Offchain Labs acquires PryLabs, Censorship chat - The Daily Gwei Refuel #467 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily great review where he kept the latest news in ethereum maker system I'm your host Anthony 13th of October 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so a huge bit of news over the last 24 hours uh it was announced that off chain Labs the company behind arbitrim is acquiring Prismatic Labs which is the company that has been building the prism clients uh the prism consensus layer client which I'm sure you're all familiar with now obviously this is big news for a number of different reasons there are lots of implications here I have a lot of thoughts here so I want to jump right into it so firstly congratulations to both of the teams here I think that I I mean honestly in terms of synergies here

there's so many arbitrim has been scaling ethereum for such a long time they have so many so many so much things in the pipeline right now and their arbitrim1 network is growing the arbitrary Nova network is growing it's just they're having a lot of great growth happening there and then on the prilab side of things things I mean they have the most used consensus client right they just went through the merge they've been working at this stuff for so long now I think it's about four years or something like that so just a crazy uh bit of news here and a crazy good outcome I think for both of these teams uh now the first take I want to kind of dive into is maybe one of no I wouldn't consider it negative but more of a neutral stance here some people brought up concerns about arbitrum being

a layer two purchasing a layer one team so to speak right and any and any kind of I guess negatives around credible neutrality that that could bring up and I totally get that like I can see that but I think you have to contextualize these things there was a there were concerns around ethereum governance as a whole saying oh is this just arbitrine buying their way into ethereum governance and it's like okay well no I mean ethereum governance is more than the client teams and even still the prism client is totally open source prayer Labs isn't just some team that came along and has only been around for like three months and all of a sudden they're part of from now there's a lot of context here so the the top two things that I wanted to talk about was one the prilabs team has been around for

a long time and for those of you who don't know the history here they started building their prism client when it wasn't even clear what quote-unquote eth2 would be would be and it wasn't even clear what proof of stake would be on ethereum and uh Preston Van Loon one of the co-founders actually left his job at Google a very well-paying job at Google to work on this thing and obviously took a pretty big pay cut because there wasn't much funding back then and funding for core development has always been a bit of a struggle there so these guys have been building for a very long time they have been just absolutely phenomenal as well as per as both Builders and as um as people that participate in the ethereum governance process and there is literally no reason to suspect that they would do anything

differently going forward just because they're under the umbrella of off-chain labs if anything it basically uh they're basically in the same position that they were private prior to this but but now they have pretty much guaranteed funding I would suspect which is awesome right but I can see the other side of it where it's like okay well what if a company that wasn't off-chan Labs came along and purchased or acquired one of these teams and then told them to do something not necessarily nefarious but do something that benefited them exclusively and I can see that happening right I can see that happening sometime in the future but this is why we have client diversity this is why we aren't just one ethereum client this is why this is not this is why we don't just have Geth and that's it right we have so many different

clients uh I mean this is one of the reasons because we don't want any one team to be captured we don't want any any one team to have centralization power around ethereum core development so that is another reason why we have client diversity and I've talked about client diversity a lot in the past secondly here I think when you look at the ethereum governance process you can't just look at the clients I mean the client teams are only one piece of the puzzle of um the ethereum governance process I should say it's involves everyone in the community and I've discussed this before but just to rehouse here some of the parties some of the I guess stakeholders that are part of the ethereum governance process include community members like you and I of course it includes the client teams

it includes the researchers who may or may not be part of the client teams it includes the app developers it includes layer twos as well right it includes exchanges it includes infrastructure providers I'm already up to like six or seven stakeholders and there are more than that obviously stakers are another one etholders generally another one so that all of those stakeholders come together to form the ethereum governance process to form the ethereum social layer so it's not just the client teams that can push things in now of course not every party has equal weight as opposed to other ones I would say that there are definitely stakeholders that have more say and their voice has more weight than others but it's not like they are dictators it's not like they have the final say they don't and for

example if uh prylabs or any other client team was to to do something nefarious or do something that went against the will of the community then people would just stop using their client and people may just Fork their client and and continue it on as it was before the the drama happens so to speak so there's a lot of checks and balances here there's a lot of different things at play and there's a lot of context here and I don't really appreciate the people who are trying to frame this as a negative because at the end of the day like there there are you know there's all the things I just mentioned but on top of that you you have to basically understand that this stuff's going to happen and we've prepared for it essentially we're prepared for it uh with client diversity we've prepared for

it with having a really strong social layer with ethereum uh and I think that it's fine from that perspective so that's the neg I guess like that was just addressing the negative takes that I saw but in terms of positive takes as I said this pretty much guarantees funding for prilabs for a long time they're going to be fine now they're going to keep building the uh you know their client their prism client they're going to work with arbitrum you know if I had to guess they're probably going to build and our client for arbitrine one so arbitrine one has client diversity sort of like what optimism is doing as well so that's obviously very cool and there's probably a bunch of other things in the works as well there but you know I can't I I can't stress enough how excited I am for these two teams to be

teaming up arbitrum and and prior labs are two of my favorite teams in this ecosystem and uh as I said there's a ton of synergies here so congrats to them again on this uh but I'm going to move on to the next bit of news which is just as big I would say so another um person or persons uh suing the treasury Department over the ofak uh tornado cash sanctions so you can see here that coin Center is supporting David Hoffman from bankless in his uh lawsuit against the treasury Department against uh Jeanette Yellen at the treasury Department over the uh fact that he was dusted on uh from tornado cash to his public address which is davidhoffman.eath and he's basically saying you know he doesn't want to waste

his time filing reports saying that he's not a criminal because he just got dusted by tornado cash so David Hoffman versus Jeanette Yellen Let's Dance This is So based I mean holy guys like I love this sort of because this is The Cypher Punk movement this is not like uh uh your usual kind of thing that you'll see a lot of people doing but this is part of The Cypher Punk movement and there's only a select people that will do this not everyone would do this and honestly I'm a bit sad because I'm not a U.S citizen and I can't do this I mean maybe there's in some roundabout way I could do this but I don't think so I'm not actually sure on the legal side of these things but if I was a US citizen I would definitely be doing this like as I said it's based as hell it's

part of this type of Cypher Punk movement and it's exactly what we want to see in this ecosystem from the people within it and honestly I wasn't even surprised when I saw that David had done this because this is the kind of person David is if you know David if you have listened to him on Bank list if you've seen him talk about a bunch of different topics you know exactly what kind of person he is and he's a very very good friend of mine so I know him quite well and yeah I wasn't surprised at all by this but still very excited cider because this is the second lawsuit that's come out of the ethereum community the other one uh I spoke about a few maybe a month ago now the one that coinbase is backing well now coin Center is backing this one against uh the

treasury Department here so just awesome I just I mean I don't really have much else to say other than that it's really awesome that this is happening who knows if uh David is going to win or not who knows if the you know the coinbase one is going to uh ending uh kind of um in a positive thing or not we'll have to see obviously the wheels of justice so to speak turn slowly they don't move fast like crypto does uh but still this is what we want to see we want to fight back like we can't just let these people steamroll over us like I I've been talking about and I'm actually going to talk about this in a sec but the Mev stuff that's happening with the relays some of them censoring and the D5 app censoring on their front ends and stuff

like that like that's just rolling over and going above and beyond what's required and it was disgusting to see play out so I'm very happy that we still have a lot of people in this ecosystem that are happy to put their Public Image towards a lawsuit against the U.S government right in favor in in the name of what they believe in so all the people that are doing this are based as hell they are true cypherpunks and they really are the flag bearers of this industry at this at this point like I I just love it and you know as I said like are the only negative here is that I'm not a U.S citizen that I can't do something like this I would love to do something like this but uh yeah it is what it is anyway uh I guess kudos to David and and coin Center for doing this

you can actually donate to coin Center at coin center.eth in order to support this and other causes that coin Center works on they're uh very awesome I guess like so to speak they do a lot of uh stuff on the regulatory side for crypto uh and the fact that they're bankrolling this or supporting this lawsuit against the treasury Department is really really cool to see as well all right some update on actually no I'm gonna go over this in a sec I wanted to update you guys on the cftc ukidel drama so the D5 education fund um Twitter account tweeted out this update today saying that a federal federal judge accepted DFI education funds Amicus brief and ordered cftc to respond to their motion to reconsider

the judge's ruling that the cftc's service was valid trdr good news next response deadline for the cftc is November 7th so this is cool I mean the judge has sided with their education fund here which is great to see but that's the latest on this as I've talked about before this suit uh lawsuit or this um cftc action against ukidao is going to have pretty big implications for all the Dows within the ecosystem so it's good to see that we have someone fighting back here and that thing if the wheels are moving here on this one as well but yeah I'll update you guys on November 7th all right so Jessica uh from I believe he works on the Nimbus client uh tweeted out a big milestone today saying that the Nimbus light proxy can now run as a

