Zhejiang testnet live, Optimism Bedrock proposal - The Daily Gwei Refuel #534 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host tennis asano and today's the 2nd of February 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so that jijang public test net is now officially live I covered it obviously over the last couple of days and yesterday I said there was about three hours left till it went live well now it is live and it is finalizing so it seems everything went quite smoothly there's all these links here which are part of the tweet that Barnabas put out which I'll link in the YouTube description below for you guys to check out of course but if you go to that Beacon chain block Explorer website for the jjang testnet you can see the progress Happening Here It seems to be going very very smoothly uh from what

I've seen there hasn't been any issues at all which is exactly what we wanted to see and I did say that I didn't expect there to be any major issues this is not like testing the merge this is definitely a lot easier to do than that and a lot less things can go wrong than that nevertheless we do test as much as we can here and there's also a bunch of other links like you can go to the Launchpad website on the ethereum.l website to become a validator all these tests net if that's what you're interested in doing this GitHub repos all that sorts of stuff that you can check out as well which will be linked in the YouTube description below but we are potentially less than two months away from withdrawals being enabled I mean given that the test Nets are going so well uh the Devon Nets have gone so

well and it seems that we've ironed out most of if not all the Kinks that needed to be ironed out I'm pretty confident to say that with 90 plus certainty we're going to see a late March uh kind of uh four qr4 uh the uh Shanghai um mainnet deployment so I early April could still happen for any number of reasons right but everything seems to be going quite smoothly and the devs definitely wants to have this deployed sooner rather than later on so does the community obviously everyone's really really I guess like waiting on the edge of their seat for withdrawals to be enabled because there are so many different I guess thesises around what is actually going to happen post withdrawals and I've given plenty of my own but there are so many out there and I'm just very very curious see who's

right who's wrong what's going to happen uh to all that eat that was steak like how much is actually going to be unlocked how much of the rewards are going to be sold all that I'm sure there's going to be dashboards to track all of this uh created by community members as well that's what I'm definitely most interested in and paying attention to but I think everyone just wants to get this over and done with so we can move on to the next most exciting upgrade which is obviously Erp 4844 which should hopefully come this year as well in in probably Q4 I would say and that's Proto dang shining uh for those of you who need a refresher there which is obviously the major upgrade that everyone's looking forward to because it's going to reduce those roll-up costs by 10 to 100 x uh and then obviously set

the ground work for uh full dank sharding later on there but yeah as I said all these links will be in the YouTube description for you to go check out all right so I'm featuring Tony again from the Mev boost.pics website here and Tony's actually an ethereum researcher uh that's I guess his full-time gig and he does these kind of websites on the side um but I've covered him a lot on the refuel lately it's because he's just been a machine getting this Mev boot stop Peaks website uh up to speed and updated as much as possible to show us the latest Mev boost related metrics now he uh this current one was done in collaboration with Hill Dobby I believe or he's just special thanks to Hill Dobby here for open open sourcing the heuristic uh heuristics to map validator

public keys to I and to entities sorry and you can see here on the Mev boost.pics validators section that there's now this section is now populated so basically it splits out the total validator Market by identified entities obviously a Lido and uh I guess like coinbase and buy and Kraken and binance are the top validators here others are unidentified uh staking entities or solo stakers and that's at 30 right now I think the last estimates that I saw showed dollar stake is it more like 20 and then that 10 uh is unidentified but it's kind of funny because when you're thinking about solo stakers it's like you have to Define exactly what a solo sticker is right like is it just an individual uh at home with this set up uh solo staking or is

it a company that's decided to stake on their own instead of using some other service are they considered a solo sticker so I think there's no real kind of hard definition there but my definition of it is more on the individual level than the company level obviously some people will have companies for tax purposes but if there's like a large a corporate that has tens of thousands of eat that they're staking um I don't know if I consider that to be a quote unquote solo Staker but I other people would right so there's no hard definition here of what a solo Staker is but I think those individuals taking from home like obviously myself and a lot of uh you guys out there I would consider those to be the you know the true solo stakers but now I'm getting into semantics and Define and trying to

