that does this i was actually extremely excited to back them when i when i was given the opportunity because i'd been talking about it for a while on the refuel before i even knew about them about this this hardware that we would need and also the software to power that hardware and i think it's going to be one of the most important companies going forward as we get into you know get further down the layer to scaling roadmap that ethereum is going down right now all right so finally here speaking of layer twos a starknet alpha version 0.10.0 has been released to gurley so this version is another step towards scaling

ethereum without compromising on security and decentralization as starkware says here and you can read the blog post uh about sorry you can read the blog post i'll link in the description but the main features are that there are account abstraction improvements in the spirit of eip 43 37 uh validate execute separation transaction uniqueness is now ensured in the protocol the fever mechanism has been extended to include l1 to l2 messages and declare transactions and there's also a few cairo syntax changes so as i said you can read the blog post for a further breakdown here with links to even even more breakdowns on all of this i'll be great to see stock net alpha a new version of stockton alpha rolled out to girlie here not on mainnet of course uh but on on a test net i'm

sure this will be pushed to mainnet sooner rather than later and i actually really like this artwork here this is really cool it's got like uh stairs on the left mountains on the right and then like a galaxy uh sorry mountains in the middle and then a galaxy on the right really speaks to i guess starkware's brand branding around voyaging out into the unknown as as as a zero knowledge or a stark uh scaling infrastructure here so very cool image there but yeah i think that's going to be it for the updates now i've left a bit of time here at the end today because i have something that i want to discuss particularly leading up to the merge which i said before is happening in around 10 ish days right i think what's on everyone's mind right now is what the markets are gonna do and

i've spoken about this before and you guys know that i don't think the merge is priced in but as i said on my podcast with hal press and as house said himself there are different levels of price thin right depending on your time frame my time frame is very very long term whenever i say i don't think something is priced in i'm talking many many years i'm not talking like 6 12 months i'm talking 5 10 15 20 years that's my time horizon so i think people miss that whenever i say it and it's fair to miss that i mean it's not something obvious but i want to talk short term for a second not something that i normally do but i want to talk about it because i think it's important i'm seeing a lot of people make comments about it so i think

it's important for me to give my two cents here it's probably going to be a volatile time right even in a bear market there are players out there who are trying to take advantage of information asymmetries trying to play pvp matches with other traders out there and basically also positioning themselves for any possible forks that are happening there's a popular trade right now where you long spot which basically means you buy each like actual eat you withdraw it to your wallet or something or put have it on exchange so that you can have exposure in case there is a proof of work ethereum fork and you get that air drop but then you short the futures or uh contracts sorry your you you short futures for eth um so that you're basically in a neutral position so essentially it doesn't matter what

way the eth price moves you're not losing money on that right that's that's kind of like the strategy because obviously if you are only trying to capture the forked coins then you don't want to open yourself up to losing money on longing each just in case eth went down because that would just negate the profit you can make from the coin so that's a very popular trade right now and you may have seen some charts out there of open interest which measures measures this leverage in the system for eighth going up and up and up and i think that's a big reason because of it now what does this mean for the price post merge i think that what we're gonna see is we're gonna see volatility but i think because we're in a bear market it's going to be way less volatile than it otherwise would have

you could imagine the merge happening in like the peak bull market say say the merge was happening in april 2021 just before we peaked in may 2021 it would have been extremely volatile right like we were probably still going to peak but it would have been even more volatile because of the fact that we had this massive catalyst of the merge uh basically right there we had this issue introduction we had all the positive stuff coming with it but we had also run up a lot i mean people often forget that we went from about 90 dollars in march 2020 to 4 400 in may 2021 in like 14 months we went up over 40 x on one of the largest market caps in crypto i mean eth was number two right so when you think about it like that even if the

merge was happening around then i think we still would have topped out maybe we would have gone higher than 4400 but we still would have topped that it would have been extremely violent it would have probably been similar to the bitcoin bitcoin cash uh thing that happened in late 2017 where there was a massive catalyst around that there was tons of volatility it was just crazy but given it's happening in a bear market and given the price has really just been going sideways uh for weeks now i mean yeah we came off the bottom but we haven't really done anything special we went to 2k we came back down kind of gone sideways now it's not really anything special there's not really any new entrants in i mean nft volumes is one of the things that i look at the most they've basically collapsed from

their highs a lot the on-chain activity is still very much down layer twos are growing but i feel like that's just layer one users migrating to layer twos at this point not really net new users yet uh which means yeah we're basically in the depths i feel like we're in 2019 personally so there will be volatility but i don't expect it to be anything as violent as as it would have been and if you're trading around this i mean that's your prerogative but i don't know i feel like trading around this is extremely risky especially on leverage so for me personally i'm you know you guys know i'm just stacking eighth long spot as i normally and i don't plan to trade around i don't plan to sell anything or anything like that i don't care about any forked coins like doesn't really bother me if i get them or not

honestly i don't probably won't because most of my atheist in staking so i don't think i'm going to get any of my ethers in staking which again as i said i don't really care about that but if you want to position yourselves for that you can but as i've mentioned before there are risks associated with that too depending on what fork you use there could be no replay protection and you want to be aware of that so i think just leading up to the merge we're very close now over the next 10 days things are going to get a bit noisy i think not as noisy as they would have been in a bull market thankfully still a bit noisy so just keep your wits about you just try and stay level-headed try and stay grounded if the eath price starts going up a lot because of the

hype i mean i could see us going above 2k just just because of the hype right that's not that far from here um just from people trying to play the trade my advice is always the same like i don't think that leverage is healthy right and i think that getting caught up in that sort of stuff is a one-way ticket to rec town but at the same time i don't try to give financial advice on the refuel i don't try to talk short-term markets i'm always a long-term guy i know most of you you are as well um but i just want to put that warning out there because we are just 10 days away like it's crazy i'm still kind of a disbelief that we're just 10 days away from this event and things are relatively quiet and as i said i think that's just solely because it's a bear

market and people are trying to fade it they're trying to be like oh you know the murder you've heard about it forever okay cool let's just get it over with um and because the price isn't doing anything people aren't really too excited about it but us hardcore ethereums have been waiting for this for a long time or maybe you're a newer theory and it's just something that excites you i mean we're all super pumped for it we're just 10 days out it's happening uh so the market stuff is pretty much irrelevant like i don't even care what the eighth price does i just i'm so happy that ethereum is going to be a full proof of stake network in just 10 days i mean i've been waiting for this since the first day i heard about ethereum the first thing one of the first things i read about ethereum was

that it was gonna transition to proof of stake and that was one of the first things that got me excited about it i've been waiting for this for over five years now so for me it's a it's a big deal i think for a lot of other people it's even bigger deal that have been in it longer um and yeah i just can't wait for it to happen but just some some words of caution there uh but i think on that note i'm going to end it for 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 to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone