Pectra is coming, Fabric introduced and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #820 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of Del refuel where up latest news e ecosystem I'm your host and the 31st of January 2025 all right everyone let's get into it so as you all know at this point there's been a pretty huge shift in the regulatory environment around crypto particularly in the US and with that a Revival of some of these older kind of efforts in the US around ethereum and one of the those efforts that has been I guess like a leading effort since 2017 is the Enterprise ethereum align sence uh which is incubated or part of consensus here and this was pretty big news back in the day I remember actually getting into ethereum in early 2017 and then the Enterprise ethereum Alliance was formed and they had these big announcements

that all these kind of big companies were building on ethereum and of course like being I guess new to crypto a lot of people thought that meant that these companies were going to like immediately start deploying things to ethereum and to integrated into their their products and services but really it was pilot programs right it was just kind of uh re search into what this ethereum thing is but in saying that it did lead to a lot of good conversations over the years a lot of good pilot programs over the years and now we're at the point where there is actual adoption going on on the institutional side of things on the corporation side of things or on the corporate side of things with regards to ethereum in particular a lot of uh institutions uh I'm hearing are pretty interested in the L2 model because it

basically allows them to launch their own you know chain on top of ethereum and maintain uh whatever controls they need to and I know that may go against what I guess we're all about in ethereum you know decentralization open source permissionless Etc but the way I think about it is like the internet versus internet model or I guess like the internet's uh the internet being like this open thing or relatively open and internets being closed and completely controlled ecosystems based on uh different environments whether that be in a corporate environment or in a government environment or institution whatever it is there are differences here and I think the same thing is going to play out with ethereum where we have an open ecosystem but we have all these private kind of chains I guess you could call them or private ecosystems that plug into that open one uh because

that's just a natural uh model of things but the reason why I'm talking about this today or at least one of the reasons was because the Enterprise ethereum Alliance a Twitter account tweeted out that they've launched um the ethereum business index survey for 2025 so this is a data driven index measuring how businesses use ethereum and blockchain today tracking growth indust industry Trends and identifying leaders and this may seem boring on the surface you may be thinking you know why are you talking about this as this doesn't really make much uh this doesn't get me bullish I'm like well I can frame anything that happens in ethereum as bullish and and I I'll prove it to you right now the reason why I think this is something worth talking about and is bullish is because as I mentioned just earlier a lot of the corporations and

institutions and businesses that had gotten involved with ethereum and crypto generally had done so in an exploratory capacity in a research capacity and a pilot program capacity but if we actually want to put kind of metrics to this put numbers to this uh and and and actually get more of these businesses building on chain in a serious way we need to show them that building on chain and integrating uh you know crypto integrating blockchains into their products and services is actually net beneficial to them you can you can tell them but if you haven't got the data to back it up then they're going to sit there and be like well what's the point you know what's the use of this we don't have any data to back this up we don't know uh what this is actually going to do for our business we're going to

invest all this money into into kind of um going down this road and we don't even know what the result are going to be at at the end so by get getting this I guess kind of survey together or this survey out there what the EA is trying to do here is get all of that information get all all of that data and basically present it to these different different parties and say Here's how crypto blockchain etherum can impact your business positively and here's how you can get started doing that and I I hope that or I mean I I don't have to hope because I know this would be part of it but essentially uh what follows on from here will be conversations that happen with these the these institutions and these companies where essentially the EA can say to them well we think

like building your own layer 2 is the perfect solution and hey you don't even need to basically reinvent the wheel here there are already Open Standards you can use such as the op stack such as arbitrum orbit such as what zky is doing with their stack as well there's a lot of these Stacks so they can just choose from that launch and then instantly they'll be able to interoperate with the rest of the ethereum ecosystem and it's relatively low overhead for them to do this and obviously it depends on what they want to do you know there are different use cases different um different requirements for each and every project but that's where the EA comes in and points them in the right direction and acts as that kind of conduit between those businesses and uh the crypto ecosystem so as I said it's actually quite bullish it's it's a

longer term thing it's not going to happen overnight this stuff takes a while I mean as I said this has been around since 2017 it's been a long time since then but this is the kind of stuff that happens slowly but then happens all at once sort of thing and then you see like a big shift towards this and ends up being very bullish in the end speaking of bullish things happening in ethereum veia the founder of ethereal lies put together a great little tweet thread here where he said we are not bulled up enough about eth it's been one week since the inauguration obviously talking about Trump's inauguration here and the entire ethereum ecosystem has been reborn here are five reasons why eth now has structural not cyclical Tailwinds for 2025 and Beyond and of course first thing he mentions is that