Define things here so I'm going to leave that one on there but yeah by splitting up the total validator Market here uh in terms of like Mev Bruce we can then then go down into total slot share so this is the total I guess like percentage of uh slots AKA blocks that are proposed by each entity uh the average Mev boost proposer payment since the merge you can see here it's quite variable right it depends on the market activity at the time and it depends on I guess competition between different Builders and relayers and just what exactly is happening and what profit opportunities there exactly are and you can select all the different validator entities that you want here right now it's just defaults to Lido and rocketpool but you can select the other ones as well then you can see blocks per validator which I

guess Maps quite evenly to the percentage of of the validated Market that each entity has obviously Lido number one coinbase crack and binance and and the rest of them you can see here and then validator overview since the merge uh uh as well just a tabulated format of that other data there so great to see this update here on the Mev booster dot peak's website but going back to my little tangent from from before about identifying or defining what a solo Staker is I don't know if it's actually something that we need to do but I'd be curious to know what you guys would Define as a solo stake and now let me know in the comments on YouTube or in the Discord Channel but as I said I am more of you solo stickers as those individuals who manage their setup even if they have a lot of Eve like this

for sure lots of solid well maybe not lots of them but there are Solo stickers out there who are staking you know ten thousand plus each right and they're just individuals doing that because they have a lot of eighth for one reason or another um but there are definitely companies doing that they're definitely corporates doing that there are definitely institutions doing that like for example let's say a financial institution a traditional financial institution says to their customers hey stake through us we've got our own setup you know they're not going to go through one of these existing setups they're going to have their own setup do we identify them as that bank entity and split that out from the solo Staker share of the market or do we say that they are a solar stacker because they're not with any of these staking entities right because these

taking entities are specifically spun up to be staking entities obviously Lido uh exists to be a staking provider right a staking service provider coinbase has the their entire arm where they do staking for multiple different chains right obviously coinbase the company isn't uh primarily focused on staking they're primarily focused on being a centralized exchange but they have a pretty big business unit that's dedicated to staking right whereas uh Kraken a same deal binance same deal and then things like obviously rocker pool they just focus on staking in a decentralized way but these come let's say you know there's a solo Staker it's an individual he's he or she is solos taking you know 1 000 eighth on their own I would consider that to be a

individual solo stacker that would fit my definition but then let's say that there's a company and maybe there's only a few people uh part of that company and they're they're basically gotten together and said hey we're gonna like stake our eighth We're not gonna go with one of these existing providers and they do that and maybe the company isn't even spun up to to just be staking eat maybe it's just part of their balance sheet same goes for these traditional finance companies whether that be a bank or a broker or whatever it is right uh um they could spin up these things as well and do it on their own so it's going to be harder and harder I guess to Define exactly what a solo Staker is but does it really matter is the question that I've I've ultimately come to uh because this isn't just something that I thought

about just now by the way I was looking at this website uh yes not yesterday when I saw it earlier today and I've got my brain thinking and I wanted to bring it up on on the refuel the way I think about it is it doesn't matter what matters is the amount of high quality staking entities that we have on the beacon chain it doesn't matter that we have X amount percent of this uh this entity or x amount percent of this entity as long as the percentages are roughly not evenly distributed but roughly distributed and healthily distributed so that let's say no one entity has over at least 20 share of the market and these entities are actually separate they're not just separate in name only they're actually the logically separate both you know either geographically or separate completely separate entities have nothing to do

with each other preferably they're actually competing with each other and hostile towards each other that's actually better because that means that they're not going to collude right there's well I guess there's a lesser chance that they're going to collude so I think the the more important distinction is number of staking different staking entities that uh have a low chance of colluding rather than trying to define or trying to put a I guess like very uh small box around what constitutes a solo sticker right or what constitutes a staging provider or what constitutes a LSD I think the lines blur a lot and I think as I said what we should be optimizing for is the greatest amount of low chance of colluding staking entities across the entire Globe obviously we want to do Geographic

decentralization we want to have client diversity there's a lot that goes into it this right ethereum is really the only chain that's trying to do this trying to tackle decentralization from every single angle at the protocol layout which is I guess a major reason why I'm so excited about this stuff and why I talk about it so much but maybe that that changes your thinking a little bit but I'm still curious to hear what you guys would think of as defining what a solo sticker actually is or maybe you agree with my conclusion that we shouldn't be trying to Define it we should actually just be trying to optimize for though you know as many different staking entities as as possible so let me know in the comments or on in the Discord Channel all right so optimism Bedrock has a date so the optimism account on Twitter