back end for metamask validating data from third-party providers like Alchemy against the beacon chain consensus how does it work you run a super light node on your computer that forwards requests to a third-party provider of your choice metamask connects to the node and the node forwards to provide R asking for data and cryptographic proof a proof is then checked against Beacon chain consensus using the like client Beacon chain protocol the same protocol that drives a nimbus light consensus client tldr this is I guess a the first iteration of a light client that you can run today that basically checks against uh a platform like inferior or Alchemy uh like a third-party provider that you use in metamask in order to verify that it's all well and good and that you can

basically have cryptographic guarantees that the node that you're talking to is actually the real um the real chain and the real canonical chain so very cool to see this nimbers have actually been working on uh light ethereum clients for a very long time uh the consensus layer client is trying to be as light as possible um but in terms of like resource requirements but like an actual like client they've been working on for quite a while so very awesome to see this I'll link the tweet in the YouTube description you can go check out uh basically the links that are linked here all right so some Mev updates so uh mevwatch dot info I had got some updates today so they've heard the feedback and launched three new features they're giving us access to deep insights and

the situation unfortunately might be worse than we thought currently 50 of each blocks are enforcing ofak censorship and increasing so there's a chart here that you can show that you can see uh if it's the um the trend of the ofak block CR you can use the time frame toggles to see up to the minute data you can visualize the status of the last 100 blocks as they come in in real time as well so cool new features on mevwatch.info which you can go check out for yourself at that website and I like the trend feature I like the like these little charts here it's giving us more data around this now if you look at this you you may be looking at it being like wow okay like it's just gonna eventually end up at some high percentage of ofak compliant blocks and to be honest I mean

the trend is going that way which really really sucks because like right now 88 of relayed blocks are enforcing of fat compliance which means only 12 percent aren't and four out of seven of the relays are sensor are censoring are enforcing censorship so just really really shitty but there was this straight from eliasomo CR who runs the rated web website which added some much needed I guess nuance and context around this so he put some data together and he has his first charts here saying so far blocks with transactions that involve addresses in the ofak list represent only 0.61 to seven percent of the post-emerge block Mass so very small percentage of turtle blocks include those the crushing

majority of these blocks pack one non-compliant transaction the sum of these transactions represents only 0.0025 of the post uh post merge transaction Mass uh 1200 transactions in total all major validating entities such as later operators coinbase and binance have produced blocks with transactions to and from the ofak list addresses can measure it with their to their Network penetration with Mev really it blocks narrow presenting 50 of the block mass and black flashbots for fifths of that ofac list transactions have a 40 chance of not included being included in the next block but to put this in perspective the probabilities that of that a transaction getting included by the nth block are in the first block is a 60 chance second block 84 third 93.6

percent fourth ninety seven point five percent and fifth 97 oh sorry 99 what is acceptable is really quite subjective but from a practical point of view ethereum as a whole is not censoring so this is I've talked I'm going to pause here for a sec I've talked about this before about how with inclusion censorship it's actually not as bad as it's made out to be because as you can see here as Elias States like I mean blocks come in every 12 seconds at worst you would have to wait probably like five blocks right so five times twelve you would have to wait a minute essentially to get your transaction included rather than 12 seconds but you can still get it included and this is obviously at uh 50 or I guess like 40 percent uh sorry 50 of the block

um uh of that of the um blocks enforcing uh censorship PR and as that goes up obviously you require more blocks to get in but it's not very long at all because of the way the percentages work because of the way the um block production Works uh you can still get your transactions in which I think is the key Point here now as Elia says here what is it acceptable is subjective but I think that there is some kind of objective metrics we can look at for example if uh I don't know 50 of the blocks were blocking uni swap related transactions well that would severely degrade performance of uh the ethereum network as a whole because the ethereum network as a whole relies on uni support uh well at least D5 as an ecosystem on ethereum

relies on uni swap so it would significantly degrade user user performance uh sorry user performance and user experience that would be a really really big issue that would be something that I would be kind of like an oh we need to do something about this now but in terms of this right in terms of the tornado cache transactions they're only affecting a very small percentage of people now because of the fact that that chilling effect that I spoke about is actually working so as Elia says here the flip side to all of this is that the ofak list transactions are down 80 percent since the tornado cash inclusion if you four times the number of ofac transactions and the probability probabilities of not getting included become a lot more Sensational so it's obvious that sections are working but it's also really not clear

that it is because of what's happening at the base layer so again like it just really does depend it is subjective it really just does depend on what's getting censored here now ideal in an Ideal World we don't want anything to be censored and we're working towards that future with things like PBS with things like CR lists and a bunch of other things that are obviously coming in the pipeline but for now it's not an existential risk it obviously erodes some of ethereum's credible neutrality but at the end of the day this can happen on any network on previous deck or proof of work it doesn't matter any network that allows validators and miners to see the contents of a transaction and also order the transactions in a block and and choose to censor or not censor them in a block

as well just to include them or not include them in a block that's the Crux of the issue if we had base layer privacy for everything on ethereum then this wouldn't be an issue if we had privacy up until the transaction was included in a block we wouldn't have this issue right with inclusion censorship if we had PBS and CR lists already we probably wouldn't have this issue I mean as not 100 fixed but it gets us pretty close so taking all that together you have to add the context here and and the context makes it a lot less worse than what it is but it's still pretty shitty and I'm still counting on or hopefully flashbots shutting down their relayer and if they can't offer censorship resistance on their relayer uh maybe they will maybe they won't I don't know again I've said

this before I don't think we should be relying on that because that's an altruist the altruistic Endeavor it's not something that we should be relying on as as a network as a community because we want to resist nation states and as we know like nation states aren't altruistic like they're not just going to do something because the community's telling them to do it right so we have to consider that as well but I'll link this thread in the YouTube description you can check it out from Elias I thought it was some much needed context and much needed data around all the uh censorship stuff all right so object has put out a great thread uh based and they started this word by saying vitalik says that account obstruction is not something we've always wanted and that it has it is something that we've always wanted and

that it has for a long time been a dream of the ethereum developer Community but why have attempts to introduce account obstruction to ethereum layer 1 layer one struggled to be implemented let us explain you can go give this thread a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below but for those of you who don't know what account obstruction is the simplest way to explain it is that there's two account Types on ethereum right now there is a eoa which is an externally owned account which is a normal ethereum address that you and I use and then there is a smart contract account which I mean that's pretty self-explanatory right the point of account obstruction is to from a developer point of view and from a user point of view make these things basically the same so that doesn't have to be there so there doesn't have to be

that separation between the two uh which comes with a bunch of nice features and the features are described by Arjun in this thread so you can go check out this thread I'll look in the YouTube description but I just wanted to highlight that for you guys all right so unisop has refreshed their front end so the same unit stop you know and love now with more token data Discovery and search options so you can swap easier than ever before you know the unisoft front end doesn't get updated that often and I think that's done on purpose because so many people use that but when they do update it they they add some nice features to it yes they're not groundbreaking features they're not doing anything that anyone's going to get super excited about but they still add features that people are going to use which I really really enjoy

so I mean you can go check these out if you haven't yet at the uni swap app.uniswap.org website here which I'll link in the YouTube description below um but yeah I guess uh good on unusual for continuing to add features to their front end here all right so push protocol has announced the launch of push chat the push chat Alpha brings web 3 native secure wallet toilet messaging to Everyday users what's push chat chat what's the alpha how do you join let's dive in and there's a thread here with everything that it is and a teaser video as well that you can check out for yourself which I'll obviously link this in the YouTube description below I want to make a comment here broadly about I guess like well to wallet messaging well to wallet chat this has become a trend lately obviously I've been covering

ether scans um uh implementation of it there's a bunch of other ones out there uh that have been around for a little while uh now this push chart I mean this is a trend and this is something of a no-brainer right being able to do wallet to wallet communication but I worry that these things fragment like we have with chat apps I think of all the web 2 chat apps that we have today we have messenger we have WhatsApp we have iMessage which in of itself can be considered a chat app because it's not SMS right um we have SMS we have telegram we have signal there's so many of these things yes we make it work but I mean I mean like I have accounts on all these things because people prefer different things and I think it's kind of funny how the same thing seems to be happening with

crypto even though it doesn't have to you could just have a you know a protocol on ethereum that people can uh use essentially as uh I guess like a Nexus so to speak and then build Finance on top of that but it seems that each one of these projects seems to be developing their own protocol around it which may end up being gated to their own community and I get why they're doing this because you want to control the user flow a lot of the time um but yeah we're gonna have to see how that consolidates over time but what shared between these things is your account basically because it's using your wallet your wallet is on ethereum everything in in that wallet is on ethereum so that's shared across these different apps but your chat history your contacts specific features won't be