Trump's World Liberty fire project team are building on ethereum and buying eth I believe I counted this today they have about $270 Million worth of eth uh right now which is an enormous amount of eth right that they've kind of got in their publicly available addresses there we don't know how much eth they have behind the scenes maybe they have more but this is all on chain and they've been using cow swap to buy eth so that's quite bullish right obviously this isn't Trump directly doing this like I know people like to debate this there was actually a debate about this in in the Dau Discord Channel just before obviously Trump is not sitting there on cow swap himself buying eth like it's not that's not what's happening but the thing is is that he is associated with this team with World Liberty finance and they're

doing it so that's really all that matters and as you guys know I've talked about narrative versus reality before the narrative is what you want to be kind of putting out there in order to frame this as being bullish for ethereum and eth because it is and saying that Trump is doing this is more bullish than saying Trump's team that's just the way narratives work but yes sure we all know the reality is that Trump's not sitting there doing transactions on C while buying e like honestly like if he was doing that I'd be like why are you doing that dude like delegate that to someone else you don't need to be doing that and that's that's essentially What's Happening Here I doubt he has any kind of I guess saying to what's going on here but his name is attached to it uh and he's promoting it through his

relevant channels as well and obviously Trump being like just Pro crypto generally is a huge Boon for our industry uh there second reason V gives here is that the buy side of of e of such as Asset Management managers and hedge funds are vocally all in on tokenization the digital future is inevitable stocks bonds all assets will be tokenized on Public public blockchains and all roads for tokenization flow through ethereum as I've said I think over the last few refuels ethereum currently is the home of tokenization it's got the most reor assets on there it's got the most stable coins it looks like that's going to remain the case we have etherealized in our corner now advocating that out to the Wier ecosystem and really it doesn't

make sense for someone like a black rock to build a tokenization on any on anything or I guess like they'll build it on other chains but like to focus on anything but ethereum because it plugs directly into their e ATF product and it also is the obviously ethereum is the most battle hardened and and and secure and reliable chain that you can build on uh but on top of that as well I would say that my kind of I guess thesis I guess you could call it or like um prediction that black rock and other major institutions will launch their own l2s on ethereum I still very much think that's in play because from the conversations I've been having with the etherealized people and others really the the the the um the interest Peaks when uh someone mentions like oh you could build your own chain on ethereum

like it really goes up because they're like wow okay all these issues that I had with blockchains are now gone such as privacy issues right such as control over the assets on there such as controlling the um The Ledger and so on and so forth as I said not something that we consider to be a blockchain not something that considered to be a core value proper of this industry but it's still uh this technology enabling something new for these ecosystems and as I said this plugs into the rest of the ecosystem so it kind of is a Ying Andy relationship rather than anything kind of parasitic there so the third reason Vette gives here is that the cell side such as Investment Bank banks are all embracing crypto functionality and what is the safest most secure blockchain with programmatic Financial

finance capability of course it's ethereum and as you guys know the other week Banks uh the I think was a Sab 121 regulation was overturned and Banks can now custody crypto so yeah I mean big news all around there for not just eth but all of crypto uh which is what which is what VC mentions here as his fourth reason as well and then fifth the stake to eth ETFs are likely on the horizon as well uh which is obviously something that's coming now that the SEC isn't hostile towards crypto anymore uh and thenc finishes this tweet by saying remember in the in this new Renaissance all roads lead through ethereum institutional block chains to tokenization programmatic finance and stable coins all through ethereum all through eth and he says you are not

bullish enough on eth which I don't think any of us are especially given like how I guess bearish the ecosystem has been on ethereum and eth uh because of the relatively weak I guess price action but also just so much fud guys there's so much fud you guys know you guys see it it's just never ending but I think over the longer term my strong belief obviously is fundamentals always shine through and the reality shines through the fud which I think is what we're seeing uh what we're seeing these days all right so vitalic put a tweet out basically highlighting some of the great work a bunch of people in the ethereum ecosystem are doing such as Justin Drake Dan crra and others here but essentially he basically put together a list here where he said in

2025 we need blobs and L1 cost reductions like EIP 4444 in 2026 we need more blobs uh many people are heroes pushing forward the research here such as uh um Franchesco here in danrad uh by 2030 we need other things now this goes back to that I guess longer term road map that uh Justin spoke about the beam chain thing that he spoke about which goes out to 2030 and as you guys know from Justin's bankler Summit talk if you watch that there's so much happening between like now and 2030 and vitalic highlights a bunch of these things here you know we need long-term robust economics we need long-term robust taking decentralization we need a CL a clean and simple protocol we need better we need light clients we need Quantum

resistance and we need things like account abstraction and the beam chain road map delivers on all of these over over time here but also over the longer term because as you guys know ethereum is not just building for today the next month the next six months even this current road map that we're on like it's not even uh like the the the real long longterm road map this current road map that we're on that started in 2020 I would say probably goes out to 2030 but then beyond that there are still things that we need to build and need to do uh but I would I I would say like the the bulk of the work that we think needs to be done will be done by 2030 but there's still so much more that that needs to be done here so ethereum is building for

decades into the future we want to make sure that the ethereum network stays alive for as long as as possible uh maybe till the I guess like um till till the far future I don't know what's going to happen hundreds thousands of years into the future I think by that point we may not even be on earth as our as our main planet that another planet may have taken over as like the main place where humans reside who knows you know we have no idea what's going to happen but the core premise of ethereum or promise of ethereum is to last as long as humanly possible on Earth I I I don't think we're going to be able to do like um the blockchain networks across planets or ac across and definitely not across star systems unless we discover how to do like localized wormholes where you could

do instant communication between different points in space which is so far out into the future from from what I've seen from all the reason I've done space is a little side hobby of mine but from all the little gr of research I've done on that that's just not a reality so if we're staying in reality here we're talking about making sure that ethereum can last as long as really humans are dominant on Earth honestly that that that's probably the best way to put it uh there but anyway you can read V Alex hold tweet for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right there was another all devs call that happened I believe yesterday and there's a quick tldr here from Tim boo if you're running gu they actually released an update uh that contains a patch to a critical

vulnerability within gu so if you are running gu you should definitely upgrade uh this is a security release as mentioned here uh you can go and just go get get your normal gu release and that'll fix the issue for you there uh client teams should share devet 6 ready branches uh with eth panda op soon which means that uh devet 6 should be stable by next week's all call Dev call and then if Dev net 6 is stable they're going to pick test net Fork slots for holeski and seoa on February 6th and then on February 10th client releases will go out for holeski and seoa configurations this is for Petra of course and Feb 20 if heski has forked without issues they will pick the main net Fork slots so they don't want to

pick a main net time slot earlier to avoid creating misleading expectations I still think it's on for mid to late March here guys we'll see how the test Nets Go of course but yeah that's basically what's happening there now uh these discussions obviously about the next Fork after Petra as you guys know it is named fusaka uh this uh Fork Dev net should only in the they're aiming for the first devet for faka to only include eof and Pi Das there were many discussions about road map planning on the call but no decision beyond that team should share their views in the Petra retrospective thread here there were also discussions around the node hardware and bandwith requirements now I want to focus on faga for one second here I think I mentioned on previous refuels that there is a a strong

appetite to only do pias and eof in the faka fork and basically have that done in like late Q3 kind of sometime in Q4 this year and then push everything else that was going to be included in fusaka such as fossil the um inclusion list EIP push that out to the next upgrade which I believe is called glamsterdam uh so I think this is the best course of action we pias is critical as I mentioned p is critical scaling blobs is critical making sure that we scale ethereum is critical and making sure that we do it as soon as possible is the best path forward here so I'm fully in favor of this I'm fully in favor of just shipping p and eof I know eof is still contentious among cevs from what I've seen I don't know if it's going to make

it into the faka fork we may actually just get pias in faka and not eof I don't know there's going to be discussions around that but I do know there's some contention there there's doesn't seem to be any cont contention around pias at all everyone wants this to go in as soon as possible so I'm very happy uh to see that there but anyway we'll know more next week around timelines for pectra of course all right speaking of fossil Terren shared a screenshot of uh the fossil EIP 7805 devnet now finalizing so beyond the happy case that they stimulated blocks not satisfying the inclusion lists are orphaned blocks skipped are missed and blocks with inclusion lists are proposed so these simulations helped uncover more open problems but one step closer to the

Finish Line this is freaking awesome guys like the fact that it's just working on a devet right now in practice means that uh we we're finally at a point where we decided on uh you know a a guess like path to go down for inclusion lists we got an EIP proposed now we're doing Dev nets for it it all seems to be going well there's obviously going to be small bugs here in there that need to be worked out but as I said this is probably getting pushed out to glamsterdam but they've got like a whole year now because glamsterdam probably won't get delivered till like let's say March of next year or around then they've got like more than oh yeah about a year from uh so a little bit over a year from now to basically do all the testing here and get this more than

ready for that fork so great to see this is already on a devet it's already working uh and I'm sure they're going to keep uh getting this better and better over time all right so a new Collective called fabric has been launched so this is a community D driven effort to collectively agree upon standards and components and continue accelerating coordination to drive for the based rollup ecosystem and there's an eth research post here for you to check out if you would like to I'll link it in the YouTube description below but this again goes towards what I was talking about I don't I think it was on the last refill the refill before about ethereum acceleration is all about coordinating better it's not about throwing more money at the problem it's not about throwing more people at the problem it's

about coordinating the existing people better and then any new people that we bring in making sure that they can quickly get up to speed and have a impact on the work as fast as humanly possible so again that's all about coordination which is exactly what fabric is trying to do here they're trying to coordinate around a set of shared standard standards a set of a set of agreed kind of principles of how to develop these things and agreed paths forward here in order to uh basically get base rollups or or make Bas Roll-Ups a reality so that we can get that inability that we've been talking about you know it was funny I was on a call with someone the other day and and I basically was giving my kind of state of the ethereum EOS system uh how I say it to this person and it kept going back to

one thing with within ethereum and that thing was that we talk a lot about things in ethereum right we talk a lot about the different research pipelines we talk a lot about things that are coming soon or coming in the future uh but I I think when it comes to based rollups and interoperability of of l2s we've talked about it a lot but we can talk about it as much as we want what we need to do is we need to actually get this stuff live and show people and and get get it into their hands so essentially uh job's not done until I can open up my wallet and do cross-chain transactions between the l2s while not having to change chains while not having to bridge assets across across chains I just want to do it seamlessly with one wallet one address one simple ux no

approving either of of tokens I just want to do a simple token swap across chains like that once people actually experience that once all of ethereum feels like one chain again that's when we can be excited I am excited about the research stuff I'm excited about covering this stuff for you guys and educating you but in terms of the marginal everyday user there's no this is no to them just like telling them it's coming we need to show them that it's coming and that's what initiatives like show them that it's live and that's what initiatives like fabric are doing and others like the sequencing call and and stuff that Justin Drake has highlighted in the past they're trying to do that and they are going to do that and they're putting like aggressive timelines on it too which is another big thing where we need to talk less do more

but also like uh I guess get things into people's hands uh quicker than we historically have all right so bolt has launched on mainnet so essentially what this is is proposer commitments on ethereum Main net here so what bolt is trying to do is essentially enable subse pre-confirmation as you guys know pre-confirmation are the key to basically unlocking Uh current rollup like user experience uh for based rollups because as you as you guys know if you're a based rollup today you are basically using the ethereum validator set which means you are tied to ethereum slot times which are 12 seconds that's nowhere near fast enough for the for the average user so they're used to having

like 1 second or subc uh transaction confirmation on the l2s we need to bring that to main net two base rollups and how we do that is with pre-confirmation which can get uh transaction confirmation to uh you know as low as 100 milliseconds or even even below that uh for for the end user here so what bolt is trying to do is essentially become this uh proposer commitment protocol uh they they say what they are here it's a bolt is a proposer commitments protocol enabling new cases starting with pre confirmations so the value for users is near instant transactions and guaranteed inclusion on the L1 as I just as I just mentioned there and for validators credible commitments enable new revenue streams so this is basically software that

validators can install like like an meev boost for example but for uh to start with for pre-confirmation so if you're running an ethereum validator you now get to essentially get revenue for providing pre confirmations providing credible commitments uh uh to the the network in order to to enable uh the these user experiences uh here and I'm I'm super excited about this because of the fact that it is like sidecast software that you can kind of plug in here and then you can do that as just like a normal validator if you've got a if you're a not operator you're running validators you can just plug this in and enable another Revenue stream for yourself and there's going to be so many more revenue streams coming here guys beyond beyond that especially uh with things like IG lay avss and bolt is

partnered with IG lay here as well uh you can see here what they're doing with their abs so uh they've got a graphic here of how this works I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so but they have a bunch of launch Partners as well uh they have some of the biggest names as launch Partners like P2P is a big note operator on the network so chorus one uh Kiln Pier 2 there's I mean a lot of names on here some cordev names like nethermind on here so a lot of big names already team already launching with this uh which is really really great uh and then they uh if you want to get involved as well there is a tweet here uh for you to do so there I do want to disclose actually I forgot to disclose at the top the

company behind bolt I'm an investor in uh because I mean as you guys know I'm all about um the the ethereum infrastructure and making sure that we can get this infrastructure live on Main net and produce value for not only I guess like validators not operators but also users and that's exactly what these uh things do here so 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 speaking of Justin Drake I've mentioned his name a couple of times on the refuel today I put out a tweet where I asked can any of the ZK gigabrain put a timeline on achieving real time proving at an average cost of basically nothing per proof uh and and and basically getting us towards the

holy grail and Justin replied to my tweet saying next slot realtime proving is coming in 2025 that's a huge statement there guys like next slot realtime proving that means proving evm main net blocks in in a slot like in 12 12 seconds um and for him to say it's coming in 2025 big statement I know Justin's a bit of a hype man at times but I do trust his word when he says things like this so that's that's this year guys that's not very far along from here and that that is considered like one of the Holy Grails of of of of um ethereum when it comes to a ZK road map here and then Justin continued and he said this year I expect multiple ZK VM vendors to prove mainnet evm blocks on gpus in less than 12 seconds at less than 10 cents per block performance

numbers will get crazier with snark AIC and you can follow the Journey of course on eth proofs and then he continued by saying no L1 is poised to benefit from realtime ZK VMS nearly as much as ethereum ZK is how ethereum scales sustainably with full validation for stakers and while it's accessible to phones and Watchers real time ZK is the endgame like I I I've got to I've got to admit here I I I I I sometimes feel like an ethereum bear when I compare myself to Justin Drake he is definitely a bigger bull than me and I know that's that's saying something but man like there's not many people who can make me more bullish on ethereum in in this ecosystem but Justin Drake is definitely one of those people so I'm I'm happy to say that he is a bigger ethereum bull than me which I didn't think was

possible but hey he is just like involved with so many different things he's directly pushing them forward and he just has a way with words and he is is he has a way of hyping things up but also hyping them up with with kind of tangible stuff to back it up and also doing the work as well which is a big thing here it's all well and good being a hype man but if all do is sit on Twitter and like hype up ethereum and eth all day and and produce nothing and do don't do anything outside of that it's okay I guess but like it's not really pushing the ecosystem forward whereas Justin Drake is doing all of the above I mean he doesn't spend that much time on Twitter but he's doing a lot a lot of work uh in the background on a

lot of different things here so yeah it was just really great to get a reply from him on that all right so there was another really uh bullish thing that happened with regards to L2 interop during the week so Rudolph or Josh Rudolph uh basically Works in R&D at the ethereum foundation he has been running this L2 interrupt call for a little bit now and essentially this call the latest call was all about setting a short-term road map for achieving interoperability at at l2s and one quote that I pulled out of it was this so it said users should be able to transfer any asset existing or newly issued across chains quickly securely and without trust assumptions and I basically quote tweeted this and I said seamless in

between ethereum l2s uh is coming fast because they have a 3/ 6month road map in flight so as I said we're putting more aggressive timelines on things now but it's because we are coordinating better as an ecosystem like the ecosystem over the last couple of months has really come together and begun coordinating a lot a lot better across different kind of I guess pools of talent you know the eum foundation ethereum core L2 teams infrastructure providers you know all those kinds of people where really uh getting them all to align on different things and align on really important things like layer to interrupt uh and it seems to be all coming together very nicely now we have a bunch of really cool people who have stepped up stepped up to lead these

efforts as well so that's why we're putting more aggressive timelines on this but as I was saying earlier timelines are cool aggressive timelines are cooler but the coolest thing is to actually get this live for users to get benefits out of and uh hopefully this does get this does go live in the next 3 to 6 months here speaking of l2s L2 beat has updated their stages framework so they have proposed a higher level and better formalized guiding principle for stage one the goal is to formalize the Notions around its security properties to make them simpler to reason about but also more strict and less open to interpretations so the the I guess like high level stage one definition now reads the only way other than bugs for a

rollup to indefinitely block an L2 to L1 message EGA withdrawal or push an invalid l 2 to L1 message EG invalid withdrawal is by compromising a uh more than 75% of the security Council so that's basically the guiding principle there and they go into more detail here in their Thread about this I know there was some push back on this there was some there was some kind of debate around this was a little bit of controversy about this but we shouldn't shy away from making sure that we're as technically accurate as possible uh just because of a little bit of controversy controversy because it's critically important that users understand how they can potentially lose money when they Bridge money into a into a less than stage to rollup but also how they can exit one of these Roll-Ups if the worst case scenario

happens where the rollup goes offline or some kind of bug happens that or whatever it is right so I'm glad that L2 beat is uh keeping us all honest here all right last thing on layer 2's here was just a handy little uh graphic here that utam from Alchemy created here I hope I said your your name right I don't know how to pronounce that name unfortunately and I'm very bad at pronunciation but regardless of that this is a really really helpful gra graphic here that basically gives you a breakdown of what each kind of rollup construction is on ethereum so he's got a list here of uh of bass rollup native rollup ultrasound rollup ZK rollup optimistic rollup validium Optimum stage two rollup and then different layers now this is a lot of rollups right this is a

lot of different terminology here this is not something that you're going to be showing to the average user and saying hey you need to learn all of this stuff or else you can't use ethereum like no that's there's nothing got to do with that what it is what it does show though and what it does do is basically get give us a baseline of each of these things so that we can understand them and so that developers and people building within the ecosystem can can build better things because they don't have to go searching for definition so that's why I really liked this graphic and I I I I I'll be referencing it myself going forward but I want to get to a world where we basically don't need to know about any of this stuff and we just call them ethereum rollups like this is titled ethereum Roll-Ups 101 I

just want to get to ethereum Roll-Ups I don't want to have to like go through all these different naming conventions and all these different definitions just to describe things I just want to say ethereum Roll-Ups and then people will know what I mean because most of them in the end game should be based on Native Roll-Ups that's what we're hoping for uh even if they use offchain da like we're still going to maybe call them something else but hopefully we can uh just agree to call them ethereum rops at that stage and I know definitions change over time but I really want to get to a point where we can just have one definition rather than than a million different ones but still very valuable graphic here you can check that out I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right last up here I just wanted

to highlight something from hyperdrive so essentially they're running a campaign right now for their new token that they've got coming out so uh there's incentivizing this and you can check out what uh the details of this I'll link it in the yoube description below but essentially 5% of the new token Supply will be allocated to hyperdrive Miles earned by users through the end of of April and you can go to the blog post to learn more about that they've also got um how to start accumulating miles um description here in in the Twitter thread uh and they're running a uh Community call as well I believe today I think this this is at I don't know what time 600 p.m. UTC is uh for me so I and and for you guys so I can't I can't uh tell you that time but

yeah if you're interested in uh going and farming some uh some of this new token or I guess like getting some of this new token that hyperdrive uh is doing here you can I'll link this in the YouTube description below uh so yeah but I think on that note that's going to be it for today's episode so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subcribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all on Monday thanks everyone