announced today that they are putting a proposal fraught forward to the Token house to get optimism Bedrock deployed on mainnet so you can see the full proposal here on the optimism governance Forum but essentially if this gets passed which I mean there's no reason that it shouldn't get past since this is the biggest upgrade to optimism in its history right um uh they say here if the vote passes the Bedrock upgrade will be scheduled for Execution two weeks after the vote passes AKA on March 15th at 9am at Pacific time so deck two weeks uh no sorry not two weeks from now six weeks from now uh which is not that far away right they're still making their q1 deadline that they set for themselves they originally set the Q4 deadline I remember but it's been q1

um and they're definitely going to uh to to meet that considering this proposal is there they only did this proposal because they're ready to deploy it basically so I'm super excited for this to go live I mean they detail what's different in a bunch of different I guess like on the on the proposal here but also on uh there's a bunch of links here to different explainers different blog posts that you should go check out but the the biggest upgrades uh sorry in terms of the size of the upgrade it's similar to arbitrim Nitro uh and it's it's definitely going to uh build uh pave the way for a better optimistic ethereum uh as we go through and I think the the the overall summary here of what's happening is that and they say yeah the highest level the Bedrock release implements a modular

architecture separating the op stack into three components of consensus execution and settlement and that's exactly what I've been saying that it pretty much like all of uh the ethereum ecosystem is doing right now um and then uh obviously they say these designs borrow heavily from the engine API introduced for the merge and as a result I think ethereum execution client can be converted into an optimism execution client in less than 2 000 lines of code this is really cool because as I've said before these layer twos they want to be multi-client architecture so essentially if you can change uh nevermind for example or Aragon or Basu into an optimism client that allows you to do things like running a full node on optimism or

running a validator on optimism or running a sequence on optimism that being able to do that without changing much code is a huge win I think so yeah anyway I'm going to link optimism's Bedrock uh details in the YouTube description below you can go check out the proposal check out all the supporting documentation I'm obviously super excited about this optimism and arbitrim I use quite regularly myself I get a lot of value out of both of these networks and they definitely and Bedrock is definitely going to add a lot more value to optimism all right speaking of layer twos L2 beat has a reminder here that they're about to launch their roll-up maturity ranking and they are gathering final feedback for this so you can visit the Forum here and give them final feedback but essentially what this is is it's meant

to be a set of information on the l2beat website that uh ranks the the Roll-Ups based on their uh I guess like quote-unquote maturity which basically means based on how decentralized they are right or how secure they are and you can see a little uh graphical example of that here that they've split this up into different stages and these are the stages based on vitalik's um eth research post I believe from a little while ago where he said that these are the stages that he defines as a Roll-Ups path or a layer 2's path to decentralization so you have the nun category here which means it's not a roll up you have stage zero which means it's under construction stage one limited security and stage two fully secured by ethereum and then uh they they also want to be able to do more

detailed information as depicted in this mock-up here as well and then yeah there's some feedback here so you can definitely give your own feedback to this if you want but I think this is going to be a much needed set of I guess like information for users because as I've said before pretty much no roll up except fuel V1 on ethereum today is in their final state or really anywhere near it I mean optimism does not have fraud proofs right now with bedrock that should um should be closer to reality but they don't have fraud proofs at all arbitrim has fraud proofs but permission fraud proofs where not any you know not just anyone can submit the fraud proof's only arbitrim or off-chan labs and uh I guess approved entities can do that uh and they're all got like they're

obviously multi-cigs and and centralized Bridges and all that sort of stuff and same goes for the ZK Roll-Ups so we need to get to a point where we remove all that stuff it's going to take time it's going to be Progressive but in the meantime we want users to be aware of these things um and I I talk about this a lot obviously on the refuel but the refill only has so much reach and and I think l2b has a lot of great reach because it's a website that I've seen referenced plenty of times it's like a central hub for this information so I'm really glad that they're continuing to to add this stuff and to to keep um I guess uh improving the website in order to allow users to be to get to make more informed decisions about where they Bridge their funds to so yeah anyway I'll leave this

uh for of this governance Post in the YouTube description below for you to check out and give feedback on all right Philip here from the uh li-fi protocol uh Team put out a tweet today that kind of surprised me so he said by now more than 90 of metamasks bridge volume and goes through li-fi protocol better prices more gas efficiency and fewer failing transactions and he says Focus wins uh and li-fi for those who don't know I've covered them before on the replay but for those of you don't know what it is it's a bridge aggregator uh it's one of those bridge aggregators I think there's a there's a couple of others out there but li-fi is definitely as seen here one of the more popular ones and it surprised me because I didn't realize that they were so

dominant like this is actually quite crazy um and uh it's really cool to see I mean this is the last two months worth of data it's obviously not you know not like uh uh uh a Year's worth of data or anything like that but the last two months give us a really nice picture because it is quite variable you can see that only uh you know about 20 days ago it was down at below 50 but they seem to be on a kind of like I mean they seem to have like steady percentage here and then and then they have spikes so you can see if you put if you were to draw a line over where it spent most of its time it'd probably be between 70 to 80 percent of the aggregator market share here um but yeah they've got like over 90

currently over the last few days which is quite crazy when you uh when you look at this and see what's going on here so I guess congrats to them on seeing this growth this is really awesome uh I think bridges in general uh as I've said plenty of times before are going to be huge and because there's going to be multiple Bridges a bridge aggregator is going to be a no-brainer right it's going to be something that I think a lot of people use without knowing they're using it because it's going to be something that sits in the background and I doubt pretty much any metamask user knows that that's what they're using when they when they use these bridging how kind of infrastructure here uh they don't know that they're using this and this is a good thing these things that act as kind of protocol

level or near protocol level infrastructure shouldn't be things that people get exposed to or shouldn't have to know about and this goes for so many of the things that exist within uh I guess the crypto ecosystem for example oracles right people interacting with defy a lot of them wouldn't even know what an oracle is or what chain link is for example uh especially going forward has to be more mainstream they're not going to know what this stuff is and that's totally fine that's actually how it should be same with things like the graph right where uh that's it's another middleware protocol and uh I'm sure even the layer twos are going to get obstructed away as well like right now everyone goes okay I'm going to optimism I'm going to arbitrim but what happens when things like layer 3s get built on here and they have their own branding to

it and then it's going to be that to the point where people are using ethereum without even realizing they're using ethereum and I've already seen some people bad-mouthing ethereum before I remember reading a comment actually a few maybe a few months ago now where someone said um if there room sucks uh I I I but I love uh sorry I'm using arbitrim because ethereum sucks or something like that and I'm paraphrasing I don't remember the exact the exact uh tweet and I was like do you realize you're using ethereum by using arbitrim and I don't think they they did realize that so it's funny how you can offer value as uh to to these people uh on ethereum without them even knowing they're using ethereum and that goes for so many things in this ecosystem there's going to be countless of these apps that we all know and love that we all know

about uh that people do not know about they're not going to know anything about it just like how we use the internet I mean you don't know what the stack of I guess like uh Facebook is or what the stack of Twitter is unless you actually look into it go through their investor presentations go through the developer presentations and actually uh dive into it the majority 99.99 of users have no idea what any of that stuff is and nor should they or nor should they care and the same is going to they're going to be true for for crypto I believe but yeah anyway congrats to li-fi protocol on the growth year it's really great to see now I'm just going to quickly go through the little disclaimers here I'm an investor in optimism l2beat and li-fi protocol uh so I just wanted to knock them all out

at once instead of doing it on each other on each of the um on each of the the the tweets here uh uh but yeah anyway moving on from that so uh Blowfish so Blowfish has been around I think for a little while uh and today they said on Twitter uh in the last year we've helped leading wallets scan 200 million transactions block 20 000 malicious ones and keep over 500 000 web through users safe today we're launching a free security browser extension Blowfish protect to make transaction security accessible to every web3 user now the closest or I guess like uh I mean and I I shouldn't but yeah no it's a competitor the closest competitor to Blowfish is happy so these are these tools that basically allow you to uh

essentially protect yourself from uh getting caught in in signing a phishing transaction for example or doing something malicious like that um and it also I believe has some features it has some similar features to fire as well which will which it'll show you what exactly is happening with the transaction and what is going to happen with the transaction by running a simulation on it so this is really cool like I I'm a firm believer in there not being uh I guess monopolies in this ecosystem even if in the end a lot of things Trend towards looking like monopolies because I think the more competition the better you know it's funny because even uni swap which I consider to be a pretty strong Monopoly in the amm space they had competition from Sushi swap for a little bit and you may not believe that if you came later

than defy summer but Sushi swap was regarded as an actual uni swap killer and they actually did end up pushing unusoft to do their token earlier than anticipated to fight back so competition is really good competition is really healthy for this ecosystem I believe and and it's really great to see that there's another I guess some tool out there uh uh that's going to be competing with Harpy because it means that uh it's going to make harpy a better product Blowfish is going to be a better product and at the end users get the benefit of that as well so yeah you can read uh blowfish's thread here about how they do things uh it's very similar as I said to tahapi and I believe that Blowfish started on Solana and not ethereum but they are supporting ethereum and polygon right now

um but that may be a reason why you hadn't heard of it before as well because it did start off in Solana and has come across to uh to ethereum at least I believe they started off in Solana from what I've seen and they came across uh two ethereum and obviously we'll be supporting all the Layer Two Chains and everything on ethereum as well so I'll link this in the YouTube description for you to check out all right last up here I just wanted to highlight and explainer that Dan cred Feist wrote about Rye so Rye I think is still one of the most uh least understood things in the crypto ecosystem it is uh as Dan Craig says here one of the coolest experiments in crypto but uh unfortunately it has suffered a lot from the I guess Capital inefficiency problem which means its

adoption has suffered here so you can read this blog post for an overview of Rye you know of what Rai is why Dan kradz excited about and why you should be excited about it as well and the piece was reviewed by vitalik buterin and Amin solimani Amin is one of the uh I guess I don't know if he's a co-founder but he's definitely one of the architects of Rye so um this post is definitely high quality I mean I read through it and I really did enjoy it and I've talked about Rye plenty of times in the past as well so I won't rehash what I've said there but definitely go check out this blog post for yourself it'll be linked in the YouTube description below now I did say this was the last thing I wanted to cover today but not the last thing I wanted to talk about today so

we're back with a bit of Market action again over the last I mean 48 hours or so with the market spiking up again and everyone being like Oh my God the bull Market's back oh my God the FED is is hawkish they're not gonna uh they're not gonna raise rates again or something all the fed's dubbish I don't know like everyone's throwing around all these terms all the time about the macro environment and it's just hilarious seeing how concerned people are with what the FED does when a year ago no one even gave a about the FED right they were all trying to fight the Fed so to speak um but it's kind of funny how things change like that but the reason I the thing I want to talk about when it came to to the markets was again just rehashing a lot of what I've said in the

past about not getting ahead of yourself you know making sure you stay grounded with things making sure you're making the most of the bear Market the sideways Market the crab market whatever you want to call it uh because even though the market may be bullish right now right it doesn't mean that a new bull market is happening right doesn't mean that a new bull market necessarily happening this year these things can happen a lot and and as I explained before it did happen a lot it happened in 2019 go look at the East chart of 2019. it's a very uh brutal chart when you look at it because it tricked a lot of people into thinking the bull market was back um but just yeah keep keep your level keep your head level here keep your eyes on the prize uh and and I think um

you'll be okay now the second part of this before I wrap up today's episode was I was looking at kind of what was moving in the market and I was looking at different sectors and it seems that the layer twos at least the ones with tokens seem to be moving quite a lot in terms of price and also the apps built on top of them seem to be moving quite a lot as well and that layer one seemed to be quiet which is pretty cool to see now I don't know if this is just a short-term phenomenon but I like the fact that these l2s are gaining in value because uh these l2s to me I mean are worth much more than the vast majority of these are ones uh and and they should be worth a lot more but at the same time I can't just say that and and not look

at the project individually like for example I mentioned before I'm an investor in optimism I got a rather large Opa airdrop which I'm still holding but if you actually go and look at the amount of tokens that are circulating for op it's only five percent there are still 95 of those tokens that are not circulating or or around that I don't think it's an exact percentage but around that so op is one of those tokens that have actually been going up a lot recently and people have been getting really bullish about and it now has a pretty large fluid air load evaluation I believe over over 10 billion dollars I think uh uh probably a lot more than that now so when I look at that I'm like okay well I I this is another reason why I don't really talk about uh token specific tokens because I

look at that and I'm like okay well I'm really bullish on optimism I I am an investor in op obviously because I'm bullish on optimism I think a lot of things that they're doing are really great I do think that op as a token is going to be worth something I don't think it's going to be worthless I do think that it is one of the better tokens out there but then looking at the the supply Dynamic right now and I'm like okay well 95 of the supply is still not circulating and we've seen what happens in a lot of those in a lot of different cases around around that so I see that and I'm like okay um this is this is anyone's guess of what can happen from here I have my opinions on it which I'm not going to to share I I mean I don't know what's going

to happen I just have opinions on it but this is the number one reason why I don't ever talk about or I try my hardest not to talk about individual tokens because it is really hard to pick things I mean for example look at what happened with Aptos over the last few weeks Aptos has basically no ecosystem it is VC infested it is it's just it it and and it and it's it's basically like everything that is wrong with the L1 space it is more centralized than Solana and Divinity which are already very centralized and yet it pumped to a fully downloaded evaluation of I believe 20 billion dollars where I think 9 of the tokens still aren't circulating and uh the tokens that aren't circulating are actually allowed to be staked and there

are rewards going to those stakers and a lot of those stakers are the VCS and they're allowed to sell their rewards so you see what I'm saying here right like I personally looked at Aptos and was like okay that that thing's you know kind of like finished it's already worth a lot it should it should be worth way less than what it is now uh if we're talking about fundamentally speaking and then it did this ridiculous pump and no one really knows why apparently some I think the the Korean market was beating it up or something like that I didn't really look too much into it but this is why um I I know I avoid the these topics generally but also why crypto investing is so hard it is so hard guys and it's why I tell you guys really just think twice about going on Leverage if you

really want to go on Leverage I mean it's your decision but leverage will kill you shorting things is usually not very fun longing things is usually not very fun like on on Leverage obviously because you can blow you blow you up very very quickly I mean even though you know you might be bullish on something it doesn't matter right maybe you're bullish on over the long term and then in the short term you get liquidated and then you're out of position and it's even worse so there's so much that goes into this stuff you can't just look at one factor over another and sometimes things just pump a lot for no reason or for stupid reasons or they they front run their price Discovery and this actually happened with chain link so chain link last bear Market um crab market in 2019 did a pretty

significant pump against pretty much everything but then during the bull market it didn't really do much against other things it definitely went up against US dollars but against Ethan BTC it didn't really do much at all because it front ran that price Discovery and it basically priced in all of its future growth I think that's what happens sometimes with these assets I think that may be what happened with Aptos but Aptos just seems to be such a weird scenario where as I said 90 plus percent of the tokens aren't circulating it seems to be led by a Korean exchange called up bit no one really knows about it normally it has really talked about it that I've seen uh there's not really any ecosystem or Community there um and there are constant there is constant cell pressure from those VCS and it is a VC kind of like infested

chain so yeah when looking at these things you have to take so many different inputs in and you have to make try and make informed decisions uh about what you invest in and a lot of the times you're going to see things go up in value and you're going to miss them and you just have to deal with that you're not going to catch the majority of things you have to have your thesis invest what you think um is the best and most efficient use of your capital and then be happy with that and then if you want to change your thesis you can but you when changing it you have to like change it and not have regrets because then you just keep flip-flopping because what happens is you're like okay well this thesis didn't play out I'm gonna go and trade this asset for this other

asset because I have a thesis on this one and then the one that you traded out of starts going up in value and like oh my God no and then you try and Chase that again and then that's another way to whittle down your your stack and Whittle down your any any money that you've made in crypto so yeah anyway enough of the the uh I mean it's not investment advice but enough on that front just wanted to to to put that out there because it's something that I've been thinking about over last few weeks for a little bit but on that note that's going to be it for today thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all

tomorrow thanks everyone