shared across these apps or protocols so to speak but at least some of that some of it is so it is a step above what we get with web 2 today um but but yeah anyway congrats to the push protocol for launching this I know they've been working on it for a little while here you can check out their thread describing it I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so there is a product called Soul wallet that I came across uh today and they are basically uh have built something at eth Global uh we and Heath Bogota here uh which is the future of the ethereum wallet is here we provide a new way to explore ethereum erc4337 compatible so you can check it out here uh the reason why this caught my eye is because it's EFC 4337

compatible which is a new wallet standard that vitalik has also been talking about and it's not an EIP it's an ERC so it doesn't require a hard fork or anything like that but this project saw wallet uses this standard to enable users to create use and perform social recovery for smart contract wallets through plug-in extensions and mobile applications and you can check out the rest of the description here I'll link it in the YouTube description and there's also a live demo of how this works as well I wonder if I can quickly do a live demo on on here no this is this is the video uh so yeah there's a video is about four minute video you can go check out and the source code is also available here um but yeah go check out Soul wallet if you haven't already as I said it's

caught my eye because of that erc4337 compatibility which basically is it has got a lot to do with um social recovery for smart contract wallets similar to what arjun's been doing I think that's a big theme going forward because social recovery I mean when it comes to wallets obviously there's no Central party that you can go to to say hey I forgot my password to my wallet or I forgot my seed phrase to my wallet can you can you you know get give it to me because obviously you don't want to be storing your seed phrase online and Seed phrases in general just bad ux so what can we do we can do stuff like social recovery and that's what's been worked on as I said by Arjun and now by Soul wallet here so definitely go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below

all right so uh it is an ens update here at alpha.ans.domain so uh taytem said here don't tell anyone but you can try the new Alpha app updates on girly featuring a sick Avatar uploader so as I said you can go to alpha.ens.domains and you can search so if I actually I'm going to connect my wallet here if I connect my wallet this is my sasol.heath wallet of course um I can check out uh oh this is on girl you had to switch Network there uh I can check out a bunch of different things on here so if I go to my names is it going to pop up uh maybe actually no because my name is on mainnet not on girly what was I thinking uh I I don't know whose name is actually on here uh maybe ens.eth maybe I can search that because

that's probably on here yeah so this is a nice little interface this is what they've been working on for quite a while to manage your ANS names as I said it's live on Gurley right now this is not mainnet but you can see here uh this would be the perfect picture on the left here if they had one set this is the address this is your address on ethereum the manager the onr just a much better looking interface than what we're used to on Main net so very cool to see this very cool to see that we can play around with this but as the name implies it's still in Alpha so expect bugs expect things not to work uh you know as they should on mainnet uh but yeah you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so this new protocol project

announced itself uh yesterday called error I I think that's how you say it's a e r a uh I don't know era maybe era which is the they're calling themselves the world's first autonomous a data-driven treasury management protocol A-Rod will provide Dows with a One-Stop solution for managing their token reserves efficiently and transparently so you can go check out their blog introductory blog post here to see what it's all about and how it all works and there's nice little Graphics here and everything but Dow treasury management has been a thing for a while it's been a theme for a while there has been other attempts at uh I guess making it easier for Dallas to manage their treasuries before but I can't remember the names of them right now and I think I'm pretty sure I've covered some of them on the

refill before but essentially this is a new one I can't remember who the team members are exactly I remember seeing some familiar names like tarun chitra who's been around for quite a while I don't know if he's actually part of the team or maybe just an advisor or something but I saw him talking about it and there's a few others as well I don't think the team is on the website um but yeah you can go check this out apparently you'll be able to hedge risk to grow safely as I say here which you can do with your treasury management protocol on a right here but yeah you can dive deeper into it and check what check check everything there is to check about it on their website at ara.finance but I'll also link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out

all right sorry I'm stumbling tonight guys I'm just trying to get through everything there was a lot to get through today but anyway last up here is just a blog post that I wanted to highlight from pseudo Theos about pbfs so this was done by pseudo Theos and domothea domethy as some of you will know is a frequent daily grade Discord uh contributor basically this blog post is called PBS neutralizing The Dark Forest now I've talked about PBS on the rear fuel a lot of times before maybe you still have no idea what it is because I don't really go into it every time on the refill because I don't want to repeat myself well you should give this blog post a read because it will explain to you exactly what it is how it works how it's going to help us with censorship and everything around that so

I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out uh it's a great read highly recommend reading it I've already read it of course uh I I really enjoyed it it's definitely refreshed my knowledge about PBS and gave me a bit of a different perspective on what I'm used to as well so I'll link this in the YouTube description and you can go check it out but I think that's going to be it for today now so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel know if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone