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1090 Dooters - Last Updated October 4, 2024
â¨Eâ¨tâ¨hâ¨eâ¨râ¨eâ¨uâ¨mâ¨
$2380.07
0.03893
Walking in the dark,
Absence of knowledge was stark,
Computing proof benchmark.
A little market lingo for noobs, when a pump falls back a little bit after sustained upward movement, itâs called a âcorrectionâ
When it falls back completely then dumps even further from where it started, itâs called âethereumâ
Just wanted to share this cool dashboard showing the onchain activities of Optimism citizens/badge holders (of which there are quite a few in here):
https://dune.com/lamora/optimism-citizens
It shows a comparison with a control group of normal Optimism users, with metrics such as participation in other DAOs, usage of OP stack chains and web3 social media.
The biggest difference seems to be in adoption of Farcaster, with 59% of badgeholders using it compared to about 12% of regular users. It also really shows how much more popular Farcaster is than Lens, which is only used by about 11.4% of badgeholders (and less than 8% of regular users).
Iâd be interested to see crossover metrics with those used for the EVMaverick Resume (https://dune.com/mtitus6/EVMavericks-Resume) such as the number of stakers, wallet age etc, and vis versa, showing EVM participation in other DAOs etc.
In fact, I wonder how many OP Citizens also hold an EVMav? It feels pretty stupid that Iâve been in crypto so long and never bothered to learn to use Dune, maybe that will be my project for the weekendâŚ
Ethereum mainnet gas at 23 Gwei right now.
Not in a bullrun, not in a mania phase. During a truly boring period.
While L2s scale us 23x. While active addresses are at an ATH of 10 million a week.
The market clearly doesnât see it yet but hereâs what will happen within a few months:
After years of underperformance, ether sees a sudden correction. Narratives immediately follow price action. Enthusiasm returns. Euphoria follows. Influencers on all sides start to pretend they all saw it coming. It was obvious. Activity skyrockets. L1 burn brings deflation back. L2 activity keeps growing, faster and faster. Millions of new users join the L2s. Blob usage reach max value. More users. Price discovery begins. Blobs start contributing to the burn. New L2s appear faster than you can follow. More institutional L2s. Blackrock L2. Stock market on L2. More users. Soon, L2 activity is higher than we can accommodate.
Ether price explodes.
Getting into eth action is 100x easier than last bullrun. People buy using paypal. People buy using debit card on Metamask. Coinbase sends their flux of new users to Base. More users. Ethereum starts to become a staple of reliability brands use in commercials. Institutions start to notice Ethereum. Mentioning Ethereum in business plans becomes as popular as AI currently is. Institutions want exposure, this time they can. More users. The ETF gains crazy popularity. Money inflows look like theyâll keep coming forever. Negative regulatory efforts donât matter anymore, you canât stop the infinity machine.
Ethereum made it. We made it.
Max Resnick is back with some more bad takes.
For those that missed it, in yesterdayâs Execution Layer meeting (discussion goes for about 30min) there was a discussion on whether to increase blobs from 4 to 5 and increase the blob target from 3 to 4 in Pectra A. The reason for this is to maintain adoption of blobs by L2s to help tide us over until we have PeerDAS.
Before continuing itâs important to note that the blobs we have now were always meant to be a stopgap until PeerDAS and network upgrades, which makes it more efficient to scale. We were never meant to scale blobs under current conditions.
There were mentions that some are already struggling with bandwidth, but was brushed off as anecdotal. Thankfully Potuz spoke up for home stakers and said we should treat data from both sides the same since those that are having no issues is anecdotal too. So there was agreement to get more data on this first before deciding whether to include these changes or not. Ryan Berckmans also made a post on the research forum for this data.
Today Ben Edgington, who is a major contributor to getting Ethereum to where it is today, wrote in a Twitter thread that he was seeing he was having signs of issues too.
In comes Max Resnick quote tweeting Benâs post and the following conversation insued:
Max: Bandwidth capacity grows at 50% a year. Asking the entire global network to slow down while we are actively battling for market share with an extremely competent opponent because you live in a swamp with 12mb/s bandwidth is extremely selfish.
Ben: Where did I ask for the entire global network to slow down?
Max: You are literally saying your node can not keep up, so you want to propose fewer blobs in your blocks. Why donât you shut your node down and unstake? You are slowing down the network by doing this.
Ben: I dislike your dystopian future.
Max: We can no longer afford to eat the cost of these luxury beliefs. Solo staking in a place where you do not have appropriate bandwidth imposes an externality on the network. If Ethereum doesnât win, the world looks much more dystopian than a world where Ethereum sacrifices a few rural solo stakers in exchange for vastly increased performance.
end
Nixo put it perfectly with how it feels reading that:
That feeling when arrogant young blood opining on the future of Ethereum comes in hot and tells the one of the most OG cypherpunks I know, who literally wrote the book on Ethereum, to shut down his node and unstake [image of sad pepe looking out a rainy window]
And Max replies to nixoâs tweet with a gif saying to shut it down. What a disgrace.
To better understand how home stakers are doing bandwidth wise, please take this EthStaker survey (itâs POAP gated):
https://x.com/ethStaker/status/1839763102952501613
Calling all home stakers! Weâre looking to investigate if stakers would be concerned about increasing network bandwidth
Please help by filling out a quick survey: https://poap-feedback.deform.cc/Solo-Staker-Bandwidth-Survey/
You need one of the staking community POAPs to fill out the survey. Let me know if there are any we should add so you can fill this out.
Share on the everything app: https://x.com/ethStaker/status/1839763102952501613
𼧠This Week - In the Ethereum Pie - Layer 2 update:
(I have a version with links but they are all to X postsâŚ. Would that be allowed and more importantly would that be wanted?)
After a decade in the crypto space, I finally became a victim of a scam. Fortunately, it was only for about $20 worth of useless Hamster Kombat tokens, and I was already fullly prepared for it to be a scam.
This was entirely expected. At least I got front-row tickets to see this shitshow, and itâs been the most fun Iâve had from the utterly-boring Hamster Kombat game.
Around this August, the HamsterKomat team promoted a non-KYC, no-gas method for the token airdrop that used the Ebi.xyz DEX. All the other airdrop methods uses CEXs that werenât available in the US, so that was my only choice. I figured the airdrop would be tiny, and I couldnât care less about it, so I picked it because it the easiest method.
I already knew Ebi.xyz was an unknown DEX that was created around the time that Hamster Kombat launched, possibly by the same Hamster Kombat team. Pretty much nothing is known about the real members of either team.
And that wraps up what I know so far.
Some pontification⌠I feel like Iâve been able to predict all the major tech trends from the last 25 years, whether it was operating systems, search engines, cloud computing, weed stocks, EVs, crypto, or AI. Right now, for the first time in a long time, I just donât know.
AI, at least at the startup stage, is clearly in a bubble. I strongly believe in the transformative power of AI but itâs already had its 10x recently and random VC investments Iâm reviewing are raising $100M just for mentioning AI. Do you honestly expect NVDA to do another 10x from here? You can buy MSFT and just sit on it or something broad spectrum like VTI and probably make your 8% a year but thatâs not a play for risk-seeking capital like all these other bets have been. Goldâs been having a great run with nation states trying to de-dollarize and basically rotating US bond reserves into precious metal reserves but even if Iâm up like 40% there itâs just boring and I donât see a future in it outside of the current run. Maybe I need to look into emerging markets? Maybe there just is no 1000% tech investment to be found right now and I just need to stay informed, preserve capital, and wait? In the meantime Iâm just parked barbell style in liquidity farming and working the fiat mines but it increasingly feels like if Iâm not making 10% a year on my whole portfolio Iâll be falling behind to inflation let alone able to live off my assets.
I feel like I have enough most people would consider me wealthy but increasingly capital is the only thing that will make money in the world while the supply and demand of human labor will be increasingly out of balance as AI accelerates. Child care costs over $2k a month while the employees watch 8 kids each and make like $10-15/hr. Universities put students hundreds of thousands into student debt yet lecturers are working multiple jobs to get by. The medical industry and end of life care is going to systemically drain all the boomers wealth before it passes down but the caretakers of those facilities are overworked and couldnât afford a room at the facilities they work at. All of our services seem to cost astronomical amounts compared to pre-covid but the people doing the work arenât making that. So who is? Capital.
You can see whatâs happening to the 98% of people already left behind. Now add in AI displacing tens of millions of jobs over the next decade. As is the nature of automation, it will replace labor with profits to AI companies but a 10/1 ratio. I once led a team of AI engineers that was automating the jobs of 200 workers at $15 an hour per engineer per year. The software was considered a depreciating asset with a three year shelf life so we were considered to be making $18M in savings per engineer per year. That was 6 years ago; the technology is much more powerful now.
I feel like thereâs this metaphorical wave I need to catch and Iâm just behind the crest of it working hard to get on top of it so I can let the water do the work instead of me padding the whole way. The fear of being left behind keeps me motivated but itâs not a happy mindset. The way out of it is to combine let the fiat mines pay the bills while I find the next 5x tech innovation to ride up but again I feel stumped there for the first time in a long time.
Regarding eth-usd
Google data: You may have noticed Google removed the nice chart in search results. This data used to be powered by CoinMarketCap.
Earlier in the month, the data just stopped and was stuck.
Myself and other members of this community called attention to Google (and I tried getting in touch with CoinMarketCap, but, no surprise, no one responded). Last week, a Google search for âeth-usdâ started working again, but without a chart. Itâs actually returning data from Yahoo! Finance.
I also noticed that my Google Sheets function (=GOOGLEFINANCE("ETHUSD")
) was still stuck on the wrong price, so I clicked the âDisclaimerâ in the footer of Google Sheets around stock/currency prices, which led me to this familiar page: https://www.google.com/googlefinance/disclaimer/
HOWEVER, the provider of cryptocurrency data has changed from CoinMarketCap to Morningstar (I assume this Morningstar).
I canât find the price of regular old ETH (or BTC or anything else crypto-related thatâs not a fund) on their public site, but maybe itâs behind a login/paywall.
Anyway, the point is, Google must be aware shitâs not working, but they didnât really fix anything yet. I encourage you to click those little âHelpâ buttons/links in Sheets or in Search or in your Admin Console and complain! Squeaky wheel and all that!
Somethingâs brewing in Chinese markets. Iâm sure you guys remember the Chinese housing market was going through a bubble pop and property prices had come down significantly from their peak over there. With lots of property in horrendous conditions, lots of property being liquidated at low prices but nobody purchasing them, etc.
Recently the Peopleâs Bank of China announced several measures that in isolation might seem appropriate to stimulate the economy, but when combined all together generate a crazy amount of stimulus. This is with the intend of pushing economic growth up, increasing stock market prices and increasing property prices.
The measures are:
Interest rates paid to savings in banks were pushed down from 1.7% to 1.5% - The lowest interest rate in its history. This is intended to push banks to seek to lend more and the movement of savings into the market for investment.
The % of deposits that must be covered by liquid reserves in banks (only for the largest banks). It used to be 10% but itâs been reduced to 9.5%. Its lowest level since 2007. This is expected to come down even more in the future. This allows them to use this additional liquidity to provide more credit. Approximately an additional injection of about 140 billion USD equivalent of liquidity.
Cut of interest rates for business debt and mortgages, reduced from 3.35% to 3.15%. Incentivising more lending for families and businesses.
Additionally, they want to create a new monetary policy tool to refloat the stock market, a swap program for securities, insurance companies and funds to obtain liquidity through asset collateralization, essentially collateralized lending.
This essentially opens up 500 billion yan (~70 billion USD) of liquidity with possible expansions in the future.
Theyâre also intending to create a fund to âstabilize the stock marketâ. Essentially a centrally planned monetary policy plan to artificially push the stock market up and property.
Lastly, for property purchases, they want to reduce the barrier of entry for 2nd home purchases, which used to be limited for banks to lend about 75% of the value of the property, but now banks can lend about 85% of the value of the property. For smaller local government entities, banks will be allowed to lend 100% of the value of properties if those local government entities want to buy those âunpurchaseableâ properties. Up until now banks were allowed to lend 60% of the value of those properties to those local government entities.
The Peopleâs Bank of China also said that this âwonât be enoughâ and that they will have to resort to fiscal stimulus as well.
Since September 13th, the CSI 300 (capitalization-weighted stock market index designed to replicate the performance of the top 300 stocks traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange) has since risen in price about 27%.
Generally if youâre invested in this market, congratulations. For everyone else, this is generally very risky. Every time megastimulus plans like these are launched, enormous amounts of liquidity flow into perhaps not the most productive places in the economy, but instead often times those targeted sectors affected by the stimulus, regardless of the productivity of these markets or if they can even recover.
The fear and greed index of the CSI 300 and the ETF call volume have both risen to their highest level since 2015.
TL;DR: The Peopleâs Bank of China is applying a megastimulus to the economy to refloat the stock and property markets to a concerning extent.
Some articles in case anyone wants to do more reading:
Eigenlayer is a restaking protocol, which means it provides security/ trust for new protocols/ products that donât have the time/ money/ community to build it from scratch. People stake ETH to secure Ethereum and the same collateral can be reused (ârestakedâ) to secure new L1s, L2s, oracles etc.
Usually when you stake, you can be slashed when you misbehave. When you try to misbehave (e.g. double spend) on ETH mainnet this can (and will) be slashed and you will lose ETH as a consequence because this happens onchain and is easy to judge.
But there are things that the blockchain/ nodes canât detect or that arenât easy to judge. These decisions are âintersubjectiveâ. Slashing isnât possible. One famous example is a data availability layer where a node withholds information. This doesnât happen onchain, because the submission of the data happens offchain.
For these âintersubjectiveâ cases $EIGEN comes into play. If people believe that nodes misbehaved they challenge the nodes, fork $EIGEN and hope that others follow their arguments and make their $EIGEN fork the new central token within Eigenlayer. Eigenlayer obviously canât and shouldnât even try to fork ETH, so they created their own token to take this task.
tl;dr
ETH is used for objective misbehaviour
EIGEN is used of intersubjective misbehaviour
Also posted in r/ethstaker, but I donât think people will mind seeing it here too:
Iâd like to share an article Iâve written about what u/KuDeTa and I are doing with respect to block proposal timing games for the Aestus relay. Weâve been experimenting with timing games for a while and in the interest of transparency would like to share our motivation, proposer-configurable parameters, and a bit of data.
The full article is here: https://hackmd.io/@austonst-aestus/BJsvEoia6
Itâs a little long to copy directly onto Reddit, but I can provide and elaborate on the main points:
?headerDelay={ms}&headerCutoff={ms}
to the Aestus listing in their mev-boost relay list.If you need some background on timing games, I provide a few links at the start. Timing games arenât a good thing in general: theyâre zero-sum for proposers and basically negative-sum when you consider the impact on network health. You can draw reasonable comparisons to an iterated n-player prisonerâs dilemma, where once you know a handful of actors are always going to defect, itâs in your best interest to defect as well, if only to mitigate your losses.
But this isnât too different from mev-boost: if we canât solve the problem (without protocol changes) we can at least reduce the advantage sophisticated actors have over everyone else. And when it comes to timing games, implementing them on the relay side with a careful eye towards consensus health should accomplish this. The article should cover the rest.
To quickly address the current hot topic, the blob-shaped elephant in the room whose ISP strangles their upload bandwidth: yeah, relay-side timing games will delay block publication (thatâs the point), giving less time for blobs to propagate around the network. But when you accept a bid over mev-boost, the relayâwith its well-connected clients and prime data center locationâwill be the one responsible for initial block propagation.
If you use mev-boost with relay-side timing games, the block may be delayed but you can trust the relay to propagate it fast. If you donât use mev-boost at all, your client will produce a block ASAP but you need to trust your own network to propagate it. The middle ground may be more interesting: mev-boost with timing games AND a --min-bid
means you delay block production but may end up responsible for your own block propagation.
If youâre a validator concerned about local propagation after delays, you could specify ?headerDelay=0
in your Aestus mev-boost entry to disable timing games at the cost of lowering bid value, though if youâre doing that, make sure to also remove Ultrasound and BloXroute relays from your list, as they also run timing games (BloXroute does allow for timing configuration, but I think you need to pay for their validator gateway service separately). Thereâs no point in making Aestus return a bid early if your mev-boost client is just going to sit there waiting 900 ms for the other relaysâ responses.
Iâm always happy to discuss. Feel free to reply or reach out directly.
I dislike every part of this, but unfortunately timing games are a reality. Thank you for the transparency, making a reasonable compromise and especially the possibility to change the defaults. I think currently there is very little incentive for solo stakers to actively optimize for timing games as the execution layer income is just a small part of the overall income. As far as I see this year execution income is slightly above 10% of the overall staking income, at least for the 20 random validators I checked, and increasing that by timing games by another 1-2 percentage points is not really a lot. At least for me it is not worth it to compromise the network integrity over it. Obviously there are different opinions about it. If the MEV opportunity increases again it might become a more substantial part of the revenue. I think overall it shows for how little reward some actors are ready to compromise the Network. Not really surprising, but just interesting to keep in mind.
Special guest Mark Richardson joins us from Bancor to discuss Carbon DeFi, an automation tool for onchain trading.
Ethereum
$2645.30
0.04053 grandpas
90,891 hodlers subscribed! (+8)
Caroline got two,
Crypto market bumps into,
Sam is a crook too.
Even Google realizes the price is never going to change.
Context: When you google âeth priceâ it was stuck on September 14thâs price, this feature has since been removed all together while remaining for BTC đ
Oh my god you guys. Whoâs cutting onions in here? đĽš
Yes Iâm coming to Hodlercon now!!! I am at a loss for words with your generosity! I am so grateful to be a part of this wonderful community and the doots wonât die until this subreddit dies or I do⌠(unless Reddit nukes my account or something, but Iâm sure Iâd find a way around it though). Anyway, through the incredibly kind funding, raising 1.2 ETH from from u/superphiz, u/allinat40, u/haurog, u/alexiskef, u/shiftli, u/KuDeTa, u/Gumpa-Bucky, u/austonst and u/da3vr, I will absolutely be seeing you all in Phuket!
As a token of my appreciation I will be sending out a POAP soon (please DM me if you donated from a CEX or not your POAP wallet with your preferred wallet). I also have some ideas for a special something to give each of you in person (please let me know if any of you wonât be at Hodlercon). Nothing big, but hopefully something meaningful, think of it like a physical POAP. No promises just yet but Iâve got an idea of something I may be able to do.
I have already checked and I can definitely change my flight for minimal extra cost. I still need to figure out the logistics, ie can I fly out of Phuket to Aus/NZ or do I need to go back to Bangkok but it seems I can change my flight and get credit for another flight for no extra cost! This just leaves any extra cost for getting to Phuket, the Hodlercon ticket, accommodation, food and airport parking for an extra week. All of which I have no reason to believe will go over my newly increased budget.
I also just want to say it was impressive/bold of you all to remember/have faith that tricky.eth was indeed my address. I have rarely mentioned that and it couldâve gone very wrong if you had the wrong address haha.
Finally, I just want to say that this community never disappoints and all of the work being done around the doots now with the podcast is incredibly motivating for me. I love to see the awesome things coming to fruition out from this community and I hope this is just the beginning.
Just watched the documentary about Ethereum and Vitalik. I thought it was pretty good overall. Thereâs a great scene with a recording of Charles crying about how he wonât become a CEO because Ethereum is going to be a public good (Iâm paraphrasing). Gave me a good chuckle. The movie is here https://ethereumfilm.xyz/. Costs $20 in ETH for a streaming ticket, but this is stuff I like to see onchain, so props.
In the all Core Devs Consensus call last Thursday they discussed the size of the upcoming Pectra Fork. They pretty much decided to make the Pectra fork much smaller again and split it into two hard forks. In essence all the EIPs that are currently being live on devnets (i.e. internal testnets) will be bundled into the first upgrade, whereas anything not part of these devnets will get its own hard fork later on. The reasoning is that the EIPs that are currently tested will soon be ready for public testnets and then mainnet. Waiting for the other EIPs to be ready would delay these upgrades by several months. More details about the reasoning can be found here: https://hackmd.io/@ralexstokes/rJVuKtlpR
As it currently stands it is planned to have the the following EIPS in Pectra 1
EIP-2537: Precompile for BLS12-381 curve operations
EIP-2935: Save historical block hashes in state
EIP-6110: Supply validator deposits on chain
EIP-7002: Execution layer triggerable exits
EIP-7251: Increase the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE
EIP-7549: Move committee index outside Attestation
EIP-7685: General purpose execution layer requests
EIP-7702: Set EOA account code for one transaction
Most important for stakers are the maxEB (EIP 7251) and EL triggerable exits (EIP 7002) changes. These two allow a single validator to have up to 2048 ETH in balance and the advantage that one can trigger a validator exit by signing a message from the withdrawal address. The account abstraction EIP (7702) is interesting as it allows and EOA account to behave like a smart contract account. There is also the discussion to include a smaller change which would increase the Blob target and max from the current 3/6 to either 4/6 or higher numbers. But there is no consensus about this yet.
Notably absent from this list are the bigger EIPs (PeerDAS and EOF). This means we are pretty much at the size of Pectra as it was initially planned (until May 2024), right before the size blew up massively by including PeerDAS and EOF. The plan is to have the first upgrade at the beginning of next year (q1/q2) whereas the second upgrade with PeerDAS and EOF would be at the end of next year. Obviously this still is in discussion so details might change. No idea what this means for the already scoped Verkle tree upgrade which is a large execution layer change which was planned to come afterwards. I guess the next few weeks will give more clarity.
The bankless episode with Mike Neuder was pretty interesting. I am not yet done, but one thing caught my attention: I think we discussed centralized sequencers here probably years ago and pointed out that these arenât perfect, but that we expect some L2s to have only one sequencer that will do all the work and that there will be some decentralized L2s. My mental model from these discussions was âthere will be a bit of everythingâ.
Mike yesterday basically said that he expects âallâ (most) L2s to have a decentralized sequencer and that it is the best strategy for them, because they wonât be more decentralized than L1, inherit all the necessary properties from l1 and shouldnât even try emphasize that dimension. His conclusion is more or less that real-time censorship resistance is cool (which is the result of decentralized sequencing), but itâs probably not as important with the possibility of forced inclusion via L1.
Is a decentralized sequencer only important in our bubble? The more I think about, the more I believe it is - and we are a niche, so developing for us and similar users might be good enough for one or two L2s, but thatâs it. So will we see 99.9% of the sequencers running on one machine?
https://warpcast.com/growthepie/0xd8c82434
Itâs gonna keep happening. Excess supply of blockspace will eventually be gobbled up. Even if itâs to do the same stuff but leaner, easier, more user friendly.
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/14l05iz/daily_general_discussion_june_28_2023/jptzgx4/
Even without new use cases that are brought forward with cheaper blockspace, which I think there are, there is a lot of pent-up blockspace demand in the form of better UX and easier to write code.
We saw something similar with our computers and the internet. As the resources available were scaled up, the computers didnât get much faster to do the same things we were doing. And web pages didnât load up faster. Instead, a lot of those extra new resources went into nicer UX and cheaper/easier to deliver code. We are in the era of smart contract programmers thinking long and hard about how they implement the functionality to minimize gas costs, looking at OPCODES and trying find microoptimizations to squeeze those extra gas savings. There was a time when programmers thought long and hard about the performance of their applications and would often go to assembly to optimize them. For most use cases programmers donât do that anymore because CPU cycles have become so cheap that itâs silly to optimize for that. The same will happen with blockspace, as it becomes cheaper and cheaper we will start to use it less efficiently in exchange for improved UX or easier code.
As a casual hobbyist developer, I keep hitting a wall at the block explorer verification step.
You can write just about any smart contract idea you have by messing around in Remix IDE. You can deploy it to the blockchain. It will run on its own forever on a permissionless network for everyone to interact with. Thirdparties can even build more stuff on top of your contracts. Amazing!
But the moment you want to make your code easy to check on a centralized block explorer? Thereâs this huge skill bump, where you need to use the command line, install git/nodejs/npm/truffle/hardhat/scoop/foundry and a million of other things, and none of it works anyway.
Well, I say âyouâ, it is of course âmeâ, dumb old me who never gets this stuff.
But, still, isnât this wild? Intuitively it feels like the hard part would be, you know, building the actual thing? Rather than proving the thing you built is what you say it is.
Imports used to be my main grievance. Now Iâm discovering the fresh hell that is âvia-ir verification. At least now I have AI⌠To help me fail faster.
â edit: finally found a way! Nothing like a good rant in public to have a breakthrough.
For any other tortured soul who might end up in the same situation, the working path was
âgenerate contract metadataâ ticked on in Remix IDE
get the giganormous hexadecimal .json in artifacts/build-info folder
crop its contents to keep just the âlanguageâ, âsettingsâ and âsourcesâ bits
on the block explorer verification page, use Solidity Standard-Json-Input in the compiler type dropdown panel
It Just Works.
The world is saved. Praise Vitalik. Praise all of you. I love you all. Good night.
âItâs different this timeâ
Just sharing some ramblings to help me solidify my theory on where we go from here.
I was a bit worried for a while, when the hype of the Bitcoin ETFs was going on it all got a bit too excited, too quick for me for a while, I was slightly concerned the 4 year cycle wasnât gonna happen as usual.
We seem to be back on course. Bitcoin still rules the jungle (for now) so what is happening with it still matters deeply for Ethereum.
Rate cuts have started in the US, the rest of the world has largely yet to follow course but they will as the cycle turns. Gold is rising and Peter Schiff is getting all excited about it but what usually follows after this is Bitcoin making him eat his words. Pretty sure this will happen again.
In my gut, I think there is one more big drop still to come, there is usually some event that scares people witless before we go to Valhalla. Would love to be wrong on this and we go straight there from this but it fits the usual pattern. From there we start marching on with Bitcoin leading the charge.
Next what happens is money starts to look elsewhere and the fabled Altcoin season has its time to shine. I think Ethereum will start attracting attention sooner rather than later and considering the hate it seems to be getting lately, it will be a glorious, hated rally by those who miss out.
Iâm sure others will pump but Iâm not worried by the likes of Solana etc. Itâs still a centralised shitcoin thatâs good for meme coins but anything else? Pretty sure it will go the way of EoS, Cardano and all the other so called Eth killers in the long term.
Iâve been staying well way from buying any crypto other than BTC/ETH since the 2017 cycle and sure Iâve missed out on shit but Iâm in it for the long haul.
We have ETH ETFs and weâve moved to PoS so all those ESG/green funds can take part that canât in Bitcoin.
We have scale this time, L2s are growing and growing.
Crypto is getting easier and easier to use.
Still waiting to see what the next narrative will be, we had ICOs, DEFI, NFTs all started on Ethereum to kick things off before, what will be next? Is it time for the long talked about real-world assets to enter the party this time?
Ignore all the noise, am pretty sure that we see a great bull market starting as per the usual 4 year cycle. I might even sell some of my precious ETH for the first time this time around :)
I have finished the recent bankless episode with Max Resnick called âIs the Ethereum Roadmap Off Track?â: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLUJ0uLye0U
I knew it will be difficult to listen to for me and I ranted about the guest a bit here before. It is mostly due to the guest being unable to contribute in any meaningful way to the discussion and making false statements everywhere. Now that I have finished it, my conclusion is: should we really listen to someone on their opinions about rollups who seems to have such a gross misunderstanding how this stuff works. He might have very good opinions about the MEV part of the roadmap or about auctions, I cannot judge that but he seems unable to understand how the rollup part really works.
I keep it to the largest issues I have heard and leave out many smaller wrong statements the guest made. To be very clear, my understanding of rollups has a lot of gaps, so please correct me if I am stating something wrong here I am eager to be corrected and learn.
After the 55 minute mark he states
ZK technology inherently compresses the state whereas the optimistic rollups have to put the transactions on chain and maybe they can run a little bit of compression but itâs not nearly the amount of compression you can get with uh ZK roll up
Wrong. There is no compression in ZK technology used today in rollups. The zk part just gives a relatively short string of numbers and characters which prove that the calculation state transitions has been done right. There is no extractable information about the state in this proof. Both rollup types have to put all transactions on chain via blobs. Many people use the simplified term âcompressionâ to get the meaning across, but this is not an accurate description of what is happening in the case of ZK rollups. It really seems like Max took the marketing term of ZK is compression and went with it without understanding what is happening and to draw his conclusions based on this flawed understanding. To make matters worse optimistic rollups do have less overhead in the calldata as they do not have to publish a fraud proof. So it is actually the exact inverse from what he says. Donât get me wrong I am a big fan of zk rollups and really hope they will dominate in the coming years. Max is just wrong here from a technical point.
let let me just be very precise that optimistic rollup does not actually substantially reduce the amount of bandwidth required
This is very wrong the bandwidth requirement can get reduced by the same amount in zk rollups and optimistic rollups. They both publish all transactions in the same way into blobs. They can employ the same optimization techniques to reduce the size of this blob data. Zk rollups have a slight overhead so use a bit more bandwidth. If he would have read/understood vitaliks post about rollups he would know that: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
like we can start to build uh ZK compression into the L1 as well and that would reduce the bandwidth requirements
Again the âcompressionâ which does not really exist. But on the L1 ZK technology can be used to massively reduce the bandwidth and still validate that the state transition has been applied correctly. The node would not know the actual state but it could validate that it is correct. Like the Mina L1 does zk proofs of their state transitions. So, the statement is only half wrong.
from a bandwidth perspective you have almost the same usage from a optimistic L2 as you would if it was happening on the layer one and the only thing youâre saving is on execution
Bandwidth argument is wrong, as explained above. One massively saves on execution in both cases of rollups though.
I think his misunderstanding of the ZK part in zk rollups works fits into his initial rant at the beginning of the episode where he accused the EF and companies behind optimistic rollups to have pushed a roadmap which is against zk rollups. If one does not understand what zk rollups really need it is a bit bold to accuse someone of pushing a wrong roadmap which actually massively benefits zk rollups as well.
we do need to take some tools from the newer blockchains one of them in particular is this kind of parallel execution
Parallel exection is already part of Besu: https://besu.hyperledger.org/development/public-networks/concepts/parallel-transaction-execution
if optimism is not arbitrum then by the transitive property cannot also be the case that optimism is ethereum and arbitrum is ethereum because then arbitrum would be optimism this is like a fundamental contradiction
I am just weirded out by this statement as the transitive relation in mathematics is not really something I would apply here to try to prove something. It is pretty normal to have a subgroup being part of a bigger group but two subgroups not being the same. I am thinking about the taxonomy hierarchy in biology. A lion and a tiger are not the same species, but they still belong to the same genus called âpantheraâ. That is how I think about the Ethereum ecosystem and the rollups. This is not really an important statement by him it just shows that he is using vocabulary to sound more important but applying things in a way which does not really make too much sense.
Rant finished. I now definitely have a worse opinion about him because he does hold strong opinions about things which he apparently does not really understand. This makes it very hard to judge if his opinions are worth considering as one cannot really say from his statements where the limit of his knowledge is. Everything has the same strong absolute language there is no nuance, nothing. And only if one perfectly understands the underlying technology one can judge if his statement makes sense. That is not very helpful for most people at all.
Yesterday I announced the âGoodbye Dannyâ POAP, itâs a POAP to appreciate the contributions of Danny Ryan, the person who is most responsible for the Ethereum beacon chain as we know it.
Itâs launching with a new POAP platform, called âAirshipâ. Airship lets you send funds to an address to receive a POAP without the need to connect to any web3 browser wallet. Effectively, if you send 0.001 Ether (exactly $5.00 at todayâs prices) to theprotocolguild.eth on mainnet, you will receive the POAP in about a minute. This is kind of a cool evolution and Iâm excited to see where it will go.
https://airship.poap.xyz/danny
* Also, I definitely encourage gaming this to get the POAP with a minimal gas cost. How low can you go? The worst that could happen is a dropped tx and you can just try again later.
** depending on how well you know this stuff, setting a very low gas price can effectively get your wallet stuck since all transactions are processed in order. There are ways around this, but i didnât want to surprise anyone.
Some thoughts on EigenLayerâs Operator Set security model.
AVSs assign operators to operating sets. I donât know if this means that by default all AVSs are whitelist only but it certainly reads that way. Itâs not the epitome of permissionless if true.
Stakers delegate stake to operators. How do stakers find an operator to delegate to? At the moment thereâs a list on the EigenLayer website which basically means EigenLayer can exclude an operator from participating just by censoring them here. At the protocol level though I donât believe they have any power so itâs just like Uniswap with their front end which I guess is good enough. The bigger problem though is why does a staker trust an operator to delegate to them. At the moment the only answer here is trust. You are either trusting someone you know like Aestus or you are trusting an LRT to underwrite for you, KYC your operators, etc. We need a better answer here.
Operators then assign unique stake to operator sets. The goal here seems to be to prevent restaked ETH from being restaked multiple times which is confusing to me. Itâs already the case that the underlying stake securing a task can become unbacked, why is it suddenly different if it becomes unbacked within EigenLayer rather than at the LST level? The proper answer here is that capital should be reusable to the extent that the cost of dishonesty still outweighs the profit from dishonesty. The cost of dishonesty is the stake being slashed. The profit from dishonesty scales with the amount of promises youâre allowed to make with that stake. I donât see how this security model is even attempting to discover a rational answer to that equation.
Within an operator set, operators are expected to vote on whether the answers of other operators are correct. Their vote is weighted by the stake they assigned to that operator set. The thing that feels wrong about this design is we are using restaked ETH as a Sybil resistance source when the nature of being an operator on an AVS consists of doing provable work. Why not just use the proof of work as the Sybil resistance source for this? I have the same feedback for subnets on BitTensor. Why do we need validators for that at all when the miners have the hardware to validate and the miners have to do work so the system canât be Sybiled?
They state that if a malicious operator takes over the operator set the system can slash him. I assume this refers to the EIGEN governance system above the AVS but they arenât explicit about this. All they say is that the only stake at risk within an operator set is the stake assigned to the operator set. I refer to stake voting schemes as subjective consensus. Ultimately, even with objective proof systems it still comes down to who runs what software e.g. Ethereum layer 0, but why involve local operator set at all at that point since the EIGEN governance system participants will apparently be required to host all the proof-validators for all AVSs since operators in every AVS will be allowed to appeal to them? If the goal is to reduce the computational load on the EIGEN governance system participants then Iâd say you should first vote using PoW within an operator set then appeal to a contest amongst all the operator sets on the matter and every appeal should require slashable stake to initiate. That looks a lot more like the Colony governance design than what I just read. Itâs also worth noting that an operator only needs to be slashed in an eventually consistent way so zk-proofs that rely on repeated games are perfectly valid here. Thereâs a long unlock period for validators to unstake from AVSs.
I also donât know what happens in this model if a staker undelegates to an operator. Which operator sets is the unique stake removed from? Is it proportionate, LIFO, etc? And how does stake affect rewards? Can an operator just forfeit their operator set consensus power but do honest work without any unique stake and still be rewarded? Thereâs just a lot of undefined aspects to this system at the moment.
Special guests Nick, Wander, and Rhett join us from NodeSet, a node operator incentivization layer.
Ethereum
$2539
0.03987
90,873 HODLERS SUBSCRIBED (+6)
Know where you belong,
Interest rates bang a gong,
Ether sings along.
GM EthFam, Iâve got an idea, feel free to veto it, but hear me out firstâŚ
Premise 1: We are pretty well represented in many of the biggest DAOs: https://dailydoots.com/#delegates;
Premise 2: Those DAOâs control treasuries worth over $20 billion: https://deepdao.io/organizations;
Premise 3: To successfully take over 50% of Bitcoinâs hashrate (either by buying ASICs or setting up facilities to manufacture them yourself) would cost ~ $20 billion: https://blockchainbeat.co/how-much-to-hack-bitcoin-and-ethereum-study-reveals-price/;
Conclusion: EthFinance should orchestrate the take down of Bitcoin, then the annoying trolls that have been showing up here the last few days would be less obnoxious, mods would have less work to do, and the daily threads would be less cluttered.
zksync governance went live yesterday. There are no proposals yet, but at least everything seems to be set up technically. Since I am one of the ETHFinance delegates, I had been visiting the page regularly to check for updates. Thatâs why I noticed some interesting changes in voting power, some examples:
Stani (from AAVE): 9M in August, 45M in September
Baki Er: 12M in August, 61M in September
polynya: 8M in August, 38M in September
2 of the top 3 delegates (syncswap, l2beat and olimpio) are more or less unchanged with the exception of L2beat. They have more than doubled in voting power (from 47M to 106M)
For Stani and Baki Er the changes are perfectly visible in the chart on the right hand side here. For polynya I checked the âReceived Delegationsâ tab in their delegate profile. All three profiles show basically the same, huge delegations on both the September 9th and September 12th.
So where do all these delegated tokens come from? The biggest delegation to polynya is from this account which is basically non-existent onchain according to the zksync explorer. It received the zk tokens 3 months ago from a wallet that received 6999999300 zk tokens and has been transfering the tokens to a lot of new addresses. I did a quick check and most of these accounts donât show any activity. The top delegations to both Stani and Baki Er from the past couple of days show basicalyl the exact same patternsâŚ
With some basic maths we can see that 6.9B is basically 33% of the total supply - which makes me think, this is likely the wallet that distributes to team and investors, because according to this blog post thatâs the only receiving party that makes sense?
So are these changes in voting power just team members and investors delegating their (locked) tokens just before governance goes live? Did zksync just tell everyone to delegate? I donât see any other explanation, but maybe I am completely off? Any other ideas?
The US SEC backpeddled and finally admitted that cryptocurrencies are not âsecuritiesâ but simply âcrypto assetsâ.
There were multiple articles that covered this yesterday:
In summary, the SEC admitted that they didnât consider cryptocurrencies as âsecuritiesâ but as âcrypto assetsâ. (Note that this only applies within the US, and many other countries never classified crypto as securities in the first place but as âdigital assetsâ.)
âWith its use of the term âcrypto asset securities,â the SEC is not referring to the crypto asset itself as the security,â the agency said. Instead, a tokenâs status as a security âconsists of the full set of contracts, expectations, and understandings centered on the sales and distribution of the [crypto asset],â it said, citing language from an earlier filing.
Thus cryptocurrencies are not securities, but how theyâre offered along with contracts and expectations can be considered securities.
Thatâs what Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and the entire crypto community have been saying all along, and it took the SEC this long to finally admit it in court.
Things are starting to (finally) take shape for HodlerCon 2024 Thailand Edition. If youâre planning on going to DevCon in Thailand this could be the perfect opportunity for you to spend some time with your EthFinance Fam.
Weâll be in Phuket from Nov 16th - 23rd at the Pullman Panwa Beach. Cost of the hotel is $800 and I have 30 rooms currently on hold. If your interested in coming to HodlerCon, fill out the hotel interest form.
Hereâs some of the events from the itinerary:
Weâre still working on the final price for the event ticket. Want to stay up to date on whatâs happening Join the Discord.
beautiful writeup on an alternate reality where we went all in on L1 scaling (it did not end well) https://x.com/domothy/status/1835188625950101590
Upcoming EthStaker community calls:
- Lido CSM: Run a validator with 2 ETH - 19 Sep, 4pm UTC
- NodeSet: Become part of a curated operator set - 25 Sep, 4pm UTC
- Puffer: Run a validator with 1 ETH - 2 Oct, 3pm UTC
- Stereum: Run a validator on easy mode - 9 Oct, 4pm UTC
- Ephemery testnet: Help test upgrades by running testnet validators - 14 Oct, 4pm UTC
Google is coming further and further into the web3 game. They started supporting ENS addresses some time ago and directly show a summary of the address in the search results. Today they announced that they provide Ethereum RPC endpoints for developers for mainnet and testnets: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/financial-services/introducing-blockchain-rpc-service-for-web3-builders
I guess this is a continuation of what started a year ago when they becam part of the holesky genesis validators and they run 10k holesky validators: <https:// explorer.rated.network/o/Google%20Cloud%20Web3?network=holesky&timeWindow=1d&idType=nodeOperator>
This new announcement is in direct competition to Alchemy, Infura and all the other commercial RPC providers. Pretty impressive how these large companies enter the Ethereum ecosystem bit by bit. And this time it is definitely not because of a hype they have to sell to their shareholders but probably rather strategically to get a foot into the door of the Ethereum space.
The next section of my Rabbit Hole Explorerâs Guide is all about managing risk.
Donât Invest More Than You Can Afford to Lose
Crypto is full of amazing heights and soul-crushing lows. The fact that there have been multiple 90% drops and it is still the best performing asset class in the last decade is incredible. However, you canât always afford to ride it out. The crypto highs and lows tend to follow the macro highs and lows. So when crypto is low youâre also jobless, economic opportunities are scarce, and youâre scared. If you invest more than you can afford to lose when times are good, you could very well be one of the millions who find themselves selling while the market is down only to watch it do some crazy 30x the next cycle. People not following this advice is the source of the bitterness every time crypto comes up on your Facebook feed or technology subreddit. The problem was never crypto, the problem was they invested more than they could afford to lose.
Pay Taxes As You Go
This is actually just a specific case of the above point but I think it bears special mention. Itâs one thing to be penniless. Itâs another to be in debt. Itâs another still to be in debt to the government. The first case is miserable but you can still live on credit. The second case is bankruptcy and homelessness. The third case is debtorâs prison. You cannot afford to invest money you owe for taxes into speculative assets. Therefore, whenever you rotate positions you should take whatever sum you need to to cover the taxes out to safer havens.
The specific case that wrecks people has to do with a crash just after the start of a new year like happened in⌠well 2018 and 2022. Just before the crash everyone rotates their capital back into the blue chip coins. When this happens even though they are reducing risk they are now selling something and buying something else at near all-time-high valuations. Then the crash hits, they tell themselves itâs just a bear trap and donât sell, and by the time the tax bill is due they canât even liquidate their entire portfolio to pay the tax bill. Seriously, itâs just less stressful to pay taxes as you go.
No One Is Giving Away Free Crypto
Whenever anything of significance happens in crypto some scammer always replies to the announcement to say âTo celebrate X event weâre giving away free crypto. Send scamAddress some coins and get twice that back!â. This is a ridiculously stupid scam that has gotten a ridiculously stupid amount of money. I seriously canât fathom how this bullshit has managed to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto. Sometimes I feel like people who lose money to this type of thing deserve to do so. Mostly though I just feel sad for how this money is going to power the next wave of scams to be that much more prevalent and effective. They do this because it works and they are never going to stop.
Let me make this abundantly clear. I have been around awhile. I have been around for many significant events in crypto. No one reputable is ever giving away free ETH. For any reason. Ever. I donât care if their account name is Elon Musk and you think heâs so eccentric he might actually be doing it. I donât care if they have a blue checkmark next to their name and it appears to be the same account as the one making the announcement. I donât care if it says its part of a fun new airdrop they are doing. Ever.
More generally, even in an ecosystem where 1000% gains arenât uncommon, if it looks too good to be true, thatâs because it is. If you see some 1000% yield LP position on some token youâve never heard of itâs almost certainly being fueled by inflation and you are gambling against the loss of value of your collateral. If you see some stablecoin position with unusually high yield that stablecoin probably isnât stable. If it actually is using a safe collateral and is on a safe platform and isnât a scam itâs either a very new position and is about to be quickly diluted or itâs being fueled by someoneâs marketing budget and is about to be quickly diluted.
Whether in web2 or web3, if you donât understand how youâre adding value to an ecosystem youâre the product. When you receive airdrops, you are being compensated for being an early user, taking early risks, boosting the numbers the team uses for valuations so they can get more funding, etc. Even legit airdrops that you can sell the day you get them are not free crypto. No one is giving away free crypto.
Inflation Is Not Profit
Every bull market in crypto has been marked by certain design patterns in tokenomics. I can mostly tell you a time range when a token was launched by its tokenomics alone like how an archeologist can tell you which civilization some ruins come from by pointing at architecture and art styles. One of those design trends in early 2021 was to launch highly inflationary tokens and then use high APR numbers to encourage people to buy the token and stake it for rewards. This was basically just a new type of casino. Your net worth would go down even as the number of tokens you hold went up 10x a year. This was basically preying on the ignorance of users who didnât really understand finance but it worked for a time while the profit the hype generated was able to expand the user base faster than the inflation rate. Once the model ran out of users to expand to the rest was history.1234 Whenever you see a high APR in some LP or staking pool you need to slow down and investigate where the money is coming from. If itâs coming from inflation you need to understand that inflation is not profit.
If Itâs Good Enough For a Screenshot, Take Profit
As volatile as crypto is there will come a time where you are massively up. Youâll be up so much you will be in disbelief. You will refresh your portfolio checker every 15 minutes and the person sitting across the table from you will know youâre doing it again because the green from the screen will reflect from your eyes. At this point, they will think you have a problem. At this point you actually do have a problem but thatâs besides the point. Hereâs the thing: you arenât a genius. Even if you actually are a genius you arenât up because you are a genius. Itâs just that time of the cycle.
At that time of the cycle everything youâll see in your media feed will reinforce how much of a genius you are. Itâs like the whole world just woke up and finally saw what you saw first. However, if you havenât heard this yet let me be the first to tell you: sentiment follow price. People love the investment now because it is up. If the price wasnât up, youâd still be waiting like you were when you first bought. 90% of those investments everyone seems to agree canât possibly fail are destined for the dustbin of history. Ever heard of Feathercoin? If you were around at the time you couldnât not hear about it. How about EOS? OmiseGo? Luna? None of these things are going to be top 100 again. When prices are up, everyone is a genius. At the end of the cycle when youâre holding the bag you wonât feel like it any more.
How will you know when the top is? If there was a numeric answer to that then weâd all just sell then and the top would come sooner. The game theory of that makes the price chart look highly chaotic at the tops. The best answer I can give you having lived through some unbelievable peaks and valleys is if itâs good enough for a screenshot, take profit.
Leverage Will Fuck You Up
Leverage in crypto takes many forms. We have all kinds of financial gizmos youâve probably never heard of and which youâll take years to acclimate to. Like, yes, we have options protocols but we also have rate stripping futures protocols, perpetual swaps, and leveraged derivatives. The leverage around here goes to 100x and it all seems to get more complicated and interwoven every year.
Regardless of the form of leverage though, the goal is to amplify the effect of a market change on your portfolio. This is all well and good when youâre dealing with something like bond rates that adjust like 0.25% a month and you can just afford to wait to expiry if youâre wrong. Waiting it out is basically what banks are doing right now and why their unrealized loss chart looks like blood dripping down a painting. Crypto assets are more volatile. Youâre not just playing with gasoline here; this stuff might as well be nuclear. I wouldnât advise you to play with the nuclear bomb without knowing what youâre doing. I donât care if it has a red button that says âPress Me for Limitless Energyâ. I wouldnât advise you to play with crypto leverage either even if their website has a fun points system.
Applying leverage to crypto assets, means amplifying the financial effect of something that is already known to drop by over 90% and with rate swings in the thousands of percentage points over a year. If you arenât right, continuously right without any blips, you wonât be waiting this out. Youâll be liquidated. I have seen too many veterans fall to the hubris of thinking the price canât possible fall to X level. Then, for one brief candle of intense market fear it does and theyâve lost more than theyâve bargained for. Before you play with leverage you should have a forecast for what the market will do that justifies taking such a risk. You should have contingency plans to execute on if your prediction isnât coming true in the timeframe you expect. Donât let it linger on until you feel like itâs a sunk cost. Definitely donât double down. Every time you sign a transaction involving leverage repeat this in your head: leverage will fuck you up.
Get Rich Slow
This last one summarizes the spirit of all the above advice. Thriving in this ecosystem is first and foremost about survival. Surviving is often a matter of having a clear head and assessing risks rationally when everyone else isnât. That requires having your emotions under control. Whenever you take any extreme action you are going to experience extreme emotions about it. Those emotions will cause you to act rashly. This is how you end up scammed, overexposed and holding shitcoins you donât honestly believe in, having missed the top of the cycle without taking profit because everything seemed so bullish, being liquidated at the bottom, in debt to the government, and joining the ranks of the disillusioned about what is otherwise a wonderful civilization changing technology. Life is a marathon. You are only racing yourself. Take the time to learn before taking big risks. Donât try to get rich quick here. Get rich slow.
Interesting news on the application front. I came across Rarimo protocol, which is building ZK passport-based voting. In this post, Iâll concentrate on proof of identity aspect of voting. Proof of identity is a stronger guaranty than proof of personhood.
Iâve been intrigued in leveraging government issued documents as a proof of identity for a while. Yes, government issued. Blasphemy! First of all, Iâve been disappointed with current web3 approaches to proof of identity. Ones based on monetary incentives - âIf the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.â Social recovery - not that I delved too deep - seems gameable. Dedicated piece of hardware to scan biometric features - maybe. Think about it, which entities have always had the problem with uniquely identifying a person? Who are the incumbent identity providers? Governments, banks, and lately IT companies like Google, Twitter, FBâŚ(âSign in with GoogleââŚ).
Right of the bat, IT companyâs proof of identity is shit. You can easily sibyl it. Banks - much beater. Having a bank card pretty much means you are a person or a legal entity and not a bot. Nobody can take your money if they donât scam you. Thing is, banks rely on government issued documents. Who caries the burden of identifying a person from the moment they are born? Can they enroll in a school? Can they cross a border? Did they pay taxes? Are the eligible for health care? Important stuff, right? Governments have been doing this for a long time. They have institutions on institutions for making sure that you are who you say you are. The world works thanks to them having done a decent job.
As we enter the third millennium, machine readable government documents have become a thing. Biometric passports are standardized (ICAO Doc 9303). Almost all the countries in the world now issue passports compliant with this protocol.
Rarimo developed the Freedom tool - opensource, ZK powered, mobile app which scans your passport and creates a user profile. It claims to preserve authenticity, eligibility, anonymity and uniqueness. The whitepaper addressed security claims and assumptions.
Thanks to ZK proofs, you could prove claims about yourself, without giving away unnecessary personal information. You could prove that you are of legal age, without giving away any other info, including your identity. Are you a resident of certain country? Are you human and not a bot?
Proper digital identity unlocks a lot of applications web3 people have been talking about: voting, reputation systems, user profiles, social networksâŚThese are the use cases which cannot be tackled with crypto-economics alone. What do you think?
Edit: grammar.
Edit 2: short demo video.
I am bearish hardware wallets. Obviously smart contract wallets are getting way better, which is one reason. But if a nation state can manipulate 1000s of small electronic devices and people donât find out until itâs too late, they can manipulate hardware wallets as well.
This is just a general thought. But be aware of the risks.
The only thing I can say is that when you become a target of one of the larger 3 letter agencies or equivalent governmental (emphasis on âmentalâ) agencies of some countries there is pretty much nothing you can do. They will get to you, get all your assets and only if you go to the most extreme lengths you might be able to prevent that.
We know since the Snowden revelations that the NSA has an internal catalogue where you can order âreplacementâ parts which then get exchanged during shipment of an order to the target. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog This is happening by diverting the shipment to a unknown location, replace part of the electronics device with an NSA produced one and then continue the shipment to the customer which obviously is not aware of any diversions or replacements. As far as I remember they also had ready made casing which included a spy device for the most popular laptops and electronic devices.
I guess the same thing could happen with a hardware wallet. But to be honest I expect it to be easier for them to monitor your used wallets, get a list of your addresses and get to the seed phrases afterwards when they arrest you. Most people will have it written down somewhere. Sure you can always just keep your seed phrase in your head (brainwallet) but I guess only a very small fraction of crypto users really go that far.
For them getting in your hot wallet will probably be easier than attacking a hardware wallet. So, a hot wallet is not safer at all.
If the goal is to attack the chain itself by compromising thousands of hardware wallets. I am pretty sure they could do that. Not sure what the legality of this would be, but hey as history and current events show these agencies have a different legal rulebook than most of us have to follow.
I still think having hardware wallet in some form is one of the best defense one can have. Normal hackers will not be able to get to the private keys as they ideally never leave the device (hello ledger). If you pair it with a smart contract multisig wallet where an attacker would have to attack several hot wallets or even hardware wallets at the same time I deem it pretty much impossible that you will lose your ETH due to a supply chain attack.
The ratio matters for me because objectively Ethereum is better at everything that Bitcoin does. There is no reason why Bitcoin is a better SoV. And this reality has to be reflected in the ratio at some point. BTC is very flawed and is not sustainable. A BTC failure without profound change is inevitable. It is absolutely perplexing that the market does not realize this. I dont care about Dollar price as much because I think the crypto space realizing whats important is the first step on the journey. I care about the ratio because it reflects the market realizing rational facts.
Its not about money. I care about the future of human society and about the improvement of our society. And I honestly believe that only Ethereum can deliver a credibly neutral trustless financial system a bedrock for finance that can not be corrupted. I want this platform to succeed because it will improve the world. Finally a level playing field that can be set up in a way that empowers people and organizations and stops corrupt governments. Its can be a counterweight for fraud and corruption and government overreach.
That is why I am into crypto. That is my main focus. So I care aboout the ratio because Bitcoin is the wrong way. And Solana is the wrong way as none of them can deliver what is needed.
A financial system that is trustless and can cater to the entire planet. Ethereum is on its way to achieve this. Aslong as Bitcoin ratio is so bad it means people are not realizing what the purpose of blockchain technology is and people did not realize what tools they have at their disposal to manage their finances in a way that can not be tampered with.
Yes obviously we are not there yet, Ethereum has many many flaws, but we are on the path to it. And the ratio is an indicator for blockchain technology to actually fullfill its purpose.
Holding coins that can not be deflated (Bitcoin will fail at this btw) is just part of the equation. People using crypto for everything that banks usually do for crypto to replace centralized systems. That is what I want. I want traditional companies to be either replaced or reorganized on Ethereum rails. I want the upper people to slowly distribute their power to more people.
Blockchain did not achieve anything yet. Its just the start the very first day of a century long journey. And the ratio is an indicator when we are out of phase 1. Realizing why blockchains are valuable. We are still in Phase 1 where the people do not know why blockchain is important.
For me its not about money. Its about change. And the ratio is an indicator for that change.
If Ethereum does not flip Bitcoin. Then blockchains are useless and its really just a speculative meme coin casino. And nothing more.
Bitcoin for me is the nr1 meme coin. It has a strong narrative but it fails at real world utility and is not designed to be sustainable long term. It needs centralized entities to offer services thus the fact that its decentralized matters only in so far that it cant be inflated arbitrarily. However the security of the protocol is dependent on the inflation so the system is about to fail.
Ethereum flipping Bitcoin and Ethereum becoming the most expensive asset on this planet is when we will be able to see crypto change the world profoundly. And thats all I want. Everything else. Is just secondary. I do have enough money. I dont need a Bugatti. I do have a job. I want Ethereum specifically to be a guarantee for a free and open Internet/monetary system that can not be censored. I want entitities like EU China America Google Facebook Apple AGI to not have total control to have to deal with a platform that they can not censor and that wont be corrupted by them. I want Ethereum to be that strong. We are not there yet but we could be one day. And flipping Bitcoin is the first step on that journey.
Seems outlandish but this was the reason why I even got interested in Crypto in the first place. The prospect of that happening. And Bitoin dropped the ball by ossifying too early and just focusing on an unsustainable inflation schedule.
A good while ago I told you all I am slow to get around to things but I wanted to add some default user flairs. Well, as prophesied, I was indeed slow to get round to it. But lo and behold, we now have default user flairs!
The new ones have some colour where the old custom ones didnât. Custom ones are still an option, they just wonât be as colourful as the default flairs. Also, these default ones should give us a good idea of your vibe. if youâre new, a TA guy, long term investor etc. Hopefully we can get a better feel for what angle youâre coming from when you make a post here. At the end of the day we want less conflict and hopefully a bit of context as to your leanings might help a bit. If not, itâs still just a bit of fun. Feel free to grab a meme flair if thatâs your style!
Finally, Iâm happy to add some more, so let me know what you want to see added and maybe even a colour request (send me ur hex codes đ). Though I think we might reserve one colour for the mods. Maybe we can colour coordinate our flairs. Currently itâs a bright ugly shade of blue so youâre not missing out on much.
Special guest Jason joins us from Puffer Finance, a liquid restaking protocol.
Ethereum
$2347.90
0.04056
90,849 hodlers subscribed (-1)
Beating up the polls,
Not giving up owner roles,
ZK among goals.
I recently got to feel like a whale, I sold a larger amount on CB, like 100k, on the USDC/EUR pair which is rather low volume.
Hereâs how it went:
I put it up in a single sell wall, shadowing over the puny trades of the mere mortals. Every bid and ask before mine paled in comparison. There it stood, a monolith, looming over the market.
As soon as the order hit the books my counterparties mustâve recoiled in shock. Who was the nameless entity, willing to dump a vast fortune in a single breath? Whispers filled the market - has a whale arrived? Has Megalodon decided to feast?
At this point, time stood still. I have become death, maker of the markets. A force to be reckoned with, altering the fabric of the order book itself.
Who would be brave enough to challenge my creation?
Eventually, all monuments must fall, but the battle was one for the history books. At first only a few daring souls nibbled away at the edges of my fortress. But after the market overcame the initial shock, larger buyers emerged, each of their trades echoing like hammer strikes against the stone of my stronghold.
It should not go down easy though, over the course of 6 long hours and 211 individual fills, they relentlessly dismantled my towering order, brick by brick. An epochal amount of time in the fast paced crypto realm.
Finally, when the dust settled, and the sun rose, only rumors remained of what once stood tall. Another testimony to the patience of the market, able to move even the biggest mountains, with enough time.
Most popular questions in the EF AMA right now:
The community push for increasing blob fees has me a bit worried tbh, I still think this would be an extremely bad move. Not going into the details again today but 2 weeks ago I detailed why I believe free blob fees + zero rollup congestion are fantastic combo for institutional adoption. One thatâs needed.
Then a couple of days later Sony announced the launch of an Ethereum rollup. Our first non crypto native rollup ever. Fantastic news. This confirmed what future Ethereum adoption will look like: companies with huge user bases will bring millions of users at once. Just like Base brings us 4 million weekly active addresses. Not gaining users one at a time. Millions at a time. Millions per institution, millions per rollup.
And then, a few days ago, Solana makes a 180° pivot from calling L2s parasitic and announces it now supports L2s. Rebrands them ânetwork extensionsâ.
Please take a second to wonder: why would Solana pivot to L2s right now?
At a moment when overall blockchain activity is moderate at best?
Could it be that Sony made them realize Ethereum is about to onboard one institution after the other? That the only way theyâll compete is by faking their way into L2 adoption partnerships?
This is why the community push for blob fees worries me:
The only reason Solana got any traction to begin with is because Ethereum L1 fees were way too high in the past. Thatâs what drove users to less decentralized lands.
Do we really want to make the same mistake again and offer an opportunity to Solanaâs L2s to gain any sort of traction? Not because we needed to but because we got greedy with our own few L2s?
Ethereum should do what a market leader does: grow the market as fast as possible and cash in when the whole world is in.
For people wanting to know what EOF is and does, this is the most comprehensive discussion I have seen about it yet:
https://xcancel.com/uttam_singhk/status/1830526179105001771
or
https://twitter.com/uttam_singhk/status/1830526179105001771
It was shared by a Nethermind dev who works on EOF a few days ago, so I think it is technically accurate. It is a 30 minute video going through the why, the scope, the improvements, the changes and also addresses some of the criticism. It is definitely worth a watch as it gets pretty deep into the weeds, but he manages to explain it reasonably well. Some things were over my head, but I definitely learned a lot.
In short EOF helps to better store smart contract code on chain by adding a header and ordering code and date sections. Interestingly this even reduces codes size by a few %. EOF does many validation checks during deployment instead of runtime, which can prevent some DOS attacks and might also help to increase the max size of smart contracts again (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-170.md). It also contains many smaller quality of life improvements for solidity developers. Some new calls are also introduced to interact with external contracts which improve efficiency. Overall the EOF improvements are rather complex and the disadvantage is that the legacy contracts still need to be supported which increases complexity by duplicating some of the logic. This means it will take a lot of testing to make sure things work correctly.
All in all most people do not really need to change anything for this upgrade it will all be handled in the background. I think if you are a solidity dev you will have to learn a few more call functions but otherwise there is also not too much to do. I personally think EOF improvements are a very good step forward for the EVM.
Wanna share here - starting today, Iâm going to be working with Protocol Support at the EF
https://x.com/nixorokish/status/1833209686272971079
r/ethfinance is where I started as crazy eth lady đ§ (well⌠really r/ethtrader but I donut know if that matters). EthStaker is where being active in this sub took me. Volunteering and then working with EthStaker has been an insanely good decision in my life. Iâm so crazy excited and happy to be working with insanely smart and creative people I admire greatly.
This community is the first good home I found in crypto <3
Iâve been thinking about these words from /u/BuyETHorDAI:
The longer Iâm in this space, the more I dislike tokens in general, but maybe Iâm just jaded.
It causes me to wonder: What are the vital constructs of web3? Itâs hard to set aside price and market performance and just consider this question. Right now they seem to be coins, tokens, and NFTs, and everyone hates tokens and NFTs right now because theyâre salty about prices being down, but the question remains - ARE these the three fundamental constructs of web3? Are any of them truly irrelevant and going to die away? Are we missing more constructs?
I really donât know the answer, Iâm just running it through my own mind. I could easily be convinced that they are the only fundamental constructs, or that we have too many or too few.
I think on-chain governance software is and will be indispensable. Code needs to be upgraded. How do we do that with so much at stake as safely as possible?
Otherwise I think tokens just represent digital ownership and are one of the best product fits blockchains have found. Itâs hard to hate on the concept of ownership, even if you may not like the distribution of ownership amongst all people. Changes of ownership often use what we consider financial tools which is basically all of Defi. Thatâs not going away either.
I think weâll continue to see the proliferation of personal digital spaces. You were just talking about the base profile system yesterday. I mentioned layer3 a few weeks ago. Guild is another one. I think curating a digital identity is something most people understand from Facebook and will be better served when done on a system that isnât explicitly manipulating you with the data you give it.
The last thing I think will become vital on chain is peer to peer services. Payment will often be part of this so it will be intrinsically linked to the chain but youâll be able to pair yourself with someone willing to do something for you using the chain as a matchmaking service. This is pretty much all DePin and AVSs to start but I see little reason these systems couldnât be expanded to non-digital services eventually.
I can see ethereum impacting so many facets of life, but here are some that I would love to see personally:
Transaction settlement becomes faster and cheaper, with more assurances. I no longer wait 3-5 business days for something to clear. Iâll have the stablecoins in my account and know that itâs there. Cross-border payments no longer take a big % fee and several days to finalize (as someone who has lived abroad but been paid in USD this was very frustrating).
Tokenize the world. Deeds. Royalties. IOUs. Licenses. Securities. Tickets. I see tokens as a hyper-efficient form of a wrapper, much like ETFs are for the financial world.
Reduced communication and coordination friction. Especially when coordinating across time zones or governments. Ideally DAOs take form, but even without DAOs the ability to coordinate digitally worldwide with effective anti-Sybil features (via introducing costs or incentives) is amazing. Got a taste of it with ICOs before regulators shut that down, and fledgling communities around NFTs hint at what is possible.
Decentralized exchanges. If we indeed tokenize the world, exchanges allow free market forces to find efficient solutions. In fact I was not sold on Ethereum until I looked into smart contracts, and when I realized what DEXs were capable of I became fully on board. But more than just shitcoin roulette, I want to see a future where one can trade currencies, assets, community access, etc., with more freedom and less cost than currently possible.
Thereâs a lot more that Iâm excited to see implemented, like personal privacy and public transparency, freedom of expression, the digital empires that are built now that digital ownership is enforceable. But thatâs enough rambling from me already.
I can see ethereum impacting so many facets of life, but here are some that I would love to see personally:
Transaction settlement becomes faster and cheaper, with more assurances. I no longer wait 3-5 business days for something to clear. Iâll have the stablecoins in my account and know that itâs there. Cross-border payments no longer take a big % fee and several days to finalize (as someone who has lived abroad but been paid in USD this was very frustrating).
Tokenize the world. Deeds. Royalties. IOUs. Licenses. Securities. Tickets. I see tokens as a hyper-efficient form of a wrapper, much like ETFs are for the financial world.
Reduced communication and coordination friction. Especially when coordinating across time zones or governments. Ideally DAOs take form, but even without DAOs the ability to coordinate digitally worldwide with effective anti-Sybil features (via introducing costs or incentives) is amazing. Got a taste of it with ICOs before regulators shut that down, and fledgling communities around NFTs hint at what is possible.
Decentralized exchanges. If we indeed tokenize the world, exchanges allow free market forces to find efficient solutions. In fact I was not sold on Ethereum until I looked into smart contracts, and when I realized what DEXs were capable of I became fully on board. But more than just shitcoin roulette, I want to see a future where one can trade currencies, assets, community access, etc., with more freedom and less cost than currently possible.
Thereâs a lot more that Iâm excited to see implemented, like personal privacy and public transparency, freedom of expression, the digital empires that are built now that digital ownership is enforceable. But thatâs enough rambling from me already.
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (Sept 2-8)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Your weekly EVMavericks catch-up: highlights of the week!
Degen chat covers NFTs and whatâs worth buying, some airdrop potentials. Pooltogether and their insane APR are discussed.
bbroad is leading the way in applying for grants. This time itâs gitcoin+octant community round.
Still a decent amount of chatter about new platforms, new coins, accumulation phase, another potential politifi seaason, pumpfun and volume.
Calls of the week:
~8x+ $clippy by GreenGeorge
~6x $IRS by whatthefuck.eth
~4x+ $FARM by whatthefuck.eth
~2x $worth by whatthefuck.eth
Farmers talk about blobs, Monad, elixyr, Eigen and more.
heeey appears on an episode of âget to know EVMavericksâ.
A new member - moonie.eth - joined EVMavericks this last week.
New EVM multisig election is on the horizon. We are in need of signers!
Lots of activity in our general public chat. Mostly talks about the market with some bullish sentiment being sprinkled in.
Lastly, your weekly security reminder: here are a few guides!
I just read a VERY cool NFT (Punk) story on X. While you can click on the link and read the tweets, I have assembled them all here!
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Today happened one of the biggest crypto punk heists of all time. Someone with a lot of patience and knowledge just bought ape 2386 for 10 ETH.
Once upon a time when fractionalisation was en vogue, ape 2386 was fractionalised and valued at like 450 ETH. This happened on a now dysfunctional site called niftex. The ape stayed fractionalised even after they shut down as it was in an escrow contract. 10000 shares were all distributed between loads of people. And a buyout was not possible. Until now..
The contract worked in a way that if you propose a buyout, a 14 day grace period was initiated where the rest of the shareholders had time to ponder and accept or reject it. 14 days ago someone made a proposal for .001 eth per share. It was not rejected and went through.. Buying price: 10 ETH (last apes sold for 620 eth, 3.3k eth and 2.69k eth)
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Tech Dive here! (pasting it below)
Punk 2386, with a current high bid of 600 eth, sold for 10 ETH today. A combination of clever sleuthing, followed by an unfortunate miscalculation lead to a 7 figure payday for 0x282.
This ape punk was fractionalized into 10,000 ERC20 tokens on 9/26/2020, and spread out among what is now 257 holders.
This was done on a now decommissioned platform called niftex (the contracts continue to live forever).The setup is such that any shareholder can propose a âshotgunâ, whereby any shareholder can propose a buyout price, and if nobody counters, they can purchase the asset after 14 days.0x282 initiated a shotgun on 8/28 (14 days ago).
Some people took notice, including at least two shardholders. One put it off because they thought they had more time, but the other (@gmoneyNFT) made an attempt to block.. In order to block the buyout, you must effectively purchase the proposerâs shares at higher than their proposed price.
0x282 proposed a price of 0.001 eth per share (10 eth for all shares), so a valid counter needed to be 0.0010000001, as defined by the shotgun contract. gmoney submitted a counterclaim of 0.000001 ETH (1000000000000 wei), just short of the requirement.
At this point, if any other shareholder had contributed 10,000 wei (two TEN TRILLIONTHS of a cent) to the counterclaim, the shotgun would have been blocked. But two ten trillionths of a cent was not committed, the shotgun was not blocked, and 0x282 walks away with the steal of the century: 1 of only 24 ape punks, for 70% under the global punk floor.
đĽ
Tough pills to swallow
Throwing shade and vitriol at TA people wonât make the ratio any better.
I personally (not speaking for the mod team) would like to see less hate for certain users or types of posts. When JT and the other OG mods founded this subreddit they did a stellar job in fostering a positive and welcoming community, even in the darkest of times price wise. I would like to encourage people not to take out their frustrations on others. I get it, you donât think TA means anything and youâre probably right, but that doesnât justify vilifying people posting TA here or a YouTuber who has been calling for the ratio to âcome homeâ back to 0.03 or 0.04.
I wouldnât even say Iâm siding with the TA folks here, in fact Iâve expressed not being super approving of some TA and also bashing on the semi-predatory paid private group model which folks like Ben Cowen use which has simply never sat right with me (but to be fair, it is better than shilling bybit leverage affiliate links etc). Anyway, I feel caught in the middle. I donât really side with anyone but Iâm sick of the negativity of people picking on certain names and types of content. One side of this debate is constantly being angry and bashing people while the other just stays quiet and often times leaves altogether and thatâs not right. This is a subreddit which is welcome to all. So can we please just chill out a bit and keep it a bit more wholesome?
Itâs always personal attacks and bold claims about TA working or not working and never any evidence to back it up. Baseless rants just spread negativity and makes this place a lot less welcoming which is against the subredditâs ethos. If you must go on a crusade against TA, at least find some peer reviewed papers which prove that it is bullshit or something because Iâm yet to see anyone do anything like that when talking about this topic and I say that as someone who is very much a TA skeptic. At the very least one could go back and review all the TA posts here and sum up how many of them were right/wrong and use that as evidence (albeit low-quality evidence).
Ethereum
$2380.90
0.04217
Go where you belong,
Knock your chest and sing along,
Apes together strong.
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Then they fight you
Then you get an ETF
Then they ignore you again
Then they laugh at you again
Introducing https://boasty.app/ - Schedule Your Ethereum Posts
Dear ethfinance, special day for me today - after 7 years in the space, i get to show something small i built. Inspired by this u/benido2030 post last Saturday, i spent the last 5 days building Boasty. I always wanted to try building an app on Ethereum, and this idea sounded simple enough so i gave it a go and now itâs live.
TLDR Pay 1 USD in stablecoin and schedule a post on Ethereum, you get a https://boasty.app permalink to reference and share which contains your published message and transactions associated. See an example here
The app is an MVP but everything works as far as i can tell. It is currently permissioned, meaning the messages are stored in a centralized database and no smart contracts yet, but as you can see on the roadmap, I intend to introduce message storing on IPFS, smart contract(s), sha256 hashed messages with auto or user reveal, supporting more wallets (currently only tested with Metamask), L2 networks and hopefully more.
Last but not least, Iâd like to make the app free to post for my fellow solo stakers and the /r/ethfinance community (EVM holders for now?). Happy to hear any ideas on how to make this happen!
Feedback appreciated, feel free to say it like it is and try to break the app. I am not on crypto twitter or any of those, so if you like it, please share it! Thanks u/benido2030 for the idea!
Started a new series. As always, subscribe to EVMavericksâ paragraph to get all new content immediately when it is out! I hope you enjoy!
Get to know EVMavericks #1 - Etheraider aka EVM 1209
Hi, what do you go by and whatâs your EVMavericks #?
Hey, this is Etheraider and Iâm EVM 1209.
Who or what introduced you to crypto?
My brother bought into ETH in 2015, held for 2 years, and sold right before the 2017 bull run. I didnât know anything about crypto until I saw he missed out on life-changing gains, so I decided to learn from his mistake!
How and when did you find your way into EVMs?
Well, actually, I was there at the very beginning and helped bring EVMavericks to the blockchain!
So itâs been a couple of years since the beginning; what made you stay?
I think weâre one of the best communities of OGs on Ethereumâa lot of good people around with all sorts of talent, perspective, and experience in the space. Itâs a good place to be.
Whatâs your best EVMavericks memory?
There are a lot of good ones. But Iâd say that first EVM podcast we launched, where many of us (who knew each other only on Reddit for years) âtalkedâ together for the first time. It was awesome.
What are you most excited about EVMs looking forward?
In the short term, Iâm looking forward to us getting into the Octant funding round. In the long term, Iâm excited to see future endeavors our community members will pursue!
What is your favorite hobby or way to spend time outside of crypto?
Well, this past year, I got really into going to the gym and living a healthier lifestyle. Decided to place an emphasis on taking care of my mind, body, and soul! As far as hobbies go, Iâm a big fan of disc golf, tabletop board games, and ping pong!
What one piece of advice would you give to someone whoâs just getting into crypto?
Learn about why crypto exists, how powerful its impact can be, and how it can dramatically change all our lives for the better.
Any piece of alpha that you can share with us? It can be anything, not just crypto-related.
When youâre on your deathbed, are you gonna care about how much money youâve made or how nice your house/cars/etc. are? No. The only thing youâll care about is the people you love and the impact youâve had on them. Donât wait until then to go all in on the people you love.
Lastly, is there anything else you wanna share? Maybe a project you are working on? Latest accomplishments? Whatever you want! The stage is yours Etheraider!
In a time such as this, where the world is so crazy, divided, and full of darkness, my favorite verse to quote is this: âThe light has entered the world, and the darkness has NOT overcome it.â
It seems like ETH has 3 big problems this year.
Airdrop flop - the hype for eigenlayer and others was completely unreal, while the airdrops themselves were a terrible combination of stingy and overpriced. If a token launches at its best possible market cap, thereâs nowhere to go but down, especially if there are gigantic unlocks coming. Tokens were a lot more interesting when you had a real chance at making a killing at buying something that seemed like it had real fundamentals or promise. If some hyper-complicated protocol launches at an insane valuation, there are going to be very few buyers - itâs too complicated for non-crypto natives, the upside is already priced in, and people are going to want to unload the tokens. So every new token has pretty much gotten crushed. tough way to build market hype.
ETF Flop - The BTC ETF set up some incredible expectations, but ETH matching it was always going to be an issue. BTC got huge early inflows from crypto-natives wanting to offload some of their unchain coins so they donât have to worry about custody. It makes a lot of sense from a diversification perspective, and thereâs basically nothing to do with unchain bitcoin, anyway. Institutions/financial advisors are much more slow moving, but the retail buyers disguised this. This was huge for bitcoins narrative and expanded its presence among the broader world. ETH, by contrast, will only be bought in the ETF by those who really canât interact with onchain infrastructure - basically, financial advisors, institutions, 401ks, which all take a long time to spin up. Holding ETH onchain is valuable, so thereâs a real cost to using the ETF instead. This makes sense to us, but makes ETH look bad to the tradfi world/retail, furthering the narrative that thereâs bitcoin as the main crypto, and then thereâs everything else. While this is disputed by the fundamentals, the fundamentals are complicated. Narrative is tough.
Solana meme coins - memecoins on Solana have been a retail incinerator. They look appealing - zero transaction fees that let you avoid extractive vc coins - but the reality is that Solanaâs centralized validator, sequencer, and MEV setup allows for colossal extraction, while the meme coins themselves allow for easily faked volume metrics and huge insider dumping. Itâs hard to imagine a worse market to participate in. However, the notable crypto influencers are some of the only people making money off this, so they pound the table about how great Solana is. VCs are (and have always been) huge owners of Solana, so they. ALSO pound the table on how great sol is/how bad etc is. So Solana is stealing retail mindshare while impoverishing everyone who uses the chain. Itâs a bad outcome.
So what does ETH need to re-attract retail? Yield farming and gambling. Onchain options that are actually liquid. New tokens launching quickly (as a quasi ico while avoiding being direct icos) at low valuations so that some momentum can build. Tokens that actually result in cash flow when staked, so that people have an actual reason to buy/speculate on them.
What ETH REALLY needs is to capture mindshare from bitcoin as a pristine non-sovereign store of value. ETH should be fighting with bitcoin and gold, not with Solana. Solana as a network may be great (I donât think it is but ignore that for now) but SOL the token is complete garbage unless things change dramatically.
Vitalik Buterin started an unofficial AMA last weekend on Warpcast after he posted about stablecoin decentralization on X
TL;DR of the original X post:
These are the highlights from the Warpcast AMA response to that X post:
Iâve paraphrased the important parts of some of the longer questions and responses
Source: https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xa3ad7913
There has been a lot of posts of people feeling down recently. My honest response to this is stop looking at numbers and make something for the fun of it. If you can code write contracts that do something fun. If you can design then make mockups for weird fictional games. If you can write, publish an article about a future society where eth never existed. Start playing with apps. use things. break things. find the glitches, the edges. look in the mirror. uniswap backwards is pawsinu. What if the aave ghost is haunting the chain? How many times have people sent exactly 0.666 eth? What if we start calling them nifties again instead of nft? can we make bingo on base?
there is so much for us to do. now it is september. summer lull is over. what is dead may never die đ
At the same time transaction count is near ATH and active addresses maintained pretty well throughout the summer. The main reason why blobs seem to go down is thanks to optimizations by L2s.
Showing the market that Ethereum has room to grow is absolutely needed, if we were near saturation today we wouldnât have institutional rollups tomorrow.
This is like a vampire attack we used to see during 2020 - 2021 defi time frame. I kind of like this thought process
https://x.com/CloutedMind/status/1830405365898580245
i take the stance that blobs being 0 fee is bullish
it chokes competition
DA is ultimately a race to 0 anyway, might as well weaponize DA as loss leader to expand ethereum GDP
not only does it tell all these DA layoors to go fk themselves like TIA etc, it chokes any ethereum L2 competitors
no longer can an alt-L1 use âcheaperâ as a selling point, only âfasterâ and âmore decentralizedâ (than an L2)
i think soon we see L2s that be âfasterâ like megaETH and then we get 2/3
then as the roadmap for L2s go along and they become more permissionless without centralization risks we tick 3/3 (cheaper, faster and more decentralized with the inherent security of eth)
then where does an alt-l1 compete ? it doesnt.. its just L2 vs L2 and its all on ethereum
and ETH is their money
thats moat
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 26-September 1)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Catch up on a weekâs worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.
We voted for Doots Podcast and Aestus MEV Relay in the Octantâs snapshot and both projects made it to the upcoming Epoch 5 allocation window!
696 hosts a new series: get to know EVMavericks. First episode with Etheraider is out now.
GreenGeorge starts a thread asking lions about one project that really excites them.
interweaver shares that Starknet has undergone a massive upgrade, now introducing 2-second transactions and itâs making a big difference for projects like Influence.
Degen chat has a little bit of everything this week. Some base mints, some random stats, some talk about Maker, some memes ofc.
Memecoins have slowed down, but people still share some useful tools and degen TG groups. Generally, thereâs a lot of chatter about coins, the market, and vibes. Discussions include safer memes and strategies for longer meme team positions. The top play of the week features Etheraider longing ETH, with several other lions following suit
Lastly, your weekly security reminder: hereâs a few guides!
EVMavericks discord has a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.
Reminder for all the folks: we have a daily-discussion channel in the discord thatâs open to public and thereâs a decent amount of activity there!
Ethereumn Foundation is doing an AMA on 9/5, get your Qâs ready and post them here:
https://reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1f81ntr/ama_we_are_ef_research_pt_12_05_september_2024
Yesterday night I was devastated, I have a big part of my funds in Penpie a yield aggregator for pendle and it was exploited yesterday evening.
I saw an an alert on twitter and was hoping I would be not affected. But the asset rsweth that was my main holding in one of their LPs was part of it. I had the worst night.
I found out today that only one of the two rsweth pools was exploited, the bigger one with higher tvl and apy, the smaller one that also gets swell L2 points(the reason I was in it) but less yield was not drained and I was spared by pure luck, I guess the attacker focussed on the higher TVL Pools. I should be okay when withdrawals open again. I can still be part of ethfinance and all the crazy ups and downs.
I donât want to experience that again, is there a safe way to get some yield at least? Or should I just stick by pure ETH on a ledger secured cold wallet? Or maybe rETH?
Losing your funds like this would be the worst, it is worse then (controlled)leverage trading and shitcoin trading because everything could be gone without an error of your own , besides trusting a protocol you should not have trusted.
One small advantage I gained of that experience is I really donât worry about the short term price action, I know we will be rewarded if we are patient and ETH will come back and we will reach new ATHs at some point.
Posting as a top level comment a reply I was drafting to a deleted comment regarding onchain vs. tradfi âyield farmingâ.
No doubt a large portion of âyield farmingâ is circular nonsense. BUT, even in the world of circular nonsense, the onchain version is transparent with respect to its risk profile and that is a consequential distinction vs. things like FTX/Celcius.
As an example, if Bernie Madoff launched a classic shitcoin yield farm with copies of battletested smart contracts, participants can trust the contracts without having to trust the person.
On the other hand, if the Pope himself started a centralized âyield farmâ where I have to send him money via Western Union, the risk profile is now comparatively opaque and a million different risks must be weighed, no offense to His Holiness.
Ponzinomics aside, itâs worth highlighting that more sustainable sources of yield do exist on Ethereum, think of AMM liquidity providing for example. Itâs making money from market making, totally normal financial service, but onchain and therefore transparent/permissionless/non-custodial/always online :)
Of course, the question of which tokens are being traded and how many have sustainable value is important for the long term viability of the ecosystem. Itâs a complicated question. The Ethereum economy has a lot of bullshit (just like the âregularâ economy), but I think it has already âmade itâ, thereâs already real activity in payments, savings, tokenization of treasuries/corporate debt, collectibles, etc.
Ethereum
$2516.30
0.0425
Storage canât go bloat,
Blockchain should not be a moat,
Accept that banknote.
Vitalik ETH bull post lol
https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1826253901240431083
Edit: it will be hilarious if this marks the bottom
Wake up babe, Vitalik is bull posting.
Ethereum has gotten stronger:
- Under $0.01 txfees on L2
- Two EVM L2s (@Optimism @arbitrum) now at stage 1
- Cross-L2 wallet UX has improved a lot (eg. no more manually switching networks), though still a long way to go
- Much more powerful and mature ZK tooling making life easier for app builders
- Starting to see second-generation privacy tools (eg. @0xbowio)
- Identity/reputation/credentials ecosystem much more powerful, and starting to actually be used more and more
- Progress on STARKs leads to much clearer long-term security and decentralization story
- Much more clarity on account abstraction roadmap
- Much more clarity on block construction endgame (it seems to be down to FOCIL + APS vs multi-proposer)
- Staking decentralization stable (see comparison charts below, the âPoS is more centralized than PoWâ line has proven completely false)
The fundamentals for Ethereum are actually crazy strong right now.
This is a much easier investment thesis to make than it was in 2016 and consequently is the reason Iâve remained close to fully invested since then.
The short-term frenzy of memecoins and L1-of-the-year technologies will continue to be eclipsed in the long-term by the secular growth of cryptocurrencies with incredible value accruing to the leaders in the space. The risk/reward profile of Ethereum is better than it has ever been..
Am I talking my book? Hell yeah I am.
New tweet from Roman Storm (tornado cash) today:
Folks, I have to win and it takes resources!
Please help.
Im severely underfunded for the trial.If you have any spare ETH, consider donating to him and Aleksei Pertsev. Pertsev is already in jail, but hereâs some info about his situation from Ameen Soleimani https://x.com/ameensol/status/1822280721870016711
Thereâs also NFTs to be claimed if thatâs your cup of tea. Iâm putting up the links for their donation sites, but please do your due dilligence of course.
Roman Storm
https://juicebox.money/v2/p/618
Alexey Pertsev
Latest Week in Ethereum News
đ Eight year anniversary
https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-august-24-2024
Huge thank you to Evan Van Ness for 8 years of Week in Ethereum News. Evan puts in a huge amount of hours in each week to gift the Ethereum community high quality curated news.
Iâm forever grateful to have played a small part in this amazing public good. 3 and a bit years editing for me.
I thought this article was a pretty good read.
Give it a click if you want some content.
To summarize the events.
At it again today to fight misinformation in r/cc
Anytime Ethereum is mentioned there will be someone to say itâs not decentralized. Iâd say half of them believe it, and many of the people who read them will believe them.
I wish Ethereum had armies of people fighting disinformation like other projects have armies to create it. But itâs a frustrating way of spending time.
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 19-25)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Catch up on a weekâs worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.
Voting for Doots Podcast in Octantâs epoch 5 is live.
Big shoutout to bbroad.eth aka Ben for spearheading this opportunity for EVMavericks and r/Ethfinance!
If any mav is going to Permissionless and needs a place to stay - dm coco on discord.
Zombie is looking for 10-14 EVMs to participate in the annual Fantasy Football League. Check out one of the recent announcements in discord to find the exact place for that or just tag ZombieBP.
696 is asking around for a website creator to help out with a project for public goods. if you are one or know one - dm.
Degen chat mints base subnames.
Some talk about ENS ensues.
Tron gets degensâ attention.
Attention shifts to EF and them selling ETH.
Untouchable2k reminds us about his 0xbitcoin call thatâs at x2 and he shares his future predictions.
GreenGeorges long TON, other mavs proceed to follow and all involved end up making some moneyz.
Our memecoins connoisseurs continue being early and hitting it consistenly. Lots of talk, itâs the most active place as of recent months. Discussions from polymarket bets to long term âsafeâ bets on memecoins. But most importantly, lots of plays. Of course we have some losses buuuut
Here are some top plays of the week:
~15x $suncat by eleusys
~6x $pjeet by etheraider
~5x $tiedan by eleusys
~4x $vibes by whatthefuck.eth
~2x $odong by eleusys
Decentralized onchain governance consultants aka airdrop farmers talk about the state of airdrops and whether they are going to be worth it and majority conclude that the frenzy is over for now.
GreenGeorge keeps being bullish on Hyperliquid and their ecosystem.
Hocilef shares scroll farming opportunity.
Onchainscore link is shared by dray.
And much more!
Our creative lions ainât sleeping neither. TheBenMeadows dropped his first Gamma print.
Our ETHFITNESS thread has been revived. Thatâs for all the ETH heads who are trying to stay fit đŞ
We had a mini sweep and a total of 4 buys last week.
Lastly, your weekly security reminder: hereâs a few guides!
Todayâs finally the day I get to share something with you Iâve been working on for some time - a new validator client targeting Ethereum. Itâs biggest advantage is it allows you to use and combine the data from multiple beacon nodes. This allows us to use multiple client implementations at Serenita, combining their output and results in us being completely protected against single-client bugs! My hope is other operators adopt this too, resulting in a more client-diverse and resilient Ethereum.
I made an introductory tweet here , I would appreciate any likes/retweets since our Twitter presence is not that huge yet.
Some more details over on r/ethstaker, Iâm happy to answer any questions here as well!
Makerdao rebrands as sky. The protocol is now sky protocol. You can swap MKR to SKY tokens, but you can keep your MKR if you want.
A new stablecoin called USDS is created it can be swapped from/to DAI 1:1. Not sure how long this is possible. DAI can still be used. The protocol gets officially launched on September 18.
USDS seems to have built in SKY rewards. SKY tokens will be distributed to USDS holders/protocol users.
More info on: https://forum.makerdao.com/t/sky-has-arrived/24959
Really curious how this relaunch will turn out in the coming years.
EDIT: As announced, the new USDS has a freeze function which makes it similar to USDC adn USDT: https://xcancel.com/functi0nZer0/status/1828432650152935605
Seems strong negative initial reaction to makerdao and dai upcoming upgrade, largely because it has a âfreeze functionâ. AFAICT from https://github.com/makerdao/usds/blob/dev/src/Usds.sol thereâs no explicit freeze function for now, the issue is itâs upgradeable which is equivalent to having a freeze function. I think to be fair to sky people should acknowledge basically everyone has exposure to upgradeable protocols already, including the major stablecoins. It was inevitable if the goal is to work with RWAs with sufficient compliance, should be no surprise.
Practically we canât avoid mutability exposure (use immut. silo and USDC or chainlink multisigs can still get you), key is how itâs done. Is it a multisig that might be one guy with no time delay? Or is it a token vote which is very slow / is multisig behind a timelock? Seems likely in this case auth is DAO which is too transparent and slow to freeze anything, user can move before DAO adds them to pause map.
I think sky and usds will have their place, excited to see how it goes. But more so for âpure daiâ, we lost NM but he still talked to Rune about these things a little, maybe they can come up with something which meaningfully improves on RAI.
Something I miss from the bear market of ~2018-2020 are the inside jokes and the dark humor to get us through the rough times. EZPZ $324 that one rhino account mocking us as we slid further, the hodl messages. I look back at that time weirdly well. I guess I was so self assured that we were misunderstood or not understood at all.
The last bull run we were learning about maker, compound, uniswap, aave, yearn finance and it was this adventure to try all them out and exciting to try a whole new world without filling out forms, showing your identity or waiting on someoneâs approval. It was fun to be an explorer and then it got even better because we got airdrops out of it. And from there it turned into something else where we turned into airdrop hunters. I didnât feel incentives to try out something unless it had airdrop potential. Other protocols started getting hacked and it felt even worse to try things that werenât battle tested. Our tolerance to take risks and explore was diminished by the two prong attack of protocol hacks and airdrop expectations.
All of this compounded with the idea that none of the l2 experience feels like the OG experience of eth. Trying to explain to outsiders how you found a new protocol to try out on scroll becomes an absolute chore. I.E purchase some eth on Coinbase, purchase a hardware wallet, send eth to your wallet, bridge to scroll, and from there trust that this protocol doesnât have an exploit that loses your funds.
Like yeah maybe itâs not all that difficult to figure out if you put in the effort. You take the time and learn. The logic is sound if you find the right places or people to guide you. But itâs too much to expect people that donât share the passion to get into.
Iâm optimistic itâll get better truly. But to get to that next level I think a lot of these L2âs need to consolidate. OP or Zksync or Arbitrum need to feel just like Ethereum or build their own brand to Ethereumâs level.
Thanks for reading. There just arenât people I see in the world that understand or care about Ethereum.
Three filled blobs are worth around 500 USD for ETH price in burn from blobspace alone. We are close to filling it up not even 6 months onto the upgrade. Ethereumâs usage has grown up 700% in one year from 50-60 tps to 350-400 tps and is not showing signs of stopping here.
Why Iâm saying this⌠3 years ago nobody had a fucking clue how to value Ethereum. So I wrote a little article explaining how you can value the network based on fee revenues, how to calculate a DCF, how the burn places a floor on Ethereumâs long-term price, how you can view the burn as having an equivalent effect to the price as a buyback⌠3 years later this understanding has penetrated deeper and now you have CT âanalystsâ calling ETH dead because they donât understand EIP-1559 fee mechanism and how it creates a fee market. And they are using the same arguments that were laid out on this subreddit first to price Ethereum, against it.
They still have no fucking clue. Ethereum is gonna fill those blobs, and then we are gonna release more blobs and they will get filled again. And every factor of 3 is gonna bring another 500 USD in price to Ethereum through burn. And in a decade you will have something like 64 blobs and thatâs gonna bring you 10K USD/ETH just from blobspace. Not even taking into account L1 native blockspace. And not taking into account any monetary premium that will slowly form because ETH will become the most pristine collateral of all that economy flowing on top and has way lower issuance than USD and even Bitcoin.
Here are the numbersâŚ
500 tps x (60 x 60 x 24) secs/day x 0.05 USD/tx x 50% (L1 value capture) / 2500 ETH/day
There are 3 assumptions here, so I let you decide their uncertainty.
500 tps with 3 blobs: Based on estimates of current tps and blobs filled. Blobs could get denser with compression improvements. But likely not an order of magnitude denser.
0.05 USD average L2 fee: This should land the median fee in around 1-2 cents that is low even for very low added value transactions like buying a coffee. Therefore at those fees even the lowest added value transactions are feasible onchain. This is also close to Solana average fees, so at those fees you can outcompete the promise of cheap fees of alt L1s.
50% value capture: the hardest to estimate. I suspect it will be a tad higher eventually, 70ish%. But assuming 50% has the advantage of not being too far wrong in either direction. If L1 only captures 25% of value (which I consider very low) we are wrong by a factor of 2. If L1 captures almost all value we are wrong by a factor of 2. So Iâm splitting the bill here.
2500 ETH/day is just how many we issue nowadays. This is quite bounded from above given Ethereumâs issuance formula.
This has been a LONG time coming, but /u/jtnichol, /u/nixorokish, and /u/logic_beach, and I met with Leo Glisic and Kyndle, founders of Guardians of the Ether to share their project publicly.
Guardians of the Ether is an upgradable NFT for solo & home stakers that serves as a badge that can promote inclusion of stakers in governance.
These NFTs are non-transferrable, so there is no economic incentive to claim this NFT - only bragging rights. (Think twenty years from now!)
Every year, a few weeks after September 15, these badges can be upgraded to show another year of beacon chain participation.
With gas in the low single-digits, now is an excellent time to mint yours.
Hereâs the video launch describing the project.
You can also see the project on opensea.
Huge shout out to u/equal-jellyfish1 for filling the gaps as our Substidooter! It truly allows this amazing service to maintain longevity and much deserved breaks for our resident troll
No Livestream | No POAP
Ethereum
$2651
0.0438
Ether atmosphere,
Validators stand to steer,
No trust paint to smear.
ETH price getting you down? Want to channel your inner Reno007? Post about it here in the daily of my new sub /r/ethwhinance!
If youâre a home staker and were wondering why youâre missing more head votes than a few years ago, at least part of the blame seems to be on Kiln, one of the largest Ethereum staking node operators.
Toni Wahrstätter (EF) published a new article yesterday:
On Attestations, Block Propagation, and Timing Games
Kiln seems to have been pushing âtiming gamesâ to the very limit, âdelaying block proposals to the 3-3.5 second mark within the slot.â Blocks are supposed to be published 0 seconds into the slot. Publishing 1-1.5 seconds into the slot is still considered okay for various reasons but 3-3.5 seconds is really pushing it since the attestation deadline is at 4 seconds into the slot. Before that deadline, the block needs to be propagated globally over the P2P network, and fully processed by nodes. That gets quite difficult (read: impossible) when the block is proposed 3.5 seconds into the slot.
Some other quotes from the article, I tried not taking them out of context but still would recommend reading the full article:
This chart shows the evolution of timing games. We can see that blocks from Kiln validators appear later and later over time.
the longer one waits, the higher the expected number of missed head votes
This comes with an impact on the network: for blocks proposed by Kiln proposers, the missed/wrong head vote rate is significantly higher:
Kiln shows outlier behavior. While most node operatorsâ attesters correctly vote for the parent block rather than the local block, Kilnâs attesters appear to disregard this norm. Over 10% of Kiln attesters attempt to keep the local block on-chain by voting for it. If such strategies are adopted, they might justify the losses from incorrect head votes if they prevent the local block from being reorged. However, these tactics are generally frowned upon within the Ethereum community: âdonât play with consensusâ.
So, are we ready to call Kiln a bad actor here? I myself am not quite there yet but I do think theyâre already way too big of an actor regardless of these timing games, managing almost 5% of all Ethereum validators (rated.network, may be even higher). I strongly dislike this behavior though, thatâs why Iâm sharing it here with all of you.
I do like a few things that Kiln does, like their in-depth blog posts about client diversity (1, 2, 3) and their open-source validator monitoring solution that we also use at Serenita.
Still I canât help but think playing these timing games causes unnecessary stress to the network, only resulting in short-term profits.
( For those that donât know the full context - these timing games are played in order to extract a bit more MEV. So as a validator you basically make a selfish decision to make a little bit more profit that hurts the rest of the network because they get a lower reward for the wrong head vote. )
Be wary when joining crypto projects from unknown people.
A notable Moon/Donut farmer was a victim of a spear phishing social engineering attack: https://x.com/ZoomerXBT/status/1823438152394055994
The attacker convinced the victim to check out the project to see if the victim would be interested in joining the team to create NFTs for it. The executable for the supposed game project turned out to be a Remote Access Tool.
I was going to reply to this in the chain of comments of the case of that moon/donut farmer (which /u/HSuke posted) that was targetted and drained but I will make this as a top level comment for more visibility:
Windows itself is a riskier system to use and was mentioned as an attack vector in the thread, however, itâs also fair to say that there are several red flags here from the info i get from this chain of comments and itâs that:
For data breach related things I suggest checking https://haveibeenpwned.com which has several tools to check this which are well known in the privacy community. Also consider using tools and taking measures recommended by https://privacyguides.org.
I also wrote an article about this on my website which I posted on here a while ago. Iâve learned a lot about networking and other things since I wrote this, so some things might be slightly off, but if you wanna check it out feel free.
More importantly though, I highly recommend software isolation, which is the most important measure to take. Minimize your surface area for attack:
For more technical folk and programmers in this community, or those interested: You should also learn to use smart contract testing software like brownie (python), foundry (rust) or hardhat (javascript) to automate transactions and use hot wallets in a programmatic way, though when learning to use these always use testnets first to try. Learning to use software like this and learning smart contract programming languages like solidity, vyper or others will absolutely help you in navigating the space in a much more careful way.
Besides âeveryone and god hates usâ, Iâve yet to see a good reason why the fundamental advantages of ETH wonât play out in price over the next 12-18 months.
ETH is the only smart contract platform that has the institutional/regulatory green light.
ETH is inflating minimally/deflating forever since the merge and 4844. (Compare ETH vs SOL)
ETH is the only smart contract platform that has a record of liveness that is acceptable for global settlement. (Again compare to SOL outages)
L2 scaling is a wild success and is up only. L2 usage is up only.
If smartcontracts/blockchain is a transformative technology there is no real competitor to ETH. BTC DOESNâT DO ANYTHING. Sure, it might be a good investment since enough people think itâs neat, but that doesnât mean itâs in competition with ETH.
The ONLY reason I see ETH failing is if blockchain itself is rendered useless by some other unforeseen technology. But otherwise the instantaneous settlement, immutability, and resilience of a decentralized smart contract platform like ETH offers enough advantages over the legacy system that it canât not be adopted. And if a decentralized smart contract platform is adopted it will be ETH.
Regulatory clarity in the US is coming. Continued scalability increases are coming. Widespread stablecoin payments are coming. Institutional adoption has started. DEFI use will be up only.
People are worried over 5 months of bad PA for ETH the asset and I agree it has sucked but narrative follows price- donât let the bad PA make you think the ETH fundamentals have changed.
https://decrypt.co/245173/franklin-templeton-ezpz-crypto-etf
This has been mentioned yesterday, i think the ezpz etf might be very interesting for european users. An etf holding only one asset is prohibited in europe/eu as far as i know, thats why the current etfs are not available to buy.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable can elaborate further, but afaik you need a basket of assets to get an etf approved in europe. Lets hope the minimum is 2!
EVMavericks Weekly Recap (August 12-18)
Blog & Newsletter on Paragraph
Catch up on a weekâs worth of, mostly, Discord content: get some inside scoop and the feel of our vibes. For all the details, visit directly our Discord.
Some EVMavericks were onboarded to participate in Octantâs rounds and help select various projects, thus contributing to public goods indirectly.
Our farmers discuss whatâs hot, whatâs cold. Orderly (TGE is on 26th), Debrdige, Tari, Hyperliquid.
Our quality chat is filled with talks about stocks and gold, whatâs underrated and why.
Degen chat is not so degen nowadays. Discussions revolve around forms of money and the differences between real money and memes.
And from the Twitter land, Batz shows his bullishness on ETH by referencing RatioGang website which is built by our very own InsideTheSimulation.
We see a few nice sales as 930.eth picks up these cool looking lions!
Our memecoining thread has been the most active. Lots of discussions but notably some juicy alpha including coins and polymarket bets. While donât be fooled that itâs all green and rosey, it definitely gets red at times, but here are some calls of the week:
~5x - $r/snoofi by WTF
~3x - $pop by etheraider
~ 2-30x - $TrumpFish by 696
Lastly, your weekly security reminder: hereâs a few guides!
EVMavericks discord has a security channel. You can literally mute everything else but that channel and only get notifications from there.
Reminder for all the folks: we have a daily-discussion channel in the discord thatâs open to public and thereâs a decent amount of activity there!
Would it be possible to defeat MEV with no protocol changes with smarter wallets?
Besides the chicken-and-egg problem here, a problem I see with this idea is that if the âMEV freeâ validators captured a larger share of DeFi transaction fees this could be offset by regular validators getting a larger share of simple token transactions since their blocks would otherwise be emptier. Also for any really big MEV opportunities it would be worth it for any validator to just take the MEV, exit the pool, and re-enter with a new identity. If we could find solutions to these problems, it feels a lot cleaner to me than some of the currently proposed solutions like builder separation.
To me this feels like the email reputation problem all over again.
In the early days of the internet, anybodyâs computer could directly send an email to an email server and it would get delivered. Then as email became widespread, the concept of spam email arose.
So email service providers (ESPs) started tracking reputation by IP address, which is what they do to this day. Each ESP keeps a small rotation of âcleanâ IP addresses to send mail from, and they work hard to make sure nobody uses them to send spam so that their IP reputation stays clean. And each ESP keeps a list of blocklists that contain tons of low-reputation IPs, from which they auto delete all incoming emails.
The result is a system where yes, technically speaking you can send an email directly, but itâs largely impossible from a residential internet connection since they block the outgoing port (SMTP) to prevent spam, and itâs largely impossible from a web host or VPS too because chances are that whatever IP you get, someone else has already sent spam and ruined its email reputation (if the web host doesnât outright block the SMTP port). So itâs a technically open system where the only way you can send an email in practice is to hand your email off to an ESP like Gmail or Yahoo or iCloud or specialized âemail hostingâ products for delivery.
Trust me, email servers suck balls to maintain. Itâs a lot of writing blocklist maintainers to try to get off their lists - maintainers who only expect emails from email hosting companies. And the software is far less streamlined than web hosting software, since nobody hosts email servers anymore. Itâs a full time job.
All that is to say, if thereâs one or more independent parties certifying whether validators are MEV-free, the endgame is that it turns into another whack-a-mole reputation management scheme just like email. And I donât want running a validator to suck balls like running an email server does.
Also for any really big MEV opportunities it would be worth it for any validator to just take the MEV, exit the pool, and re-enter with a new identity. If we could find solutions to these problems, it feels a lot cleaner to me than some of the currently proposed solutions like builder separation.
You have to track reputation somehow. And there are limited ways of doing so. You could track them by IP, which runs into the aforementioned issues and makes âcleanâ IP addresses expensive. Or you could track the coins themselves, which just means that every ETH on chain has a hidden reputation value, which makes âcleanâ ETH more expensive.
I believe the answer is âit fundamentally cannot be done in a fair way within the latest production version of the Ethereum protocolâ.
Edit: Of course, protocol changes like shutterization can help.
Warning, very geeky hardware topic ahead.
In the last few weeks I have worked on running Ethereum nodes on RISC-V boards. RISC-V is one of the more modern CPU architectures besides the well known x86 (most PCs) and ARM (Apple and cell phones). RISC-V started being developed around 2010 and got published around 2014. Only in the last few years the basic parts got standardized and the they are still in active development to standardize some of the extensions.
One big difference is than anyone can design and build CPUs on this standard and many companies actually do. This is in contrast to x86 processors where only 3 companies have a license to actually design/build them: Intel, AMD, VIA Technologies. For ARM CPUs anyone who buys a license from ARM Holdings can design and build ARM CPUs but these licenses can be very strict. For example, ARM Holdings is currently trying to force Qualcomm to destroy all ARM based Windows laptops due to a licensing dispute. RISC-V is open, which means anyone can design and build processors following this standard without having to pay anyone anything or follow any strict licensing rules. This means this is the most open CPU architecture we have. The disadvantage is that it is all very new and therefore the currently available Processors are not the most powerful ones. But the progress in just the last 5 years is quite amazing. Back then one could only get the most minimal boards which pretty much could only read some inputs do some basic calculations and control an output. There was no support to run any operating system on these boards. Linux support was pretty much non existent.
Today, we can get boards which can easily run full Linux distributions even Ubuntu supports some boards directly and about every 9 months a new iteration of ever more powerful boards hit the market. The driver for this development is the openness. Companies know, that no one can take their licenses away and this gives them security to develop RISC-V based CPUs. This open competition will probably enable many more people to get access to affordable and powerful enough hardware to run an ethereum node. To get there however, the node clients themselves will have to be optimized for this hardware platform as well.
That is why another node operator was asking in many discords if anyone else is interested to help in this effort. I obviously jumped on this opportunity and we have been working on it in the last few weeks. We now got Nimbus, Lighthouse and geth running. They can be built with some modifications and run reliably. Some of the modifications have already been pushed to the respective client teams and some more modifications will come in the next weeks. We are working on some other clients as well (grandine, Reth and prysm) but they have some more issues which need further investigation.
At the moment we have 4 different boards to test our stuff on. These are the HiFive Unmatched, the VisionFive 2, the Lichee Pi 4a and the Banana Pi F3. All of these are at most barely powerful enough to actually run a full node. Nevertheless, we managed to fully and reliably sync the sepolia testnet on the Banana Pi (Nimbus/geth) and we even managed to sync mainnet with lighthouse, but only for brief periods of time until it lost sync again and then it was behind the head for about 1-3 hours until it regained sync again. We even overclocked our board which slightly improved the sync reliability, but not by much. Looks like the current iteration of boards is a good basis to test nodes and get the clients ready but we need at least one more iteration to be able to run nodes reliably.
In parallel, my colleague tries to incorporate as many improvements as necessary into eth-docker so that prospective node operators will have a very convenient way to spin up a node on these boards. It still is a very rocky road ahead, but I am pretty sure that when actually powerfull enough RISC-V boards will hit the market in 1-3 years or so, a good selection of clients will be ready to run on them.
Itâs a little complicated because EIP-1559 served multiple purposes, and the burn achieved multiple goals. You can read all about it in the github of the EIP (itâs short, and really digestible - I promise!) â EIPs/EIPS/eip-1559.md at master ¡ ethereum/EIPs ¡ GitHub
The short of it is, the burn was absolutely a stated part of monetary policy, to the point Iâd argue it was past âa nice side effectâ. Honestly a fairly elegant solution IMO. And if you remember the narratives around BTC vs ETH at the time of itâs launch, issuance/inflation rates were a very hot topic.
I think where the disconnect came from was people misunderstood that it was an amplifier, not a driver, of price action. Meaning that in the event we saw a period of relatively little crypto demand combined with low fees the burn wouldnât be as impactful. Which we sort of unfortunately saw post-launch.
An important aspect of this fee system is that miners only get to keep the priority fee. The base fee is always burned (i.e. it is destroyed by the protocol). This ensures that only ETH can ever be used to pay for transactions on Ethereum, cementing the economic value of ETH within the Ethereum platform and reducing risks associated with miner extractable value (MEV). Additionally, this burn counterbalances Ethereum inflation while still giving the block reward and priority fee to miners. Finally, ensuring the miner of a block does not receive the base fee is important because it removes miner incentive to manipulate the fee in order to extract more fees from users.
I just thought Iâd share a snippet I shared just now in yesterdayâs daily about why the defeatist attitude to privacy around âoh they have my data anywayâ is actually completely missing the point of privacy. Itâs not about going off the grid, its about reducing your attack surface and if you hold crypto, then reducing your data footprint is not paranoia, itâs prudent.
One of the key things outsiders miss about the privacy community is the concept of the âthreat modelâ. Who are you trying to hide your data from? Most people canât hide from 3 letter agencies without hugely inconveniencing their daily life, but thatâs ok because there are some legal protections to stop some degree of government abuse (for example police need to get warrants to search your home etc.) But if you post all of your life details to social media then police can just buy your data, they donât need to search your home if they can buy info from tech companies. Stalkers and $5 wrench attackers can do the same and hackers have waaaay more places to steal your info from, making you more prone to phishing, burglary and much much more. Basically there are some super simple steps to make your digital footprint soooo much smaller. Things like degoogling, using uBlock origin and Firefox for browsing, avoiding cloud services in favour of physical backups or your own servers and not owning a car made after the mid 2010s which collects and sells location and converstional data (some car companies reserve the right to sell your sexual data, no Iâm not kidding, its right there in their terms and conditions). These things donât take much effort for tech savvy people and it gets 80 â 90% of your data off the marketplace and out of the easy reach of government agencies beyond the most powerful ones which you donât really need to worry about if youâre not a terrorist.
Ethereum
$2662.54
0.043
90,771 hodlers subscribed (+2)
Itâs a scarry chart,
Fundamentals outsmart,
Itâs merely a fart.
be me
wake up in cozy Airbnb on fine Sunday morning Tropical Storm Debby cancels flights home fuckthat.jpg
wife and I decide to drive rental car back to New York 12-hour drive ahead
leave at 11 am ETH price tanking, watching it on Apple Watch
realize I have a big loan on Aave
sweating.jpg remember liquidation point in low $2000s, canât remember exact number
anxietyintensifies.gif
hit traffic nearly 12 am, price dropping faster
panicmode.exe
arrive in NYC, get in Lyft, tell driver to go fast
driver understands and drives like a maniac
wife has no idea get home, check position LTV at 76%, 4% away from liquidation
fire up Ledger, send more crypto lower liquidation price by half
calm.jpg
what. a. day.
(1/2)
I broke my no conference rule and attended EDCON in Tokyo this year. Didnât see any posts about it, but maybe I missed them, itâs been hectic running around to try to attend everything (and missing most of it). Either way I thought Iâd share my subjective experience as a normally privacy-conscious grumpy internet man.
First, the quality of that conference was impressive. On every aspect. Coordinating any event is no easy task, and here the organization was top notch. As someone who doesnât speak a word of Japanese and can hardly mumble coherent English, the EDCON team aptly corraled me and others wherever they needed to be.
Great venues too. Most days we were at the United Nations building. I think the whole building catered to the convention? One big conference room housing about ~400 people for the main talks, and side conference rooms for side talks/workshops. Then the main 2 days took place at the Yoyogi gymnasiums, which were OK for the more festive atmospheres they were meant to be, but a bit iffy on acoustics when it comes to listening to technical talks.
Of course this is what matters most, the quality of these talks. I have to say this did not disappoint. Thereâs something to be said for being committed to an event and passively sitting there for hours, as opposed to surfing the Internet and actively seeking knowledge. Whether you want it or not, when youâre physically present your brain starts to absorb knowledge like a plant does photosynthetis.
In particular, I found all the talks on MPC (Multi Party Computation), TEE (Trusted Execution Environment), FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) especially interesting. Many of us have seen these terms many times, the most adventurous among us even try to read Vitalikâs blogs on the topic. Personally it still failed to click for me. Until I sat in these rooms and saw the points explained and reexplained in a variety of different ways by various speakers.
Major props in particular to the panel between Guy Itzhaki (Fhenix), Zhen Yu Yong (Web3Auth), Chua Zheng Leong (Automata). Three guys who manifestly know their stuff and engaged with each other to make these concepts obvious to the crowd. The theme was MPC vs TEE vs FHE, but really it came down to them explaining where each solution makes the most sense. I donât know when EDCON will put the videos of these talks online, but if thereâs one panel Iâd suggest watching, it would be this one.
In person, you truly get to see whoâs passionate and whoâs acting. Either that or there were some excellent actors. The aura of highbrained discussion shifts your perspective, you get caught in the enthusiasm. When I first saw Fhenix (which is a L2) online, my cynical ass thought oh joy, they took FHE and made a little play with Phenix, how âcleverâ. Post conference? Oh, they took FHE and made a little wordplay with Phenix! How clever! (his frown and cynicism: gone)
Another protocol that flipped me 180 was Zircuit. Initially (online) their marketing as an AI-powered L2 made me scoff. But the talk by their CTO made an excellent case for the future of sequencers, differentiating themselves by subjective qualities rather than the objective increases of scale. I got to speak with one of their devs, who told me the AI is really used for data analysis, to classify the possible pathways for DeFi hacks weâve seen in the past, and then identify transactions that look functionally similar and send them in quarantine before inspection. Which is entirely sensible when you think about it. So many exploits boil down to flashloans, oracle manipulations and high changes of volume in a single block, that it should be not only possible but practical to build heuristics to defeat most common attack vectors.
Needless to say, Iâm now accumulating some Zircuit pointsâŚ
Intmax people were on several panels, and then they featured proeminently at Plasmacon the next day as they were organizing it. Justin Drake had a pretty cool gigabrain (omegabrain?) talk about it. I wonât even try to pretend I can explain, save that you can run pretty aggressive compressions for payment usecases.
Justin also made the interesting case BTC as an asset could survive a 51% attack (which in his opinion will happen within ~10 years) by using one-shot quantum signatures and leaving the PoW chain behind. Right, I understand some of these words.
Adrian Brink of Anoma had several talks on completely different topics, all great stuff. Heâs a good speaker and obviously a smart man, if a little bit too smart as his presentations tend to end up too dense with information. I liked his hot take in Plasmacon the most, paraphrased: if we define scalability as the ability to retain fixed costs no matter the activity, then rollups are not a viable scaling solution, while Plasma can be. Personally I think the burden on app developers (who have to guarantee data availability or think of the right incentive mechanisms for others to provide it) is too large for the time being, and I would not bet on Plasma being big at scale before 2030, but what do I know?
The more relevant point, maybe, is that a whole lot of people are clearly building for 2030 and beyond. If youâre ever looking for a fix of optimism to distract you from market trends or cryptotwitter feuds, I will wholeheartedly vouch for EDCON. This could not have been better exemplified than by Vitalikâs keynotes.
Finally got to see the unicorn⌠scratch that, the horse⌠amend that, the man⌠on stage. There is a special sort of energy to his talks. You can tell heâs exposing his concrete, factual vision for the space, which he makes accessible to the rest of us but doesnât massage, inflate, nor reduce, in any other way. But I also liked the energy of his body language. Always moving around, pacing from one leg to another, the frame of someone who speaks of a topic he knows in and out and wishes our input/output bandwidth as human beings could stretch to accomodate the full speed of his thoughts as fast as they come. It hits different when mr Buterin says we can scale, because it MEANS we CAN scale.
The focus was on the next 10 years of Ethereum, touching on where we were, where weâre at and where weâre going. Main idea: we got the fees down, now we need to get back to 2016 UX of a monolithic construction from the user perspective. Main pathways: gas auctions (you have ETH on any rollup, someone else broadcasts your transaction on the desired rollup for a fee, competition should push that fee down to negligible levels), chain prefixes (op:0x1234 and arb:0x1234 instead of 0x1234, handled at the wallet/dapp level, all you see and use is 0x1234 and everything is taken care of).
In closing, he suggested the infra is good and we should expect to see a shift in focus towards applications. Music to my ears.
(re: unicorn. On the final day, Vitalik came in a Bufficorn costume. Then removed it to reveal his secret identity as a humanoid horse holding Dogecoin. Then became human. I feel the genius in that costume is that he waddled around the conference for hours before, incognito. How do you attend a show when youâre a rockstar billionaire? Without the suit he would have been crowded all the time, but as a mascot most people seemed to blissfully ignore him.)
(2/2)
So the main stuff was good. And there was a lot more to it! The hackathons were great, you get to see what people are building. Much of it was sponsored by zkSync. There was a funny dynamic to this. First youâd hear the zkSync guys describe their newest infra directions, the possibilities it allows. Then the hackers would show up on stage⌠and after their presentations, would be assaulted by technical questions from the very same zkSync people. âWhat do you think about this potential issue? Have you thought about using specific feature X in your app? What aboutâŚâ All in good form, benevolent, but nonetheless you got the vibe of Infra Nobility questioning Application Peasants. If there ever was a need to illustrate this current reality in our industry, I think it was on display there, in those poor hackersâ confused answers.
zkSync had the best swag. They brought their eli5 books (which you might have already seen here: https://eli5.zksync.io/ ), in Japanese and English. A 200-piece puzzle box. Their mascot âZeekâ was proeminently featured. Theyâre killing it on branding, itâs stuff youâre happy to own because it looks visually pleasing, and itâs appropriate for kids too.
They had this pretty slick zkQuest website too: https://zkquest.zksync.io
Which you activated by going to their booth. It let you do a bunch of developer quests, ranging from very simple to rather involved, and covered a large spread of topics in their ecosystem. You got real ETH for finishing those quests, and the amounts were rather generous! Doing everything could net you about 0.065 ETH.
(Most people didnât. I only managed less than half, and Iâm in the top50 leaderboard.)
Oh, and finishing the first set of easier quests got you the coolest swag, a Zeek hat. It was genuinely cool to see people wandering around with theirs on, you could tell whoâs engaging deeply with the developer side of the conference. Status signals like this make for fun crowd dynamics.
The PSE research group (pse.dev) worked the same magic in their FHE panel. They demonstrated this app letting you connect with other people by tapping your NFC-enabled phone to a ring, to then let you make private groups and vote on various things anonymously. In the end everyone who participated got a NFC black ring. More subtle than a Zeek hat, it was neat to spot other ringbearers in the wild through the rest of the conference.
The entertainment was fun. Partly because there was clear confusion between the attendees and the shows. You hear stories about fans going ga-ga for Kpop, then youâre here watching tripleS get on stage and half of the crowd is getting up and walking away.
(It was just after Vitalikâs keynote. You could see the flow of the wave moving in for his talk, then moving back out. Half of the total crowd or so.)
I made it a purpose to approach this conference while revealing as little about myself as possible. I did not specify my job, my occupation, made it a point to say I was neither a developer nor an investor, didnât tell my name, never connected my Twitter or Telegram to anything. My goal in that was to see how open the culture is, to check whether reputation/identity are defacto requirements or if people are willing to engage with you regardless.
The conference scored highly on that scale. I applied to almost all side events, and almost everyone let me in. I didnât try to approach people, but several individuals came to me. Out of them only one I would qualify as a shitcoin shiller, and even then he was fairly respectful and didnât try to push beyond giving me the swag. Everyone else was insightful, loved to trade ideas and talk about what they were doing. Iâm not a particularly charismatic person, so to come in anonymous and get this amount of positive sentiment and friendliness freely extended⌠truly suggests, at least to me, the community has done a good job translating the âpermissionlessâ concept to real life.
There was a good spread of side events. Whatever it is you wanted to do. If you wanted to go deep into some technical topic, there was a side event for that in a crowded classroom somewhere. If you wanted to watch Japanese idols sing some songs about smart contracts being the next hope of humanity, there was a side event for that too. I went to everything I could, if only because as a first-time Japan tourist it made for a guide to discover the hot spots in town. It was a good reminder blockchain leans young. You could count the people with grey hair on your two hands, if not two fingers.
Subjective conclusion to subjective experience. I had a blast. In life itâs easy to nerd out and itâs easy to have fun, but it can be hard to find a crowd doing both. Iâm also flabbergasted this value is delivered essentially for free. As the EDCON tickets were given to anyone who applied near the end. There was a healthy mix of foreigners to locals, maybe about 60:40. Most of the talks were in English with some AI real-time translation in Japanese.
Strangely enough, it only reaffirmed my belief going to conferences is a tricky path. As in, you can lose sight of the ârealâ users, onchain. Free tickets to attend or no, the guy from Serbia who makes âŹ600 a month is not hopping on a flight to Tokyo anytime soon. The attendance was definitely biaised towards rich, and itâs easy to feel optimistic when youâre here either because youâre financially independent or because your well-paid job foots the bill.
Thereâs a counterpoint in that the Ethereum community goes through significant effort to diversify event locations and to make things accessible. At this point thereâs probably something somewhere anyone could attend, given a reasonable effort.
Itâs hard to stay objective when youâre having a good time. I now have so much positive bias towards several protocols based on my people encounters. Thereâs a reason many societies have strict anti-bribery laws, most of us get swayed easily; and man do I feel bribed out in the abundance of free stuff thrown my way.
But you know what? Maybe objectivity is overrated. Brings to mind a certain WEF video: âwelcome to the 2030 roadmap. I own all the things, I have some privacy, and life has never been better.â
If you ever feel down about this space and have the opportunity to attend, do yourself a favor and take the plunge.
Estimating the late game economics of blobspace. This is just a quick back of the envelope math, to get a taste of the numbers. Feel free to tweak the assumptions as you see fit. With current blobspace target of 3 blobs (1 shard):
500 tps x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365 secs per year = 15800M transactions per year
Say average transaction fee is 5 cents. Which would make the median even lower, around 1-2 cents. Making even the lowest added value use cases (e.g. pay for coffee) perfectly viable. This is likely extremely conservative because if we start having serious financial applications on top of Ethereum (i.e. tokenized RWA) those fees are ridiculously low. Your broker charges you easily 5 USD per transaction. And registration of car titles, houses, etc⌠is even more expensive. So it could push the average much higher easily.
15800M tx per year x 0.05 USD per tx = 800M USD per year
Say Ethereum captures 80% of that. This assumption is based on the current burn %, which has typically floated around 80% of the tx cost. This is the trickiest assumption, I donât have a good way of estimating how much value will be captured by Ethereum from the L2 transaction fees. This is dependent on the attractiveness of data availability on Ethereum vs all other options. So feel free to tweak this value. If we assume 80%, that gives us 640M USD per year with 1 shard.
With full danksharding we will go up to 64 shards. So that would puts of the order of 40B USD per year of burn just from blobspace. That gives you an implied price of ETH of 30-35K USD just from blobspace alone. Add to that Ethereumâs proper blockspace which in the past has been able to capture a similar figure of burn and you get to a price of ETH around 50K to 100K USD. The price estimate is simply a consequence of assuming ETH cannot be absurdly deflationary, if it were it would cause a supply crunch and the price would go upwards resulting in less burn until it estabilizes around the price that gets us to close to 0 inflation.
Mind you, this is a long-term view of the roadmap. It will take us still years to deliver Danksharding and 64 shards and onboard all the use cases. But it serves to illustrate how the ETH late-game economics could look like.
Disagree with any of the numbers? Change them! The point is not so much to derive a specific figure, but to get a sense of the order of magnitudes we would be dealing with.
Word of warning to any validators out there - I recently updated all of my Linux Mint 21.3 systems to Linux Mint 22, and every one of them that had chronyd configured had it removed during the upgrade process. My one Ubuntu 22.04 server also didnât have it after upgrading to 24.04, but Iâm not certain that one ever did, so I donât know if this is par for the course for any Ubuntu-based distribution or if itâs specific to LInux Mint.
In any case, if you arenât running chronyd for timesync, I recommend it. Thereâs a CoinCashew guide for setting it up, but I recommend relaxing the frequency settings to minpoll 2
and maxpoll 10
to avoid KoD RATE messages.
The most recent Bitwise memo from Matt Hougan is pretty great. Here is the relevant section:
The last time the market melted down like this was March 12, 2020. That was the day the world realized that Covid was a big deal.
In case youâve blocked it from your memory, let me remind you: It was chaos.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average sold off 2,353 points on March 12, its worst day since 1987. Tech stocks were in free fall, as were commodities. We all thought the global economy was going to end. The president would declare a national emergency the following morning.
Among all assets, bitcoin crashed the worst, falling 37% from $7,911 to $4,971. It was a breathtaking one-day move, wiping out a yearâs worth of gains in 24 hours.
It felt as if we might never recover. The media claimed bitcoin had failed its test as a hedge asset.
And then something spectacular happened. As global leaders stepped in to stabilize the economyâcutting interest rates, printing moneyâbitcoin began to rise. A year later, it was trading at $57,332, up more than 1,000%.
In retrospect, March 12, 2020 wasnât a time to panic. It was the best buying opportunity for bitcoin in a decade.
Itâs easy to see why with the benefit of hindsight. Nothing fundamental had changed about bitcoin because of Covid. The maximum number of bitcoin that could exist (21 million) was the same on March 11 as it was on March 12. You didnât need to rely on any bank, government, or company to store wealth in bitcoin on March 11, and that was still true on March 12.
At the same time, Covid supercharged the reasons for bitcoinâs long-term rise. It showed that central banks would bail out the economy at the first sign of trouble. It demonstrated the limitations of centralized institutions. And it reminded us that the future is more online and digital.
The changes all pointed in favor of bitcoin becoming more important, not less. And in the long term, thatâs exactly what happened.
I see the same setup today.
Edit to add this:
But, in brief: Weak economic data in the U.S. on Friday sparked concerns that the global economy is slowing. This prompted a panic in Asia, where a rapid unwind of the yen carry tradeâa strategy aimed at exploiting interest-rate differentials between currenciesâpushed Japanese markets sharply lower. Things werenât helped by rising concerns over geopolitical risks in the Middle East, where Iran is threatening to attack Israel.
These events collided with idiosyncratic negative developments in the crypto market, where a large market maker (Jump Trading) ran into trouble and faced forced liquidations of large positions in ETH.
Yesterday I made an (apparently) well received lengthy comment of disorganized thoughts regarding the stock market crash that ocurred this week. I want to correct some inaccuracies or imprecise details I explained regarding the particular events in japan.
The immediate cause is the carry trade, but some corrections about it and the situation in Japan:
The first immediate reason why this happened is because while the FED and the ECB raised rates to control inflation, the BOJ kept rates at 0. This lack of coordination with other central banks, which is entirely within the rights of the BOJ as a central bank of an independent nation, but not ideal, has made a very profitable trade: borrow money in japan, sell JPY, buy USD or EUR and put that money to work in public debt or other yield bearing instrumnets, or if you prefer a riskier trade, buy stocks denominated in other currencies. So both the FED/ECB and BOJ are at fault because they kept rates high for too long and keeping rates low for too long respectively, creating a very profitable trade. Hence why central bank coordination matters in large markets.
And also bad data from other directions causing more drawdown in the market in the days prior to yesterdayâs crash:
The market had already been pricing in a slowdown in the economy, with unexpectedly low job creation in the US and less than ideal earnings from US companies, though the most concerning figure was the job data. This is likely what caused that first drawdown that brought us to 2700-2900 in the past couple days. But other markets have also been slowing down, not just the US, China too apparently, and Europe we already knew was weak economically from several different directions. Just an example of Europeâs weakness at the moment could be seen through Germanyâs GDP growth, which shows a contracting or stagnant economy, rate hikes most definitely affect this by reducing demand and making credit more expensive, and Germany already had had a weak 2022 with lots of noise in its trade balance as a result of the sanctions to Russia, though this is old news.
Some inaccuracies I layed out that I want to rectify/correct:
I said the BOJ had had near-zero or zero % interest rates for almost a decade, but itâs way more than that. The BOJ has had interest rates at zero for MOST of the past 20 years, with short periods of increase that never went above 0.5%.
Hence this trade being not just recently profitable, but historically profitable, especially because this monetary policy from the BOJ was intended to remain for as long as possible. Even now the rates are extremely low, at 0.25% despite increases. The higher the difference between the BOJ rates and the FED/ECB rates, the more profitable this trade becomes, especially because the JPY was particularly weak vs these currencies, so the profit is double, you earn from shorting JPY relative to USD or EUR and you earn from having high interest rates, so the JPY weakness came from a lot more people taking this short position in JPY. Though this was especially profitable recently.
I said that the BOJ wanted to end the carry trade. This is not necessarily true, the BOJ only wants inflation in japan and purchasing power to remain static or to increase (currently Japanâs economy has been contracting). The carry trade had been hurting the JPY causing loss of purchasing power because (one example) e.g. commercially, if their currency is lower, their exports are cheaper, but imports are more expensive. Generally this hurts citizens, so the BOJ increased rates to reduce this disparity and give a little more strength to the JPY.
Given that many traders expected the rates to not increase in any meaningful way, and especially expecting the intent to increase them from the BOJ would remain the same, many traders took recent short positions on an already weak JPY, which caused a large cascade of margin calls on JPY borrowers performing carry trades, resulting in that immediate large rise in the JPY.
I wonât get into why the Nikkei crashed harder than it ever had in history, it could be due to several factors, but I havenât done any profound research on it. It could be margin calls due to shares being collateral to loans, it could be due to bad earnings, idk, thereâs probably multiple things at play here.
Pretty good content, both yesterday and today. Some quick complementary comments.
BOJ cannot raise substantially interest rates because Japanâs debt to GDP is a ridiculous 263%. This ties their hands, their interest payments would go through the roof. Yes, their debt is issued in Yen. They could always print more but you are just trading one evil for another one.
Nikkei went down because the Yen is strengthening to reflect the new conditions. Japanâs economy depends a lot on exports. If the Yen goes up their exports are less competitive. This compresses earnings of their companies. Markets try to see into the future and price that. Plus minus any short term market turmoil, liquidations, etc⌠But this is short term noise.
The carry trade is not ending here, it has started to unwind. The yield differential is going to keep existing for quite a while as itâs related to point 1. Because of that yield differential the Yen should be weaker and devaluing over very long time horizons (decades). What we have seen is just the tip of the iceberg, the most degen of the degen levered to their tits, getting exposed when the market moves a bit against them. And having to close down positions in a disordered manner. Seems some liquidations must have happened but nothing is publicly known yet.
/rant, skip if you donât like sad stories but I need someone to hear me out for my sanity
These are the hardest days for me ever.
The other day I got liquidated on my ratio long on the scam wick. It was not a very aggressive position (actual breakeven ratio for collateral/debt was at 0.0355) but I guess it got to 90% LTV on the protocol anyway.
I did not expect the ratio to drop that much that fast and I was stubborn and did not reduce it in the coming hours when it was at 0.045.
This is where I donât know if I can ever get closure. The protocol that I have used (which I donât want to badmouth but it definitely has some design issues) leaves the difference between liquidation threshold and actual value all to the liquidator. All this to say that the guy liquidated me at barely 90% LTV and actually got a 27ETH payout on a 225 ETH position because it probably actually bounced back in the time it took for him to actually exchange the BTC for ETH.
If I had not been liquidated, that position would be worth something like 40 more ETH than I have now. Had i kept most of that 10% it would have been 25ETH. Instead, I have zero left from that position. I feel like I got robbed.
So, for me thatâs it. I am back at my initial ETH stack after all these years of working to increase it (I was at my record just over a month ago at 2x the current ETH amount) and now Iâm just left with years of stress for nothing.
I canât honestly bounce back from this, I donât have the mental strength nor the stack to risk it anymore. I know that I would probably blow the rest trying to get it back quickly.
I donât know how will I ever overcome this, I have missed real life goals and have been stressed constantly trying to increase my internet coins and now I have lost all that I had built.
I will stick around and follow the progress for Ethereum for which I truly believe in, just with a different outlook for myself and a bad memory of all these years. Hopefully I will be able to partially forgive myself for the mistakes I have made, because right now I am unable to.
Thanks r/ethfinance, you truly have been a beacon of light in all these years and that will be always a nice memory for me.
Damn, Iâm reading comments from overleveraged people after yesterdayâs events. Itâs a trip down memory lane (2018-2020), where plenty of people lost their precious eth. The biggest ethfinance loss Iâm aware of was an 8000 eth position that got halved (back then we were talking about a couple of million $ iirc).
There are no âbig lessonsâ imo. You just have to go through these events to learn, or at the very least, treat much more carefully than you think.
To those who have lost a lot yesterday (and the prior weeks), I hope you find your way out of it. Itâs not easy. At least the tech is âprovenâ right now and eth isnât going to zero.
Things to be bullish about :
Source : NBER Recession Indicators, Conference Board LEI
BONUS - Short Term
I just wanted to share a bit of a mindset change Iâve had over the last couple of years in this bear market which I discussed in response to a fellow EthFinancier at the end of yesterdayâs daily who lost a lot of ETH (but not their whole stack) to a liquidation this week. Iâd love to hear how everyone else who is quite far into this game has had their mindset change over time. I also hope it doesnât come off as pretentious. Iâm not some zen guru who is holier than thou for being grateful for what I have. Far from it. I just stress a lot less and chase that calculating my net worth dopamine hit much much less and I hope others can achieve that too.
Hey friend, I can relate. I lost about 30% of my stack to shitcoins and another 20% I have cashed out because I let my lifestyle adapt based on a price movement (last bullrun) which didnât stay around and which I didnât take anywhere near enough profits on but still had a lot of taxes to pay. I recognise that your story probably stings a lot more than mine ever did with the scam wick, but I think the important difference here is I am 2 years further down the line after taking a big L than you are.
After the my big sudden L with a couple of shitcoins which basically went to 0, I went cold turkey on the bullshit. Anything risky is out of my portfolio. No shitcoins, no leverage. Not even âblue chipâ or darling altcoins like LINK or RPL. At the end of the day theyâre all about taking on risk to get more ETH. But thatâs just a form of gambling. So all thatâs left is DCAing (which is out of the picture for me as a student) and staking. So Iâve just been comfortably holding and staking for the last two years. As time has gone on, I have come to terms with not being able to attain my more lofty price targets and bullish financial goals. Instead I have focused on what I do have. And holy fuck, Iâm only sitting on one home validator but my god, this still puts me way ahead of anyone else my age that wasnât born into the 1%. This bear market has been humbling for me in a good way. Iâm no longer trying to gamble for more ETH, so I have had time to reflect on what I have and how much freedom it can bring me, how much less it makes me stress over tough financial situations on a daily basis.
My friend, hang in there. You have not lost it all. In fact, if youâre patient and responsible, youâre right about to find what it is you have and itâs more than you think. Just give your mind time to adapt as it moves away from a dopamine filled moon chasing, ETH gambling mindset and towards a more grounded and grateful one. I hope it doesnât sound cheesy or pretentious. But losing half of my stack has been good for my wisdom, financial responsibility and mental health. Try not to stress about it all too much and just let it be. From the sounds of it youâre still in this game and I donât want to lose any more EthFinanciers to liquidations and high risk plays.
I know it is painful now, but it will get better. Youâve just got to focus on the right things.
Forgive me for my liberal use of the word gambling. You know what I mean though. Itâs taking on risk with large sums of money which really shouldnât be at so much risk.
Ethereum
$3152
0.0489
90,748 hodlers subscribed (+1)
Ignore politics,
Distrust their economics,
Store your mnemonics.
There once was a coin called ethereum
With a fanclub in neigh-on delirium
They asked Ray to flippen
But he just kept on dippinâ
Mayhaps life canât be judged by this criterium
alt. last line:
Some patience to temper your accelererium
âŚmaaan, ethereum is a stupid word to rhyme with. Impress me, ethfinance!
When discussing crypto, and comparing ETH with BTC/alts online and offline, I can easily refute all points against ETH. Ethereum is so well thought out and designed, that it seems there are literally no weak points, and you can easily debate its superiority.
But Iâm wondering about one point that I donât have the technical knowledge to easily counter. Many altcoiners say that ETH suffers from âspaghetti codeâ, and a large technical debt that is going to be a big issue going forward, either by eventually causing a huge bug and collapse of the blockchain, or by just slowing down its further development and letting other, better written coins come on top.
So Iâm asking anyone thatâs more into Ethereumâs technicals/developement than I am. Is there any truth to this claim? My answer would usually be that Ethereum was mostly accused of slow development, which would indicate prioritizing quality over speed, but this isnât concrete proof that the code is actually good quality. How would you reply to someone that claims that Ethereumâs code is bad code?
Bloomberg guy Eric B is stating that out of all the inflow into new ETFS, 2/3 is actually new flow, and 1/3 is people swapping from ETHE to low fee ones
This would be super bullishâŚ
https://x.com/Evan_ss6/status/1816882268075372756
If @EricBalchunas is correct here, this would be outrageously bullish
New ETFs have taken in $978MM in 3 days.
At 2/3 new, thatâs $652MM or $217.3MM a day
During slow summer
Big if, small sample, but even something modest like $30-60MM a day would be bullish
Regarding the recent Compound governance attack the real danger here isnât that they rugged the treasury. However much they stole there isnât enough liquidity to exit that amount. The real danger is they went from having outsized control of the governance to do something like this to defacto ownership of the governance system to do whatever else they want soon.
Iâll remind everyone that Compound doesnât use isolated lending pools. Every depositor/borrowable asset is at risk against price losses of every collateral asset. So the real risk here is that they mint a token e.g. LogrisShitCoin, seed it against a tiny amount of liquidity to give it a price while owning 100% of it, vote to enable use of that token as collateral, borrow all the assets in Compound, and let the liquidations rack up bad debt behind them.
If you have assets in Compound this is your cue to switch to an isolated lending pool strategy. We used to have more of these but some like Rari and Euler have gone the way of the dodo. Euler v2 is just around the corner but given their history Iâd probably give that a year before trying it. Otherwise I can recommend Silo, Gearbox, Ajna, or Llamalend.
Itâs really cool that I was able to traverse back one day at a time a whole year via Daily Doots without encountering a single broken link. Great job, u/Tricky_Troll and Substidoots!
Anyways, I was looking for a list of scams techniques that our community has encountered. Hereâs a short summary of the scams and how to avoid them, if even possible.
####Google Ad links
How it worked: User searched for polymarket and clicked on a google sponsored ad link (right above the actual link) directing to an identical page with a 1-character domain name difference. User then signed a permit Tx draining user of a specific token.
How to prevent:
A wallet guard or advanced-security wallet like Rabby wallet can prevent some of these kinds of attacks.
####Bridge hack
How it worked: DeFI protocol LI.FIâs L2 Bridge got hacked. Contract was drained. (User narrowly avoided hack by using good practices.)
How to prevent: Donât approve more than you need to use. Try to use official bridges when possible. Be careful with DeFi bridges.
####Persistent spear phishing attack + Homoglyph attack
How it worked: Attacker called and emailed multiple times about a known recent hack of specific account belonging to the user that got its info leaked (the leak part was true). They had the userâs account due to the recent leak. The domain was indistinguishable from the official domain, but it used an identical-looking foreign character instead of the real English character (a homoglyph). User didnât fall for it, but attack was convincing due to its persistence and professionalism.
How to prevent: Remain skeptical about calls and emails. Always be wary of ayone who tries to rush you into making hasty decisions. Always check email and website domains, though in this case that wouldnât have helped since the domain was practically indistinguishable (homoglyph). In this case, donât click on the email link. Instead, retype the link in the address bar.
####Home break-in with armed attackers
How attacked: Crypto dev with 10k followers had a home break-in with armed attackers
How to prevent: Well, this is really hard to prevent if you already have your info public due to a previous mass data leak. Everyone has already had their data leaked multiple times. If youâre rich, maybe get good security and have a throwaway wallet. Honestly, I donât really have a good way to prevent this. On the other hand, this attack is not specific to crypto.
####Address poisoning a test transaction
How it worked: User made test transaction (which is good practice) in preparation for a bigger transaction. Immediately got address-poisoned by an attacker monitoring whale addresses. User then used the poisoned address from the accountâs transaction history. (Story seems a bit fishy since the user shouldâve been an expert at avoiding common attacks.)
How to prevent: Use an address book with whitelisted addresses. Be wary of address poisoning attacks. Donât copy addresses from the transaction history.
####Liquidity Pool was hacked
How it worked: Self-explanitory. Liquidity Pool was hacked. Userâs LP wallet was drained.
How to prevent: Be careful when joining LPs. Some of them have bugs or exploits. User was able to avoid heavy damage because he kept his LP wallet separated from his main wallets.
####Warpcast frames
How it worked: Blindly trusting a mint via a Warpcast frame
How to prevent: Donât immediately assume that people on Warpcast are trustworthy. Treat it like a slightly-safer Twitter.
####Supply-side attack
How it worked: 2 separate reports for this kind of hack. In one, a hacker pulled off a BGP hijack (compromises routing protocol) of a crypto platformâs service provider. In another, hacker compromised a github account of a library the a wallet software used.
How to prevent: If youâre the end user, there is no practical way to prevent this kind of attack. It doesnât matter if itâs crypto or traditional finance, a supply-side attack can destroy you, and thereâs very little you can do about it. Stick with wallets and platforms that have good security practices to minimize the chances of this happening. Realistically, if some infrastructureâs DNS or BGP gets hijacked, even crypto security experts can get screwed.
####Fake revoke scam
How it worked: This got reported multiple times, though I donât think anyone on the sub fell for it. Basically, after a large hack, scammers would link to fake revoke_dot_cash sites hoping to trick careless users who were rushing to revoke their approvals/permits.
How to prevent: Donât fall for schemes that try to rush you into doing something and making a careless mistake. Type in website addresses manually.
In 2022, I started writing a book on crypto, that I intended to self publish to help complete beginners get a head start on the philosophy of crypto, how to get into it, how to self custody funds and how to avoid scams.
I never quite finished everything, I had a little over 30 thousand words, but I did ask for help for scam examples in this subreddit at the time.
Today I decided to publish the âidentifying and avoiding scamsâ section because the longer I wait to ever publish this, the more outdated itâll be. Itâs likely already outdated. It was still missing some examples I wanted to show, but I believe itâs already valuable enough to at least post here.
Here it is in case anyone wants to take a look: https://dac.ac/blog/identifying_and_avoiding_crypto_scams
Feedback is appreciated too, just bear in mind that not even I have given it a full re-read in a couple years.
Thereâs an acknowledgements section at the bottom giving credit to those who helped me out, but I want give a shout out to them here too:
Our boy Song A Day Mann is suing the SEC for the sake of all NFT projects lol
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/i1yd58id0lcbez3x2hiqp/1-2024-07-29-Complaint.pdf
Tweet where I highlight how to present yield distributions for non-pooled stakers. Some webpages and researchers rely on things like the median across all validators over some minuscule time period, averaging these medians over time. This fails to capture the probabilistic outcome facing the solo staker. Half of the validators will never propose a block during the same day, yet half will still propose within a few months. Order statistics are instead relevant on a per-validator basis over longer time.
To check if it is raining, do not extend your hand and measure the median number of fingers impacted by raindrops every millisecond. The result will always be zero; yet it might still rain.
The figure shows how distributions vary with pool size after one year. This is a more appropriate way to communicate order statistics. The tiny vertical black line segment is the solo stakers that do not have a block proposal or sync-committee duty over a year, presented as the âall-time medianâ on sites such as Rated. The real median outcome facing solo stakers after one year is indicated by a black arrow, fairly close already to the expected yield.
The context of this discussion is the modeling assumptions in the post on maximum viable security (MVS).
The modeling and the same figure can also be found in my latest response to that post.
Ethereum came a long way:
When I joined prediction markets and decentralized social media were concepts people pointed at when discussing potential use cases of the network
Today both concepts are implemented (polymarket, Farcaster) and show how it all makes sense. The teams that implemented them were not the ones which people initially thought would but thatâs the beauty of decentralization
Both of these are early and have lots of growth ahead but weâre at a stage where weâre beyond imagining with live apps in production. Weâve came a long way so far
ETH is an asset I feel comfy holding for the next 20 years+
I can not say the same about any other crypto asset. The ones that are mostly VC hyped are the ones that get dumped at the end of the cycle so I would certainly not recommend to hold these for the long run if your objective is to take home profit
How would Blackrock (or anyone else) actually implement tokenization of real world assets?
Theyâd need to maintain some centralized control even if KYC whitelisting wasnât required, just to reverse transactions of lost or stolen coins. North Korea wouldnât actually get to be part owner in Lockheed Martin because they stole some shares and âcode is lawâ. Thatâs not too big a deal because RWAs will always require trust in the issuer anyway, and Blackrock is of course more trustworthy and regulated than crypto startups like Celsius were.
I donât think Blackrock would be comfortable using existing L2s for the token smart contract. They wouldnât control the governance and any breaking changes could be catastrophic with billions (or trillions?) of dollars worth of assets at stake representing claims to real world things. I know technically this governance argument could apply to Ethereum itself, but I think Ethereum governance will always be more reliable since validators with ETH at stake are the ultimate approvers of any changes. L2s will either be centralized or have changes decided by cash grab governance tokens. If Blackrock or an industry consortium designed their own specialized and controlled L2 then wouldnât we lose most of the benefits of the openness of DeFi?
At some point itâs just easier to just build an API with specifications for transferring ownership between accounts when a trade has happened. They could even have an address / signed transaction scheme similar to blockchains so that any exchange could instant settle a trade, but that would still just be tradfi.
Iâve sold my ETH, but the possibility of RWAs coming to Ethereum gives me some FOMO because the opportunity could be absolutely massive. Iâm trying to visualize how it would actually work in a way that accrues value to ETH.
I suspect BlackRock, Nasdaq, etc⌠will run their own permissioned L2s. I.e. you cannot execute orders directly, you wonât have the private keys and a wallet to create your orders directly. Your experience as a user might be exactly the same as it is today, through your broker app. These L2s will be the underlying infrastructure where the trades are executed.
Whatâs the advantage for them? Running their trading on their systems already works and is likely cheaper in terms of infra, so why bother? The answer is composability. They will be all interconnected by Ethereum, acting as the infrastructure backbone for finance. Moving assets from one L2 to another is trivial, immediate, auditable, cryptographically secure and you know the assets are truly there. Finance works currently with D+1, D+2 settlement. During that 1 or 2 days, your assets are in the limbo. And that settlement is costly, in terms of resources and delays. Sprinkle these with a bit of zk magic, based rollups, pre-confirmations⌠and you will have global instant settlement.
For trivial stuff, like small trading, they give us the perception of immediate settlement. Your MSFT stock appears directly in your brokerage account when you click buy, but itâs not really there yet. But for big money, you cannot really trust the money is there until itâs settled. The financial world was on the brink of collapse during the 2008 crisis as nobody could trust anybody elseâs balance sheets.
Have a watch to this podcast if you havenât: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUMGYEKIiGw
Daily Holesky:
I reported something causing Nethermind to crash and it got fixed. In more exciting news, erigon has otter art now.
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Special guest Ryan McPeck joins us from Metamask.
Upcoming Guests
Ethereum
$3247.62
0.0487
90,668 hodlers subscribed (+2)
Ether ten year old,
Outperform the bitcoins sold,
A story still told.
So, during that little dip, I said to myself, Solanaâs very likely going to outperform ETH because everyoneâs retarded.
I went to hit the buy button, but my body started convulsing and I threw up in my mouth. I physically could not do it.
I bought more ETH instead.
If youâre a Rocketpool operator and havenât yet, please initialise your voting power as described here: https://medium.com/rocket-pool/rocket-pool-protocol-dao-governance-a3c3e92904e0
If you donât care about participating in governance, you should still initialise your voting power and then delegate it to someone from the delegates listed here: https://delegates.rocketpool.net/
You can always override your delegateâs decision on a particular vote if you desire.
This setup just takes two minutes and ensures the on-chain voting system can fully launch soon (theyâre waiting for 50% initialised voting power).
As per a suggestion from u/stablecoin a few weeks ago (yes Iâm slow to get onto things), us mods would like to put together a default list of flairs for users to choose from. Stablecoin suggested that this may help in discussions by providing context into the perspective through which someone is probably coming from when we are having discussions. For example, if you see a permabull flair, then maybe their hopium should be taken with a grain of salt or with a long timeframe in mind. Or, if someone has the developer or tradfi flair, then they may have some extra credibility when discussing those topics.
So, anyway, please help us brainstorm a list and we will get them on the default flair options!
Starting off, this is me borrowing from what u/stablecoin put:
DeFi Power User
Home Staker
Value Extractor/Mercenary
Trader
SocialFi & NFTs Enthusiast
Here for the societal revolution
Please brainstorm away! Cheers!
I have continued the âeducational battleâ/âfight the misinformation campaignâ on /r/investing. Itâs really amazing how poorly Bitcoiners understand their own investment.
Here I explain that Bitcoin is, in fact, not unstoppable. On the contrary, it will stop itself in the year 2038 due to a time overflow bug. The fix to this requires a hard fork. The issue is that they have pinned themselves into a corner by making hard forks taboo. A hard fork is also what you need to change the issuance schedule of Bitcoin, if you fix this bug it would be implicit recognition that 21M is not a feature of Bitcoin code, but of social consensus and it can be changed through social consensus.
When you have been in this space long enough you understand that people that approached Bitcoin over a decade ago through an ideological lens, are not Bitcoiners anymore. Those that approached this space with the intent of removing the monopoly of money from the State and giving back the rights that governments had been eroding for decades from their citizens, have left and moved on to Ethereum. And likely this will remain the case for as long as Ethereum keeps fighting for those principles through math.
Ethereumâs development resembles much more the discovery process of science, Ethereum is not the way it is because of capricious choices. Itâs the way it is because the constraints you have to work with are so binding that it cannot be in many other ways if you want to maintain security, decentralization, credible neutrality, censorship resistance, scale to the serve the world needs, inherit those security properties on the upper layers of the financial world, etcâŚ
These properties alone have lead us to PoS, EIP-1559 burn mechanism, the roll-up centric roadmap. These choices are a result of these constraints, and there really is very little leeway around it, as far as we know.
In much the same way Einsteinâs theory of relativity is not the way it is because scientists decided those were the equations. Itâs the simplest solution that respects relativity, respects the equivalence principle, reproduces Newtonâs gravity in the low energy/low speed regimes, reproduces the gravitational curvature of light, the precession of perihelion of Mercury. Those requirements are binding enough to give you Einsteinâs field equations.
There are some higher order details that can be tuned in both General Relativity and Ethereum, but the core principles become rather constrained to the point there is a single theory that meets all those in the case of General Relativity. Itâs unclear to me yet if the case is as constraining for Ethereum, but we are progressively getting there as we understand better this problem space.
I made a post about blockchain resilience to bugs in a separate thread between PoW and PoS:
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1e8a62w/pow_vs_pos_and_safety_vs_resilience_why_ethereum/
Itâs quite long, so here are just the Preface and Summary sections. Use the link above if you want to read the rest of it.
##Preface
I originally wrote this piece after Ethereum lost finality back in May 2023 twice when both the Prysm and Teku minority clients encountered bugs. Around then, Vitalik also dicussed the possibility and concerns for staking bailouts in his âDonât overload Ethereumâs consensusâ article if a catatrophic bug were to happen.
Iâm updating and reposting this in light of 2 recent events:
This is a reminder that there is a reason Ethereum updates are slow and methodical and use multiple testnets.
It only takes one unlucky bug to cause catastrophic damage to the blockchain and cause a mass-slashing event where the majority of stakers will lose their Ether. We got lucky back in 2023 because the bugs were in minority clients and it only halted finality. A bug affecting the majority of clients might not happen now or even in the next decade, but there may be one day where another catastrophic event as damaging as the 2016 DAO hack causes the chain to split again.
##Summary
Historically, successful PoW attacks have been numerous, but successful PoS attacks are virtually non-existent.
History has proven that PoS consensus is a more secure alternative to PoW consensus against Sybil attacks like the 51% attack. However, this is at the cost of PoS being less resilient than PoW for disaster recovery. This is because PoW by design allows for miners to re-attack/reorg the blockchain to revert mistakes.
While client bugs are exceptionally rare, they do occur, and most PoS blockchains have no on-chain method to revert past finality. Itâs important to avoid reorgs in the first place because any transations that finalize off-chain through DEXs, bridges, and CEXs are often irreversible even after the blockchain is reverted.
Similar to the Blockchain Trilemma where there are trade offs between Security, Decentralization, and ScalabilityâResilience is also a tradeoff of Security.
Even the 2 biggest blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum (when it was still using PoW), have encountered 51% attacks. Bitcoin (in 2010 and 2013) and PoW Ethereum (in 2016 and 2016) had both been successfully 51% attacked twice each in order to fix catastrophic bugs and issues. It would be extremely difficult if not impossible to accomplish this in reasonable time under PoS Ethereum and most other decentralized PoS blockchains today.
Past finality, it usually requires a DAO-hack like chain split or bailout to undo a catastrophe: i.e. through Layer 0 community consensus and off-chain governance.
ETHE rotating FYI
The NAV price of an ETF corrects at the end of the day, but can deviate a bit during trading hours because of supply and demand forces.
Nobody likes the high ETHE fees, but it might be worth waiting a couple weeks before switching to a different ETH ETF as the ETHE sell pressure early on may push it below NAV during the day. If you sell ETHE and immediately buy another ETH ETF, you may end up with slightly less ETH value than you had before.
This was evidenced during the first week or so for GBTC when the BTC ETFs started trading. Immense sell pressure during the day took GBTC below NAV and strong buy pressure for the popular BTC ETFs may even have pushed them slightly above NAV during trading hours. Those that quickly sold GBTC and immediately rebought another BTC ETF early on often lost a bit of their value.
Best of luck, may the ETH ETFs help take us to the promised land.
Hereâs my understanding of how it works. Letâs say you have 1000 shares of ETHE purchases at $20 each, and these shares represent 10 ETH for easy math.
Since settlement for shares is T+1 and the âRecord Dateâ is today the 18th at 4:00 PM, any shares purchased before today will be included in the spin off to the mini ETF. Now if you fall in that camp this is what will happen.
You still own 1000 shares of ETHE but they only represent 9 ETH now, so your cost basis on those ETHE shares is now $18/share. You will also own (on a later date to be determined, the âDistribution Dateâ) 1000 shares of mini-ETH representing 1 ETH, or a $2/share cost basis.
If you sell your ETHE shares today or beyond, you will still receive your 1000 shares of mini-ETH because of the T+1 settlement. This also means that if you buy ETHE today, you will not receive any mini-ETH shares.
So, the 10% âdiscountâ is not really a discount and is pricing in the new NAV, meaning itâs basically at fair value.
Iâm a longtime follower who primarily lurks the daily since finding Ethereum in 2017. I want to share my story about my massive wake-up call on the importance of account security and backups after becoming complacent due to my time spent in the space. You never think it could happen to youâŚ
For 3 weeks, I believed I lost access to all my crypto savings and cold wallet / validator withdrawal address. I travel extended periods for work and have some large life expenses right now, so I brought my Ledger with me. Not the first time Iâve travelled with it, but it is the first time I had a bag stolen. I was frustrated but knew I had my seed phrase stored and could recover when I returned home.
Iâve recently bought my first house and moved in with my partner. In the confusion of moving 2 apartments into one, my recovery sheet and other old 2017 financial records were missing. I was feeling pretty despondent knowing that my carelessness and non-urgency about prepping for disaster recovery were starting to bite me in the ass. I fully believed that I lost access to my cold savings and minipools.
Itâs not like I couldnât afford my mortgage, but all hope I had for early financial independence were gone. That planned 2 year maternity leave, funded by ETH, for my pregnant partner wasnât financially feasible anymore.
I did eventually find my ratty old college notebook with my Ledger seed phrase scrawled in the margins from 2017 when I originally set it up. The euphoria and relief on that day was enormous. I got lucky, I restored everything and have it all secured now. But I feel the need to share my near miss with others so that no one has to feel that rollercoaster of emotion going forward. I made plenty of mistakes to put myself in this situation.
My advice learnt from this; Setup an annual recovery method testing reminder. If you have a trusted partner, teach them about how to access things in the event you pass away. Keep your position records up to date, it also makes me less inclined to toss ETH into various flavours of the month that inevitably crash and burn. Pull the trigger on that Eversteel and set it up properly.
I made my mistakes but got lucky. Dont let complacency and one moment of misfortune ruin multiple years of making the right decision to invest and hold Ether.
https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1815316383233925498
ETH is 10 years old today!
The ether ICO started July 22, 2014. Back then ETH was sold on Bitcoin at a rate of 2,000 ETH per 1 BTCâtotally permissionless, no VCs, no vesting.
Today 1 BTC buys less than 20 ETH. Few assets have outperformed BTC over 10 years; even fewer have outperformed by 100x.
ETH is blockspace currency. 4.3M ETH have been burned to pay for gas since EIP-1559. Many more millions of ETH will be burned for blobs.
Through staking ETH provides $100B of economic security for Ethereum, 10x more than Bitcoin. ETH is also pristine collateral for defi and restaking, unlocking economic bandwidth in size for the internet of value.
Tomorrow ETH spot ETFs start trading in the US. ETH is now widely recognised as a digital commodity. The institutional journey is starting.
And for those who know what the emojis mean, ETH is đŚđ :)
The clock started today my friends.
The trifecta will burn from today forward of: (1) 1559/merge tokenomics, (2) growth of L2 usage/competition and the ETH ecosystem and dapp creation (enabled by cheaper transaction fees and a growing developer base), and now (3) tradfi and retirement account access (ETFs).
Cry all youâd like about the ratio bleed until now. I remember 2019 well. We bled until the eventual lows in the fall even through the optimism and fake breakout of BTC and crypto in the first half of the year. If you were there, you know how things went. If you werenât, open the charts.
I shook my head often over this year as I see ratio complainers or people impatient for a golden bull. Thereâs never been a crypto bull run in history short of a 3+ year bear market. Iâm not saying it canât happen from here forward, but until it happens, we should exercise caution with our impatience.
Iâm one of the people who thought weâd ratio gain throughout this year. I was wrong. But, zooming out, and overall, the ratio has held stronger and better than anyone could have imagined in 2018-20. Now the games begin as we have the banks and tradfi financially incentivized to explain the benefits of ETH, as the ecosystem itself continues to improve itself and expand/grow. Make no mistake, this will still take some time to percolate. Enjoy the ride.
Happy ETF launch day. Our first future bull with all the pieces align. It only took 7 Lubins and I still pray nightly for Vitalik to not turn off the master node.
Hereâs something thatâs been bothering me for years. As Ethereum continues to gain adoption, I cannot see a future where Ethereum is left to be a neutral settlement layer without having itâs fair share of battles.
How will large financial institutions excercise control over Ethereum? As centralized stablecoins increase in size and gain adoption, and large TradFi institutions accumulate and stake ETH, the economic and social power will shift towards them and away from retail.
How does the community ensure development of Ethereum doesnât get co-opted by these institutions?
Centralized Stablecoin liquidity and support is a huge social attack vector. While I doubt the ETH devs and researchers will care about that, the social pressure from the community may become to loud to ignore if coordinated propaganda is used.
Large TradFi institutions may also begin funding client teams or even create new clients themselves. Iâve already seen questions of conflict of interests raised proposed ERCs and upgrade proposals. I can only imagine what would happen as larger financial players enter the scene.
Creating troll armies are easier than ever and can quickly flood social forums with coordinated messaging. These social attacks would be the most impactful as they would cause the most confusion in discussions. The discord from bad faith actors could put a stranglehold on development and research.
Anyway, thatâs my half baked doom and gloom. Havenât been posting here since reddit got rid of the 3rd party mobile apps but Iâm trying to get used to the Reddit app now.
Iâm DELIGHTED to share this Ethereum Spot ETF POAP with everyone. Not just because of the collectible, but because of all of the years it took for us to get to this place. Congratulations frens! POAP mint requires a $3 donation to AestusRelay
https://checkout.poap.xyz/176266
Congratulations everyone :)
Donât mind me, just bumping u/stablecoinâs post from the end of yesterdayâs daily.
https://juicebox.money/@defend-roman-storm
stop larping about freedom and make it happen. donate to Roman Storm to keep him out of jail and ensure the freedoms of censorship resistance transactions.
LifelongHODL then asked:
Who is Roman Storm?
Tricky:
A Tornado Cash developer.
So basically a man who is being prosecuted for spreading what has previously been defined by the US supreme court as free speech. Should an arms manufacturer go to prison for a mass shooting? No, that would be ridiculous. So why should he go to prison for creating a piece of open source software which allows me to stop people connecting my public facing wallet to my cold storage just because North Korea also uses the same tool? Surprise surprise, North Korea also uses the internet. But I donât see the US government charging web 2 companies or Tim Berners Lee for that.
This is a huge double standard and we will be living in a very dark future indeed if the US government wins its case against the Tornado Cash developers.
Edit: Also, u/stablecoin is there an update or something? I see a recent uptick in donations.
Edit 2: Update: https://x.com/FreeAlexeyRoman/status/1815466170948219153
Theyâre running low on funds for the upcoming trial. Their fees are $500K/month 𤯠reason being itâs a novel case and they really need as robust of a defence as possible.
Upcoming Guests
Ethereim
$3085.73
0.054
Day 666 since the merge.
290tps
Markets wind the clock,
Use cases filling the block,
An EthCC talk.
Life cycle of an ETH holder:
Source : my poor decisions
the real cycle is:
rinse and repeat
The year is 2098. After years of building the network, Eth finally touches $5k for 0.08 seconds before being sold into oblivion. The poap is deployed, but weâre all dead anyway. If you go to a cemetery and listen closely, you can hear the muffled cheers of dead Ethereans celebrating that they were right the whole time.
Guys, Iâm kinda freaking out, if someone could help me understand whatâs happening, Iâd be very thankful.
I have a Compound position that I intend(ed?) to leave running for the long term, managed with Defi Saver, on the Base Layer 2 network. It supplies cbETH and boosts by borrowing ETH, buying more cbETH and supplying that etc.
So I wake up today to find that my APY, which last I saw was 15%, is now at -40%. This caught me by surprise, as you can imagine. The reason has to do with the price of borrowing ETH, which went up from 1% to around 8%.
I had a CDP position back when it blew up, in 2019 if Iâm not mistaken, so at first I thought some kind of problem like that, but I come here and no one seems to be talking about anything related to this, no crisis, no liquidity problem on ETH or anything like that.
So can anyone shed some light on this? Should I liquidate this position right now, or is this a temporary thing that will normalize soon?
Hey, good ser, so a person from defi saver here, as u/TheCryptosAndBloods mentioned below (thanks for the tag once again!).
These kinds of spikes in borrowing rates are common in all pool-based money market protocols (i.e. protocols such as Aave, Compound, Morpho Blue) where rates constantly change based on current overall utilisation of the used pool.
I wouldnât panic about it and would rather wait it out for a day or two to see how the rates change further. Usually thereâll be new (ETH) depositors quickly that have noticed the high available APY for supplying, which is usually considered one of the lower risk opportunities for yield on ETH when it comes to tier 1 protocols such as these.
Hope that clarifies things?
And p.s. the net APY specifically is calculated based on your position balance and how it would change in one year from now based on current supply & borrow APYs, if that wasnât clear.
Excellent tweet from [@materkel](https://x.com/materkel):
Iâm kind of fed up with all the negativity around #Ethereum and Rollups when the whole ecosystem is shipping out of its mind right now. People who look at what we have now and still think Ethereum should have scaled L1 first⌠are you all out of your minds?
Let me tell you what approximately would have happened if we scaled L1: - Maybe 50-100 TPS now on L1⌠wow⌠Iâm sure all the skeptics would have jumped on Ethereum L1 and done all their stuff there. - Rollups that were previously aligned with Ethereum would most definitely have chosen alternative solutions for DA to meaningfully scale (which is now possible using Ethereum as DA). - We would not have hundreds of Rollup teams contributing back to the Ethereum and EVM ecosystem. - Minimal marketing for the Ethereum ecosystem⌠L2s would just end up doing their own thing, because why should they stay if Ethereum chose to abandon them in the most critical of times?
Ethereum would have essentially pushed the most valuable allies away despite funding a lot of the ZK and rollup research in the past (even 5+ years ago).
We now get so much more back from L2s, and with PeerDAS and full proto-Danksharding on the horizon, there will be no argument left for why those rollups should even think about doing their âown thingâ or choosing a different DA. I mean, look at what is happening with $TIA⌠Ethereum is basically eating their lunch right now.
We now have: - Multiple Consensus and Execution Client Teams making Ethereum the most decentralized public Blockchain to ever exist by a large margin. AFAIK no other Blockchain even has 2 meaningfully adopted clients⌠Ethereum has 7 clients with >10% distribution, thatâs just incredible if you think about it - Multiple Rollups that are among the most active chains right now - Both @base and @arbitrum breaking their own records every few days, attracting billions in TVL and millions of users, shipping out of their minds, having meaningful traction, and a growing app ecosystem - Multiple more theme-focused, Ethereum-aligned L2s like e.g. @Immutable onboarding hundreds of game studios and eventually millions of gamers - Account abstraction wallets that wouldnât have been easily possible on L1 (at least not so soon) via @Immutable passport or @infinex_app offering sponsored meta transactions - The cheapest L1 gas fees weâve probably ever had. Introducing blobs with EIP-4844 made room for more meaningful transactions. At peak times, L2s made up for up to ~30% of the Ethereum blockspace (this most likely still is temporary and also bought us some time to give L1 some love)
I have no doubt in my mind that what Ethereum did has led to the absolute best outcome for the protocol we could have hoped for in the last 3-4 years. Of course, L1 could have used some love, but that critique is on such a high level that it feels like weâre just coping because the price is not catching up with fundamentals.
If you had told me where Ethereum would be right now 3-4 years ago, I couldnât have imagined a more solid position for it to be in.
Now we can discuss what should be next and that going further down the Rollup path might be a bad idea, or that we should focus on fixing fragmentation, etc., and that delaying this and that in favor of some L1 love is a good idea. Iâm totally into that, but please stop with all the coping when we basically just shipped an upgrade that gave @base and other Rollups <1 cent fees ~4 months agoâŚ
#Ethereum and its whole ecosystem is still winning, and nothing can stop it from winning even more, as the whole behemoth that is thousands of ecosystem teams all shipping in parallel is just getting started.
(* These arenât my words, but I didnât feel like doing a massive quote block to share it! -phiz)
I know Iâve been woefully non-reporting my ARB delegate updates the last month, but for those who want to check voting records I did make a reporting thread a few months ago if people want to follow for the links to all my votes + rationale
https://forum.arb.seamonkey.tech/t/bob-rossi-delegate-communication-thread/23653
Beyond basic duties, notable projects Iâve taken on recently. Which if people want to discuss / voice opinions about Iâm all ears.
Also donât forget ARB is still running the LTIPP incentives so there are likely some good projects out there to earn some extra APY, or simply getting rewarded for using. Here is the list of them all if your curious - Powerhouse Connect (arbgrants.com). May I suggest checking out the âHâ section as well, although forgive me as iâve been busy and a little behind on what I need to update (I will be this weekend)
On Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Altcoins
Many people might have noticed that Iâm one of the most vehemently anti-Bitcoin people in here, and also very often diss Altcoins. They are not wrong. So I will attempt to explain why thereâs a world of difference between a Bitcoin Maxi and an Ethereum Maxi.
Itâs strange, because I was really, really late on Ethereum, and really into Bitcoin. Not only was I completely oblivious to its existence until 2017, I even initially dismissed it as another altcoin thatâs going to zero. Up until 2018, I was essentially a Bitcoin Maxi. After a few short months or reading up on several coins, getting heavily rekt in the 2018 crash betting on NANO, and educating myself about crypto, I had completely converter to Ethereum. And I left Bitcoin completely behind.
Why is that?
Greshamâs law states that bad money drives out good money. The good money that is driven out is hoarded, so if it is scarce, it increases in value. Many people understand this as âCrypto will always outperform Fiat because itâs better moneyâ. But thereâs another angle to it. In my opinion, this applies even more strongly within the highly liquid and interconnected crypto ecosystem, sucking value out of every single Altcoin and giving it to the leading crypto, which is the one that has the most âmoneynessâ. During this process, the leading crypto builds even more status as money, and altcoins are dismissed as bad investments at best or scams at worst.
Every cycle, once the speculative frenzy dies out, and it eventually does, every single crypto ends up being valued exactly as a company stock: according to the current and future profits it can bring to the holder, taking into account the potential for its future growth. For most altcoins, that means following an asymptote to zero, since they donât really have any profits.
Why has Ether escaped this fate for a couple of cycles? After all, Ethereum is constantly regarded as one of the most undervalued altcoins not just by Ethereans (of course we would think that) but even by neutral Altcoiners. âEthereum can only dump after good newsâ is a meme in most crypto subreddits. But somehow Etherum persists. In my opinion, this can be explained because even though in the minds of the majority Ethereum is still an altcoin, itâs again valued as a stock: according to its profits. Itâs seen as undervalued precicely because a lot of speculative value has evaporated due to it having been around for a couple of cycles. The fact that itâs not only profitable, but the only profitable altcoin (OK thereâs also BNB and maybe TRON with some light profits) is the reason it is not following every single other crypto to oblivion.
Every single crypto⌠except one. The one that in the minds of the majority is the best money. The one that every single cycle, without fail, will be the safe haven thatâs not going to zero, because it has a hard support of rabid acolytes that see it as the best money on Earth. Bitcoin.
So, sometime during Ethereumâs development, I think some very smart people realized that this is the game. As a result, Ether is the only crypto that has worked and fought to be seen as a better money. Ultrasound money might or might not be the best attempt to communicate that to the general public, but in my opinion is very apt.
Ethereum is an absolutely unique altcoin in this regard, because from the moment it was created, its scope and capabilities exceeded Bitcoinâs by such a huge margin, that it could legitimately claim to be the money of the crypto ecosystem, superseding Bitcoin.
Many of you think thereâs room for both BTC and ETH on the ecosystem. Sure, thereâs room for both, if BTC is the money and ETH keeps being valued as a stock. If BTC reaches $1M and ETH reaches $12K.
But if you want a $150K Ether, then you just canât have Bitcoin being seen as the better money. And if Bitcoin ceases to be seen as the better money, itâs not even going to be in the top 20 on Coinmarketcap.
So, when you people try to be moderate with Bitcoin Maxis in order to drive a civilized discussion you miss the fact that this is impossible. The smart Maxis know that Ethereum is a mortal threat to Bitcoin. Thereâs no civilized discussion that can happen in light of this fact. They can only dismiss Ethereum as the worst shitcoin, because acknowledging it might lead some moderate Bitcoiners or people that are on the fence to jump ship. And when youâve build a personal brand and an entire livelihood on Bitcoin being the best money, you might not be able to do the same. But even though you might know that Ethereum is objectively better money, you do have some very strong weapons to fight back. The early Bitcoiners are some of the wealthiest people in the ecosystem. They can help launch âEthereum killersâ and pump them 2000%. They can spread FUD. They can go on podcasts and shit on Ethereum non-stop. The vitriol and dismissal Iâve seen against Ethereum from smug Maxis is not even close to other altcoins.
Because they realize the fact that you can have many cryptocurrencies and a thriving ecosystem, but not all of them can be money. Crypto needs a King. And so far, this Maxi strategy is working, because it keeps Bitcoinâs network effect intact and damages Ethereumâs. And the network effect is the only thing that gives money its value.
So, I am an Ethereum Maxi. But hereâs the difference: I am not an Ethereum Maxi because I canât move to Bitcoin. I am late enough to be neither rich or have buit a business around Ethereum. Iâm a Maxi because Ethereum is just better. So, unlike Bitcoin Maxis, I donât really have to resort to arguments found at the lowest levels of Grahamâs argument pyramid. I can make intelligent points, refute Maxiâs stupid arguments, and be an Ethereum Maxi myself. Itâs easy, because there not even a conflict. The world benefits along with my bags, which I think is pretty rare.
So be a Maxi, because what Ethereum is trying to do is neither easy nor certain. We are coming for the King, and we definitely best not miss.
ACDE 191 Recap posted by ralexstokes in the ETH R&D Discord:
ACDE 191 Recap
Started with Pectra updates
** Note: devnet-1 will reflect the current spec of EIP-7702
Then turned to discuss EIP-7212
Next, we discussed a proposal to add events to the predeploy system contracts for cross-layer communication with EIP-7002 and EIP-7251. Consensus was that this change makes sense and the corresponding contracts will be updated.
Then, we had a call to deactivate EIP-158 to simplify the effects of deploying EIP-7702 and the Verkle migration. In light of the latest updates to 7702 we no longer need this proposal and decided to ignore it.
And to wrap the call, we had a discussion around making progress on other protocol improvements like history expiry and changes to the blob mempool to streamline usage of blobs by users like rollups. We jumped across various concerns here so check the call for the details. In short, there was a call for more regular updates on EIP-4444âs progress, and a call out to various things both rollups and clients can do to more intelligently handle the pipeline from blob producer to blob inclusion on-chain.
Reminder: Goerli has been deprecated and so clients will (or have already!) dropped support for this testnet.
200 sustained tp/s and still only 1-2gwei gas fees
we are severely over capacity
the infrastructure currently in place is able to support so many more users
it will destroy all shred of doubt whether or not blockchain can scale to support the entire world as it was intended to
the next bull run will be like nothing weâve ever seen
and the etfs going live might just be the linchpin
cba for the flippening
I want to see the great supply crunch as the economic beast awakens and is firing on all cylinders
on to the next cycle of new tech â> new users get interested â> eventually current tech limits are hit â> users face frustration and lose interest â> technology improves and readies itself for round of user adoption â> repeat
Itâs safe to say weâve at least x100 our user capacity since the last big bull run
now let the users come back and see what happens
Iâll never forget this time I was waiting at a bar for my btc transactions to be confirmed, had to wait over an hour to get the needed confirmations, PoW RNG be damned. The UX experience is crazy much better compared to back then.
At some point, weâre all going to realize this technology isnât going anywhere and is not a ponzi, or at least, not any more than all other fiat is.
Except that this is money by the people, for the people.
How did you find your way to ethfinance?
My story was that I was a semi active user on r/silverbugs and r/pmsforsale. Around 2016 I noticed more people accepting âcryptoâ as payment. I remember someone selling about $50 worth of silver for something like 10 eth. Once the boom of winter 2017 happened a few friends brought crypto back up and we all bought the top (btc, eth, ltc). Thatâs when I found ethtrader and became a lurker. Once ethtrader dissolved into whatever the hell it is now, I followed dcinvestor, jt and a few others here where I still am someone active.
Adding to the staking posts below (or above if youâre in Australia) - I have also been onboarded to NodeSet recently, and my first testnet validator went live today and is chugging away just fine. The Gravita project looks good, but Constellation is the one I have my eye on - basically staking for and on behalf of others via RocketPool, taking a cut of their earnings for running the node - hopefully coming by next year.
Iâve also just signed up for the Stakers Union, and have been having fun with Heroglyphs the last few weeks, and there is Etherguardians coming up soon too.
This has been the best and most interesting few months for a home staker like me, at least since the excitement of Genesis - itâs great to see community efforts to encourage and reward home staking that are supported by the ecosystem as a whole . A big shout out to u/superphiz for his ceaseless efforts, as always.
A few months ago I was onboarded as an operator with nodeset. I have been running a few thousand genesis validators alongside a dozen or so other techno-acolytes that coalesced in the rocketpool discord, so I threw my hat in as I thought I had some qualifying experience in and around the college ball level.
Well, the first validator I have spun up using their hyperdrive software stack goes live in about an hour on holesky, and I am looking forward to spinning many up on mainnet when the opprotunity to do so presents itself. The software stack is straight forward and does require some registering on their website to finish things off, but overall the process was painless and left me feeling good about the whole thing.
There already are some lucky operators attesting on mainnet permitting the existence of Gravita Protocolâs LST, gravETH which is a part of the Stakewise Vault ecosystem. I havenât kept up with stakewise recently, but I did lose some eth trading their token like, a year or more ago. Not a knock on them or anything, I am just a bad trader.
Gravita does have a points program running (they call them marks) and while I donât know too much about their roadmap, I do think the space/time dilation art style and theme is kickass. Itâs hard to launch an LST in this already crowded market, but I wanna take a minute to remind everyone that every additional LST out there helps decentralize the entire network a little bit more. Which is overall good.
Diva/Nektar staking development is coming along, as is Lidoâs CSM which is also currently operating on testnet with some early permissioned adopters. I am on this list, but have not yet gotten around to spinning up another VM. Will try to find the time today or tomorrow but several big-ass tree limbs came down in a storm yesterday that I have to bust out the chainsaw to deal with unexpectedlyâŚand as much as I enjoy a hard-days work outdoorsâŚI am doing all of this keyboard clacking and button clicking in an attempt to not have to do as much manual labor.
Vaya con dios, amigos.
Staking survey data just dropped on ethstaker. The most surprising stat for me is that 77% are staking 60-100% of their ETH. I know us solo stakers are in it for the long haul, but damn that is a lot higher than I imagined.
Livestream Recording | No POAP
View weekly roundup on Reddit âSpecial guest Brendan Asselstine joins us from PoolTogether, a protocol to win while saving.
Announcements
ĂhâŚthereum?
90,560 hodlers suhhâŚubscribed (+4)
$3509
0.0544
Bridge in and bridge out,
An habit we must ditch out,
Intents will switch out.
Itâs 3am and Gary hasnât been home yet. Heâs sweating, gently waxing his red stapler for the last time over a bottle of Jim Beam. Elizabeth Warren said he could only keep the stapler, which he stole from the strange man in the basement, if he destroyed crypto. After glossing over the TPS reports on his desk in a bourbon-daze, Gary picks up the phone. A smokey Eldritch voice answers.
âItâs Gary,â Gary says, wondering if any other color of stapler will ever fill the vessel of his soul like the red one has. âDrop the investigations against ETH.â
He pours himself and his red stapler a snifter of whisky; then he simply weeps.
(Which is to say: https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-to-drop-ethereum-investigation-says-consensys)
[edit] these amendments are in committee still and likely will be tough for Brad to get his way this time. we will know more when the bill is finalized. [/edit]
Brad Sherman just cucked the USA again by effectively banning P2P crypto amending shit last minute into a must pass defense bill.
Every node connects to Russia, every transaction must be doxed. There is no escaping this hell until the tech is so innocuous and private it is impossible to regulate.
https://x.com/eleanorterrett/status/1801228173851394204
đ¨NEW: California Democrat @BradSherman filed an amendment with the House Rules Committee for the following to be included in the must-pass NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) bill:
- The @USTreasury Secretary would have âclear authority to prohibit digital asset trading platforms and transaction facilitators under U.S. jurisdiction from transacting with cryptocurrency addresses that are known to be, or could reasonably be known to be, in Russia.â
- @FinCENnews (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) would be able to require U.S. taxpayers engaged in a transaction with a value greater than $10K of cryptocurrency offshore to file FinCEN Form 114 (FBAR).
https://honeypot.is/?address=0xd52456e8a33718f72ba38469539c082eb761f78b
POPCAT (POPCAT)
Honeypot DetectedRun the fuck away.
execution reverted: TransferHelper: TRANSFER_FROM_FAILED
The taxes on this token are extremely high. You will get significantly less from a trade than expected, be careful!
A very high amount of users can not sell their tokens. This is likely a honeypot.
all_snipers_honeypot
From twitter:
People donât understand why markets pump. How the flow of money works. The first tier of money goes to top tier stocks and government bonds. Then to high level private equity private credit etc .. Then it flows to higher risk bonds. Then to higher risk stocksâŚto top tier corporate bonds. Lower tier private equity⌠alternative investments like bitcoin. ThenâŚ.
After everything is filled ⌠money flows to high high risk like Altcoins etc and alt stocks penny stocks what not. The reason no Altcoin or even Ethereum has hit a new ATH or broken or even come close to breaking 2021 highs is because there isnât money to make it that far.
You need liquidity events in market to reach the far depths of risk. That far depth gets touched once everything else is full. Similar to money flowing bucket to bucket. The liquidity event that happened in 2008 and 2020 has not happened yet. Liquidity events are lower rates, or stimulus. Without it you cannot have high risk products pump. In January 2024 market was pricing in a huge liquidity event for 2024. 7 rate cuts. This is why everything hit 3 year highs. This along with bitcoin etf got us a new high on BTC and saw many alts climb several 500-1000% from 2022 lows. That liquidity event never materialized. We went from 7 cuts, to 3 cuts to a shock 1 cut now for 2024. The only way for market to go back up to all time highs accross the board is for liquidity event. Unfortunately if we get a shock event like Covid , or something else black swan that forces the Fed to cut rates quicker or a hard recession itâs usually too late. Market will crash ahead of it. That crash you buy and ride it back up into the liquidity event.
Fed has decided they donât want to cut aggressively. They going to cut in December this year and then next year. This will possibly result in a recession or maybe we just see soft landing and gradual cuts over next 2/3 years. I. That scenario market will slowly grind up over next 2-3 years and we might see altcoin highs during that time. Market is forward looking so it can always change. If we approach a recession worse than expected and say u employment ticks up to 5% then Fed will cut but by then we will see a big dump in market on recession or stagflation fears.
Itâs always a tough battle. The last 15 years of bull markets were on the back of liquidity events. This is the first time we have no stimulus. Itâs a diff ball game. Itâs a much tougher grind market for high risk assets in such scenario. Thatâs why all money is flowing to easy tech stocks that are giving better returns than crypto. Nobody wants to risk anything because there is no liquidity event. Ofcourse things can change but thatâs the state of the market.
Remember that Solana chain everyone was so worried about a couple of months ago?
Solana currently has a 4.24% TVL market share over defi. Ethereum has a 60.8% market share. Include L2s and itâs closing on 70%. Include EVM chains and sidechains and itâs over 90%.
A part of me used to wish for eth to remain king on all fronts, including memecoins.
My worst case scenario used to be âeven if everything fails, thereâll still be demand for Ethereum to be the internetâs casino, which will require eth for gas (more demand) and this usage will burn eth (less supply). So even in the worst case, price goes up over timeâ.
But memecoins have migrated to Solana. Is it a bad thing? Well, not anymore.
Given the recent surge of L2s, the tx cost drops, the ETF, and the institutional demand for tokenisation, the worst case scenario is far better than it used to be. The complete vision seems to be happening, green and scalable. Ethereum becoming the worldâs settlement layer isnât a pipe dream anymore, itâs becoming a realistic scenario.
Today solana is alleviating Ethereum from scam, grifters, and hopefully regulator attention. Itâs taking the garbage that didnât require decentralization to function out of our ecosystem.
Ethereum is taking everything else.
In case you didnât see it yesterday:
Meanwhile, information sources do business as usual: Coindesk, Cointelegraph and The Block ignore Ethereum-related news or turn them into âblockchain newsâ, Crypto Twitter and YouTube shill the shaky and declining Solana, BTC cultists and Solana moonboys repeat outdated propaganda against Ethereum over and over.
Why? Because they know. They are worried.
Farmerâs POV: $ZK takeaways
My personal insights and experience from farming $ZK airdrop.
⢠Variety of strategies.
It really paid off using different strategies and although medium and small wallets basically got nothing, it was a good bet to try it out. Focusing on more than 1 big quality account was really smart and thatâs one of my main takeaways: have 5ish big juicy legit farmor accounts with a deeply rich history and previous qualifications and go at it. It also allows for easier and more pleasant farming because itâs not that tedious to repeat.
⢠Giving up small sybilling accounts.
ZKsync had 9M+ wallets and only ~696k qualified. It makes no sense to continue using low-value and quality wallets while spending oneâs time and energy. Farmers are not going away, thus youâd still need to stand out in the sea of hopeful airdrop chasers.
⢠Farming can be ze wei - great risk/reward.
Airdrop farming can be profitable due to great R/R. You have a capped downside of how much money you will burn on gas fees, NFTs, and what not and you have quite an unlimited upside. Yes, zksync had a cap at 100k points but that would have been more than enough to guarantee an insane upside.
⢠Sybilling is a must.
Due to the upside being capped sometimes, we have to hedge ourselves or, like in the case with $eigen, lower value accounts are rewarded for being too low of a value lol. For those reasons, itâs important not to whale projects unless thereâs a transparent structure of unlimited upside that aims clearly to not forego whales.
⢠Overview.
Iâve heard and been told that itâs too late to start farming yada yada but a decent chunk of $zk considering that I started late with no prior knowledge is a great accomplishment. Airdrop farming was and still is one of the most lucrative ways to gain the edge. However, I would argue that the edge lies in whaling some metrics or in the ability to access those resources to pump up your stats, and lesser accounts without that capital are unable to compete, therefore missing out on the great R/R play which in turn makes it worthwhile for lower value portfolios. Time and effort is no longer enough not just to outcompete but to even have a decent chunk of making it.
⢠$ZK price speculation.
At current premarket prices of $0.3-0.35ish, it would open at $7ish bn FDV given the 21bn of the total supply. To me, that would be a hold. As always I expect a dump at the open but being realistic even if I am not that skillful to be one of the first to dump, I wonât be able to buy back lower. Historically, it has also been true to wait for a pump within days or a week, sometimes up to 16ish days or in rare cases for up to 1.5 months. With those things in mind, I can see a dump, a post-dump pump and Iâm personally hoping for a cope pump - you know, that type of pump that TIA had. Ideally, Iâd get ~$0.7ish+ and exit.
What are your takeaways?
p.s. this better edited article + more articles, including recent ones on how to get on farcaster and tips for the newcomers are available on my paragraph
I just played around with the zksync dao tool / delegation portal and the search is⌠not optimal. I wanted to add an ENS after not having one when setting up the profile and I did, but you canât find my or any profile via ENS. I think starknet used the same tool (Tally) as well I thought it didnât work because starknet has different addresses. You also canât search for usernames, it seems to be not working by default.
So a quick summary for tomorrow in case youâre not dumping on day1:
u/haurog: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/haurog.eth or copy paste this address: 0x1c0AcCc24e1549125b5b3c14D999D3a496Afbdb1
u/_weboftrust: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x7aaba482329d001d9ab7120f0546b6760ae3fe19 or copy paste this address 0x7AAbA482329D001D9AB7120f0546B6760AE3FE19
u/benido2030: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x05429d5113c06405398f613eaad632f5a00b43e1 or copy paste this address 0x05429D5113c06405398F613EAAD632F5A00B43E1
I guess searching for the address is the easiest since I expect claiming and delegating to be one process. You probably can skip delegating and then go to the profile and delegate manually, but doing it in the claiming process is more comfyâŚ
Iâll repost tomorrow morning as well!
zkGM - reposting from yesterday re: delegation in zksync
I just played around with the zksync dao tool / delegation portal and the search is⌠not optimal. I wanted to add an ENS after not having one when setting up the profile and I did, but you canât find my or any profile via ENS. I think starknet used the same tool (Tally) as well I thought it didnât work because starknet has different addresses. You also canât search for usernames, it seems to be not working by default.
So a quick summary for tomorrow in case youâre not dumping on day1:
⢠u/haurog: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/haurog.eth or copy paste this address: 0x1c0AcCc24e1549125b5b3c14D999D3a496Afbdb1
⢠u/_weboftrust: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x7aaba482329d001d9ab7120f0546b6760ae3fe19 or copy paste this address 0x7AAbA482329D001D9AB7120f0546B6760AE3FE19
⢠u/benido2030: https://vote.zknation.io/dao/delegate/0x05429d5113c06405398f613eaad632f5a00b43e1 or copy paste this address 0x05429D5113c06405398F613EAAD632F5A00B43E1
I guess searching for the address is the easiest since I expect claiming and delegating to be one process. You probably can skip delegating and then go to the profile and delegate manually, but doing it in the claiming process is more comfy.
Claim is still not working for me; I changed to custom RPC, but Rabby is not responding. However, there is some hope on a related topic. Every time I used to look at DAO governance, I would see the same faces as delegates with only token-based governance, which never motivated me to contribute or participate. Everything changed when Optimism governance was announced (plus few other things).
I just looked at the ZKsync delegate page. The Ethfinance delegate combined has a voting power of more than 10M ZKsync (Benido + haurog + Liberosist + smol amount delegate to me as well). This might be a fraction compared to Syncswap or Olimpio, but the point of my rambling is to highlight a change, a positive change that I wanted to see. New faces, views, opinions, and ideas- not just projects representing themselves as delegates, but also community members. Even though they are invested directly, they care about the ecosystem and want to drive it in a positive direction.
Haurog DMâd me on Farcaster to create a profile as they could not see my profile there, and time was running out. Benido took this initiative to form a sort of delegation council emerging from Ethfinance. To me, I donât see any financial benefits they might be getting for doing this apart from their belief in helping, improving, and contributing to this evolving ecosystem.
So, my dudes, thank you, and I look forward to reading more from you outside of this forum.
ETHEREUM SURVIVES THE SEC.
Today weâre happy to announce a major win for Ethereum developers, technology providers, and industry participants: the Enforcement Division of the SEC has notified us that it is closing its investigation into Ethereum 2.0.
This means that the SEC will not bring charges alleging that sales of ETH are securities transactions.
If you plan to go to devcon this year, the first opportunity to get a ticket just opened: https://devcon.org/en/tickets/
It is a raffle. You bid on tickets. The 20 highest bids get a ticket and then 184 are raffled among all the participants. Minimum bid is 0.08 ETH to participate. The raffle will be open until July 9th. On July 9th they will open discount ticket to which you can apply and plead your case on why you are an important part of the ethereum space. Discount tickets have the same price as the raffle minimum bid (299).Onjuly16ththenormalticketsgoonsalewhichcostdouble(599).
Lighthouse devs released a blog post about attestation misses. It goes into a lot of details on the path from attestation creation until it is included in a block and discusses all the possible ways an attestation might not get included due to failures at any of the intermediate steps. It also shows how to analyze the origin of possible misses in the logs and their grafana dashboard. This part is obviously focused on how to do it with lighthouse. All in all it is a great read.
The take home message is that quite often attestation misses are outside of the users control. To minimize attestation misses the user can make sure that their clock is synced, has opened the necessary ports to get enough peers and have a hardware setup which does not have a bottleneck (SSD, CPU and bandwidth) to make sure to get attestations out as efficiently as possible.
https://lighthouse-blog.sigmaprime.io/attestation-analysis.html
Special guest Chris, Jean-Paul, and Interweaver join us from Influence, a space-strategy MMO born from humanityâs desperate quest for survival.
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Ethereum
$3755.67
90,496 hodlers subscribed (no change)
0.0548
One you canât ignore,
Gas burns like never before,
Still Ether candour.
Todayâs the day boys and girl, Iâm wearing my finest t shirt and shorts (least amount of stains) wife asked me whatâs the occasion.
I told her future of France is happening she rolled her eyes, but I know you understand.
Cool as a cuecombone đť
Now just in case people are starting to speculate about other crypto currencies getting an ETF. Only Bitcoin and Eth have embarked on this journey. There were several milestones that took years to achieve.
Namely CFTC Futures and Futures ETF. For CFTC Futures there needs to be a sufficiently liquid market of a certain size before that is going to happen. I honestly dont see any coin following Eth quickly at this stage.
Other coins do not have that nor is there any application or similar filed for this. So even if we assume an expedited process for the next coin. We wont see it any time soon imo. If FIT21 gets approved in the Senate there will be finally clear rules to see what constitutes a security and what a commodity in the crypto space. Decentralization IS important and the entire point of crypto. The market being to dense to realize this doesnt change the fact that this is the reason why crypto exists and why it is valuable in the first place.
I am really happy to see america moving towards clear rules when it comes to crypto. Being a crypto security should also not be a death sentence because if the SEC does their job their will be a clear path ahead for exchanges and security tokens to be traded.
Removing uncertainty from crypto is a great step. It will help the market mature and also will kill many needless CT discussions.
Next fight is uniswap legal precedent there will be very very bullish for ethereum and defi. Defi could finally become part and replace parts of traditional finance forever.
Ethereum is the future.
I stumbled upon hackedwalletrecovery.com, which helps you recover funds if your wallet has been hacked and a drainer is observing your wallet. It helps you build a flashbots bundle which moves ETH from a non-compromised wallet to the hacked wallet and then moves the desired token out of the hacked wallet address. This happens all in one bundle which is sent to the flashbots RPC to make sure it never hits the mem pool. The wallet drainer monitoring the wallet cannot steal your funds as they do not see the transactions and it will happen in one big transaction anyway.
I learned about this project from a presentation by Austin Griffith who works at the Ethereum Foundation. This is a project from the BuildGuidl which does the âspeedrun ethereumâ course. I personally have not tested it as I do not have a hacked wallet available, but I clicked around a bit and it overall makes sense even though some steps leave me a bit puzzled. It is a very limited tool, but maybe it will help someone recover some of their funds in case of a hack.
So, what will ETF flows be? Obviously significantly less than the BTC ones IMO but letâs look at what happened in Canada with their ETFs:
CI Galaxy:
Purpose Investmets:
Evolve ETFs:
3iq:
Iâd say 20-30% is the benchmark, though many of these Canadian funds are staking which the new US ones will not be.
EDIT: These are CURRENT values, each page has charts but Iâm too lazy to see spikes at launch
Some sobering thoughts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lx4pwSXycck
James Seyffart makes a pretty good case for why he thinks ETH ETF inflows will amount to around 20% of Bitcoin inflows. His argument: Market cap is around 1/3 so base case would be 33%, but you lose more with putting your ETH into an ETF compared to Bitcoin.
Makes sense to me. Bitcoin was made to put in an ETF and itâs core to its value proposition. The entire ETF narrative just fits Bitcoin better. On the day of the Blackrock BTC filing, the ratio was 0.065. Given that I think ETFs are more bullish for Bitcoin than ETH, I think the ratio should even out around 0.058-0.061 now to fully price in ETHâs ETF.
For ETH to improve on the ratio and take the spotlight away from Bitcoin it needs something more, something that is core to Ethereum to take off. This could be real adoption by institutions like with the BUIDL funds, a new mania like with ICOâs or NFTs or the breakout consumer dAPP that we have been waiting so long for. Perhaps the improved regulatory climate is the catalyst for this, I hope it is. If such an event does happen, the ETH ETF will allow a pathway for a lot of net inflows making a flippening more possible. So it could end up getting more inflows eventually, I just think that the mere existence of an ETH ETF is not sufficient to take significant market share from Bitcoin.
That being said. I am extremely happy that ETH got itâs own ETF, mainly so it does not start falling even further behind Bitcoin in the zeitgeist. Itâs back to âBitcoin, ETH and the restâ instead of âBitcoin and the restâ and that is extremely bullish
Had a first round interview at one the biggest crypto media companies in the space on May 6th. And was asked what my most controversial take was. I said I think the ETH ETF would be approved by the end of the summer. The interviewer strongly disagreed and said there were not any signs pointing towards that. They decided to pass on me after the second interview. Oh well I will just keep building.
In other news I have been collecting a bunch of data to start to look into the correlation between price/price change/market cap/market cap change and social media/GitHub metics. My first shallow dive into some of the data showed a Pearson correlation of 0.72 (which is pretty damn good) between market cap and twitter followers. After dropping meme coins (often have bought/fake followers), CEX tokens (they have a bunch of followers because they are well known, but most tokens are not valuable), and pure BNB ecosystem tokens (the theory here is that Chinese users probably donât use crypto Twitter much, which I would assume are a large percentage of BNB buyers and users). Going to test the correlation going back historically next, and see how this changes during bear/bull. Will also look to see if month over month changes in market cap are correlated with month over month Twitter follower count change. Finally I want to use all this to build a index / watch list for coins that are gaining momentum, tying in trends that indicate a coin in the say top 200 to top 500 by market cap is on a trajectory to the top 100 by MC. My theory is two fold, one is network effects, the more followers a page has the more it gets shown to other users via the algo and second coins are the ultimate marketing tool as buyers are likely to talk about a project when they buy, trying to get others to buy, others will follow the project to learn more before potentially buying then repeating the process. Plus most projects get more useful with more users and liquidity/TVL.
Any feedback or thought ideas are much appreciated.
Hey ethfinanciers, I want to warn about a very sophisticated scam that I was targeted with (unsuccessfully, of course).
If you get contacted about some kind of job at a very legit looking (at first glance) project called UNI APT, it is A SCAM.
Seems obvious to some of us, but it is a rather elaborate and above all expensive social engineering scam.
If you want more details about it check this tweet: https://x.com/iknowgoodthings/status/1790737051219845562
Every single person claiming to be a member of this whole UniAPT or UNI APT project is a SCAMMER, so please please beware. Their twitter account is @uniaptio, PLEASE BE VIGILANT AND STAY SAFE OUT THERE.
This is not the first scam of its kind, there are plenty like this, so be careful, doubt everything they say, DO NOT DOWNLOAD SOFTWARE FROM RANDOM ENTITIES ONLINE and NEVER give deeply personal information to them.
https://x.com/AdrianoFeria/status/1794364149012545665
institutions and ultra-high-net-worth individuals will look past the maxi narratives when considering which assets to allocate within crypto.
Here is what they will find out:
- The 21M cap is not unconditional. Issuance is a subsidy, and BTC still relies heavily on it (within the last year, issuance subsidy exceeded 99% at times).
- ETH has a superior S2F, and while net issuance fluctuates, it has averaged a NEGATIVE 0.19% since the merge went live.
- ETH has managed to provide over 4% native yield while being deflationary over the same period.
- ETHâs PoS has eliminated structural selling related to miners as well as ESG concerns.
- BTCâs glorified scaling solution, the LN, has been a complete disaster. It suffers from horrible UX limitations and nuances, and is bottlenecked by L1. For this reason, it has failed to gain any meaningful traction over its existence (only 0.025% of circulating BTC is operating under the LN).
- The rollup-centric model on ETH has been extremely successful, with L2s seeing explosive growth in adoption (currently processing about 10 times ETHâs L1 capacity).
- L2 scaling on ETH is so sound that the most disruptive and dominant company in the crypto space, Coinbase, launched its own L2 (Base). They have also made official statements about using it as their primary network for on-chain services and products.
- Stablecoins are a killer app and will see faster and wider mass adoption ahead of all other use cases in crypto. The most reputable and regulated USD stablecoin, USDC, operates primarily on ETH.
- BlackRock has just launched their own USD stablecoin exclusively on ETH.
- ETH has had 100% network uptime. Not even BTC has been able to achieve this.
- There are no major upgrades ahead for ETH. Prior to the merge, execution risk was a real factor, but that is no longer true.
- ETH ETFs have simultaneously provided a financial instrument friendly to institutions and cleared all regulatory uncertainty and FUD about ETH. ETH is officially a commodity.
These are not opinions. Drop your biases and look at reality for what it is.
Every time I venture out into other crypto subreddits I am always disappointed. They are either ghost towns or filled with mostly bots/shills.
I was worried that this community would fall apart when ethfinance forked from ethtrader. Instead, what happed is all the knowledgeable and engaged people came here. While ethtrader became completely filled with bots trying to earn money on donuts. Forking ethfinance also had the side effect of purging most of the bots/shills that ethtrader had accumulated over the years, so the signal to noise ratio actually improved too.
While I hope our community will continue to grow, the fact that it smaller and less known has actually been a big blessing, since the bots and shills go to the largest subreddits to chase the largest audience. With ethfinance being outside the top 25 crypto subreddits, we manage to fly under the radar of many bots/shills. The main downside is that it makes it harder for ETH newbies to find good information about ethereum, but it also preserves our unique culture here.
TLDR - Thanks for being such a great community ETHFinanciers! Crypto and ethereum wouldnât be the same without the high quality daily discussions here.
Ok reading several posts on the daily insinuating that the latest Mt Gox news are FUD.
Itâs not FUD, repayments are coming soon. Itâs been a decade long saga but itâs close to certain that itâs about to end.
Cash repayments already happened, Iâm one of the creditors and I received cash about a month ago. Iâm sure others here are creditors too.
I wrote in here about the rehabilitation plan 3 years ago, which is the point at which it had been determined what to do with the remaining fiat, bitcoin and bitcoin cash.
Deadline to vote on the plan was then extended two years to make sure all creditors could fill all required documents, I wrote about this in ethfinance too.
Then in April 2023, I wrote here that the deadline was most likely not going to be extended this time. This was confirmed a few days later, no deadline extension, Iâve informed Ethfinance too.
Cash repayment started in December 2023 with a fuckup that later got solved, Iwas sharing the info too.
Then in February 2024 I told you guys that I believed the bitcoin repayment was likely to happen in 2024, and everything points at this.
Today $2.9B of bitcoin belonging to creditors and expected to be paid this years were moved to a new wallet. This is in preparation to repayments that are likely to start soon.
Close to 1% of all bitcoin in existence are expected to be reenter circulation.
This will clearly have an effect on the market, and thereâs going to be some btc selling. But I expect a significant portion to be reallocated to eth. Even if itâs far from statistically significant, a post in the Mt Gox insolvency subreddit today asked members if they intended to diversify in eth, most popular opinions were yes.
Regardless of price action, this post is just meant to say that itâs not a rumor, itâs not FUD, Mt Gox repayments are most likely happening within a few months.
I donât normally write huge blog posts, but I am very passionate about getting EOF and PeerDas, among other upgrades included in an Ethereum upgrade sooner rather than later. I started writing, and it became a blog post.
https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1d1yce1/why_we_should_ship_eof_peerdas_and_other_upgrades/
Part 1 gives educational background of how Ethereum upgrades work and gives definitions.
Part 2 gives my long form reasons of why I believe that Pectra should either be a large upgrade âdubbed Mega Pectra, or split into Pectra 1 and Pectra 2 to make testing easier. Either way, I think EOF and PeerDas should be included before a year+ upgrade that will see the database structure of Ethereum transition from Merkle Trees to Verkle Trees.
Hi everyone!
Thanks to Tricky_Troll for pointing out an error on kollit.ai . the issue was related to some math issue, which stemmed from my parallel development of a new and improved website for Kollit. Anyways i am like 95% sure itâs fixed now :D
Despite the lack of recent updates (i think the last update was more than a month ago), Iâve been thrilled to see so many of you continuing to use Kollit. Itâs the best feeling ever!
Since you guys brought it up organically, I want to give you a sneak peek of the new website: hereâs a preview. Iâm working hard with another developer to bring you the best version of Kollit possible.
once itâs ready, Iâll be looking for around 10-20 alpha testers. If youâre interested in being part of this testing group and providing feedback on the new platform, please leave a comment below or send me a DM.
Wishing you all optimal trading!
It looks like Bidenâs crypto about-face is complete and they go back hat-in-hand to the crypto industry they spent a whole presidential cycle persecuting: https://www.theblock.co/post/297504/biden-campaign-shifts-crypto-stance-engages-crypto-industry-presidential-elections-2024
If I was a crypto lobbyist though, I would expect way more from the administration than an eth ETF approval before I open my purse for the Dems (albeit it was a welcome first step): (1) approval (not just pocket veto) of the SAB-121 resolution, (2) Gary Gensler at least announcing that eth is a commodity and dropping their most egregious anti-crypto lawsuits, if not retiring for family reasons :-), (3) Elizabeth Warren not just sulking in the background but eating dirt in public or, even better, Biden appointing one of the high profile pro-crypto Dem politicians in her place as the political crypto policy head honcho. She had three and a half years to do damage, that should be enough. In fact, (4) a presidential speech praising the crypto industry as a beacon of American innovation and worthy of support, enumerating such concrete measures would not be amiss :-). Cheap talk is cheap.
Special guest Anthony Bertolino joins us from Obol, an ecosystem for trust minimized staking that enables people to create, test, run & co-ordinate distributed validators.
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Ethereum
$3804.56
0.056
It is a tale as old as time. In the days of yore it was the exploitation of serfs and the indentured servitude of the layman for the few pulling the strings at the top. Nowadays it is venture capitalists going public once market saturation is reached and multinational corporations squeezing the last drop of profits through shrinkflation and enshittification so that they can buy up all of the family homes in western nations.
It was said, that one day the tables would turn. Some thought that was the communist revolution in Russia, but we all know how that turned out. Other more shrewd folks have been saying that the wealth flippening has yet to come and is almost upon us. The time is nigh. I can feel it in my loins.
From 2009 onwards, for the first time in history, the little guy could get access to new financial primitives from the very beginning. Following Bitcoinâs unprecedented rise, there was a second opportunity with the Ethereum ICO which launched in 2014. Open to all, the gateway into a new financial system had opened. Sometime in 2017, I somehow stumbled my way onboard this movement and thatâs despite being a broke university student. But that didnât matter. Thatâs just how big this opportunity was. Shortly afterwards, the long rumoured flippening was supposedly on the table â no, not the ETH/BTC flippening â the flippening which the lower and middle class have been waiting for since the dawn of time. The flippening of financial opportunity.
For once, the incumbent, antiquated systems designed to entrench wealth amongst the upper class was holding them back from the latest opportunity. The gatekeepers of TradFi tasked with keeping the everyday man âsafeâ from the best wealth building opportunities now found themselves gatekeeping the rich and powerful out of the biggest opportunity yet. At first they laughed. Such an opportunity couldnât be anything other than a bubble! But the bubble showed no signs of popping. Soon, they realised that they had to fight it or else it would become entrenched on its own, outside of the existing system. Knowing better, the grassroots community building out this new paradigm did not yield. With every line of code and every battle fought in court, their new system became stronger, more resilient.
And so here we are. Sitting on the precipice of this long rumoured flippening. The cycle is nearly complete. Upon realising the inevitable game theory of a superior technology in an adversarial and capitalist world, the Finks of the world made their intentions clear and the gatekeepers could no longer stand in their way. The future is tokenised and the future is public. The big gates are opening. For the first time in human history, the people have had the opportunity to front run the establishment. The established has become the exit liquidity. The institutions are coming.
It has been an honour being on this ride with you, gents. Not only has this opportunity been once in a lifetime, it has been once in an aeon. Gentlemen is imminent.
Lol just kidding. Larry, you can pry my ETH from my cold, dead hands. This solo staker ainât going anywhere. If youâre lucky you can have my staking rewards for a pretty penny.
Okay you debbie downers, hereâs some small bits of optimism:
Article highlighting growing tokenization push by TradFi, this time in the form of a pilot project involving some TradFi heavyweights (bonus - in article, note the image referring to DTCCâs Ethereum network⌠every time I read about tokenization, it always seems to be riding on Ethereumâs rails)
Yesterday, BTC broke out of its downward trend since March, and is also just over its 50 day SMA. Yes yes, I know many here love to shit on TA, and Bitcoin for that matter, but a rising tide lifts all boats, and this could be telling us that the worst of the pain is over (which isnât to say we wonât go sideways for months). Concurrent ATHâs on the S&P and Nasdaq donât hurt, either.
Look, ETH ETF denial is priced in. And not only that, Iâd go as far as to say that if the main reason for denial is some bullshit like âweak correlation between spot and futuresâ, ETHâs price is likely to see a nice bounce. And even if the SEC goes the âitâs a securityâ route, Iâm still not even convinced that itâll be bad for price. After all, the market has already been digesting this possibility for months, and there will at least be less uncertainty, something markets loathe. Anecdotally, back in January 2017 when the the Winklevii BTC spot ETF got rejected (right around halving time, not unlike now), BTC briefly spiked down before rocketing up throughout the balance of the year. Iâm not saying itâs an exact analog, but ratherâit always seems darkest before dawn.
Now quit yer bitchin!
Not sure if this was posted here already, maybe I didnât spot it between all the whining.
Coinbase published a research piece about their Ethereum outlook.
tl;dr: theyâre as bullish as ever
We think that ETH may yet have the potential to surprise to the upside in the coming months. ETH does not appear to have major sources of supply side overhangs such as token unlocks or miner sell pressure. To the contrary, both staking and L2 growth have proven to be meaningful and growing sinks of ETH liquidity. ETHâs position as the center of DeFi is also unlikely to be displaced in our view due to the widespread adoption of the EVM and its L2 innovations.
That said, the importance of potential spot US ETH ETFs cannot be understated. We think the market may be underestimating the timing and odds of a potential approval, which leaves room for surprises to the upside. In the interim, we believe the structural demand drivers for ETH as well as the technological innovations within its ecosystem will enable it to continue straddling across multiple narratives
In the interest of keeping you updated on the Tornado Cash case in the Netherlands against Alexey Pertsev, his legal team filed an appeal with the local court of appeals right away, on the day of the verdict. It is not yet clear whether the appeal has been approved, but the good news is, according to some sources Alexey is free on bail for the time being.
Since Iâm not a lawyer I didnât feel qualified to objectively judge the courtâs verdict, I like to leave these things to subject matter experts. Thankfully, today a local Dutch law firm published an article (in English!) analysing the verdict and concluding: âFrom my perspective, the judgment fails to address these questions adequately, indicating that it is ripe for appeal.â
Hereâs what I found most interesting:
The role of Pertsev in Tornado Cash
The court asserts that Pertsev, alongside co-suspects Roman Storm and Roman Semenovâwho are under prosecution in the USâare the creators of Tornado Cash. They engineered the system to function autonomously and immutably. Since the systemâs basic operations were unalterable from the outset, the court holds these individuals are and remain accountable for its functionality.
In December 2020, the governance of Tornado Cash was transferred to a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), meaning its governance structure was by then overseen by the community. However, the court concludes that the foundational operations of the system were unchangeable and, therefore, the original setup by the founders remains a critical factor.
Co-perpetration Concerns
The courtâs reasoning on co-perpetration seems flawed to me. It suggests that Tornado Cash, letâs call it a digital platform or system, independently enacted the acts of hiding and concealing cryptocurrency with a criminal origin. This implies that a system can engage in criminal behaviour on its ownâan unusual and potentially problematic interpretation, as it shifts the criminal conduct itself from individuals to systems. [âŚ] This could have significant implications for software developers if tools are perceived as independently capable of criminal actions, making the developers responsible for the toolâs âactionsâ.
Questioning criminal intent
Another aspect open to criticism is how the court motivates Pertsevâs criminal intent. [âŚ] The courtâs assumption that the general knowledge that mixers could be used for criminal activities was enough to establish Pertsevâs intent for these specific transactions is questionable.
The court argues it is common knowledge that mixers are used by criminals, citing a report by the Financial Action Task Force and the classification by the Financial Intelligence Unit in The Netherlands dated August 15, 2017, that the use of a mixer is a money laundering typology. [âŚ] Does foreseeing that your software might be used by criminals make you criminal liable for their actions? And what did Pertsev know at that moment in time, as the assumed common knowledge in 2019 is highly debatable? The case file might indicate Pertsev was aware of criminal usage of Tornado Cash at some point, but this does not necessarily relate to his actions at the time he set up the system or to the timing of the specific transactions.
I believe the judgment for Pertsevâs criminal intent was poorly motivated, and the legal intricacies remain underexplored. An appeal will be necessary to address these issues thoroughly.
As someone in a legal field in a different EU country (Sweden), I cant say anything about dutch law necessarily.
But if our system is any indication of their system, it wouldnt at all be surprising if the lowest courts is a coinflip of whether theyre reasonable and rational or batshit.
And it also would surprise me if their lower courts (in this case and in general) defer to the âcommon senseâ conclusion simply because this case is so novel, and leave it to higher courts to delve into the nuances if they deem it reasonable to do so.
Stupid as it may sound a lower court (so less authority, lowest hierarchy, little to none precedential power) may well decide to err on the side of simplicity because it recognises the complicated nature of a novel legal question is above their paygrade and they could throw a wrench in the gears by trying to âproperlyâ deal with the complication.
At the same time a universal legal principle is that for criminal law the courts should side on the benefit of the defendant, where the law isnt entirely clear. So its not like Iâm happy with the situation.
Also I will say that a reason for why the lower courts being tolerated for what they are here in sweden is because we have an automatic right to appeal (it cant be denied) to the second level courts. So a criminal case will always be tried at a second instance if the defendant wants it to.
I cant find online if the dutch have a similar systems, but if they do it would also go a long way to explain why a lower court may be less hesitant to be more stringent to a defendant.
The dutch also seem to have a more professionalist second instance of a tribunal of 3 judges, so the risk of the important questions simply being ignored is significantly lesser than in a trial with a single arbiter.
Two charts to show to anyone claiming that Ethereumâs PoS is more centralised than Bitcoinâs PoW:
https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1791471483526463924
Bitcoin PoW centralization versus Ethereum PoS decentralization
So Ethereum processes lots of user transactions. Those transactions are submited to many places, but commonly the public mempool that is maintained by all the Ethereum nodes. Validators propose new blocks to add to the blockchain, and they are the party that gets to decide which transactions, and in which order, those new blocks contain. If they do this themself, it is called âlocal block buildingâ; but in practice, most validators use a piece of software called MEV-Boost (more on why itâs called that shortly) to receive built blocks from external builders, who pay the validator for the privilege of selecting the blockâs contents. Those blocks are passed to the validator via a âneutralâ third party called a relay.
Now, many of those user transactions âleave money on the tableâ in one form or another, and clever third parties can take that money, which we call MEV, for themselves. They usually do that with the use of bots.
A common (and relevant here) example of MEV would be sandwiching, in which a user submits a transaction for a dex trade, but with a relatively large slippage set, which means that the market can move by that percentage from where the user saw it, and the trade is still valid. A MEV bot that is able to see that transaction before it goes through (which is easy if it was submitted to the public mempool) can come along and frontrun/backrun the transaction, by taking a large amount of money (often VERY large) and making their own trade on the dex, moving the price in a direction disadvantageous to the victim, then letting the victimâs trade go through (losing some money due to slippage), and then going back in with the backrun tx and recovering all their starting money, plus some extra that came from the victimâs slippage.
It is of extreme importance (for the MEVer) that that sequence of three transactions (frontrun, victim trade, backrun) happen in exactly that order, without any other transactions in between, because potentially those other transactions might also trade on the same dex, and might do the âwrongâ thing versus what the MEVer wanted, i.e. trading in the opposite direction from the victim transaction, which would result in the MEVer losing money instead of the victim. So these transactions are submitted in âbundlesâ by the MEV bot to the external block builder; the block builder promises to keep those bundles in exactly that order and without anything in between. That allows the MEV exploit to successfully take the money the victim transaction âleft on the tableâ. It is essential that the MEVer can trust the builder to leave their bundles alone.
An excellent question at this juncture: the validator has to sign off on blocks that they submit. Why couldnât the validator see all of the transactions in the block and mess with the MEV transactions themself? The answer is that MEV-Boost is designed such that the relay just passes the validator the header of the block, which is the thing that needs signing. The validator has no idea whatâs in the block, or if it is even valid, when they sign it. This is a fairly trusting thing to do, but the ecosystem has accepted it. Back in 2023, as soon as the validator signed the header, the relay would send the rest of the contents of the block to the validator (who could now see the MEV transactions, but has already signed that version of the block, and so cannot change the block, at risk of getting slashed), and the validator would broadcast the block body to the network, and everything is hunky dory.
So thatâs all necessary context for what happened. These smart brothers from MIT realized that in some cases, itâs actually worth it to get slashed. They set up their own validators, got some bot code ready to go, and waited.
When it was their turn to propose a block, they received the block header from the relay via MEV-Boost, signed it and sent it back, and were sent the block body (with all the transactions) like usual. But instead of broadcasting that block, they looked at the transactions, and saw that there were some juicy MEV sandwiches going on inside there. (In fact, they had made sure of that, by putting their own âvictimâ transactions into the public mempool to bait the sandwich bot, once they knew they were going to be proposing.) And their bot unbundled those MEV sandwiches and did the thing the MEVers assumed no one could do: they inserted their own dex transaction in between the sandwich frontrun and backrun, going the âwrong wayâ. They did this in such a way that essentially all of the sandwich botâs money, which again can be a LARGE amount, and in this case was around $25M, was eaten up by their inserted transaction. Basically the MEVer got MEVâd.
After very quickly doing all this, they took their modified block, signed that block, and broadcast it to the network as quickly as possible. Now there were two versions of the block floating around, one the original that they had to sign in order to see the block transactions, and one the modified version that they also had to sign. The modified block won (they made sure of this via another clever trick outside the scope of this post). Of course, signing two blocks is grounds for getting slashed on Ethereum, and their validator did indeed get slashed, losing the usual 1 Eth.
But the brothers were able to take $25M of the MEVersâ money, which they thought was completely safe, but due to this loophole in the way MEV-Boost worked, was actually not. (The loophole was subsequently patched by having the relay broadcast the signed block body to the network for several seconds before sending it back to the validator, so the validator doesnât have a chance of getting their own version of the block accepted).
Was this a crime? I honestly donât know haha. A lot of us were cheering for them at the time, because it was a case of one of the Dark Forest inhabitants who regularly preys on normal users, getting eaten by an even bigger and darker denizen of the Forest. On that battleground, I think a lot of us assume that everything is fair game; if you play that game youâd better be ready to watch your back. But it would appear that the MEVers that got taken advantage of are both wealthy and pissed off, and thatâs a recipe for lawsuits. Weâll see what happens. It will be a fascinating case from the âcode is lawâ perspective - the MEV people will have to argue that this was a crime without also implicating their own entire business model in equivalent crimes haha.
Hadnât check for a while but⌠according to https://clientdiversity.org/ the dominance of fetch fall to 55%! Thatâs impressive! The huge worries of Geth and Lido are gone, which ones are the worries now?
Again, another great example of how the ethereum community got proactively started involved into keeping the health of the ethereum ecosystem.
The following is my current understanding
They have split up the staking into two tokens now. ETH and EIGEN. Before that the goal was to only use ETH. In my understanding, the problem with the old approach was that all the slashing would have happened on ETH, but most slashing conditions for the current round of AVSs are not verifiable on chain. This necessitates that one has to come to an agreement among AVS operators that one of them has to get slashed. Most of the time the conditions are pretty clear and they can come to an agreement. But in the case of malicious majority for a certain AVS, they can slash other operators, steal their ETH and there is nothing one can do, even though it is obvious that they are malicious actors. The only recourse is to make an irregular state transition, which means forking the ethereum chain like for the DAO hack reversal. It would be messy it would hurt Ethereum and is not something one would like to have again. This is in my understanding the issue with overloading the consensus layer.
In the new system these kind of not fully objective slashing conditions are moved to the EIGEN token. If AVS operators collude to take away EIGEN from one operator, the community will most probably see this as an attack and can just fork away into a new EIGEN token. If the social consensus is that it was a malicious attack, the forked away EIGEN tokens will retain the value and the âoriginalâ EIGEN token will lose its value. This takes a lot of power away from AVS operators and especially allows forking the value and security of the Eigenlayer protocol without forking the underlying Ethereum chain.
This greatly reduces the amount of ETH that is needed in the Eigenlayer protocol which will also reduce the amount of ETH staked in it which again helps with the resilience of Ethereum. Before that change there was the concern that every single ETH will be restaked. I do not see this happening anymore.
As said before, this is my current understanding of Eigenlayer and I am sure I missed some issues the protocol still has. I am definitely happy to learn about them.
Some bad news on Lido staked ETH dominance: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2024/05/14/lido-co-founders-paradigm-secretly-back-eigenlayer-competitor-as-defi-battle-lines-form/
Paradigm and Lido plan to ship a restaking competitor to Eigenlayer. As you can imagine, Lido stETH deposits would be heavily incentivised in Symbiotic (ironic new name for the product), which will likely shoot up dominance higher.
On a side note: Cobie was a Lido co-founder (dont ask me how or why). Lido obviously foresees the social layer being another cock block for their new product when it ships. Cobies tweets in the past 48h would make more sense with that context.
A word of caution to everyone, old and new here:
Yes, this is one of the most bullish things that has ever happened in the Ethereum ecosystem and for crypto in general. The ramifications are huge. Legistlation was probably the biggest obstacle to the vision of Web 3.0, and now it seems like (and you feel like) the price is going to $5k, $10K, or $150K. I feel like that, too.
So you think to yourself: Why shouldnât I leverage? Maybe just 2x? Or 3x⌠or 10x. Your eyes are flashing with dollar signs. This rocketship can only go straight up, right?
Well, no. We are going up, yes, but the longs are piling atop of longs. A small rumour could move the needle juuust enough for a liquidation cascade. Donât let a sudden flash crash destroy what you have been patiently waiting for months, or years.
I can pretty much guarantee that this will happen as we go up. We are going to have 15%-25% red wicks. The volatility just demands it.
I have been burned by these crashes a lot when I didnât know better, and I believe I have learned my lesson. Donât do the same mistakes I did. You are not only going to lose money, you are going to fuck up your mental health and sleep, too.
Here, Bitcoiners have it right. The only thing you need to do is HODL. Donât leverage. Donât try to trade the tops and bottoms. You will only give your money to the same whales that made your life miserable this past year. You want to get back to them, and those that fucked with us? The crypto influencers on twitter? The miners that paid to FUD PoS? The haters and shitcoin peddlers? Deny them the chance to have your Ether. Make them beg for it. Make them FOMO like theyâve never FOMOâd for any coin. Make the market go crazy.
Fucking Hold On for Dear Life⌠spot only, preferably in self-custody!
Yesterday, Toni Wahrstätter, an EF researcher, had an interesting talk at Dappcon about block sizes in Ethereum and how the size is distributed. Apparently some builders do not include as many blobs as others because including blobs gives little rewards, but could increase the risk of the block not propagating fast enough in the network and getting re-orged. As far as I understand beaverbuild, the largest builder, does include fewer blobs than Titan builder, the second largest one. Currently this is not a big deal as L2s can just increase the fee tip to make it more attractive to include the blob. But this generally hints at a mispriced resource within the Ethereum protocol. Similar with very large transactions that do not pay a high enough fee due to the very low priced calldata in the EVM.
As far as I see it, this needs to be fixed before increasing the number of blobs per block and probably also before increasing the block gas limit by a large amount.
And he also talks about how he broke sepolia with his super large transaction.
Definitely worth a listen:
List of Anti-crypto Senators to contact for FIT21
Tina Smith, Sheldon Whitehouse, Angus King Jr., Gary Peters, Jeanne Shaheen, Sherrod Brown, Jack Reed, John Hickenlooper, Maggie Hassan, John Fetterman, Mark Warner, Debbie Stabenow, Mike Rounds, Elizabeth đŠ Warren
Possible crypto swing vote senators to contact for FIT21
Bob Casey Jr., Chuck Grassley, Bob Menendez, Marco Rubio
Source:
https://x.com/drakefjustin/status/1792143477163106787
I recently became an advisor to the EigenFoundation. I feel the community deserves transparency so here is an extended disclosure :)
(more in the tweet)
The Ethereum Foundationâs credible neutrality is critical for us to perform our role in the ecosystem. We are aware of the current conversation about potential conflicts of interest, and share the communityâs concerns.
It is clear that relying on culture and individual judgment has not been sufficient, and we have been working on a formal policy to address this problem for a while now. We will be accelerating this work, and will share an update soon.
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Blockchain needs no stock.
It is late 2026, total crypto market cap reaches $50T after 10 consecutive memecoin seasons, all cyclical rotations in the cryptocurrency market have been replaced by memes.
Top 10 - all memes. Dogecoin and pepe replaced BTC and ETH, both receiving an ETF while the ETH ETF is still awaiting approval due to volatility and underlying utility concerns.
BTC and ETH linger at the low end of the top 25, just under recent newcomers: SkibbidyToiletInu69420XL, Kek, and Gamestop (unrelated coin, not the stock)
A soft hard recession that doesnt land is forecasted by JPow, whose forward guidance is expected to reduce some of the froth and risk seeking behaviour in the markets.Â
Posting directly here, as I was informed people donât like clicking through to Twitter links:
Building a fully onchain game is stupid, and you could just do it with existing infrastructure without needing the blockchain⌠at least thatâs what Iâm told. Â
After spending 3 years building a FOCG, here are some of the least known and most impactful reasons to build them:đ§ľ
1. Peer-to-peer infrastructure for gaming
To create a player driven world, that enables play to flow between players without an intermediary requires significant infrastructure.
Traditionally this would be a set of servers that are rented/bought, maintained, and tooled by the gaming studio.Â
While possible it is exorbitantly expensive, time consuming, and requires engineers to maintain. For an indie studio itâs likely not a great use of resources, hence why we likely havenât seen it in traditional gaming.Â
Building fully onchain significantly reduces cost and maintenance for teams which would otherwise make it prohibitive to build such games.Â
Cost down, efficiency up
2. Blockchains give us a world computer
Blockchains like Ethereum have revolutionized the development landscape by enabling the creation of decentralized, peer-to-peer systems without the burden of maintaining costly infrastructure.
Teams no longer need to find independent solutions to develop applications that are universally accessible online without acting as intermediaries in transactions.Â
This additionally helps eliminate many of the issues with âmoney exchangerâ laws, as seen with platforms like Uniswap, where users transact directly, rather than something like Venmo that holds your funds.Â
Reduces operation cost and maintenance needs â Helps avoid potential legal issues â
3. Free Market & Asset Exchange
Blockchains enable more efficient markets by allowing users to own and control their accounts and assets separate from the game itself.Â
While traditional companies can support the buying, selling, and trading of items within games, these activities are usually centralized and restricted.Â
By fostering open markets where players can freely transfer items without fear of bans or deletions by the game studio, we empower players to determine the value of their goods.Â
This model also supports asset trading across different games, enabling players to use their collected items to access new games through trading. Players can do this without needing to download new launchers, software, third-party applications, or create new accounts and spend additional money.
Free Markets â Unrestricted trading â Trading across game titles â
We could make cars powered by steam, but we donât. We do this because it would be impractical.
Building fully onchain creates a new way to build games, and with recent advancements to scaling, blockchains have become incredible efficient in enabling this new way to build.
Lastly, these types of games whether built on traditional rails or with blockchain still need to be fun.
So even if one day we all believe building onchain games for specific game types is the best solution, itâs up to the studio to craft experiences players want to play.
Curious to get your thoughts :)
There once was a famous interior designer who served many high value business clients. She noticed her clients always wanted to have a hand in the design - after she laid out their place, they would always want to change it a little. Theyâd want it to âpop moreâ, or âfeel more chillâ, or âmore cozyâ. This slowed down the designerâs job significantly, as she had to make a costly and time consuming second design pass to appease the client.
After a pattern of this happening, the designer realized that her clients always felt like they needed to make at least one change to her designs, to convince their bosses that they added value and werenât just standing around and letting a contractor make all the big decisions.
It was upon this realization that the designer had a brilliant idea. From then on she added a wooden statue of a duck to each of her new interior designs. Her new clients, when shown these designs, would say âthat looks good, just remove the duck statue.â As this was an easy fix to make, it saved the interior designer a considerable amount of time and effort in redesigns. Her new designs were always approved, minus the duck, and she never had to do a second design pass again.
ETH ETFs are the design, staking is the duck, and the SEC is the manager who needs to feel like they had some input.
I wanted to give a short update on the EigenLayer Aestus AVS Operator - especially since the $EIGEN âstakedropâ (lol) went live earlier today. Over the last 3 weeks or so weâve attracted about ~3000ETH from ~100 participants. This is a pretty reasonable(!) start and weâre obviously tremendously grateful for the continued support from members of this and the wider solo-staker community. That said, weâre also keen to grow this significantly over the next 6 months.
u/AustonSt and I have been pretty focussed on onboarding with all the AVS that will have us. The vast majority require explicit whitelisting so communication is essential. Many of the teams have been very straightforward to deal with, but there are others who make contact very difficult, or will only accept KYCâd (institutional) capital. Iâm not surprised by this, but itâs kind of depressing, and itâs important we push back against this as much as we can.
While slashing isnât live (and it looks like it will be some time before itâs developed) - the risks to Operators and re-staked capital is pretty small. But it will grow, and weâve been having conversations with a few neutral participants who are interested in figuring out how to manage this. The independent development of a risk framework seems important and we hope to be able to share some kind of plan in the near future.
For now, weâre publishing a table with an overview of our status and progress with various services. Weâd eventually like to be able to share a proper dashboard with live data, but this is some way off. Weâre also opening a Telegram channel for those of you who want to help us coordinate, receive updates or just want to ask us questions.
Today I launched my first project built on Ethereum, this is the best day of my life. The name is AirdropScan, itâs basically Etherscan for airdrops đ
Whatâs the airdrop you canât wait for?
This recent thread by Hasu has a lot of great points on what Lido has been doing to better align with the ethereum ecosystem this past year. One specific comment - which encourages Lido to participate in Ethereum roadmap research has received some negative comments from community members which makes me scratch my head
âa player with a financial interest should not take part in Ethereum research and governanceâ. Wut? We literally built a monetary coordination platform, Ethereum, where every single user has a financial incentive. And then we say that if you have a financial incentive, you canât take part in governance? Makes no sense to me
âa large player should not be allowed to take part in Ethereum governanceâ. If that view is normalised, that large players - who are by definition successful players in the ecosystem - are discouraged from contributing to ethereumâs future, who does that leave? One could make the argument, via the process of elimination, that then we are encouraging unsuccessful players, people who never had the competency nor the courage to spin off their own project or to do it in a successful manner at scale - we instead encourage them to exert their voices. That is instilling a negative selection process which leads to a poorer quality of discussion within the Ethereum ecosystem. Besides that, large players have a wealth of information and experience pertinent to our ecosystem, and itâs unwise to exclude their voices.
The key point I think we should be mindful of, is that success isnât a bad word, having financial motives isnât a bad word. Using your protocol dominance to arm twist other players to get your preferred outcome, or using your financial competency to bribe other players to get your preferred outcome, outcomes which are at odds with the long term good of Ethereum - these are what needs to be focused on. But if a protocol isnât engaging in such behaviour, they certainly should have a seat at the governance table.
I saw auroras from mainland NZ last night. They werenât exactly spectacular without a long exposure photo to bring out the colours, but it was still pretty incredible. Now before you say this is off-topic, yes, this is related to ETH.
It would seem to be something which doesnât get much attention, but likely since it is a developing thing which may just be noise and not a sign of things to come. However, there is an increasingly alarming trend which started about 150 years ago which has gone exponential in the last 20-30 years. This is the shifting of Earthâs magnetic poles. Now this isnât unprecedented. It has actually happened hundreds of times in Earthâs history, but it is the first time since we have had advanced technology. Now, if the trend continues and Earthâs magnetic poles shift, we could be in for a few hundred years of a reduction of Earthâs geomagnetic shield which protects us from the sunâs damaging radiation. What this means, and what we have already seen, is that the solar storms which have recently hit Earth are causing more electromagnetic disruption and auroras than storms of their size historically have because our shield is in a weakened state. This can result in localised blackout and infrastructure failures across the world. While a global outage is very unlikely, these localised impacts can be very disruptive to the global economy. This weekend alone dozens more platforms and services have had outages than usual and if any of these services are core infrastructure like banking or credit card services then the economy can grind to a halt.
This is yet another reason why we need Ethereum. We need resilient payment and settlement networks. Otherwise, our ever increasingly unstable world will perpetuate more instability. Especially as we constantly increase our reliance on a larger number of infrastructure systems from roads, to power, internet, AI and beyond. We have a unique chance to solidify one of the flimsy legs which hold up society and replace it with a rigid, decentralised and resilient system.
Edit: If you want to watch a good YouTube video on the ongoing pole shift and what it might mean for us, I highly recommend this one:
YouTube link: https://youtu.be/ridb9olnqLc
Watch privately: https://invidious.fdn.fr/ridb9olnqLc
All these years in crypto and still just barely avoided falling for a phishing scam toda
These guys are so incredibly good itâs scary - I had my Ledger in my hand to sign the fake transaction and there was juust enough friction to drop me out of autopilot and make me think âwhat is actually going on hereâ.
I have some liquidity in Reya Network - itâs a (legit) new trading optimized L2 with a âshared liquidityâ model for all DEXes on the L2 and some major backers. Itâs launching this week but liquidity deposits for points have been open for some weeks.
I went and checked my rank on the Leaderboard on the (real) reya.network site, and then I thought âOh they are launching today - better go check their Twitter to see whatâs going onâ
So I checked their Twitter update, and at the bottom of their (real) thread about the new Session and points etc, there was a final tweet saying something like âcheck your position on the Trading Leaderboard for Session 1 hereâ and I thought âOh, is this a separate leaderboard to the liquidity leaderboard I am on? Better check it outâ
[NOTE: the final tweet was of course from a phishing account but I only noticed when I checked later - the language, wording, PFP etc, were all perfect except for a one-character difference in the username]
So I click over to the [FAKE - DO NOT CLICK - âReya Labsâ site].
But the psychology was really interesting to kind of think about how someone like me who should know a lot better can still get taken in and the brain smooths over all the cognitive dissonance âwarningâ moments until they piled up enough that I was forced to acknowledge it..
Alexey Pertsev (Tornado Cash dev) is found guilty in the Netherlands and sentenced to 5 years in prison. That seems crazy! Someone please tell me that they proved he did more than just deploy open source code to mainnet.
Court statement in English available here - https://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-contact/Organisatie/Rechtbanken/Rechtbank-Oost-Brabant/Nieuws/Paginas/Developer-of-Tornado-Cash-gets-jail-sentence-for-laundering-billions-of-dollars-in-cryptocurrency.aspx
Well, this is a sad day for crypto, privacy and building permissionless systems in general. Some excerpts:
Tornado Cash functions in the way the defendant and his cofounders developed Tornado Cash. So the operation is completely their responsibility. If the defendant had wanted to have the possibility to take action against abuse, then he should have built it in. But he did not. Tornado Cash does not pose any barrier for people with criminal assets who want to launder them. That is why the court regards the defendant guilty of the money laundering activities as charged.
Tornado Cash is not a legitimate tool that has unintentionally been abused by criminals, as the defendant presents. Tornado Cash suits criminal use.
He also behaved lazily when victims of hacks or investigative authorities reported to him, simply stating that he could not do anything for them. He continued the development and exploitation of Tornado Cash with blinders on. He chose to look away from the abuse and did not take any responsibility.
The court follows the prosecutorâs demand and sentences the defendant to an imprisonment of 5 years and 4 months.
I donât fully remember the technical details but IIRC the contracts, once deployed, were not upgradable, so him saying âhe could not do anything for [victims of hacks or investigative authorities]â was the truth right?
u/etheraider has mentioned sharding yesterday and when it will come. Sharding as a scaling solution been discarded at least 3 years ago. I first wanted to write a short reply but it got longer so I post it here.
Sharding was the idea, that the Ethereum chain will be split up into different shards with each shard being able execute transactions. The core of the idea was that nodes would only have to validate a subset of all the shards leading to an increase in throughput without pushing home stakers out of the network by increasing resource demand. The problem in this approach is that shards cannot easily communicate with each other which complicates transactions as one would have to make additional transactions to move from one shard to another. Overall it became a rather complex solution.
With the advent of rollups, people found that this allows for an easier and even more scalable solution. So in about 2021 the original sharding concept was abandoned and scaling through L2s is now considered the way to go. In my understanding there still is the concept of shards, but they were renamed to blobs and they cannot execute transactions. So the nodes do not have to run and validate the transactions which are stored in blobs. Rollups do this.
With the dencun upgrade we got the first iteration of this scaling plan with EIP-4844 (proto-danksharding). This allowed scaling of the Ethereum ecosystem by about a factor of 50 to 100. Currently the rollups do around 10 times as many transactions than Ethereum does, so they still have room to grow. At the moment, we allow to have 3 blobs per block on average for rollup transaction data, which seems to be like a good value. It increases the load on nodes, but not so much to compromise decentralization. I guess there will be more analysis done in the coming months to see if we can increase the number of blobs a bit.
The next step in the L2 scaling roadmap is danksharding, which will allow nodes to only store a subset of blobs for a limited time but still make sure that all the data has been published by the rollups using data availability sampling. This will increase the available blob space by at least another factor of 20 without increasing the load on nodes by the same amount. The details of this upgrade is very much being worked on and as far as I understand peerDAS (EIP-7594) is currently the best proposal to achieve that goal. Not sure if peerDAS is already the end goal or just a minimal implementation of data availability sampling.
I am not sure when this is planned to be implemented, but if it will not come in the next Ethereum upgrade. But maybe in the one after that. The good thing is that going from proto danksharding to full danksharding does mostly (or even only) involve changes in the consensus layer, which means there is less coordination necessary between the different teams.
In addition there will be improvements of the Execution layer as well (like verkle trees, statelessness, history expiry and snarkifying the base chain). Those improvements will allow to increase transaction throughput on mainnet while keeping the resource demand for node operators in check. None of these will 100x increase throughput over night, but together they will massively scale Ethereum in the coming years. If you want to catch up on the current roadmap the bankless podcast from February does an amazing job explaining the different steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqVaycBINdc
Part of the reason thereâs so much disagreement regarding where we are cyclically is because returns have been so unevenly distributed
Additionally, a lot of previous cycle signposts have been absent and/or entirely invalid
The conventional ârisk curveâ trade of BTC â> ETH â> large caps â> mid caps â> shitters has been unprofitable. Barbell portfolio of BTC + memes has dominated.
ETH/BTC has been remarkably weak, whereas historically it has benefitted from a risk on environment. This has also spilled over into ETH L1+L2 proxy trades being suboptimal. âCrypto as a casinoâ thesis has been captured by memecoins on SOL (vs previous cycleâs casino was NFTs on ETH).
Memecoins have been consistently leading and rotating from that sector has been costly, whereas memes pumping has historically been an indicator of being late in the cycle.
BTC hasnât offered a series of previously âstandardâ bull market pullbacks of 30-40%. This has created a bunch of early sellers/sidelined traders. Also led to proliferation of left-truncated cycle discourse, shorter cycle, super cycle, and other heterodox variants.
There are so many new tokens (amplified by memecoins) that âcrypto bull marketâ no longer means âeverything thatâs listed goes up for weeks/monthsâ - the rising tide has not lifted all boats and there are very clear winners vs losers (and theyâve broadly stayed the same, no massive rotations e.g. ETH eco/L1+L2 trade been weak relative to SOL for ages, with exceptions).
Taking all this into account, itâs entirely plausible that you have Trader A who rode BTC, SOL, and memes and feels like stuff is hot and needs to cool off, whereas Trader B has barely made any money and feels like stuff hasnât even picked up yet, and everything in between.
We all have different portfolios, trading styles, time horizons, risk appetite, volatility tolerance, and a bunch of other stuff.
Most of crypto Twitter thinks crypto will go up and to the right over time, we just disagree about the fine print.
Thoughts? This seems to me to be a pretty good summary of this cycle so far. What we have seen at the end of last cycle and in the bear market was that some stuff still pumped while other assets were down only â> micro cycles. Is this cycle the one where things really are (more) uncorrelated, both from stocks etc. but also within the crypto ecosystem?
Two Brothers Arrested For Attacking The Ethereum Blockchain And Stealing $25 Million In Cryptocurrency
First MEV related bust.
Wild. Sharing some snippets from the indictment as Im reading
90% of ETH validators use MEV boost
These guys basically stole $25m by attacking MEV bots, they ran their own validators and when it was their turn to validate, they meddled and tampered proposed blocks with false signatures
Juicy parts Daddy Gensler may not like
The conduct described herein relates to the Ethereum Network. Among other things, Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain that is used by millions of people across the world. Since at least 2023, on average, there are more than one million daily transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. No central actor runs the Ethereum Network. Instead, the Ethereum Network is run through a decentralized network of participants across the world that operate based on a set of rules and protocols. These rules and protocols are typically executed through âsmart contractsâ-self- executing computer protocols with if/then conditions-which enable transactions to take place on the Ethereum blockchain without the need for a trusted intermediary. Ether or âETHâ is the native cryptocurrency on the Ethereum Network.
The MEV situation worries me much more than any price action.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1351996/dl
Those guys who outsmarted MEVbots about a year ago, baiting them to extract $25M of their money?
Theyâre now on trial for âconspiracy to commit wire fraudâ.
Steal billions from small users through automated sandwiches -> A-OK.
Steal millions from extremely wealthy sandwichers through a clever exploit -> straight to jail.
It has been clear for a long time the MEV landscape is filled with well-connected, well-capitalized tradfi individuals looking to extract maximum rent out of our ecosystem. Conspiracy to commit fraud, you say? I would love to have full transparency on every MEV actor out there and their doings. Would not be surprised if it turned out some of them pushed pro MEV sentiment through various means over the years. For the acceptance of robbing users as an unavoidable fact, or even worse, a desirable property, seems absurd at face value.
Special guest Prince Jindal joins us from Lantern Finance, a new liquid staking protocol.
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Feel the blockchain beat,
The protocol is complete,
Rest is obsolete.
Idk man. I doubt that Blackrock, Van Eck, Franklin Templeton, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, JPM Chase etc. being interested in ETH is important.
We probably wonât even see ATHs again, or even appreciate in price from here.
When Larry Fink talks about instantaneous guaranteed settlement and the tokenization of securities Iâm sure heâs talking about Cardano or Solana.
Iâm sure Base deploying as a layer 2 on ETH instead of as an alt Layer 1 thatâs just noise.
The United States Federal Government being concerned about DeFi as a national security threat is obviously not the most bullish thing imaginable. They totally always embrace technological innovation quickly and without question. If ETH was truly as disruptive (and lucrative) as weâve all been suspecting the United States Federal Government certainly wouldnât be raising an eyebrow at it. No sir.
Sell it all. ETH isnât just a security. It a mega-doodoo scary evil security that is also a shitcoin of no importance and will clearly go to 0.
After the EIGEN token announcement (and subsequent backlash) Iâve been thinking a lot more about how so much in the world of crypto right now seems to be the product web2 thinking i.e. VC money, financialized governance, etc etc.
One big plot hole with this web2 thinking, as I see it, is that itâs really hard if not impossible to create a moat in crypto. Liquidity is never truly locked, vampire attacks are a thing, etc. etc. I personally believe that the crypto future that we were promised is not built on the back of for-profit, but rather autonomous public goods that are built and then kindâve just put out into the world. Therefore this is a misalignment.
Adding to this rift is the fact that it seems VCs have figured out the crypto equivalent of the traditional attract->extract model. Since it is so hard to âturn a profitâ in crypto, the main way to get paid is via this charade we call governance tokens. The attract cycle is building up TVL and hype, and the extract cycle is a user-hostile TGE and exit. This would explainâŚ
The EIGEN announcement is of course disappointing, but in retrospect itâs obvious that it would go this way.
The silver linining in all this is that once the dust settles weâll find that some things did get built with all this VC money after all. Those interested in creating public goods can take whatâs been built, clone it, and undercut it. Since I donât see a shift in how we fund crypto projects anytime soon, this is what I rest my optimism on.
The other day, one of us asked if depositing assets into Swell L2 was safe.
I took a look today!
Swell L2 isnât live, so currently youâre depositing into a staking contract. The code looks clean and intuitive.
If you deposit rebasing assets like eETH or stETH or plain ETH, your deposit is first routed through a zapper contract to convert it to weETH, wstETH or wETH.
The zapping contract is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0xbd9fc4fdb07e46a69349101e862e82aa002ade0d#code
Thereâs no issue with this contract. Itâs immutable, no access control, everything is clearly defined.
Then in either case, your assets end up in the proper staking contract.
The staking contract is here: https://etherscan.io/address/0x38d43a6cb8da0e855a42fb6b0733a0498531d774#code
Itâs a simple contract with a couple functions. When your assets are inside this contract, they are dormant, not used for anything and not exposed to extra risk.
Only you can deposit and withdraw your assets.
**EDIT: relevant update -> u/ennui85 points out the emergency function canât actually touch your deposits. That was a misread on my part.
This means the contract is 100% safe, much better than my âfairly safeâ assessment.
â end of original post below â
Save for one emergency function: the âownerâ of this contract can withdraw the full balance of any allowed token inside the contract.
This âownerâ leads to a Timelock: https://etherscan.io/address/0xCa2DF225ba3c4743E02611EC423FaAC311dEEEd4#readContract
The Timelock delay is set to 259200 seconds (3 days).
The âadminâ of this Timelock leads to a 4-of-6 multisig: https://etherscan.io/address/0x20fDF47509C5eFC0e1101e3CE443691781C17F90#readProxyContract
Overall Iâd rank this as âfairly safeâ = less safe than Uniswap, but safer than PT/YT on Pendle and safer than money markets like Aave/Compound.
The 3 days delay on owner withdrawals should be a guarantee against any wrongdoing, provided you assume between $500M of TVL some depositors will monitor the multisig (or do it yourself). The code is simple, in a good way, your assets simply sit in this contract. There is no upgrade function of any kind, presumably the bridging to Swell L2 will be an entirely manual process once it goes live (which is also a good thing).
Invested in Ethereum in the 2014 ICO. I have been away for a long time. Iâm currently unwell and do not have the energy to try to get up to date, I barely understood how POW worked.
Whatever Ethereum is today, does it still have promise of building a new financial ecosystem and being the backbone of finance? Mass adoption will come if the correct/needed applications are being built.
But at a quick glance the space seems to be slightly empty, and all I see are airdrops and yield farming, when Ethereum and in general crypto has (had?) the potential to create a real revolution and change humanity.
Can someone direct me to good sources of information I could read or watch to catch up with what has been happening since 2021? As I said, Iâm very unwell and do not have the mental sharpness or strength to go in depth right nowâŚeven if I want to.
Ever since August 2015 Iâve been following the ETHBTC ratio, and although Iâm not worried, I am starting to think perhaps my timeline for seeing a ratio bull market is farther away than I had hopedâŚperhaps this still needs a few years. Or perhaps this is a retest of the ratio breakout from 2021 before moving higher.
But we need a catalyst, and airdrops along with yield farming wonât cut it. Ethereum needs to prove that a new financial system is on the way before a bubble similar to the dot com bubble is possible. Perhaps thatâs here, hence Iâm asking for information to help me build an objective narrative. Thanks, and bless you all with good healthâŚits much more important than any of this.
After the latest update that made rollups economically viable, Ethereum is ready for primetime. The vision for a new, efficient and transparent backbone for finance that dis-intermediates middlemen is finally possible technically. Before we were limited to 10-20 transactions per second which is clearly insufficient to meet global settlement needs. Right now we have room for around 300-500 tps and the scalability roadmap will keep pushing it further to the order of 100K tps.
The most significant roadblock right now is regulatory, the SEC and current US administration is very antagonistic of crypto and Ethereum in particular. But technology is unstoppable, once the genie is out it cannot be put back in. These hurdles will be overcome too.
If you have not been following you can hear it from the mouth of Blackrockâs (biggest asset manager in the world) CEO himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTveRlW7QPo
Wish you the best, take care of yourself.
I think people always look to the consumer/retail side to see if Ethereum is living up to its potential, but I think that is a mistake. I think the real potential is in the commercial side of things, such as the stuff Paul Brody is doing with EY. Just google âPaul Brody EY Nightfallâ. There are tons of videos.
The tl;dr is: EY is working on a set of business tools for supply chain tracking, so that companies can track every input and output of the supply chain from raw materials to consumer. Additionally, companies can ask for bids over the blockchain, award contracts, track performance, and do all the necessary accounting and payments.
They thought it would take about a decade to really build momentum â like turning a battleship, you need a lot of lead time. I believe we are about halfway through that, and many companies are trying it and starting the transition.
The âregulation by enforcementâ is so frustrating. You cant seriously tell me Coinbase, Uniswap and Metamask are the bad guys in crypto.. when so much blatant insider trading, pump and dumps every single day. It suggests that there is just some ulterior motive
Robinhood is one of the largest non-crypto companies to get into crypto in a big way (I mean for retail they have wallet/dex, and please the BTC ETF doesn really count in this), and now they are being sued. This is just intimidation and send a message to rest of the companies that if you get into crypto, you will be sued
Its no wonder no other big company has even tried. Last cycle there was genuine hope that companies will push into crypto. Nike, Coke, many played around with NFTs. Reddit came up with tokens. This cycle many more were gonna experimentâŚ.but now do you think a big company like Apple or Google will launch even a crypto wallet? If they dont know they are going to be charged as a âbroker dealerâ or âclearing agentâ or âunregistered securityâ or whatever
Its just to kill crypto âŚ. Its all part of the agenda to stifle any growth of crypto
SEC sues $COIN and claims SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, SAND, AXS, CHZ, FLOW, ICP, NEAR, VGX, DASH and NEXO are securities
$HOOD gets sued and only list BTC, ETH, DOGE, SHIB, AVAX, LTC, UNI, ETC, LINK, XLM, and AAVE
So either SEC is making it up as they go or they missed a lot of âsecuritiesâ when they sued coinbase
Completely offtopic but she said yes today. :) đ
Infinite Jungle podcast by Christine Kim (she used to do the tweetstorms after each ACD call back in the day) is easily my top podcast on the Ethereum ecosystem lately. Beats out the Daily Gwei which was my previous must-listen
Thereâs two 30min episodes a week, the first which covers what the core devs decided in the previous weekâs ACDC/ACDE call, and the second which interviews someone from the Ethereum ecosystem.
The best part is she has a way of explaining hard to understand concepts almost like a school teacher - Iâve learned so much about account abstraction, Verkle tries, the EVM, EOF etc, even despite having a rough understanding of these areas already.
EthDenver follow up regarding Exponential.Fi, which was one of the stalls in the hall and had an offer for those that signed up during EthDenver. The offer was for those that verified by the end of the gathering, deposited and held the investment for 60 days, those that deposited 1,000 USDC got 100, and a 10,000 deposit got 1,000. Just got passed the 60 day mark and got the offer paid out, so thatâs neat.
The Exponential product, in my view, is trying to make defi appear through a more traditional investment bank wrapped. You login, do the KYC and all, and can either deposit from your Bank through Bridge or send via an Eth wallet, on mainnet, Arb, Polygon, and others, and you can send Eth or usdc. Once deposited you are presented with a variety of portfolios and projected APRs to invest in, denominated in currencies like eth, BTC, stables or some alts. They have pretty charts and stuff, and easy to understand descriptions of whatâs being invested in and the risk (and I just found you can click on âFull Reportâ to get a detailed breakdown, like quality of code, usage, reliability and more, and links to the actual defi site and a discord to discuss), like USDC-Across bridging, the Arb TriCrypto, etc . Pretty easy to invest into something, isnât instant like defi, I suspect they delay a day or two to try and batch transactions. Once invested it shows your average return and projected, again with charts and percentages. Pretty slick overall.
I like the product for a couple reasons. First, it keeps (and kept) me from doing wilder defi things because I knew I had to invest for the 60 days. It also allows automatic reinvesting of profits, like a traditional investment fund. Will probably keep my investments there since it pretty much was funded with eth profit taking. Itâs a very nice site and I donât need to be doing lots of wallet approvals and transactions to do anything. Iâm assuming the tax report will be pretty nice when the time comes. And hey, they followed through on their 60 day promise of a USDC reward and I canât be sad with free USDC.
Cons, though not super cons I guess. KYC with ID, so very tradfi. Also, for some reason you can only withdraw in the same amount as you deposited, you canât divide it up, which is weird cause I can do that with stocks and the like. So Iâve got the ability to withdraw my whole initial deposit, or my profits. The fee page says they can take up to 1%, when I looked at mine it said 0.2%, so a positive in understanding the fees involved, but no variability for onchain gas or timing to make it cheaper.
Not shilling (the majority of my defi is still via wallets), but just think itâs a good way to take defi into the tradfi space.
Good day EthFinance,
I would like to share a new initiative: The Ethereum Defense Alliance. So what is the Ethereum Defense Alliance or EDA?
We are a group of individuals and entities with the goal of protecting Ethereum against risk vectors and fostering a robust and sustainable network.
The EDA was initiated last year when the threat of Lido was even greater than it is today and as you all know it has evolved since then. Some EthFinance members like u/hanniabu, u/bob-rossi, u/minimalgravitas and myself are EDA Stewards and we are trying to coordinate people and ideas. There are already many more members and entities that have joint the EDA.
We saw the power of coordination and importance of governance to protect the network. The EDAâs mission is protect Ethereum from centralization and risk vectors in every shape of from through:
We believe this community understands the risks as well. Basically the search for delegates is/ was already one of the EDAâs initiatives. But governance is only a means to an end and there is obviously more than that. We are looking forward to your input. The goal is to become even more proactive and drive changes before threats even show up. If you have any questions, you can post them here, contact one of us or use the contact form on the EDA homepage.
Even if there are bipartisan pro-crypto agreements in congress, Biden is prepared to veto it according to a press release from the White House today on one such potential agreement that is being voted on later today. Is this how democracies should work?
Basically, the SEC issued guidelines (SAB 21) that banks, brokers-dealers, and many other entities canât custody digital assets. They did so without first asking for comments or coordinating with other agencies.
See link below for full reasons given why they want to nullify the SEC SAB 21. It is a good brief read that makes sense to me. Risks are also bigger if all custody is concentrated to Coinbase.
https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=409242
Special guest Swagtimus joins us from Scroll, an EVM-compatible ZK rollup.
Upcoming Guests
Ethereum
$3000
0.05025
Time to sue Gary,
Itâs not even that scary,
The man canât parry.
As a marketing gimmick EL offers an F-35 fighter jet for some seemingly impossible amount of points. Rogue degen discovers a levered YT exploit - obtains required points. EL sued and forced to provide the jet -degen learns to fly it. F35 with ETH symbol appears over Ukraine - Russia requests cease fire. Jet appears again over Iran then Israel - both sides lay down arms. Same jet appears over San Francisco - solana headquarters hit by mysterious electronic warfare attack. Solana goes down for 17 days - SOL token does a 5x (itâs still in beta guys). Degen closes levered long and pockets 320 million - retires - two decades of world peace ensue.
Guys, I am absolutely in favor of trying out new stuff, thatâs perfectly fine and normal (and somehow incentivized). But please keep in mind: If you have no idea what the protocol or asset really does, you probably donât understand the risks.
I am saying this today because of the liquidations yesterday and some questions in todayâs daily, but I was already very surprised some months ago when some members here deposited (rather large sums of) ETH into Eigenlayer without understanding what it does, what this deposit does (or does not) do with your ETH, timelines, etc.
You all are obviously free to do stuff with your money, this is a permittionless industry, but I am a conservative boomer that cares for you. I donât want you to lose money, because you fucked around and found out. You can lose money, we probably all do from time to time. But donât risk too much of your stack in protocols and assets you donât understand, for unclear upsides.
In a bull market you literally have one goal: Keep your ETH. The problem in a bull market. They all want your ETH. If you part with it, do so after spending some time really understanding what youâre doing and getting yourself into.
Boomer Bearnido out.
This is a reminder that the latest Gitcoin Grants round is active. My picks for this round:
dApps & Apps
Web3 Infrastructure
Developer Tooling
Let me ramble about my biggest disappointment from the last year which is Eigenlayer.
When I first heard about it, the concept was a bit difficult to grasp. Once I started grokking it my mind was blown. Decentralized trust, where validators can start to run various services along their nodes and they can make truth statements about the world. It would lead to a world where we would be getting independent of centralized truth brokers. Projects could easily and trustlessly tap into the decentralized Ethereum network and start, for example, a decentralized oracle without having to kick start such a network on their own. It could even encourage the decentralization of the Ethereum network by giving small home stakers a better revenue than centralized operators as decentralization would have a value. Rainbows and unicorns everywhere. Obviously, I filled some of the gaps in my understanding and Eigenlayers very minimal docs with the best possible outcome.
Last autumn when I first saw the requirements for running the first AVS which is EigenDA, I realized that is not something just any node operator will be able to run on their node. Their delegated stake requirements made the problem even worse such that only a selected few operators will be able to run the EigenDA AVS.
Now, with EigenDA mainnet release, we have a few powerful entities like etherfi and other LRT providers which are the king makers in the protocol apparently having bilateral agreements with AVSs to make sure they can get the most profitable deals. The AVS operators have pretty much nothing at stake. If they loose money, they loose the money of the restakers, and meat space legal agreements will be the only thing keeping them in compliance. Not sure this is enough to be honest. All in all it is not much better than if projects outsource running their services to a service provider which will run stuff on a data center somewhere. The restaked assets were historically meant to be ETH on the beacon chain, which would directly map operators to their stake. Now, a large part is just ârestakedâ LSTs and as far as I understand it soon could be any token. This is a far cry from the original vision. Not sure if it is good enough to even be long term profitable for restakers considering the nothing at stake risk for AVS operators.
EDIT: I love all the different takes and nuances. Thank you.
âSecurities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler said Thursday that cryptocurrencies and intermediaries that allow holders to âstakeâ their coins might pass a key test used by courts to determine whether an asset is a security. Known as the Howey test, it examines whether investors expect to earn a return from the work of third parties."
I wouldnât say eth fits into that since you donât gain anything from just holding it in a wallet, but Reth and steth certainly do.
I think that a court if presented with the right facts, will find that a pure proof of stake consensus mechanism like ETH 2.0 does not infact satisfy the howey test, because there is no demonstrable common enterprise that is built into the protocol. Solo stakers who earn rewards from staking do so, not because another party does the work and they earn their share from others work, but because they put in the effort themselves and whatever rewards they earn are the results of their own work
I remain pretty confident that if this matter goes before a court, the court will have no option but to rule that proof of stake consensus mechanism by itself does not violate howeyâs rule.
If it comes to other staking mechanisms like delegated proof of stake or liquid staking, then there could be various entities playing the common enterprise role. But in a pure pos mechanism, there is none. The rewards are baked into the network - like new issuances to fund the staker rewards, sync committee rewards etc.
If SEC were to make this claim in a court, I would be ultra bullish on a highly likely defeat for the SEC. Crypto companies arent exactly fucking around either, both Coinbase and Consensys have got the best law firm in USA to represent them, the calibre of lawyers is 2 or 3 leagues better than the muppets at SEC
New Etherscan feature launched called Cards, in a special section. One shows unclaimed airdrops. It seems to be a cooperation with Bankless. I found it still listed STRK despite me already claiming and it didnât give the ETHFI airdrop so it might not be 100%, but still pretty nice. Especially if you have multiple wallets, you can check them easily.
It also shows blockchain messages and token approvals - pretty nifty. Anyone can apply to Etherscan in a form with their project and they might consider it as a card, if itâs useful enough.
How it looks on Vitalikâs address below:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045#cards
Edit:
Looks like Bankless hides a lot of the drops between a paywall. Not a fan of that.
Tornado Cash case. Governmentâs response to motion to dismiss
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.604938/gov.uscourts.nysd.604938.53.0.pdf
The gov is basically arguing that smart contracts are money transmitter businesses and should KYC users and run a BSA program.
This is real bad. If this sticks ( most likely does unless the judge specifically over rules these arguments) it means DOJ can go after any company or person that created a wallet or a dapp (smart contract) or any crypto product claiming they are unregistered money transmitters - irrespective of the fact that the wallet or smart contract doesnt allow them to control customer funds
It opens up the potential for a 6 AM FBI Open the door and arrest for anyone working in crypto
Damn reading yesterdayâs reddit im feeling downâŚ
Consensys complaint isnât looking too good: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/s/Y0pWVVy3CM
Potential huge risk in the tornado cash case targeting smart contracts: https://reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ce6bam/comment/l1j4tzk/
R/cc has 2 top posts about vitalik talking about centralization and itâs filled with Ethereum hate.
And with the SEC being on a war with crypto,⌠Yes they are losing a lot but they arenât done yet.
I hope this all turns out ok. Why is crypto investing never relaxed, itâs always stressful lol.
I went over it quickly but I have a hard time to take them seriously when there are obviously in bad faith arguments. Let me pick the one that most quickly jumped to me while I was scrolling through.
At some point they make this argument:
And they go on a long tirade to argue against it as provably false. But the complete opposite is true. Itâs a provably true argument. After EIP-1559, transacting on Ethereum necessitates ETH, this is completely unavoidable. The argument Consensys is using basically boils down to, to use the Ethereum network ETH is necessary. Going after ETH, kills the possibility to use the network. And this is true, even if you assume all the fancy goodies of account abstraction. Someone needs to pocket the ETH to transact on Ethereum, either the end-user or the wallet provider with account abstraction. Now letâs look at the arguments:
Can I install a fresh instance of MetaMask in my browser or as an app & generate a fresh Ethereum address with no ETH? â
Not a transaction settlement.
Can I go to EthCC or wherever & get a cool POAP dropped to this Ethereum address with no ETH? â
LOL, not a user transaction settlement. But someone is paying for that use of the network. If they kill ETH through regulatory maneuvers I can assure you, you will not be getting a POAP or anything in the US.
Can I login, check-in, connect to cool blockchain dapps, sites, friends, and spaces with my ETHless EOA that has my new POAPs on it, to maybe get more POAPs, or just to browse, or whatever? â
Not transactions on the network. And the POAP argument was just covered.
Can I sign messages & authorizations & authentications with my ETHless EOA? â
Not transactions on the network.
Heck, can I sign contracts with my ETHless EOA? â
I start to see a pattern here. 100 ways to say I can still sign stuff with my public key. Everything except actually using the network which is the argument Consensys was making.
Can I be served with legal process to my ETHless EOA? â
?
Do at least some of these interactions constitute âtransactions on the blockchainâ? â
Absolutely not. They are not transactions on the network. To transact on the network you must spend ETH, this is unavoidable after EIP-1559. EIP-1559 is what made ETH a commodity in the most literal sense. Is the commodity you consume to settle computation on a global settlement layer. Signing something with a public key is not using the Ethereum network. Itâs not propagated nor settled on the network.
Do people do things like this onchain đŚ and irl, even without ETH? â
?
Is this legally significant? â â â
Dunno if itâs legally significant but it is factually wrong.
EDIT: And to clarify why I think this article is written in bad faith. Whoever wrote it understands well enough the technology to very meticulously choose a niche use case of your public key (i.e. you can use it to sign messages) and conflate that with transacting on the network which is not. There is a lot of intent in whoever built this argument to confuse things, they are arguing for US-based users to not be able to use the Ethereum network, period. And they are willing to twist reality to get there.
Itâs so frustrating seeing the marketing push happening right now with influencers on Twitter acting like Eigen Layerâs token is some amazing breakthrough.
They act like itâs some amazing new revelation that EL will have itâs own protocol rules and not affect Ethereum consensus. Like no shit, why would it have any bearing at all on Ethereum. And this is coming from people that I know are definitely smart enough to understand this, all using the same language, so the only reasonable conclusion is theyâre getting paid to push this narrative.
When you have enough money you can create your own reality b/c thereâll always be people willing to bend their morals for payment.
Iâm slowly giving up on meaningful things coming from the space beyond what has already been or is being built. Most things from this point onwards feel like theyâre increasingly more disconnected from the core values of this space. Instead itâs VCs building yet another level of financial engineering just because they can. So aside from some less hype-y DePIN projects, a small selection of aligned L2s, teams working on FHE and other core values related projects, Iâm getting pretty over this all. I look forward to the day where I can cash out at my target price and just perpetually stake my only validator node to do my part in keeping the decentralised vision alive.
I actually never put funds into any sort of EigenLayer restaking; while I was always interested in the concept, the points system and insane levels of hype for an unreleased protocol triggered some circuit breakers in my brain and I just couldnât let myself participate materially. So congrats to those with access to a good amount of EIGEN, and my condolences to those who feel rugged by the distribution parameters and/or geographical/IP blocking.
The more interesting topic for me is the release of the EIGEN token whitepaper. The authors present EIGEN as having a critical role in restaking and Iâd like to try to break it down a little.
Restaking provides economic security to AVSs through the threat of slashing deposited collateral. If you (or more specifically, your delegated operator) follow the rules, you get paid. If you break the rules, you get slashed. But under the hood, slashing rules are encoded into smart contracts, and preferably the logic isnât just âthe AVS devs have complete power at any time to choose who to slashâ. The contracts can be smarter than that.
The paper looks at two different categories of faults, the bad things that would trigger slashing. These are objectively attributable and intersubjectively attributable faults. Objective faults are the more straightforward of the two. This is where the contract can directly verify that the fault occurred. Think of double signing: the contract can easily check that yes, the same private key did sign two different conflicting messages, and therefore committed a fault. Fraud and validity proofs can also fall under this category: someone does something malicious, someone else creates a SNARK proving it was wrong, the contract verifies it, and slashing occurs.
These are not always easy or possible to implement for an AVS, but detection and resolution of these faults is straightforward. EigenLayer with restaked ETH is perfect for this.
Intersubjective faults occur when there is a generally agreed upon truth but it is not mathematically provable on-chain. The standard example is price oracles. The contract doesnât know whatâs happening in the real world. We can all agree that the current market price of ETH is ~$3200, but the contract has to find some way to get a price feed from a source it can trust. Maybe that would be an AVS with a decentralized group of validators casting votes about the current price. The majority vote wins, so if the validator set is sufficiently decentralized, the correct price becomes a Schelling point.
If everyone says ETH market price is $3k but I cast a vote saying itâs worth $10k, despite my number being much better, Iâm not following the rules of the AVS. Anyone can look at actual market data and confirm that the price was actually $3k and that Iâm in the wrong. But the contract itself canât objectively confirm that $3k is correct and $10k is wrong. So itâs through agreement of the validator set, and my lone disagreement, that determines that I have committed an intersubjective fault. Other potential sources of intersubjective faults include censorship resistance/detection, data availability, and as a stepping stone in verifiable computation before proving can be fully SNARKified.
Identifying intersubjective faults through majority votes works well⌠as long as the majority is honest and can all agree on the truth. There are a few ways this can break down. First is when a malicious attacker gains control of a majority of votes: they can trick the system into accepting an incorrect truth, and simultaneously slash any honest validators. Bribes make this possibility scarier. Second is when the truth itself is ambiguous, and honest voters may come to different conclusions. Maybe weâre giving Ethereum an oracle price feed of another chainâs native token, and that chain undergoes a contentious fork; which forkâs token price do we follow?
In the end, with the intersubjective on-chain voting mechanism having broken down, the system has to fall back on social consensus, usually implemented through forking. If a malicious majority is saying the market price of ETH is $1, the rest of the world knows thatâs wrong, so weâll come to off-chain social consensus to make a fork. The old system is abandoned, and at the social layer everyone agrees to move to the new fork, which likely introduces socially-agreed-upon state changes to slash the attacker and âunslashâ any honest validators caught up in the attack. A forkable oracle could also do just that to mirror a fork in the tracked token.
So what happens in the case of EigenLayer when an attacker gains majority ETH control of an AVS with intersubjectively determined slashing conditions? We have actual honest Ethereum validators who could end up slashed and effectively (or literally, post-Pectra) booted from the Ethereum network. The social layer could come to the rescue again, but it would mean a hard fork of Ethereum itself to slash the malicious actors and restore the honest ones.
Vitalik wrote a well known blog post on this subject, referring to the issue as the overloading of Ethereum consensus. One of the greatest risks is that we get a repeat of The DAO, where disagreement on if/how the social layer should resolve an application issue caused the Ethereum chain as a whole to fork. Itâs not too hard to imagine a situation where a large AVS gets intersubjectively attacked, an uncomfortable number of honest validators have their ETH slashed, and we once again have to decide between allowing some harm to the health of the network, or forking on behalf of a broken application. We really donât want to find ourselves in a position where we have to seriously have that debate again, and EigenLayer needs to be careful to not enable that.
The paper talks about social consensus from the perspective that tokens/projects have certain social conditions agreed upon during their initial setup phase that determine how to resolve intersubjective faults later on. Bitcoinâs community agreed on the longest chain rule for PoW consensus. Ethereumâs community agreed on its fork choice rule as well, but with a stipulation that the goal would be to move to PoS, an important decision during the âsetup phaseâ that eased the social acceptance of the transition. Rollups and national governments also follow this paradigm. EigenLayerâs perspective is that allowing intersubjective restaking of ETH would be a violation of Ethereumâs setup phaseâciting the same Vitalik post. They argue that intersubjective restaking in general requires a very specific setup phase where the entire community engages with the token with a very specific set of expectations around its principles and intended use.
So the answer: Design the EIGEN token specifically for the purpose of universal intersubjective staking. Design all AVSs so that all objective faults are backed by ETH, and all intersubjective faults are covered by EIGEN. In case of a failure of the intersubjective systems that requires social intervention and forking, that will be handled through the EIGEN tokenâs own forking system rather than overloading Ethereumâs social consensus.
EigenLayer actually envisions a system that contains two tokens, EIGEN and bEIGEN. Iâm not going to go into full detail about the tokens and forking behavior, but I can provide an overview, specifically of their V1 design. bEIGEN (b is for âbackingâ) is what is used internally within EigenLayer; it is what is actually staked with an operator and may be forked into different versions over time to resolve issues at the social layer. EIGEN abstracts that complexity away for the purposes of DeFi, providing a token that can be used without worrying about the forks going on behind the scenes.
bEIGEN forking is pretty interesting. An intersubjective fault can still result in slashing, as usual, but each AVS must implement a system by which anyone can raise an alarm about a fault to suggest that there is a need for social consensus to resolve a dispute. If there is an issue, e.g. attacker controlling majority stake, a challenge can be raised in the form of an ERC20 contract fork of the bEIGEN token. So you end up with the old pre-forked bEIGEN1 and new post-fork bEIGEN2. bEIGEN1 holders can claim their bEIGEN2 for a limited time.
In order to raise a challenge, the challenger must burn a significant amount of bEIGEN1âthis is the cost to them if their challenge turns out to be incorrect and bEIGEN1 remains canonical. The challenger must also tag a sufficient amount of bEIGEN2 tokens as malicious, these will be burned in bEIGEN2, and punish the attacker if the challenger is correct and bEIGEN2 becomes canonical. Once both tokens exist, the social layer takes over and through market price discovery, adoption of the tokens by AVSs and other protocols, etc, decides which token is correct and canonical.
Through this method, the need for a social layer to intervene in some intersubjective faults can be realized. Ideally, AVSs are designed to minimize ambiguity about which fork would be correct if you just check the real-world source of truth. So in most cases it should be obvious. But itâs probably unavoidable that some will be contentious, those will be more fun to watch play out and Iâll be glad Ethereum validators arenât at risk.
Technical note: the reason why bEIGEN2 redemptions are limited-time is because it needs to be shorter than the withdrawal time in order to prevent an attacker from committing a fault, withdrawing, and claiming the bEIGEN2 tokens anyway. By having t_redeem < t_withdraw
, the attacker has no way to get around their punishment. This carries the unfortunate design issue of putting a limit on redemption time. bEIGEN holders who delay may see all their value evaporate.
The EIGEN token is designed to be insulated from all that, because imagine what a nightmare that would be for DeFi integrations. Anyone with bEIGEN can wrap it to become EIGEN. The EIGEN contract provides its own governance to follow the various forks of bEIGEN and swap its contents to reflect its view of the canonical bEIGEN token. When unwrapping, it will only ever return the bEIGENx it considers canonical, not any other others. In short, if you hold EIGEN, you are trusting its governance system to accurately follow the canonical fork and in exchange donât have to worry about the forks yourself. The obvious risk is that if governance is wrong or corrupt, you may end up holding junk.
The big change in their proposed V2 is that the EIGEN contracts become immutable, and so must also be forked to create a EIGENx to match each bEIGENx. This creates a sort of historical record of the fork history through the various contracts, which gives EIGENx holders the option to hold passively and later claim all the bEIGEN tokens along the fork history, while protecting them from malicious EIGEN governance.
This seems to hurt the DeFi usage of the token, as each EIGENx will remain its own tradeable token. I think only the most recent EIGENx will be used, as itâs the only one that could be actively wrapped from bEIGENx, so that would mean DeFi protocols would have to add each new EIGENx as they come out. But itâs still much more convenient than using bEIGEN in DeFi. At least with EIGEN thereâs no pressure to redeem forks immediately; with bEIGEN if you donât manage to untangle it from nested DeFi positions and redeem forks in time youâre screwed.
The big thing here is that ETH restaking will only be used as economic security for objective faults, while (b)EIGEN provides economic security for intersubjective faults. Intersubjective faults often require social consensus to resolve through a fork (e.g. The DAO) and can sometimes be contentious. So the biggest benefit of this system is that the Ethereum social consensus layer is not pressured to fork the chain in order to resolve issues with an AVS. Without this thereâs a really good chance that a too-big-to-fail AVS would eventually get attacked and Ethereum would face a difficult decision about whether to fork to protect the honest stakers caught up in the incident, possibly bad enough to create an Ethereum Classic 2.0.
The biggest downside to me is the breakdown of EigenLayer as an ETH REstaking platform. Anyone can deploy a smart contract through which you can stake an ERC20 token as collateral and earn rewards for computational services while taking on slashing risk in case of misbehavior. A general marketplace for buying and selling economic security, kinda neat.
EigenLayer is particularly interesting in that it uses ETH (which is possibly the worldâs best collateral asset), and all of the ETH it has access to for security is also actively involved in regular ETH validator duties. For me it feels like thereâs a fundamental difference there. That having your AVSâs economic security come from the same ETH thatâs securing the network feels like youâre sharing in that same security, like youâre tapping into a particularly valuable, established set of actors. Ethereum validators are already committed to locking up their ETH to earn rewards, if EigenLayer makes it easy to access the same set of actors, you know youâre able to easily source high quality economic security for any project thatâs willing to pay for it, rather than bootstrapping a validator set from scratch.
EIGEN isnât ârestakingâ, itâs just⌠staking. To be fair, itâs a token designed to be the best universal intersubjective staking token, allows delegators to provide security to numerous shifting AVSs simultaneously, and will have tooling around it to make it easy for AVSs to adopt. So itâs the basis for a nice market for economic security for anyone who wants to buy or sell it. But in my mind it loses that critical edge that ETH has.
If EigenLayer dropped ETH altogether and EIGEN were used as the sole medium of exchange for economic security in their marketplace, I feel like Iâd hesitate to use it. Wouldnât you? To some extent I feel like EigenLayer gained a lot of prominence specifically because of the ETH restaking direction, and itâs a bit of a light rugpull to say ânow that youâve gotten on board, you have to buy our token in order to use half of our systemâ. Maybe it helps that the airdrop goes in part to ETH stakers who followed the incentives, making it easier for them to participate in both aspects? And maybe this is a necessary tradeoff to avoid overloading Ethereum consensus; thereâs no other way?
Regardless of the above, I think itâs clear that EIGEN as a staking token is a riskier play for EigenLayer than ETH restaking. It means a notable increase in complexity and risk factors. The system described in the paper is in no way simple to design or implement. And this tokenâs close integration with critical staking systems means Ethereum as a whole has more risk exposure to Eigen Labs. Should we be putting more work into protocolizing EigenLayer in the same way that weâre working towards ePBS? In taking this step, EL further invite this discussion.
I have been a little frustrated with the rough state of AVSs at this point in EigenLayerâs launch, and how few of them have really described what slashing is going to look like (despite them being literally live on mainnet!). This announcement does explain it somewhat: AVSs are going to have to factor EIGEN and intersubjective faults into their designs, so it would have been unfair to expect them to develop their slashing mechanisms before this was described in detail. So cool, maybe they can work on their economics now finally. But at the same time⌠why the heck did EigenLayer deploy to mainnet before this info was released? Why?
I havenât really done a deep dive on the theory of forking tokens, so I canât really analyze that too deeply. But I have always thought itâs a cool idea, and enjoy reading about governance systems designed with forking as a central concept, e.g. The DAO, Nouns DAO. The paper draws comparisons to Augurâs REP token but doesnât list others that really fork an applicationâs utility token. So this may actually be pretty novel, EigenLayer is huge and their forking system is very likely to be stress tested by malicious actors. Iâm very curious to see how it plays out.
And I guess thatâs that. The paper is 43 pages, so I guess I shouldnât feel too bad that this ended up so long. Always happy to explain more details from what I understood of the paper. And even happier to get corrections and different perspectives.
One of the CT resident lawyers did a thread on all this yesterday. Iâd suggest anyone having these questions to go through that
TLDR is that these are all legal issues. Its not that the project says lets take their money and defraud people or lets block US, that is a good idea for us.. No.Â
Its all down to legal constraints, and projects trying to waddle through unclear regulations, protecting them from potential government charges. Projects tell users, infact make it very clear from the very start not to expect airdrops for the same reason - they dont want to trick people into thinking they are going to airdrop, but end up not airdropping few countries or jurisdictions because of sanctions or regulations. So they make it very clear there isnt gonna be an airdrop. If someone files a lawsuit - they can just point to the message posted 12 months ago in discord #Wen-token channel that says dont expect an airdrop.
Similarly, the locked is also locked to make the token appear decentralized from the start. There is a belief that a locked token has less chances of being labelled a security (since it has no value), so the project is airdropping a locked token. And they will want the community to create proposals to unlock it, add value to it
No doubt, for end users its painful - you locked $50k for 6 months only to find out you arent eligible and the whole country is blocked. At that point you are mad, and dont want to hear âlegal thingiesâ. But the bitter pill is that all of this is due to not just unclear regulations but potential regulatory actions against projects/founders. US users must consider that there is a high chance they will be ineligible for most airdrops. So either they should not farm airdrops or acquaint themselves with gud airdrop claim technology (VPNs that work)
Of course, one will say that XYZ project 2 years ago airdropped us, and didnt do all this, you guys suck. Again the fact is that now the times have changed, regulatory environment has worsened. If you follow what is going on for the last 24 months, its kinda obviousâŚ
Coming to Ryan from Bankless - I really dont envy his job of trying to explain all this to a crowd of people who think theyâve been sold short.
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Looking for a list or some comparison of safe Eigenlayer operators to delegate to. Any help?
I see Aestus mentioned here but not familiar with their background.
EigenYields seems sketchy upon further inspection.
Etherfi has like 8 different operators, but are they all the same?
I also see Staked.US and they seem to have a good track record, but they shut out Americans from airdrops so how would that work if youâre an American restaker?
Or, is it best to just wait until some of the larger exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken get in on the game?
(Reposting since reddit deleted last post because of links.)
Few weeks ago when finding of Geth bug was posted here I decided to contact top 11 majority-Geth/undisclosed staking operators listed on supermajority info (having 1% and more network penetration)
I presented myself as a current/potential user, concerned about client supermajority issue, asking about their current setup and potential plans to improve client diversity status.
Contact was made through emails, customer support or Discord. Here are the summaries of respones I recieved:
I think Binance, Kraken and OKX (8% combined) should be campaigned further through social media and other channels to ensure they make an action. It seemed to be effective with Coinbase, we saw Brian Armstrong responded personally to DC on twitter, it also worked with consensus clients.
Many smaller operators seem to be steadily working towards diversifying, but feel free to check up on them as well.
Community did bring awareness to the problem and it improved, we can get it to 50% or below.
The Aestus MEV Relay is hiring a DevOps Engineer.
Frankly when u/austonst and I started this projected ~20 months ago, we both imagined (hoped?) it would have become irrelevant by now. However, ePBS is an unsolved research problem that even optimistically feels years away from any kind of resolution. So - we intend to set things up to play a long term game. We still think itâs crucial to the long term health of Ethereum that credibly neutral players occupy this space - because MEV is an incredible centralising force.
Weâve recently received some funding from an Optimism retro PGF round, which ethfinancers were instrumental in supporting. So, itâs because of the fine work from people like u/superphiz and u/bendido2030 that we are in a position to hire at all. It would be great to return that trust by sourcing someone close to this community.
The ad suggests this is a full-time role, but weâre very open to committed part-time contributions â and this could be a fun, albeit intense, side-gig for someone. Your primary role will be to help us improve the performance and stability of our existing architecture and develop a plan for the future. The right person will have very strong cloud and k8s experience in domains including observability and security. Generalist coding capability, a willingness to absorb new information and learn new skills are also essential. Youâll also be part of an on-call rota.
This work brings you very close to the core Ethereum protocol and part of your job will to be stay on top of research and developments in the MEV and ePBS space. While for me the most exciting part of this project has been in the constant adventure of working at the bleeding edge - there are many unknowns - and that also means that whoever we hire will have to accept a bit of insecurity. Having said that, the additional capacity will allow us to spend more time exploring new services and opportunities both in the relay ecosystem and beyond - restaking and shared-sequencing are both ecosystems where we think our ethos and experience can make a difference.
Worth also noting that unfortunately and for complicated reasons, we canât hire anyone resident in the US. I hope iâm not breaking any rules by posting this here!
Starknetâs foundation is well aware that mistakes were made in the initial round of provisions. There are numerous efforts underway to address those mistakes and find a more positive way to move forward. In that vein, I am hoping that some of you who feel they were unreasonably excluded from the first round will share a) why you feel that way, b) the account address (DM me if preferred), and c) what criteria you feel *should* have been applied. I am asking in my capacity as a Starknet delegate and member of the Starknet builderâs council to provide as much guidance as I can back to the foundation.
Edit: doesnât have to be limited to *your* account. If you know of any accounts that are good examples, please forward them along.
A very good indication that we are in a bull market is the pick up of the various scam attempts I come across. A few weeks ago my cold wallet on Ethereum was getting spammed with address poisoning attacks. Cost the spammer several dollars for each poisoning. I cannot really believe that these kind of things are worth it for them, but apparently they are ready to spend real money to do it.
Then came a cold DM on telegram from someone wanting to borrow my github account for a day. I blocked them so I never found out what they actually wanted with it, but I guess they saw my github account in the list of some airdrops and they would have wanted to claim them.
Yesterday I got DMs on Discord and Telegram with freelance coding job opportunities. These are close to 100% a scam as well. At the moment I am talking to them to try to find out how they would want to scam me. The slightly worrying part about the DMs is that they feel a bit closer to me than address poisoning. Especially, when these messages have been sent on two different apps (discord and telegram) simultaneously. Seems like someone is adding my user name to their scamming database.
Iâve got an addition to /u/haurog âs scam watchlist from yesterday. My more valuable wallets have been getting hit with address poisoning attacks, which at this point I would hope most people here are familiar with. And this should really be addressed with better tools at the wallet/etherscan level.
But more interestingly, my personal cell phone was hit today with a text message:
COINBASE: An unauthorized device from Salt Lake City, Utah has logged into your Coinbase account. If this was not authorized by you, please reply with âNâ. If this was authorized by you ignore this message.
I caught on immediately, in part because I wasnât actually sure I have a Coinbase account (I checked, and I do, but I didnât even really complete account setup, never set it up to receive fiat or crypto funds). But also because I had just recently read this article on Ars Technica, which describes the abilities of the CryptoChameleon phishing-as-a-service toolkit. Itâs a really good read, would recommend. But the first step of one of CryptoChameleonâs techniques is described to be similar: a phone call telling the recipient that there was an unauthorized login and asking them to press â1â or â2â to accept or deny.
This is kind of tricky because thereâs not really any immediate danger in replying âNâ (or pressing â2â to deny). If itâs legit then youâve done your part to prevent an attack. If itâs not legit, then all youâve done is sent a pointless text message. And users have become increasingly used to dealing with these kinds of messages from all sorts of account logins, so it may not ring any alarm bells. Why not send a quick âNâ and be done with it?
But my understanding is that the first step of a scam is by far the most important. On one hand, some scams deliberately use dubious sounding claims (Nigerian prince, anyone?) as an initial filter, so that the savvy users weed themselves out, and the people who actually respond are more likely to be duped by the subsequent requests. But thatâs probably just a side-benefit here, maybe allowing the recipients without Coinbase accounts to filter themselves out. And itâs notable that this message asks for action to deny and a non-response to approve. The vast majority of legit messages of this kind are the other way around: silence means deny. And thatâs smart, thatâs the way it should be.
More relevant this time is a sort of a sunk cost fallacy. In the world of video games that are âfree to playâ but with microtransactions for additional bonuses, itâs well understood that getting the user to make their first payment is a massive step. Once someone has caved and paid once, theyâre much more likely to continue to do so. And at some point you can ask me about the fascinating ways in which a scammer on the streets of Istanbul employed a bunch of tricks to make it really hard for me to disengage once we had started talking, but thatâs a longer story. But in short: if a scammer can get you to take the first step, youâre much more likely to fall for the following steps. So in this case, having the first step be something so likely to get casual responses means a higher success rate as a whole.
If the CryptoChameleon playbook described by Ars is accurate, there would probably be a followup text or email with a link to a fake phishing Coinbase login page, ready to take my password. I would hope even if people fell for the first step, theyâd catch the issue at this point, but the danger could be that the first step being fairly risk-free would cause people to let their guard down.
This turned out longer than I planned, hope it reads all right. tl;dr: Scams nowadays will likely start with âunauthorized device/loginâ messages, these kinds of messages should make you consider if the source could be a scammer.
Can I accidentally sign something malicious and it then drains my wallet?
Yes, hackers can be very creative. You could lose all of a single token, or an NFT or even native ETH. Not more than one type or token per signature.
I didnât think they could touch your ETH but just recently learned of a way. It uses eth_sign to have you sign a TX that the scammer generated in advance. It will only be valid for one nonce though. Basically, your private key has signed a TX that the scammer can create later, for example an ETH transfer. The wallets warn of those signature types heavily though.
It is also possible to lose many NFTs at once. I donât completely understand it but I remember when some people lost multiple Apes/Punks a couple of years back in a signing scam. Below is an article on it.
âHowever, signing a message like the second or third image on a website that turns out to be a scam will grant the scammers contract (and linked wallet) the ability to literally just buy all your approved NFTs to the specified contract under the âexchangeâ for ETH" -https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-gasless-signature-scam-heiner-garcĂa-pĂŠrez-u0ice
It can be difficult to spot a scam because the UI in Metamask is often abysmal for signatures. Itâs a lot better in Rabby but even there sometimes it doesnât understand things. It can then look like, you are trading asset 0xCY45⌠for asset 0x567DF⌠at a price of 85000000 gwei. Thatâs just ridiculous and easy to make a mistake on any of the contracts or even the amount might be a zero too much/little. I have read of people getting scammed this way.
You should always be careful when signing. If you are some public crypto MVP with millions of USD, you should even be extra careful. Use a separate PC only for crypto. I read about someone at a crypto company that opened a job resume PDF, it had some kind of malware that affected his metamask to push a modified TX to his hardware wallet which drained the company of millions USD.
Separating wallets and having a multi-sig are good practices.
Logris got me very interested in FHE for the past few days. Thank you for sharing! The tech is super interesting as someone who consistently takes the long and dull path while navigating the internet to preserve privacy and reduce data-mining (even though I know that it doesnât change anything in the grand scheme). A bit surprised I didnât know about this technology before. Running algorithms over data without knowing the true input/output, while still knowing the validity of the computation is preserved, is mind-blowing, but also makes sense when looking a bit closer.
In a utopian future, where this is the new standard for how the internet and its services work, I wonder how companies will keep serving you things like relevant ads and a personalized experience. Although Iâd be more than happy to live in a world without these âfeaturesâ, the incentives are just so strong that it doesnât make sense for them to let them go willingly. Anyone have any thoughts about this?
It would be nice if it turned into a marketplace, where you get these things served blindly through the same mechanisms, and got compensated for doing so (Brave had a cool visionary idea like this, but didnât work out that well in practice). A less cool approach would be design-patterns for applications to gate-keep certain features, like premium services or exclusive content in exchange for users opting in to give their data.
(Feel free to delete this if its too off-topic, mods)
Howdy yâall!
So, I think most of us here watch The Daily Gwei everyday. For those of you who do watch, youâll know that Sassal is taking a 2 week break from recording the show starting on Monday. During that time, Iâm going to help fill in the gap by providing Ethereum news on top of Rocket Pool news on Rocket Fuel.
Sassal talks about it in todayâs episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhI6OsMVZk8
For those of you who want to follow along, my YouTube channel is [www.youtube.com/@RocketFuel-RPL](http://www.youtube.com/@RocketFuel-RPL) and I also release episodes via podcast here:
I wonât be able to match his knowledge and insights (or bullish rants), but it might be a useful stop gap while heâs away.
Lodestar v1.18.0 released today
Our new release contains some noticeable facelifts! We recommend this update to all users of Lodestar.
Our documentation located at https://chainsafe.github.io/lodestar/ is now using Docusaurus for a better experience. Weâve attached Plausible metrics to further help improve the contents of our documentation with minimal intrusiveness and open-source analytics. We continue to do content additions and improve our documentation for the best user and builder experience possible.
This release addresses many compatibility issues discovered from cross-client testing with Lodestar and other consensus clients. This also includes fixes for compatibility with some external DVT platforms and remote signers.
Target peers by default has been increased from 50 to 100 peers. Many users have already set this for better validator effectiveness and now we have it set by default to become a better peer on the network.
builder.selection now has a default setting that gives slightly preferential treatment to locally produced blocks via builderBoostFactor=90 . This configurable setting is set to 90 instead of 100 by default, requiring builder blocks from relays to be above ~10% profit to be selected. The previous default setting was maxprofit. This can be changed in your local configuration.
Basic devcontainer support is now integrated for easier development setups such as Github Codespaces. For more information, see https://chainsafe.github.io/lodestar/contribution/getting-started#devcontainer.
Special guest Paul Brody joins us from EY and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
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Give me one good reason why I shouldnât 80x leverage my entire stack then 80x that 80x then deposit all of that into a 980 day lockup of yxBgkLklyupyupYupfgCc-xETH to get frank points that can be exchanged for 200 yarn credits (at a rate of 649 Galaxy cones to 400 ant points I should have an apy of 49080%)?
Letâs take a moment to talk about freedom. Here in the US thereâs this point of national pride they try to imprint on you that the US was founded on principals of freedom and somehow spreads the torch of freedom around the world. Thereâs the bill of rights they trot out, right to free speech etc. A pedantic point I sometime raise with people is that if something is discretionally permitted by the government, it is not a true freedom. Right to free speech? Not if you yell fire in a crowded room, start a riot, libel, slander, etc. If a judge can issue a gag order, speech itself is not a freedom; it is permitted. Driving is not a right; it is permitted. Owning a firearm is not a right, it is permitted, despite what all the 2A folks want to believe.
In terms of true freedoms, you have very few true ones and even amongst your permitted rights they are often being deprecated by technology. For example you had the right to privacy, the government couldnât open your USPS mail without a warrant. This is still technically true, but the vast majority of mail has instead become email and the US doesnât need a warrant to scry that. You had the freedom to transact with cash, but increasingly every payment is digital and those rights donât carry over. We hear frequently stories of people that go to deposit to a bank and have the deposit frozen. You have to report transactions over $10k, which practically means less and less expensive things in purchasing power each year due to inflation. Legislative inaction and judicial activism, in the face of technological progress, are eroding what few permitted freedoms we still have.
The notion that everything every citizen does should be permitted is attractive to those who wield power. They want you to have to ask their permission so they can say no and only permit actions that preserve or expand their position of power and at a time and place most convenient for them. The days tick by and the vice constraining what you are allowed to do silently tightens each day. The people who need freedoms the most are those with the most controversial ideas, the ones most likely to destabilize the status quo; for good or ill.
People like Warren fundamentally disagree with me on the freedom to transact. They want the freedom to transact to fully transition to a permitted freedom. They make arguments like âequal playing fieldâ with the banks that are already wound in the straight jacket for them. They argue that the only people who need these freedoms are those with malicious intent. They reductively argue that blockchains are financing North Korea and child porn. Of course, they are only here to protect us. Itâs very much analogous to the ânothing to hideâ arguments you get from the surveillance state encroaching on your right to privacy and itâs every bit as ethically wrong. They couldnât be further from the founding principals of this nation if they tried.
Your transactions are an expression of your values. You invest in things you believe in, you buy things that add value to your life, you donate to causes you hold dear. Limiting your transactions is fundamentally an attack on your ability to express your values and shape the world to align with them. The moral compass of crypto is a controversial one, precisely because it bucks the trend and creates true freedom; for good or ill. So yes, there are scammers abound, memecoins with deliberately hateful content, and rugs every day but there are also people escaping the oppressive inflation of their nation state, financing art and innovation, and eroding the role parasitic middlemen plaguing our society.
So, asking for permission simply wonât do. Iâd rather just be free.
approve() is part of the most common standard token interface, erc20. It has nothing to do with ethereum and is unrelated ethereum upgrades. Tokens can be any contract which implement any interface, or if you want they can all be from the same factory and you can check if theyâre in that factories mapping of built tokens if you want to be sure what they are.
There have always been tokens which do it differently but erc20 isnât going anywhere, youâll stop noticing it when account abstraction becomes standard. For example on starknet ethereum rollup where account abstraction is default the approve and function call all take place within a single tx. Same can be true with dapps which use dsproxy.
ERC 4337 is going to win and become account abstraction standard. I hate it but itâll be fine. Would rather hard fork and do it properly.
ARB DAO updates:
Iâll also update everyone here that the March delegate incentive program data is out - here. This is a trail program looking at ways to incentive delegates to participate more meaningfully in governance, rewarding active voting and discussion. I actually ended up being rank #1 out of all those who participated! Hopefully those who delegate to me here feel adequately represented :) and know that I try my best to make sure your voting power isnât wasted.
Quick HOP governance update.
Iâve spent the last few months working on applying to the ARB Long-Term grant program on behalf of Hop, heading up a team with a few other HOP delegates. Council voting results have been released (list of all passing projects here) and HOP has passed the first round! So now it goes to the ARB delegates for vote this week for final approval.
The grant is asking for 500k ARB tokens with the goal of making bridging to the ARB networks cheaper for users. This will be done through fee rebates and liquidity incentives (to reduce slippage), and if it goes live should hopefully help users switch between L2 networks to take advantage of the growing space.
Iâll also add, I worked as well to apply for a similar grant through Optimism. Hopefully with similar results.
Like most of the rest of you, I sometimes ponder why Ethereum in recent years tends to perform so⌠differently⌠from many other cryptoassets out there.
I keep coming back to this one reason:
Most people today buy crypto to gamble, not to invest.
The market, broadly speaking, is not interested in fundamentals. It sees crypto as a giant casino, where if youâre lucky better and faster at reading the trends and moods and narratives, you can become rich overnight, and escape the increasingly dystopian financial state of society. Fundamentals are not the bedrock of deciding what is and isnât a good deal, in this mentality - they are a ball and chain that keeps an asset tethered to reality, when what you actually want is one that is free to ascend into outer space with no pesky P/E ratios or highly technical upgrades to slow understanding and buzz. The more innocent an asset is of any practical use, the less beholden it therefore is to actually needing to support that use, to actually addressing that market, to actually working. If youâre not supposed to do anything, you canât fail, and the market canât fail to understand what you do!
By contrast, most of us here would consider ourselves investors. We do care about utility, and we do care about real yields, and we do watch each upgrade with bated breath, and we do follow the discourse on roadmaps and adoption. We care about those pesky fundamentals, because we understand that having a fundamentals-driven thesis is the difference between investing and gambling, and we are not here to gamble. Ethereum, which by this point is deeply embedded in the crypto and web3 ecosystems, and which has, by most metrics, already won the adoption war - thatâs something we can sink our teeth into, and the fundamentals look pristine. Ethereum is bae for us because in buying it, we can feel secure that we are investing in something that has real underlying value beyond memes and narratives and the attention economy.
Consider the chasm between those two mentalities, and consider that we are in the incredibly distinct minority right now. Weâre rocking up to a casino with spreadsheets and reams of research. And weâre shocked when the degenerates around us take one look at our stodgy âinternet of valueâ, our âglobal settlement layerâ, our âworld computerâ, and pass it by, because it has won a battle that memecoins are not even trying to fight.
Times are changing, of course. The gamblers that still make up the large majority of the market are soon going to be dwarfed by the massive capital that institutional investment can bring to bear, and make no mistake, those investors of size do do their homework, they do care about fundamentals. They know, like we do, that selling shovels during this gold rush is the best way to profit, and that Ethereum is that shovel, and moreover, that it will grow into the digital equivalent of Manhattan real estate in the fullness of time. How soon these more competent investors will arrive en masse is hard to say, of course - weâve been crying out, âthe institutions are coming, the institutions are comingâ like some kind of latter-day Bilbo Baggins for years now. But I think most would agree that the ETF approvals, whenever they may come, will in many ways herald that advent. The time of fundamentals is not here yet, but it is coming.
So while we all sit here gnashing our teeth and pulling our hair while the markets happily ignore our precious Ethereum, keep in mind that while weâre a tiny component of those markets today, what we really are is forerunners.
Weâre not the last of our kind in a world devoid of reason, raging against the dying of the light.
Weâre the first.
I have this idea for quite some time now and Iâd like to share it with you.
I think that DeFi lacks itâs own high level script language. All major systems have SDKs (for advanced developers) and â on the other hand â UI, but nothing in between.
Take Uniswap as an example: you have low level SDK, where you have to deal directly with all the components (and bignumbers, various notations and so on) or pretty clumsy UI (try to move your position to a different range, even if it doesnât require swapping tokens â it takes lot of clicking, waiting and itâs almost guaranteed that price will move while youâre doing all of this.
The solution would be high level language or set of scripts which would allow to execute all the most important functions of given Defi system by using simple commands. It should eg. understand token symbols, decimal numbers.
So instead of 100+ lines of code or using browser etc you could do:
`movePosition 29133 2000 3000` and after confirmation (which could be disabled) itâs done for you.
or, in interactive mode, you could do
`movePosition` and youâd be asked to select from list or type which position, then set range.
Those commands could be executed as scripts. There could be also an event watcher (eg. watching price on some pool) to which you could bind scripts, executed when some conditions are met. Eg. when APY on AAVE is lower than on sDAI, withdraw USDC, convert to DAI using Curve and stake on Spark. Even if not automated itâs much easier, faster to execute and probably cheaper.
What do you think about it?
EDIT: If there are some devs whoâd like to do such project, please pm me.
Yesterday, u/syzygy00778 posted a link to a comment discussing the identity of Satoshi. Buried in the comments is another link, to an EXCELLENT article titled âLen Sassaman and Satoshi: a Cypherpunk Historyâ.
Iâll paste the first two paragraphs, and let you read the rest..
"Weâve lost too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
Embedded on every single node of the Bitcoin network is an obituary. Hacked into the transaction data, itâs a memorial to Len Sassaman, a man essentially immortalized in the blockchain itself. A fitting tribute in more ways than one.
Len was a true Cypherpunkâ equal parts brilliant, irreverent, and idealistic. He devoted his life to defending personal freedoms through cryptography, working as a developer on PGP encryption and open-source privacy technology, as well as an academic cryptographer researching P2P networks under blockchain inventor David Chaum."
Any node operators / solo stakers!
EthStaker & Obol are putting out a survey to get to know the landscape of home stakers and solo stakers. The goal is to create publicly available data that accurately represents what home/solo stakers care about, what kind of software and services we mostly use, what we need, etc. The info can be used to advocate for stakers in ongoing research based on their own words. Some questions were contributed by EF researchers themselves
It shouldnât take longer than 15 minutes, most questions are optional, and no data collected can be tied back personally to people (the survey software is FOSS!). We aim to repeat the survey every 6-12 months to get an idea of how the landscape is changing. Itâs available in English, Mandarin, Spanish & Italian. Weâll leave it open for 2-3 weeks depending on volume
The survey is primarily aimed at those running personal validators (anywhere! Cloud services, bare metal services, at home, with a staking-as-a-service provider), minipools, or DVT clusters. If folks have any feedback or suggestions for the next iteration of the survey, would love to hear them! Feel free to direct them to me or to the EthStaker team email (team at ethstaker dot cc)
Survey Link: https://stakinglandscape.limesurvey.net/748278
The Aestus Relay team (thatâs me, and /u/austonst) have decided to run an experiment in the EigenLayer AVS Operator space. I want to test whether our service and reputation in the MEV-Boost ecosystem as a credibly neutral and solo-staker focussed infrastructure provider, might be of benefit in other domains. I honestly donât know how this is going to work out, but itâs an interesting sideline to pursue.
So, as EigenDA hits mainnet today, iâm announcing our intent, and hoping that you might support this by delegating your Native or Liquid Restaking Tokens to us here. Once we hit the required threshold of 320 ETH, weâll begin operations. I expect this to take a few days.
Iâll write out a longer post that sets out our motivations and intent, soon. But in brief: it seems clear that the restaking and AVS ecosystem is in danger of rapid domination by staking pools. We hope to make a small difference by leveraging our existing infrastructure in pursuit of decentralisation.
The technology doesnât appear to support it yet, but once itâs possible - weâll figure out how to make sure native solo re-stakers donât pay any fees to use our AVS services.
I donât encourage anyone to participate in Eigenlayer restaking because of their stated intention to onboard all validators (thatâs a form of network capture), but if you DO use Eigenlayer and need to delegate your LSD tokens to a node operator, Iâd really encourage you to choose Aestus.
Aestus is made up of two long time members of /r/ethfinance, /u/austonst and /u/KuDeTa. In all of my interactions with them Iâve found them to be working in the right directions.
https://app.eigenlayer.xyz/operator/0x30eafe8869a1528660a97b7a7e8e2d0037dcb922
So on the EVM call last Friday I went on a rant for a few minutes after JT read my doot. Itâs so good Iâm literally just cleaning it up and transcribing it here:
FHE is complementary to zk-proofs. Zk-proofs say that I did the calculation honestly. We can prove something like I calculated 4+5 honestly and you donât have to go and rerun it yourself to get the answer to that. FHE can be used for many things outside of AI but itâs especially valuable for things like DePin.
For example Biometric Authorization. When you want to take your thumbprint or eyeprint and use that as an authorization mechanism. You donât want to give someone your decrypted eyeprint. Today, without FHE, we encrypt your data in transit so the people in the middle canât get it, then we decrypt it on the receiving side, and then the person on the receiving side now has your decrypted eyeprint and can basically just impersonate you. There is fundamentally trust with whomever is the processor of your data.
With FHE, we can give you an encrypted eyeprint, they can check that your eyeprint is actually you, without knowing itâs you. They donât have something that can be reused. So they can do authorization without you leaking your public data.
The same thing would be true if I was in healthcare and wanted to make health predictions about you. If I know itâs you and you give me all your health data what am I going to do? As a centralized provider Iâm going to take that data, Iâm going to jot it down, and then Iâm going to sell it on the data market to some health insurance companies so they can jack up your rates.
As a user, I want the output of the LLM that tells me what might be wrong with me without the processor of the data being able to jot it down and sell it maliciously against me and add that extra monetization. The same thing would be true in a lot of places. It should be true throughout all of web2. This should explode and become mandatory in certain environments where privacy should be sacrosanct. But in DePin especially, because of permissionless compute, I canât even just say I trust Amazon. I have no idea who the processor of the data is and due to market forces it is going to devolve into the most malicious operator who is able to extract the most monetization out of the data they steal.
So for DePin to be applicable to any area where there is the remotest sense of secrecy or privacy we need to be able to do calculation on an untrusted operator and both prove that they did the calculation honestly (zk-proof) and that they didnât have access to the underlying data (FHE). So you put these two technologies together and you get something that can eat into the margins of centralized compute providers like AWS in a significant way.
To put their margins in perspective, a P5 instance on AWS right now is $92 an hour. I can buy that machine for about $350k. At $92 an hour thatâs over $800k a year, Amazon is making over 200% APR on the investment of the machine. There is an extraordinarily huge margin there and the effect of that is that the highest grade of compute we have isnât democratized and therefore the apps that require that grade of compute are increasingly being centralized into a few tech oligarchs.
Due to the compute requirements, this basically translates to AI. So weâre seeing brick wall around AI being built every time we add another parameter to the LLM. Chat GPT was 1.5B parameters; it takes about 13 gigs of video ram to hold and use the model. Chat GPT 4 is bigger. Weâre going to go to a trillion parameters. Weâre going to get to a point where you need to have hundreds of gigs of video ram just to serve on the model and thatâs not going to be accessible to the average person. The average person isnât going to buy a half million dollar machine from NVidia. We need to be able to provide that high end compute to them at a lower margin than AWS is charging.
That is both an opportunity and a moral imperative of Defi and Depin. We need to make the compute required to access the technologies we are pioneering more democratically accessible before they become permanently locked behind brick wall and only accessible to a few tech oligarchs and used in their most extractive possible way against humanity.
Todayâs Bankless discussion came at the perfect time. I had just finished reading u/AElowsson âs analysis and I think I understand more clearly whatâs really at stake (heh) here. I have to admit my initial reaction when I read the proposal was pretty negative, so in order to help others make up their mind and also keep track of all the arguments that I see, Iâve made a list of the pros and cons as Iâve understood them, and explained them as simply as possible. If there are any more that you can think of and ELI5, Iâll be happy to add them to the list.
Pros of issuance change:
The network stability benefits from an optimal number of validators, as itâs more difficult for a huge number of validators to effectively attest blocks fast enough.
The ETH that remains in circulation is not superseded by LSTs, which apart from having smart contract, centralization and rugpull risks, make the LST a proxy for ETH. As a result, ETH does not lose its âmoneynessâ in the eyes of its users.
Non-stakers benefit immensely from an issuance reduction. Currently, non-stakers benefit from the burn by having an effective ~0.5% APY, and at the same time, stakers get >3%. However, as more ETH is staked, non-stakers end up not benefiting at all as more and more rewards go to stakers, who at a minimum will be getting 2% at 100% ETH staked.
The more ETH is staked, the harder it will be to implement this change. This is due to several reasons, most important of which is that big staking providers have a huge incentive to block it. Lido has already come out in favour of ALL ETH being staked and wanting as much of it to be stETH. What would happen in a post-staked ETH ETF world, when BlackRock lobbies against implementing a change to issuance?
Unclear if issuance change will be a pro or a con:
It is not clear how this change will affect the dynamics between solo/hobby stakers and huge staking services. On one hand, thereâs definitely a limit where solo stakers would exit, and if the staking pools manage to profit though other means, the APY could be very negative and drive all solo stakers out. On the other hand, a market optimized APY leaves less space for staking pools to get a cut of the profits, and if solo stakers eventually have all the ways to profit through other means as big pools, they might be more resistant to low APY. Personally, I would keep a validator up even at half a percent APY, but would not keep my validator up at, say, -5% APY.
Fewer ETH staked means less economic security for a network that aims to secure trillions of dollars of assets. However, those fewer ETH can end up having more economic value in the long term due to a more robust and valuable network, so the end result is not immediately clear.
Cons of issuance change:
Changing the issuance again will lead to huge amounts of FUD, and ETH losing some of its âmoneynessâ due to the belief that the EF can unilaterally change the monetary supply.
Itâs definitely not good optics at a time when the SEC is investigating and will be pretty bad for our hopes for an ETF.
The issuance can and probably will need to be changed again. The main reason is that there are economics we simply do not understand, like the effect restaking will have on the amount of ETH staked. Also, the amount of validators might go down significantly with EIP-7251 (max-ETH per validator), leading the network to require more validators to be sufficiently decentralized. Finally, there are ideas for future updates that, if implemented, will significanly alter the economics of ETH. MEV-burn is one frequently discussed here, but the Anti-correlation Penalties for validator attestations, which in my understanding disincentivizes big staking providers by implementing heavier penalties when lots of validators lose an attestation at the same time, will most probably also affect the number of validators and the staking pool-solo staker dynamics.
âPersonal opinion belowâ
So here is my view now: I am still mostly on the fence regarding the immediate (see:Pectra) issuance curve change, but at the same time I want to come out in support of an eventual change of the issuance curve towards one where staking much more than 50% of the supply is heavily disincentivized by negative issuance.
The main reason for this is that most of the disadvantages of changing the issuance are short-term troubles, and wonât have any effect on the long-term longevity of Ethereum. Iâd rather see the project succeed and change the world, than make a bit more money for a year or five. âIâm in it for the techâ might be a meme, but itâs also the best way to analyze long-term investments, and it would be much easier for me to leave a project that has ossified before being finished, than it would be to leave because the price dumped. Changing Ethereumâs issuance will not only make it a more robust network, but also better money, especially for smaller holders that cannot stake.
ETH needs to keep changing for the better, so donât sacrifice the future to the present. Thatâs what Bitcoin did, and apart from the fact that it will have huge issues eventually, it ended up being only a shadow of what it could be.
Special guest Don Gossen joins us from Nevermined, a decentralized AI payments protocol.
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Ethereum
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The meme franchises,
Stupid games with stupid prizes,
Down turn surprises.
You know the old saying: âBuy ETH on April Foolâs Day, $8000 by end of Mayâ.
Donât ignore it this time.
So a couple of days I asked if the EF wants to kill or at least tame restaking. I relistened to the UCC episode and hereâs my understanding.
Restaking is not restaking. At least in the case of Eigenlayer (and I think for now its fair to assume Eigen will be 80%+ of the restaking market) technically any asset could be used as collateral. Just because right now itâs validators via eigenpods or staked ETH via LSTs doesnât mean thatâs the endgame. Actually pure ETH, USD or even other tokens could be used to secure the AVS. This seems to play an important:
If the AVS really requires the restaker to be a validator then the plan is to âsmoothenâ rewards, which likely (!) means that MEV spikes will be captured and burned/ redistributed. Even though they didnât mention this I guess something like based sequencing where the validator sequences the L2 could be one of these cases. The goal is to make sure big entities arenât in a better position to capture value than solo stakers.
If the AVS is just secured by capital provided, but the security is not connected to a validator and could be done by someone with USD and a computer, then thatâs a different story.
I still have many questionsâŚ
Iâm a big fan of the work that /u/hanniabu and EthStaker (/u/nixorokish) have done with https://ethstaker.cc/incidents to document Beacon Chain incidents in a publicly aggregated way. I think this is awesome for transparency and accountability.
I was brainstorming ways that it might be improved, and I think it could be helpful to convert this page to a table and include a severity scale. Hereâs an idea what that might look like, and I think it would be awesome for other people to take that apart.
Iâm never good with these scales, I wonder if the most severe incidents should have higher or lower incidents. This example is ranked with lower severity = lower higher number. I also think itâs good to leave room for a 10 point scale and realize that there may be shuffling over time.
ALSO, I think it may be useful to indicate that different events can trigger the same level of severity, as Iâve tried to illustrate below.
Note that this is a very first draft and it would need a ton of editing by others to be useful.
Beacon chain incident severity scale:
Minor
Severity 10 - Minority client issue that caused that client to miss attestations, participation above 95%, no missed slot.
Severity 9 - A client or multi-client issue causes participation to drop between 85% and 95%, no more than 1 consecutive missed slot.
Severity 8 - A client or multi-client issue that causes participation to drop between 66% and 85%, no more than 1 consecutive missed slot.
Medium
Severity 7 - A beacon chain consensus or execution client becomes a majority client (greater than 66% use)
Severity 6 - more than 1 consecutive missed slot; or any entity exceeds 33% of validators
Severity 5 -
Major
Severity 4 - Any entity exceeds 50% of validators
Severity 3 -
Severity 2 - No transactions were processed on the beacon chain for < 1 hour
Extreme
Severity 1 - No transactions were processed on the beacon chain for > 1 hour; An entity exceeds 66% of validators
To monetise their infrastructure, relays need a performance edge - which they canât possibly maintain if everything is open source. So to some extent, competing at all necessitates competing in private. At the moment, ultrasound are running a fee delta / bid adjustment experiment in which they try to capture the difference between the highest and second highest bids - effectively depriving the validator of it. By doing so, they can take a fee - but also break some of the natural resilience of the mev-boost system - as bids are now unique to their relay. As i understand things, they also have a closed source rust implementation of the relay codebase, and have done some work with reth to try and improve bid simulation performance (vs geth). Those are the broad strokes, and youâll see that they do open source some of their core thinking.
Frankly, itâs very difficult to work out exactly who is running what code, and what is clear is that none of the relays (including Aestus - though all our code is opensource) are vanilla MEV-Boost anymore, except Flashbots. /u/benido asked me elsewhere if this canât also be seen as a âgoodâ thing. Judge for yourselves based on the recent incidents. I would much rather find a way to incentivise relays (until we can get rid of them entirely) such that they want and need to work together. An upfront fee is probably more healthy. However, we should also face facts: the validator set is pretty mercenary and convincing Coinbase, LIDO and others to e.g. only use open source relays seems unlikely to happen.
To make matters even more interesting, we seem to be entering the early stages of a race to compete on timing. Bloxroute proudly boast they are making validators who sign up to their gateway an additional 6.4% of MEV income. Where does that come from? The next proposing validator (not using their service). I havenât managed to get to the bottom of whether other relays (including US) are yet doing this, but i wouldnât be surprised if they are.
Iâve spent time with people from across the MEV (relay/builder/searcher) ecosystem at various events, and i want to underline that while itâs somewhat tempting and human to try and reduce this to a question of individual/entity behaviour or ethics, threatening everyone with the ethereum police really misses the point entirely. The incentives are broken and the competition increases fragility. Donât hate the player - hate the game.
Another update!
After yâall crushed my app for planning your exit strategy, I used the weekend to get it on a proper hosting plan.
Itâs live on kollit.ai now!
Thousands of people entered in a matter of a day, i utterly speechless and so greatful you guys found my app useful!
For the folks who missed it:
I made an exit strategy planner using game theory. Itâs called Kollit - you call the prices, enter your risk tolerance and a few more optional things and the app will spit out an exit strategy that mathematically minimizing your total regret, be it regret of selling early or regret of waiting for a higher price that never comes. I think itâs really cool and im super excited to hear what you have to say! If you have any questions or suggestions please dont hesitate :)
Here is a long-form âEIP research postâ on my reward curve with tempered issuance.
There shouldnât be any significant issuance or monetary policy change unless the issue is something so obvious and objectively agreeable or existential already. The reasons for any significant changes to issuance now seem to be for highly subjective reasons. The threat to centralization comes much more from some central body trying to tweak monetary policy, not from the market, institutions, individual users, and the broader ecosystem naturally figuring itself out. Even if only a small percentage of ETH is in circulation in the future then so be itâŚÂ Anyone drumming up ideas for changes to monetary policy right now should rather maybe consider simplying user experience for solo stakers or try to educate the masses on holding or using ETH the hard asset. Even advocating to LSTâs and the like to follow some kind of better defined framework would be a better approach. There are so many other ways to address subjective issues like the ones being brought up imo. Monetary policy changes are like the absolute last resort.
There are good arguments on both sides of the issuance debate. I donât, however, believe consistency of monetary policy is a good argument in favour of doing nothing. Itâs naive to imagine we could have ever designed the yield curve correctly the first time around, given MEV, LSTs and restaking had yet to appear. It would therefore be hubris to suggest that any changes we make now will ever be considered final, given all the unknown unknowns. Crypto just moves too quickly. The capacity for evolution and adaptation is a core strength of the ethereum community and we should embrace it to stay ahead of the competition.
Some things I believe are true. I could be wrong on some.
For me this is the best take on the issuance reduction so far: https://warpcast.com/orangesamus.eth/0x7668549c
My thoughts on issuance reduction:
To target < 100% staked ETH you assume:
- There is some yield âx%â where the market finds it irrational to take on the risks/opportunity costs of even delegating to someone else to stake
- Issuance curve is chosen such that we cross below x% before we get to 100% staked ETH
The problem is that I think:
- There is also some nominal yield ây%â that makes it irrational to be a solo or home staker after you get any lower than y%
And until you find a way to make solo/home staking more competitive relative to centralized alternatives:
- y% will always be greater than x%
So I think the worst case scenario is the one that we get an issuance curve that leads to:
- crossing below y% (no longer rational to solo/home stake)
- And even worse: we are still > x% even at 100% ETH staked, meaning we didnât accomplish our primary goal, and our validator set is highly centralizedEven if we choose a good x% and land at less than 100% staked ETH, we could still end well below y% and our validator set may end up highly centralized.
Iâd rather Ethereum âover payâ for a robust validator set in the short term, than âunder payâ and end up without a robust validator set
I think we should prioritize research to make decentralized staking more competitive, like ideas shown below:
- https://ethresear.ch/t/how-optional-non-kyc-validator-metadata-can-improve-staking-decentralization/17032
- https://ethresear.ch/t/supporting-decentralized-staking-through-more-anti-correlation-incentives/19116
If solo staking equilibrium yield is lower than pooled staking equilibrium yield. Then we must overpay issuance to ensure solo stakers can exist, otherwise the network will become strongly centralized.
Another argument on top of this one, whatever the optimal issuance curve is (if there is even one), we must approach it from above. Because if we overtighten we will end up having to raise issuance. And this creates a very bad precedent that will likely erode any monetary credibility Ethereum may have.
A limitation of permissionless execution for as long as Iâve been around has been that everything is necessarily public. We use mixers on occasion to obfuscate fund movements but the underlying program and underlying data for smart contracts is always public. If thereâs a chain adjacent service like an Oracle, everything about its function is public. If I wanted to use a smart contract or a keeper to serve some data for me conditionally on authorization I end up having to use a centralized service at some point to issue a decryption key. Otherwise whomever wants the data could simply join as a data provider, download everything, and then exit without paying for the data. The root problem is just that if a system is permissionless then it canât be entrusted with secrets.
This has become an acute pain point for AI x crypto applications recently. We canât use DePin to train on private data or to serve answers from private models. However, thereâs some math magic just on the fringe of development at the moment that could blow this space open: zk-proofs + fully homomorphic encryption (FHE)1.
Hereâs an ELI5: I want you to add two numbers for me but I donât want you to know which numbers Iâm adding. Letâs say I want the answer to 1+1. So I add a secret number known to me but not to you to each input, letâs say 3 and 4, and I give you the problem 4+5. You calculate 9. To get the decrypted answer I just subtract the sum of the secret numbers in my input from your answer: 9-(3+4)=2. This looks silly in the reductive case but makes a lot more sense as the number operators (+, -, *, /) and operations in the calculation grows. Today, there are workable FHE encodings that can support any combination of multiplication and addition on an encrypted space. This is promising because as it turns out neural nets are nothing but a very large combination of simple arithmetic operationsâŚ
Hence a FHE encoded neural net can potentially be run on DePin infrastructure while protecting property rights to the underlying model. Once we see some of the initial projects like zama, privasea, and based.ai prove out this concept and it becomes more widely understood the full applications of FHE in crypto are going to be huge. I highly suggest Rabbit Holing on this one for a few hours.
The startup I work for just shipped https://www.rdatadao.org. Without sharing my own opinion or involvement, Iâm curious what impression it leaves you all withâŚ
Warning: It was realized this also exports your DMs.u/dondochaka is bringing this up with the team.
Special guest Ram Ahluwalia, CFA and CEO of Lumida Wealth, a digitally native, SEC registered investment advisor specializing in alternative investments and digital assets.
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Ethereum
$3570
0.07
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Jailed FTX bro,
Itâs six halving in a row,
Raise and fall below.
Is âyou donât have enough pointsâ the new âyou donât have enough ETHâ?
Hey guys. As a genesis solo validator, I would like to share with you the reasons why I oppose the increase in block size at the present time.
Therefore, I think this is not the right time to increase the block size. I think we should wait until Ethereum L2s have reached a point where they can compete with alternative L1s in terms of capacity and the cases where complex blocks can cause small validators to miss blocks have been thoroughly tested and eliminated.
I recently read Polynyaâs latest blog, which reminded me of how grateful I am to be a part of this group. X is nothing but a shitshow; Farcaster looks promising, but the conversation is fragmented. The only place where the comment-to-quality ratio is high is here, with a wholesome bunch of strangers discussing the whole ecosystem and offering help without prejudice. Itâs a rare find in the current market, especially now that meme mania seems to be leading the charge.
Even beyond this group, some fellow members have offered their guidance and support. MinimalGravitas, my dude, if it werenât for your kind words, I would have left the DAO in â22. Do you know, a fellow member even offered me their NUC, its up and running. Every time I look at it, I forget the gloom I see elsewhere, it gives me hope. This motivation to run a node, even if itâs non-staking, was inspired by Nixoâs tweet. Not directly, but Logris has taught me valuable lessons through his well-explained comments. Whether on vacation or gone camping, no worries, Tricky got you covered with doots when youâre back. Benido and Hanni have written extensively on different topics, from DAO to LST to client diversity. And the list goes on⌠all that without an expectation of any financial return.
Sometime we take things for granted or we are unaware of impact of our action but not today, today I want to show my gratitude and thank you all for contributing to this forum. Even if I have nothing to say, I ready the daily and learn something from it and I am greatful for that.
L2beat.com does an amazing job at explaining the trade-offs in detail. L2s are definitely not web2 technology. In fact, itâs so novel that they are still being built, thatâs why they have some amount of training wheels and safety guards at the moment.
The first thing to observe is that you can give up decentralization for an L2 as long as some protections are guaranteed to the user programmatically. Itâs OK for a rollup operator to run the rollup themselves, it may even be permissioned, it may even be censored. And thatâs OK as long as you can always escape hatch with your assets to the L1. And the analogy I would use here is that this is the exact same thing that happens with private businesses. A restaurant doesnât have to serve you, they may reserve the right to not have you as a customer sometimes for trivialities like dress-code. A web forum may ban you. And thatâs fine because you can go anywhere else. If you are unhappy with the rollup you get your stuff and go somewhere else. Your fundamental rights are preserved in the public space, the L1 is the public space. And the L1 is permissionless and censorship-resistant so you can be sure there will be somewhere else to go.
Here is an example of how this works in Arbitrum: https://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/arbitrum#risk-analysis
Sequencer failure Self sequence
In the event of a sequencer failure, users can force transactions to be included in the projectâs chain by sending them to L1. There is a 1d delay on this operation. Proposer failure Self propose
Anyone can become a Proposer after 6d 8h of inactivity from the currently whitelisted Proposers.
Even if Arbitrum went for the ultimate censorship, turning off their rollup, you would be able to use the L1 and escape hatch.
Bitcoin maxis have been parroting a never ending stream of FUD arguments for years, systematically being proven wrong and when that happens instead of recognizing their mistake they move to new FUD arguments. Facts be damned. I would recommend updating your bayesian priors taking their track-record into account.
I am dealing with internalizing the hate toward Ethereum, but am also trying to prevent myself being blinded by my own bias.
One trap that people often fall into is refusing to acknowledge any scenario where their beliefs, convictions, or ideals could ever be âwrongâ.
As a result, I am compiling a list of things which would indicate to me that I was wrong about Ethereum. That Ethereum was a failed experiment doomed due to irreparable flaws. Of the 4 listed here, any one of the first 3 coming true I think would be enough for me to concede the âdeath of ETHâ.
For myself, and hopefully some of you here who are deeply invested in Ethereumâs success, these scenarios would likely need to be demonstrable, systemic, and irreparable to convince us that Ethereum was a failed experiment.
What you think about Vitalik 5 year time-frame for Ethereum to prove its ready for mainstream real world adoption?
https://thedefiant.io/vitalik-says-ethereum-must-achieve-mainstream-adoption-within-five-years
Despite the cc subreddit pushing a negative narrative, it seems like Vitalik is actually bullish.
âI expect Ethereum to be a very leading player in helping to make stablecoin accessible to people in a way that actually is open, actually is decentralized, and actually doesnât require trusting fragile third-parties.â
Also, improvements to be able to run a node (not sure if validators but probably) without the need for a lot of storage space. zk-SNARKs would help us move from our staking rigs to just a phone/very light processing on a computer.
âWith Verkle Trees, as a node, you would not have to store the state locally. And with EIP-4444: History Expiry, you would not have to store most of the history locally,â Buterin said. âThe amount of data that you would need to be a node would decrease from multiple terabytes to⌠being able to run a node in RAM.â
âIn the long term, running a node will feel like⌠a few very simple computations that will be very easy to do as a background process on any computer, maybe even a phone, even inside a browser,â Buterin said. âThereâs a pre-existing technology roadmap to get to that point.â
With EIP-7251/MaxEB coming I was curious why the beacon chain did not launch this way in the first place. It has an interesting backstory.
From the EIP itself:
The limit on the MAX_EFFECTIVE_BALANCE is technical debt from the original sharding design, in which subcommittees (not the attesting committee but the committee calculated in is_aggregator) needed to be majority honest. As a result, keeping the weights of subcommittee members approximately equal reduced the risk of a single large validator containing too much influence. Under the current design, these subcommittees are only used for attestation aggregation, and thus only have a 1/N honesty assumption.
maxeb is now planned for the next hard fork. This will remove the 32e max limit for validators, greatly reducing bandwidth consumption for stakers. - eric.eth https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1770836409848332554
Will maxeb really reduce bandwidth greatly? Only if the whales with thousands of validators actually consolidate to big validators instead of many small ones, something that is yet to be seen. You could argue that they donât want to have 3200 ETH validators as the impact of a bug would be 100x bigger. It would lower Ethereum protocol risk though so should be in their best interest.
It seems unlikely to me that we will lower the number of validators by 50-75%, which is what I would consider greatly reducing consumption. More likely we will drop by some 10-30%, so not really making a big difference in terms of bandwidth.
This is almost certainly referring to attestation subnets.
For each validator a solo staker has (up to 64), they have to subscribe to a new attestation subnet, with all the gossip and increased traffic that causes.
If that solo staker consolidates their validators under maxEB, they could go back down to a single attestation subnet, reducing bandwidth usage significantly.
On my LinkedIn feed I saw that Paul Brody just got appointed as Chairman of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. Curious as to what his plans are to speed up enterprise adopotion.
Just wanted to amplify u/_WebOfTrust post from 2 days ago⌠what an awesome community this is. I am a relatively late comer into the community.
Thank you all for consistency sharing your knowledge with internet anons like me. Iâve learnt more from this sub than any other place on the internet. I literally got a job offer because I dove into MEV because of the daily doots posts about it consistently throughout the past few years (I didnât take the offer in the end).
Your selfless sharing has consequences, and I my career trajectory is one of them.
Other than that this year has been transformative for me career-wise (got back in the crypto industry after a stint in fintech) and personally as an artist (did my first solo exhibition yay!). Going to ETH Denver for the first time and meeting u/jtnichol and other folk was the most wholesome experience Iâve had in a long long time.
I work on consumer side of crypto, specifically in games and 99% of the ppl are talking about the casino/degen aspect of crypto, I think they are firmly in the camp of âitâs just how it isâ , and perfectly captures what polynaâs sentiment that
âthis evil in crypto is banal and normalized. This has become the identity of crypto - sure, some useful stuff, but mostly just infested with scams and absolute degeneracy.â
Despite the mis-aligned incentives, greed, grift in the space, I donât see any other system that can even attempt to fix the problems we face at scale. I donât know what the answer is, but I believe it starts with places like ethfinance, that can influence the culture of the ecosystem.
I also finally got my EVM today yay.
Itâs not a topic I look at much, or one that I plan to spend much more time on, but I spent my morning trying to fill in some knowledge gaps about execution layer clients this morning. Most of you guys rely on supermajority.info, but obviously there are some unknowns since not all proposer sets have publicly stated their client usage (Binance, Kraken, OKX, Bitcoin Suisse, etc.).
The idea is that even though most blocks are built through PBS, every proposer still has a small share of locally built blocks (min-bid reversions, network latency delaying payloads from relays, local blocks being more valuable than PBS if there isnât much MEV during the block, etc.) and for those subsets of blocks we can look at the extra_data encoded on-chain to tag what clients proposers are using.
Part of the issue with this methodology is that besu and erigon donât actually embed extra_data so the field is blank, and at the same time there are some MEV builders who try to stay anonymous and donât embed data, so we can only cleanly tag geth and Nethermind, and then we need to check vs off-chain MEV data to see if the empty data blocks are from anonymous MEV builders or from one of besu/erigon.
On top of that, thereâs occasionally been MEV builders using the Nethermind tag that briefly crop up. I think this is just from misconfigurations because they go away pretty quick, but it adds a bit of noise to the data. Basically the methodology is a bit of a mess.
As a quick summary:
The data is here for anyone that wants a peak:
[https://hackmd.io/@dataalways/execution-layer-diversity](https://hackmd.io/@dataalways/execution-layer-diversity)
The CFTC refers to ETH as a commodity in their KuCoin complaint.
On the same day, courts side with SEC on the staking issue in Coinbase case.
Meanwhile, Fidelity files S-1 form for spot Ethereum ETF with staking included.
Within 24hrs, Larry Fink says on Fox News that if ETH were designated as a security, that wouldnât be deleterious to the approval of an ETF.
Perhaps spot ETH is a commodity (CFTC regulated), but staked ETH is a security (SEC regulated).
Prediction: Staked ETH ETF approved before spot ETH ETF.
Where are people going to be the next few weeks? Is there some way to share where we will be?
Iâm headed to:
Who am I going to see where?
Special guest Adam Blumberg of Interaxis. Adam is a Certified Financial Planner, and a former Registered Investment Advisor. He co-founded Interaxis in 2019 to educate advisors and investors on digital assets and decentralized finance. His Interaxis YouTube channel is viewed by thousands across the globe. He is a regular contributor to Coindeskâs Crypto For Advisors and was featured on Bloomberg TV and Blockworks.
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Good code for your peers,
Great discussions and some beers,
Blockchain pioneers.
I wish the ETF passes and gets pushed down all the haters throats like bad medicine.
In May, when SEC nods in grace,
ETH ETF takes its rightful place.
Skeptics scowl, in disbelief they stare,
As Ethereum soars, slicing through despair.
âImpossible!â they cried, their words so cold,
Yet forward moves the future, bold.
Their doubts, like shadows, quickly flee,
As ETH ascends, for all to see.
The haters cope, their voices dim,
Against the tide, their chances slim.
For in this dance of digital fate,
Ethereumâs rise, they canât abate.
So let them cope, let them despair,
While Ethereumâs light fills the air.
For in the end, itâs clear to see,
The SECâs nod sets Ethereum free.
It might have gone under in yesterdays daily, but u/KnowNoShade posted a very interesting link about the new fee structure on Optimism and why they had such a huge reduction in cost after the Dencun hardfork. Blobs alone could not have reduced the fees by that much. What optimism did in addition was that Optimism started to consider priority fees in their fee calculation. The base fee can be close to 0 and optimism still makes enough money through the priority fee. Optimism does not directly subsidize transactions, but the way they calculate the transactions and set average gas usage for the base fee to increase it essentially means that the actors which pay a high priority fee are indirectly subsidizing the fees for the other users. And apparently there are enough users paying a high priority fee which makes OP chains still profitable. Quite interesting to be honest. According Ryan Berckmans tweet OP Mainnet and Base still make enough money through priority fees. I am not sure if this is also true for Zora as I would expect not too many people pay a priority fee there, I might be wrong there though. Overall, I think it is quite interesting how Dencun now has kicked off a rollup fee competition. Apparently arbitrum will also improve their fees soon.
Few more ARB DAO updates beyond what I brought up a few days ago, more personal to what Iâve been up to if anyone is curious. (As well as open to feedback before I go âliveâ with one of these items).
Late to the party, but ARB did release their 2023 Transparency Reporting (https://docs.arbit rum.foundation/foundation-documents#transparency-reports). If anyone wants to give it a read there is some good things too look at, although I will note page 11 might be my favorite :). And please note that 100% of the work was done by Questbook, I was just there becase I posted it to Tally / Snapshot. Just having a âLeonardoDeCapriopointsatthetvâ moment.
Iâll admit this sort of came up in January and then I got busy so it got pushed aside once Feb rolled around, but Iâm probably going to start working towards it now that I have the time⌠Iâm going to try to get some of ARBâs council election processes standardized. More info here (https://forum.arbit rum.foundation/t/rfc-create-a-standardized-guideline-for-non-security-council-elections/20915). Basically, these different councils have elections and the process isnât very standard as different people are running the programs each time. I think that detracts from how effective these elections can be. My thought is that a minimum there is a lot of community support for âShieldedâ voting (results hidden until completion). So Iâm hoping at least that will get support, as Iâm breaking it our into three categories:
- Mandating certain election types be used to avoid common pitfalls with less effective voting methods.
- Mandating âShieldedâ voting, as there are too many ways to game the election if results are public as they go along.
- Mandating some type of minimum period for applicants to apply for roles to ensure we can get the best possible field possible.
Solana fees have spiked and are currently ~4X higher than most L2 fees. The Solana low fee narrative is dying.
Solana average fee (24 hours): ~$0.048
Optimism/Starknet average fee (24 hours): ~$0.01
Sources:
And with some very rough numbers L2s may scale 3x their use of blobspace without even raising the blob fee. Currently the network is averaging 1 blob per block. So until it reaches 3 or more blobs per block there wonât be actual pressure on the blob fee. https://dune.com/hildobby/blobs
According to l2beat the L2s did yesterday 133 tps. A factor of x3 will place it around 400 tps. Solana seems to do around 500 tps. https://realtps.net/
With this rough numbers Ethereum seems to have beaten in scalability Solana. Can manage same order of magnitude tps but cheaper. But unlike Solana it has an actual roadmap to keep scaling:
All that without having to give up on decentralization.
I saw a presentation at EthDenver that used a mock dapp from the future, showing what the UX would be like if we had the complete roadmap. In this case it was for buying and selling cars and had assumptions baked in like digital identity, smart wallet, etc.. I really like these types of demos and would be cool to see more. This is the video Iâm talking about: https://youtu.be/TrLbTglwzXg
âDecentralizationâ is a complicated term. In crypto we usually see the system as decentralized based on criteria like âhow many nodes have to collude to censor the systemâ or âhow many nodes need to be taken out for the system to failâ or âhow difficult it is for a single entity to take over governanceâ. But there is a more traditional meaning for decentralization, a pre-digital one, which defines it not as a large system but many local ones and this is where blockchain has some shortcomings.
I am on this subreddit for the blockchain ideologies that resonate with me (and ma bags, of course). But I would also say that being âall inâ is not great. Take Bitcoin maxis. The idea that all the complexity of expression and exchange of value should be scorched and replaced by a single system derived from a single limited resource (which at the onset has every uneven distribution) to me is nothing short of fascist. That idea is despotic and anti-human in the sense that it deprives us (you know, the people who are supposed to be benefitting) from the ability to decide how we want to express human relationships.
Now fans of smart contract chains (say Ethereum) are not Bitcoin maxis at all. Smart contracts are foundation for building any kind of system on top of it. In case of Ethereum experimentation and possibility of human expression (new forms of value, new forms of organization, new forms of interaction) are at the core of the ethos. Yet a blockchain network is still a single system, with one governance, with one limited-supply token, requiring electricity and internet, insecure and with potential middlemen. That said I think what is actually a corollary to Ethereum ethos is cherishing of the good meat-space things - not everything needs to be onchain, digital has security limitations, organization comes in many forms, non-digital governance is important.
High level summary
Season 1 Token Allocation: 90% to stakers 6% to partners 4% to Early Adopters (fan NFT Holders and EAP participants) Stakers received a proportional share of the 90% (59M tokens), the distribution was linear but skewed in favor of smaller stakers Bottom 50% of wallets contributed 1.8% of TVL and received 18% of token allocation Top 10% of wallets contributed 88% of TVL, and received 65% of token allocation Eligibility Rules: What were the rules to be eligible? Anyone who earned more than 1000 points or more from staking 1,000 points was equivalent to staking 1 ETH for 1 day, or staking 0.1 ETH for 10 days Holders of fan NFTs received 430 tokens for each NFT Participating solo-stakers in Operation Solo Staker received 4200 tokens Badge holders and referrers received boosted allocation Specifically who wasnât eligible? Users with less than 1000 points from staking activity, (i.e. if a users points came entirely from badges, they didnât get an airdrop) Users who didnât not transition out of the EAP
Appears to be wallet running an âaddress poisoningâ scam:
Scammer -> new wallet -> victim
The scammer sends a small amount of eth dust to a newly created wallet, which sends it to the victim. The new wallet W* is created to have the same first and last four characters in the address as an address W the victim transacted with recently.
The idea is that the victim in a future transaction copies the target address from the transaction history and because of the address similarity takes the scammer-controlled wallet W* instead of the legit wallet W.
Good catch!
SEC absolutely got bodied here. It should help with ETH ETF filing, I would think. I am sure SEC doesnât want another embrassment
https://twitter.com/iampaulgrewal/status/1769835308559032608
âFor the reasons explained below, the court imposes sanctions against the Commission for bad faith conduct in obtaining, maintaining, and defending the TRO, and denies the Commissionâs Motion to Dismiss without prejudice to refile in accordance with the District of Utahâs Local Rules.The Commissionâs above-discussed conduct constitutes a gross abuse of the power entrusted to it by Congress and substantially undermined the integrity of these proceedings and the judicial process.â
A quick HOP governance update. Although honestly itâs a pretty light one as ultimately most votes over the last few months have been fairly standard DAO things. To run through a quick list (https://snapshot.org/#/hop.eth):
Iâll also share that Iâve been heading HOPâs application for the upcoming 12 week ARB grant program. Me and two other delegates that assisted with this just submitted our finalized application located here. The goal is to subsize bridging fees to Arbitrum, as well as incentivize AMM pools, over those 12 weeks. Decision pending council / DAO vote, but I was really happy how it came out. So I have my fingers crossed.
Which, btw shout out to u/seamonkey82 as youâll notice a link to a certain ARB forum actually works now :)
Yaâll weâre in before BlackRock đĽ
âJUST IN: BlackRock launches digital asset fund and deposits $100 million $USDC on the Ethereum network.â
Eric and Mariano starting an awareness campaign to increase gas limit from 30 to 40mn.
Gas limit can be increased in a coordinated and rational manner by validators. It doesnât need a hard fork.
This is the exact amount that Vitalik suggested during an AMA last year
How much gas limit can we safely increase now? and after Verkle?
Honestly, I think doing a modest gas limit increase even today is reasonable. The gas limit has not been increased for nearly three years, which is the longest time ever in the protocolâs history (that 2x bump in the chart in late 2021 is âfakeâ, in that it reflects the EIP-1559 transition, which increased the âlimitâ by 2x but only increased actual average usage by ~9%). And so splitting the post-2021 gains from Mooreâs law 50/50 between increased capacity and increased ease of syncing/verification would imply an increase to around 40M or so.
Long overdue and Godspeed!
If this drop bothers you, I potentially have bad news for you. Well, not really, but if we are really just at the start of a bull run, similar drops at higher USD values might make you sick⌠So prepare mentally for crazy stuff that will happen. Some random numbers to showcase the things we might be witnessing:
Disclaimer: Everything that follows is based on the assumption that your whole portfolio is in ETH and that we basically went from 4k to 3k (which, at least until now, we didnât, but we also peaked slightly over 4k, so 25% is as good as it gets). Youâre probably a little diversified, so your port value fluctuates a little differnet. Just pretend it is 100% ETH!
If you have:
Good news: 1 ETH = 1 ETH, but from my experience from the last cycle itâs the USD value that hurts.
Bad news: If this is just the start of a bull we might 2.5x from 4k to 10k or even 4x to something like 15-16k. This is great, but a 25% drop will hurt even more. With ETH = 10k USD
or with ETH hitting 16kish
Now why am I posting this? I know I canât really prepare you for these scenarios. You probably will have to go through these to really understand what this means. Also let me tell you I have no idea how I will feel if we hit 10k or 16k and drop 25%. May 2021 (basically down only from 4k to 2k within 2 weeks and even below 2k within 2 months) killed a lot of emotions and changed me long term I think. But if you just joined in the last 2 years, you should try to play through some scenarios and get used to losing a lot (USD) value in a short amount of time.
And while I am at it⌠Think about how you would feel if we hit 15k and then the bear hits and we go down 75% :)
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540 days since The Merge.
Thereâs none his kin,
Tokens canât do the talkin,
A dead man walkin.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray that Wall St. will pump my ETH. But even if the ETFs should fail, I know and I trust in good olâ retail.
ŕźź 㤠ââ ༽㤠ETH TAKE MY ENERGY ŕźź 㤠ââ ŕź˝ă¤
Finalization
Iâve just been learning more about finalization and had a few ah-ha moments that made me very happy. I figured Iâd share them here and also ask anyone to check my thinking.
Finalization is not some magic 2/3 number, where an almost finalized block just needs to get over that hump of 2/3 of the validators attesting to it and then itâs safe. Itâs just a line that weâve chosen to define and say âhereâs a good bar to meet and we can say the block is âfinalized.â
So what is it and why does it matter?
The beacon chain chooses one validator at random to propose a block in each 12-second slot of the blockchain. That validator is the only one who can propose a block, and they can only propose one block. If they propose more than one block for the same slot, they get slashed and force-exited as a validator.
The interesting thing to note here is that an Ethereum block reorg only has two possible outcomes: the proposed block or an empty block. That differs from Bitcoin, in which reorged blocks contain different transactions and were proposed by different miners.
AnywayâŚblocks are only validated by a fraction of the existing validators, as each validator only attests to 1 out of every 32 blocks. This is a way to keep Ethereum nimble, as requiring each validator to attest to each block would bog down the network.
However, at the end of every 32 block section (32 blocks is an âepochâ), there is a block called a âcheckpoint.â When a validator casts their 1-out-of-every-32 blocks vote, they also cast a vote attesting to the last checkpoint. When a checkpoint garners attestations from 2/3 of all validators in existence, that checkpoint (and every block before it) is considered âjustified.â
And when two checkpoints in a row are justified (which naturally takes at minimum of two epochs or 12.8 minutes), the oldest of the two justified blocks is considered âfinalizedâ along with every block that preceded it.
So why is this important? Because of the double vote slashing offense.
Each validator can only vote one way per block. They canât change their vote, or a double vote slashing occurs. When a validator is slashed, they lose around .5 eth and are forced-exited after a certain amount of delayed time. This time delay allows the protocol to see who else is being penalized around the same time period. If there are many slashing offenses, the protocol assumes they were colluding to attack the network, and the slashing offenses start to get angry and impose an additional penalty. Itâs important to understand the formula for this additional penalty. Itâs:
validator_balance * 3 * fraction_of_validators_slashed
In other words, if youâre the only offender, your additional penalty is negligible. However, if at least 1/3 of the other validators were also slashed around the same time, you lose all of your stake. (This is one reason that itâs so stupid to be running a super majority client, but I digress).
So letâs look at this in terms of a justified block. Most conservative case:
A block is justified because exactly 2/3 validators have attested to it (and the other 1/3 havenât voted yet). In order to get reorged, 2/3 + 1 validators need to attest to a different block in that slot. Weâll, 1/3 of validators are still free to vote, but to get the other 1/3 + 1 validators, 1/3 + 1 of all total validators will need to cast a second vote. They can do this, but theyâll get slashed. And a quick look at our handy formula above tells you this will result in a total slashing event of all of these validatorsâ shit.
And if itâs this costly to change a justified block, imagine how difficult it would be to reorg a finalized one. The details get a little tricky here for me, but I believe it would require over 2/3 of all validators losing all of their stake. Right now, thatâs $73 billion dollars worth of security. Not only would the benefit of coordinating this attack have to be worth more than $73 billion, but the attacker would also have to corrupt over 2/3 of the decentralized validators of Ethereum. That last statement is the reason that decentralization matters in Ethereum, and why home stakers are soooooo important. Ethereum needs to be able to withstand a full on moloch attack worth all the money that will ever be settled on top of the chain. Since we like to think thatâs the entire worldâs economy, the value of the eth securing the network by validators will only take us so far. Decentralization does the rest.
i made a âmy bull case for Ethereumâ post in r/cc if any of you are interested, or have any corrections :D
somehow i spent 2 hours on making that post LOL! Also posted on eth subreddits but check out the r/cc one ;)
To help validators with the upcoming hard fork, I improved my open source Validator Updater so everyone can easily update their validator in under a minute!
Detailed instructions can be found on the Ethstaker post, quick summary below.
Note: The updater is adapted from Somer Esatâs guides, and saves the updated binaries to /usr/local/bin. If you have a different setup, you can move the binaries to your desired location after download.
Validator Updater Summary:
Thatâs it, updates process in the terminal and you can be back online before missing a single attestation!
Feel free to check out my other open source Ethereum projects:
Validator Install - Install a full validator from fresh Ubuntu in minutes
Client Switcher - Instantly switch execution clients to improve client diversity
All code is open source but has not been audited, so any testing/feedback is always appreciated.
A Prysm dev forked my code!
I wanted to share my story in case anyone here is considering contributing to Ethereum and isnât sure how to get started.
So to start, Iâm not a programmer. I was the âExcel guyâ at the office because I knew how to do vlookups. I started dabbling in VBA and eventually wrote a macro to take an Ethereum address and lookup the balance using Etherscan API.
One day while updating my validator, I decided to try a Python script rather than copy/paste the 10 commands. I ran the script and was shocked it actually worked. I slowly added more clients and eventually created the validator-updater.
I figured if I could write a script to update, maybe I could write a script that took commands from Somer Esatâs guides and create a full validator-install script.
It took a few months, but I finally got it working. I decided to create a Github account and share on Ethstaker. People responded positively, but no one actually wanted to run it (would you trust your 32 ETH to a random script on Github?)
It was pretty disappointing to know I created something that made staking 100x easier, but no one wanted to run it. I made updates, added clients, but in the end it felt like I was screaming into the void (props to u/superphiz for saying he liked my project and encouraging me to continue working on it).
Eventually u/nixorokish at Ethstaker reached out and said they liked my initiative and wanted to send some DAI as a thank you. Once that DAI hit my wallet I remember thinking I made it, Iâm officially on the Ethereum payroll!
A few months later, I got a notification that someone created a pull request on my repository. I went to investigate and noticed it was Preston Van Loon (Prysm dev) fixing a typo in my validator install code. Pushing the merge button made me feel like an actual developer.
He also forked my repository, which means itâs now hosted on hisGithub. That was a major boost to my confidence and Github street cred.
u/hanniabu reached out and suggested adding a keystore import to the installer. I worked up a few changes and he graciously reviewed the code and provided valuable feedback.
As the client diversity stuff became popular, I created client-switcher to help people switch execution clients with a single click. It was well received and multiple people reached out saying they were able to successfully switch to a minority client.
Recently u/coincashew forked my code and created their own one line installer, mentioning that because of my code they were able to write the whole thing in a single day. People were actually building off my code, and the idea of open source started to make more sense.
So whatâs the point in writing all this? Iâm not really sure. I spent years as a silent observer of this sub, so decided itâs finally time to share my story and maybe inspire someone to start that project theyâve been thinking about.
This hasnât been very lucrative financially, but itâs nice knowing Iâve contributed to Ethereum and made staking a bit more accessible. Not sure where it goes from here, but Iâm cleaning up the code in hopes to eventually have it audited.
Thanks to everyone who provided guidance and encouragement. This really is a special corner of the internet, and Iâm happy to be a part of it!
Be careful, someone is address poisoning transactions pretty efficiently. I sent some ETH from wallet A to a new wallet B, and after the transaction went through, someone sent me a dust amount of ETH to wallet A. The scammerâs address has the same first 4 and last 4 characters as wallet B. Now I have to be really careful not to accidentally send anything to the scammerâs address.
Its alarming because of how quickly they did it, being able to brute force a vanity address with 8 matching characters, fund it, have the txs go through within a minute.
Free idea: a few years ago, someone told me theyâd like to see a Nobel Prize equivalent for Ethereum, but it hasnât happened yet.
The chain will turn 10 years old in ~18 months, which seems like great timing for this! It gives enough time to make it happen properly, too đ
I really love this idea and could see it being something that EthFinance and/or the EVMaverickâs spearheaded.
Hi guys, I am currently building a little website, mostly to improve my typescript and next.js skills. I am a backend dev trying to get more into frontends for a while, partly because of my job.
I wanted to come up with an educational page about ethereum gas and L2s. The main points I want to bring across are how gas cost is not the same for every transaction, but depends on the type of transaction and especially the gas limit. Also I wanted to cover L2s and have an interactive option to compare the gas prices between L1 <> L2 (so far only mainnet and arbitrum)
There is a lot of confusion among newcomers about these topics, and maybe a website like this will help someone. I know there are similar pages, but as I said I mostly needed an excuse to build something haha.
Check out my prototype here gashighdontcry.net
Mobile view works but is not optimized yet.
While working on it I noticed that the arbiscan api always returns 0.1GWei for the gas price, so that part is kinda static, but afaik there is no better way to estimate arbitrum gas.
When you have ideas for more content, or notice bugs or whatever let me know!
Pretty incredible to be closing in on $4k again after 2 years. Cheers to the folks who stuck around in the daily, I wasnât as active as I was in 2021/22 but I still read it almost every day.
Rocket School now Live! EVMavericks ManeNet DAO + EthStaker + Rocket Pool - Class Is In Session!
đâťď¸ https://twitter.com/ProDJKC/status/1765032313962811697
https://nitter.net/ProDJKC/status/1765032313962811697
Reminder:
Sorry guys, this is my fault. My van has been damaged after someone reversed into it and the door wonât close properly so camping has been jeopardised. I will do everything in my power to get the old girl up and running again so camping and the subsequent bull run can continue. Thank you for your understanding.
â(This is not a joke)â
Special guest Kevin Owocki joins us from Gitcoin and Green Pill (https://greenpill.network/), a network-society that exports regenerative digital infrastructure to the world.
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How do you do fellow digital asset securities investors? I would like to enquire about which registered broker-dealer you use to trade your digital asset securities such as Ethereum and others. I just donât trust these âcrypto exchangesâ like Coinbase, nor do I trust open source code as you never know when it might fail! Could one of you please recommend me an SEC compliant platform which I can trust to be properly regulated? I only feel comfortable holding crypto under such regulations as anything else makes me worry about a 2007-style collapse.
Besu is Dencun Ready!!
This release is the minimum version that is required for the upcoming Ethereum Mainnet Dencun upgrade on March 13th. You must upgrade to this version (or greater) before then, or your node will no longer follow the chain. This is also a required version for Besu nodes on Ethereum Classic (ETC). This release does not contain other fixes or improvements. We plan on releasing more fixes, improvements, and features in our next release.
A resume for solo stakers and STRK airdrop, if you are not correctly identified, I think you should :
If you want to keep privacy regarding your public keys, you can DM wenmerge on X : https://twitter.com/Wenmerge2022/status/1757897430992056580
Hope I didnât forgot anything about everything Iâve read here and there, and hope it helps !
This week I turn the page on being a 1000 days on chain. I like to share this with you, as I have a lot to thank this community for.
Getting from CEX to on chain is daunting and feels like stepping into the dark with dangers left and right.
By lurking on Ethfinance I learned some best practises for basic security and common on chain sense. This made me confident in exploring the early L2âs and dApps and qualifiing for, among others, ARB and OP. I got gifted an EVM lion and went on to stake on Gnosis and test for Diva. I rode the 2021 bull hype, and survived the 2022/2023 bear depths and despair.
From time to time I try to contribute here and help others out.
Thank you Ethfinanciers for having me! May you live long and prosper.
Now onwards to the next 1000 days!
NFT news: Yuga Labs bought the Moonbirds project. They already âownâ Bored Apes (which they created), and CryptoPunks (which they bought from Larva Labs).
Moonbirds is CC0 so no one has the copyright to individual NFTs, but Yuga now owns the name and the team. It was an âall stock dealâ, no money. The plan is to integrate them into their Otherside metaverse platform. Many apes are pissed as they see it as diluting the ape brand, but Yuga leadership is saying itâs good for all holders in their ecosystem, which includes apes, mutants, cryptopunks, meebits, 10KTF, Kodas, Otherdeeds, HV-MTL, Mara, and doggos. Maybe I missed one.
GM Everyone! EY Blockchain Summit is back (again). You canât keep us down :)
Registration is here and weâll do our usual collaboration with EthFinance on Q&A.
This year weâre VERY FOCUSED on finance because of the global regulatory convergence going on. Weâll be doing the summit from London with a big focus on Europeâs increasing regulatory maturity.
Speakers include the Lord Mayor of London and weâve got folks from Fnality, Coinbase and more. Weâll also be showing our newest state-of-the-art privacy tech as well.
Bankless episode with yours truly is out
Itâs a long one, but itâs fairly comprehensive of the whole roadmap (still had a lot to say tho)
Some months ago I started to ask for input for a community driven ETH bull case. Today I would like to update it, cause I think the bull market and developments of the past 5 months have changed some of the points we collected back then!
Ethereum the network
Ether the asset
I have deleted one bullet (that talks about nation state demand) and have exchanged it basically with the ETF , cause at this point this seems like a plausible narrative and all institutions could buy ETH that way. On top I have added new demand drivers like Eigenlayer and the effects it already had and will have.
I am sure there is more, so keep it coming if you think there should be more added!
After creating my farcaster account, I realized there wasnât a way to easily share your handle in a frontend-agnostic way so i created https://mycaster.xyz.
With Mycaster you can easily create a share link which will redirect to whichever frontend the person opening the link uses.
How does it work?
The person that wants to share their account enters their farcaster handle and selects Generate Link. This will automatically copy the link to clipboard so you can share it.
For the people that click your link, they can select their preferred frontend to be redirected to. Their selection will be remembered and automatically forward them the next time they use a MyCaster share link.
Try it out! https://mycaster.xyz/?p=hanniabu
The day has (almost) finally arrived, Starknet has announced the $STRK token will be launched and airdropped tomorrow. If you are part of the airdrop: Congratz!Â
Now some of you will probably dump it and thatâs okay. But for those that will keep it, you probably know that you will have to make a decision soon, because $STRK is a governance token and so you will have to pick a delegate. In the past couple of weeks and months we have found three delegates that would like to represent the community within the starknet ecosystem:
While atleft and _weboftrust are delegates already (governance was kicked off even before the token was airdropped, they both got $STRK delegated by the starknet foundation), panthoreon is a new delegate. You can find a little more info about that here. Panthoreon shared some thoughts, insights and motivation here.Â
So when you claim and delegate, keep these three names / delegates in mind. The goal is that all three delegates are open to listening to your feedback and vote based on comments and discussions happening on reddit. So instead of delegating to some maybe famous name from CT, that will probably not take your opinion and arguments into account, I think it would be beautiful if some of us delegated to âour delegatesâ.Â
Starknet is one of the very few non-EVM layer2s. The other very famous ones (OP, ARB, zksync, etc.) are (zk)EVMs. So it is unique in that sense, users need a different wallet and hence the UX is different than what we âusuallyâ see. This is also true for developers, since they need to develop in Cairo, the programming language for Starknet. Because of that (almost?) all apps you can use on starknet are starknet-only since itâs not easy to bring e.g. Uniswap or AAVE to Starknet.
I believe there are only smart contract wallets. Account abstraction is natively built into Starknet. Also STRK can be used to pay gas in the future.
now that ETHâs nearing $3K, consider sharing some wealth to help folks in need đ
Seeds: Crypto Mutual Aid is on Juicebox:
https://juicebox.money/v2/p/624
If unfamiliar, Seeds has helped folks in need in 29 countries & counting. Because DeFi, the ecosystem can successfully offer aid where tradfi and traditional aid fail.
**
One example:
Kana Piath, a schoolchild in South Sudan, couldnât afford to continue elementary school, so her grandmother redeemed a SEED to ask for help.
The Seeds community got them the funds they needed so she could continue school.
They sent a thank you note that said Kana was so excited she ran to school at 6 am the first day back to catch up with her friends. :)
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Leave the rest to parch.
Guys Iâm really worried. Cardano. Youâve heard of it right? Pretty sure the founder and lead dev - canât remember his name but he has a dope beard - also the founder of playboy (or maybe itâs one of those boomer porn mags - hustler?) Anyway dude is LEGIT and recently announced theyâre moving to ON CHAIN GOVERNANCE! You canât get more decentralized than that. Pure democracy. Tokens = votes just like in the REAL WORLD. Eth and dare I say Btc need to get their shit together. Btc is a horse and buggy (with shitty suspension). Eth is a stock car (leaking oil). Solana is a space ship (leaky o ring - we know how that ends). Algorand isâŚsorry lost my train of thought. Cardano tho. Theyâve FIGURED IT OUT!
Youâre on alert eth devs. The time of autocratic rule will soon be over. On chain governance - pure clean democracy as it should be - is our future.
Argent yesterday announced on twitter (youâll not see me using that new âbrandâ) that
The Starknet airdrop is coming soon đŞ
I think Argent and Starknet are in a rather strong partnership. Argent is now a Starknet only wallet (Ethereum etc technically still works, but I think all other chains are âlegacyâ by now). If they post stuff like that, itâs really close.
We have two members from the community already that would like to be âourâ delegate:
They both have been delegates for some time, since Starknet governance is already up and running. This is great, they know how it all works, they are known (both here and within the starknet ecosystem), so these are great people to delegate to.
But I would still like to find a 3rd, âfreshâ delegate, someone who has not been a delegate but is familiar with Starknet, wants to go into governance and has the time and energy to listen to this community.
This time I would like to change the process a little. If there are people that want to be a delegate there, feel free to leave a comment. But since last time there was only tricky (and they sadly had to drop out again because of missing free time for such an adventure) I think we could also propose people we feel would make a great delegate. Those members of course have to decide if they want to do it (and potentially starknet is not the best protocol if they are not users/ familiar) but at least we can get a discussion started :)
So in response to this post from yesterday and the thread on farcaster: I would like to get more involved with the ethereum community, so I would be honored if elected as a delegate for starknet.
I am a non-dev person with a mechanical engineering background, working in the supply chain field with a wide variety of functional experiences like network planning, procurement, demand planning, and logistics. My background equipped me with strong logic-based thinking, process mapping, and root cause analysis / problem solving skills.
As a person, I come from a very humble background that I believe has granted me a more holistic worldview; born and raised in Turkey, where corruption and poor fiscal management are like bread & butter (hence we see a wider adoption of crypto there):
I am very familiar with oppression, I know how it feels to be completely insecure in the midst of a military coup. I know what being tear gassed just for walking on the wrong street feels like. I know first-hand that to a third worlder, blockchain technologies mean a whole lot more in financial sovereignty.
Yet, I have also gained perspective of the Western world as i have been living in US for the past 10+ years, developing my expertise in Supply chain.
A bit on the lighter side; I am a fitness enthusiast and have been a division 1 athlete in the past, I have self-taught art to a pretty serious level (primarily drawing) from imitating Spiderman comic books as a kid, and a huge animal-lover that spends a lot of his time with his two dogs.
I have known about ethereum since the single digit price times but was at the time not interested in âcryptoâ, seeing only gambling as its usecase back then.
I got more interested as the ecosystem developed and we started seeing real applications of DeFi, when I joined this community and have been a relatively silent reader that contributes every once in a while ever since. I am part of EVMavericks and active in a few other groups on Discord where you can find me under another handle: Aybala.
My real âAhaâ moment happened when - thanks to this awesome community - I attended an EY blockchain conference in NYC, and learned about Baseline and the potential applications of zero-knowledge within my industry, supply chain. Ever since, I have been more invested, both financially and timewise, in the overall blockchain ecosystem.
As a non-dev and a non-social media person, there are fewer possibilities to contribute to the ecosystem but being a delegate is something I can do.
I can commit to you all that I would invest the necessary time to ensure the best interests of this group, that I can bring to the table a perspective that is able to empathize and consider a wider ranges of human experience and be meticulous and process-driven in approaching any proposals / initiatives.
I appreciate everyoneâs time reading this and the consideration. Let me know if there is anything I can answer for you.
A year ago I lost access to a significant to me amount of ETH. Since then I had been working with developers from Offchain Labs and The Arbitrum Foundation to retrieve the funds. Two weeks ago, following an incredible amount of effort from some big-brained devs, developers from The Arbitrum Foundation deployed retrieval contracts. Unfortunately the contracts were front run which resulted in the ETH being sacrificed and converted to a large block proposer fee. This would be similar to if I dropped a dollar on your front yard and asked you to pass it to me but when you reached out to do so, someone ran between us and grabbed the dollar.
I followed the transactions using a block explorer and noted that white hat hacker c0ffeebabe.eth had also attempted to rescue my funds but was also unable. I learned that c0ffeebabe.eth has used their skills to protect everyday users, in once instance they rescued $5.7M/2879 ETH from hackers and returned every cent/gwei, so I reached out for help. They, and users from this sub, were able to help me confirm that the proposal fee address belonging to Staked, which was recently acquired by Kraken Digital Asset Exchange.
I was able to get in touch with several decision makers at both organizations. I explained the situation and provided documentation to prove the ETH had belonged to me till I lost access. Within a few short days they told me they had decided to return my ETH to me. As far as I know this is the first time a validator has returned a block proposal fee in an instance of theft or exploit , but please correct me if I am wrong. Regardless, I hope that the actions of Staked, Kraken, the Arbitrum Foundation, and OffChain Labs helps to set industry precedent moving forward.
I am incredibly grateful and incredibly lucky for the way this turned out. Without the support, sympathy, and skill of many strangers this outcome would not have been possible. Thank you to all those involved and to members of this community who helped me see this through.
So, Iâve had an idea about client diversity (and how to push more people to switch clients).
See, we are right now in a âtragedy of the commonsâ situation, where people CBA to switch from Geth because its usage is falling anyways, so someone else will do it, right?
Plus, psychologically, a 72% Geth dominance looks way better than a 85% Geth dominance. And on top of that, the risk seems lower to just stay on Geth.
But we all know that thereâs no difference whether the supermajority client is at 66% or at 90%. A bad block will finalize immeiately, and stakers will lose their stake. Most people on Ethfinance are aware of that.
The risk is the same⌠right? Well, no.
So, hereâs my idea. I think that, if you believe in the dynamics of âLayer 0â, a 66% supermajority is much, much worse than a 90% supermajority for stakers running the supermajority client.
At 90% supermajority, I can easily see the community deciding on either a rollback (yeah, yeah, I know, never again, code is law etc., but letâs be realistic) or accepting the Geth block as the correct one and going forward from there, either with some kind of compensation for Nethermind/Besu clients, or even no compensation.
At 90% supermajority, there would be little discussion and itâs clear to me what would happen. And itâs clearer the higher the Geth dominance is.
However, I think that at 66% things would be way more messier and contentious. This is now the âdanger zoneâ where enough of the community did the right thing and have a strong enough voice, that the outcome of a supermajority client bug will be respected. This is where Geth users find themselves losing their stake.
And they might have a much more quiet voice than they expect. Centralized staking services, which are the ones that are mostly refusing to do the right thing (Iâm looking at you, Coinbase and Binance) will just lose someone elseâs money, not their own. They got their cut on your profits, they lost your stake, câest la vie. There might be some lawsuits, they are used to that.
Change your clients. We are far from dealing with this and the situation is still critical.
*Sidenote: Iâm very much a layman (albeit a staking one), so Iâd like some input if my thinking is wrong.
Something to note with the values on clientdiversity.org is the lower the geth dominance does, the less accurate it is
/- hanniabu
As of today, Eigenlayer reports 2,470,100 Ether staked. With a total of 30,338,443 Ether staked (according to Hildobby), this represents about 8% of the total staked Eth under withdraw contract addresses developed by Eigenlayer. This is far from the 22% threshold I advocate, but itâs wise to look ahead.
On one hand, I donât see this as a problem at all. Eigenlayer is cool, and restaking is interesting. Iâve made a small deposit into Eigenlayer and I look forward to seeing what it does.
On the other hand, amassing 8% of the validator withdrawal addresses prior to launch might send some red flags, especially considering that Eigenlayer has indicated that they have no intention of self limiting (Itâs somewhere in that chat, I donât have a time stamp, feel free to offer it).
Why is this concerning? It represents unnecessary protocol risk. Our ultimate mission as stakers is to secure the beacon chain. Itâs great if we can eek out extra revenue doing other tasks, but the social contract is to secure the beacon chain. We ought to recognize the real smart contract and governance risks here and recognize that any time we shift the balance and aggregate risk in one large pool weâre posing a threat to the underlying protocol.
As usual, Iâm not directing this to you, dear friend, Iâm talking about the larger ecosystem risk. I imagine youâre participating in Eigenlayer with less than 300,000 staked Ether and you likely represent less than 1% of the Ether staked on the beacon chain. Iâm telling you that large entities who have no commitment to the success of Ethereum may put our network at risk and you ought to be aware of that AND ready to protect the protocol as well as your investment. You donât have to stand idly by as your work is eroded by anyone.
Iâm not asking you to avoid Eigenlayer or any of the cool ancillary platforms that have sprung up around it, Iâm asking you to zoom out and recognize the dangers of aggregating risk. This isnât about Eigenlayer - itâs about ANY risk aggregator who is ever willing to add existential risk to our chain. And Iâll repeat myself: I LIKE the Eigenlayer concept.
So, regarding u/HiPatternâs post yesterday about wallet dusting attacks which impersonate the most recent wallet you sent funds to in an effort to make it look like the top wallet in your Etherscan history is yours but itâs actually just a similar wallet which is not yours in an effort to get you to accidentally send funds to their wallet next time you need to send to your previous sender. (Sorry, itâs hard to explain, check out the post if you didnât get that.)
So currently, people are losing lots of money to these sneaky scams. I could very well see a dark future where I myself let my guard down when selling some ETH to get on the property ladder one day and when I go to transfer the funds to an exchange, I click the wrong account since itâs right there at the top of my walletâs history and boom. My hopes and dreams of stability in where I live are gone for years to come.
Just imagine thinking you can finally buy a house for your family and then at the last minute one slip up and that whole dream was taken from you. This has happened to people before and it will happen again.
But this is completely avoidable! This is an extremely easy issue to solve. While it would be nice to get everyone to have better OpSec, itâs not going to happen. However, one really minor tweak to Etherscan and it could be solved.
They could add a simple bit of code to either display the Jazzicon/block profile pic next to every wallet address. This way, even though it is small, one could see that the address is different since the colour/design is different.
They could add some code to flag wallets which have similar starting and ending letters. It could be a simple orange warning sign or something which has more info if you have over it or a big banner if you actually click on said wallet.
Best of all, Etherscan is good at this sort of stuff usually. They added a revoke token permissions app to prevent those affected by exploits and that was a much more complicated addition. On the simpler side, they tag known scam wallets as such.
So Iâd like this to be a call to action for this community. We have done this before. Previously when we have wanted to get an idea broadcast out to the wider Ethereum community or a certain protocol, we have been able to do it if we all do our part. So please, if anyone knows someone who works for Etherscan or if you have followers/influence on other platforms like Twitter. Please, tell Etherscan to automatically flag dust attack wallets. If we are successful, we could successfully save many people from losing their life savings to this avoidable tragedy.
This is quite possibly one of the easiest changes which could be made to prevent a lot of money from falling into the wrong hands.
Edit: I guess this also should be done in wallets too like MetaMask. So why stop at Etherscan? Letâs make a fuss to every wallet provider which doesnât have some kind of system to prevent this. It should be as simple as if you shorten wallet addresses, have a kind of warning bubble if there are similar addresses you have previously sent funds to.
As some of you may know, since the launch of the holesky testnet last September I have been maintaining and testing several thousand genesis validators alongside a dozen or so other meganerds from the rocketpool community. This is in spite of the fact that I almost certainly am responsible for bringing the average IQ of this group down a couple of points.
Over the last few months I have picked up a number of skills required for this sort of thing and I get a great deal of satisfaction knowing I am contributing in a small way to the development and progression of ethereum. Iâll have these guys running for as long as the testnet needs âem.
AnywayâŚI am proud to be able to say that, as of yesterday, I have received my first ever retroactive public goods funding from the folks over at ethstaker for operating these validators. Some months ago u/nixorokish posted in here about there being the possibility of a small grant/funding, and I inquired. I have a little extra pep in my step today. It isnât a huge pile of cash or anything, itâs only meant to cover most of the cost of operating the machines. But it feels like a huge pile of cash to me, because for the first time I have tangible proof that I am, in fact, doing something useful in the spaceâŚother than shitposting on CT and farcaster, which I will contrinue to do regardless.
Ethereum is not just a cryptocurrency; itâs a platform for decentralized applications, smart contracts, and various decentralized finance projects. This ecosystem supports a wide range of applications, from finance and gaming to art and identity verification and tokenization of real-world assets and tokenization of commodities, offering a utility that goes infinitely beyond what Bitcoin was designed for. Bitcoin primarily serves as digital gold or a store of value, whereas Ethereum aims to be an open, transparent, equitable settlement layer for the entire planet.
The Ethereum network has spawned numerous Layer 2 solutions (L2s) like Optimism, Arbitrum, and zkSync, which aim to scale the network by handling transactions off the main Ethereum chain, thereby increasing throughput and reducing fees. This is in contrast to Bitcoin, which has largely remained focused on Layer 1 (L1) with some off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network, which is dying in front of our eyes. The growth and adoption of L2s arguably add to Ethereumâs utility and value. With zero-knowledge proofs coming sooner than anyone expects, liquidity fragmentation between the L2s and L1 will soon be a thing of the past.
Ethereumâs transition to Proof of Stake (PoS) with the Merge significantly altered its issuance model and energy consumption. In PoS, validators stake ETH to secure the network, which is more energy-efficient than Bitcoinâs Proof of Work (PoW) model. The issuance model under PoS is designed to be fairer and more sustainable, with rewards not exponentially weighted toward the ultra-wealthy with exponentially more computational power, but on rather on a linear model that scales fairly with the amount of ETH staked. This levels the playing field for earning transaction fees and block rewards, contrasting with Bitcoinâs model where mining power concentration can lead to extreme disparities in earning potential where the APR of the ultra-wealthy is magnitudes higher than the APR allotted to the lower 99%.
EIP-1559 introduced a mechanism for burning a portion of transaction fees, reducing the overall supply of ETH over time. This deflationary pressure is unique compared to Bitcoinâs currently inflating supply until it finally caps at 21 million. The fee market mechanism of Ethereum also aims to make transaction fees more predictable.
Ethereumâs ecosystem supports multiple client implementations, fostering a diverse and resilient network. This diversity can reduce the risk of network-wide failures due to bugs in a single client implementation, a contrast to the single point of failure landscape of Bitcoinâs one and only client.
Despite these advantages, the market valuation of ETH compared to BTC has been far too heavily influenced by narrative, âstore-of-valueâ meme-ability, speculation, investor sentiment, and market dynamics. While Ethereumâs technological and ecosystem advancements provide ETH a stronger value proposition, the market has failed to notice.
PSA: New toxic address scam
They register an ENS with your address, such as 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045.eth (vitalikâs address) so when you search for an address in an app itâll show in the results, potentially even as the first result as shown here:
itshappening.gif
gm STRK â¨â¨â¨ Read more: https://medium.com/@StarknetFoundation/introducing-the-starknet-provisions-program-05d03ce13970
https://twitter.com/StarknetFndn/status/1757676598730342761
Let us intro: The Starknet Provisions Program Claiming starts Feb 20, 2024, 12pm UTC Check your eligibility đ provisions.starknet.io
https://twitter.com/StarknetFndn/status/1757676600596811928
Happy Valentineâs Day stakers ETH Community:
You staked ETH up until the Merge - September 15th, 2022. Note that if you staked via a staking pool or centralized exchange you canât claim ETH directly through the portal. Your provider should claim the allocated STRK and distribute it to you.
Allocation:
In case no one has mentioned this, to check your STRK eligibility on an Ethereum address, you have to go to the claim page and click the third tab on the left before you enter the address. This is kind of a confusing ux.
Hereâs what the claim page looks like after you click the third tab: https://ibb.co/KVX2C4S
And the claim may be based on your deposit address or your withdrawal address, so check both if you donât see it.
I think all pre-merge beacon chain depositors are eligible.
Donât forget to appreciate Starknet for being the first airdrop to show significant support to the solo/home staking community!
Also, it looks like Rocket Pool stakers arenât able to claim right now, but Iâm aware of internal discussions that are very like to conclude with Rocket Pool node operators claiming STRK.
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The next fork in March,
Continously overarch,
Leave the rest to parch.
I got your points. Meet me on the corner of West 32nd and Buterin at 10 tonight. Dress like youâre leaving the bar early heading home to a WoW raid. Act casual - like you know me. Talk in a Lithuanian accent - my devs donât like Americans. Bring your seed phrase and pass it when we shake. If you hear somebody with a Swiss accent just keep moving and donât make eye contact. Our danger word is Cardano. You hear that word. Get the hell out of there. if this works your points will show up within 48 hours. These are loyalty points - for fun. Like maybe weâll let you on an AMA with the devs some day. Weâre NOT doing a token - hear me? Donât even mention a token. If you doâŚletâs just say not all airdrops end well if you catch my drift
Spent some time at the rack last night. Updating the staking machines, swapping some patch cables, etc. Iâve got a new (to me) managed POE+ switch Iâm pretty excited about. Gonna learn how to do vlan stuff for better security, and so I can install some POE cameras. Gotta rent a trenching machine and bury some cable tooâŚnot really excited about that part.
In going down the POE rabbit hole I came across a couple of interesting POE devicesâŚincluding a POE NUCâŚwhich is awesome. Itâs priced like enterprise grade hardwareâŚbecause it is. But a fanless, POE NUC that has the processing power to stake, yet is power efficient enough to be able to operate over POE is the dream. I already have the machine Iâll be using as a nodeset operator setup, but I am considering throwing my hat into operation solo staker with etherfi too. If I could just hit one of these lottery blocks people keep talking about I would consider grabbing one of these POE NUCs.
While doing my normal monitoring I noticed that, on mainnet validators, the rewards per epoch have begun to consistently drop below 10,000 gweiâŚand I wonder if we will ever see 5 figure rewards epochs again. Holesky validators never saw 10xxx gwei rewardsâŚit launched with well over a million validatorsâŚI think we have closer to 1.5 million validating currently. These lil guys are receiving 7xxx gwei per epoch. Will we see 1.5 million active validators on mainnet? Iâm guessing that might be close to the upper limit of what people will accept as a return on their investment. Depending on what restaking does to overall APR, of course. I donât have enough info to begin to speculate on that.
The dencun upgrade went boringly (good!) on sepolia, and after updating the holesky machine the consensus client log reads âINFO Ready for Denebâ. Me too, computer. Me too. Mainnet soon after.
(in the voice of the thing): ITâS BLOBBERINâ TIME
What is restaking?
I will try to explain using EigenLayer as an example, following up on u/stablecoins post, but also because I have seen a lot of comments/ questions and think the concept isnât really clear. Please keep in mind that I am also writing this to structure my thoughts, but am not an expert at all, so things here might be wrong. If you spot mistakes, please correct them!
What is the general idea of restaking?
Restaking means that we use capital that is staked to secure Ethereum - both staked ETH in validators but also via LSTs - and also use it to secure something else (and something else).
What kind of things can be secured by restaking?
Basically anything. It could be an oracle. A data availability solution. An L2/ appchain. Anything that needs security.
Why is this needed?
Bootstrapping security for a new protocol is hard, especially if you want the validator set to be decentralized. Eigenlayer wants to be âa marketplace for trustâ. On this marketplace protocols that need trust/ security can tap into the already existing staked capital that Ethereum offers and build on that. Eigenlayerâs thesis is that this is way easier than building it on your own. Their argument also builds on web2: Why have your own servers/ authentication etc. when you can just build in the cloud (e.g. AWS) or use Auth0 etc. = existing solutions that allow you to focus on your core product.
Important: the existing solution is not Eigenlayer, but the security offered by stakers / holders of LSTs.
So how does this marketplace = Eigenlayer work?
New protocols that want to build on Eigenlayer basically define what kind of trust/ security they need. This comes down to: Do they want only solo / home stakers to secure their network? Or are LSTs okay as well?
At the same time they define what they are willing to offer for that service: How much are they willing to pay for securing their network? This could be in ETH, their native token etc.
Also they of course define what the restakers have to do to secure the network. This means they provide a software/ client that the restakers have to run to secure the protocol. This is similar to what stakers run with execution and consensus clients to secure Ethereum. All these are called âAVSsâ. Actively validated services. Actively. Someone needs to do an action.
Restakers start by either creating an Eigenpod or by depositing LSTs. An Eigenpod is a smart contract that a validator points to. So if a validator wants to exit the beaconchain, the ETH goes to the Eigenpod first. Similarly by depositing LSTs into Eigenlayer you deposit it into a smart contract. If the restaker wants to exit Eigenlayer there is a 7 day period before they can finally really withdraw their assets.
This means that the assets donât leave the validator or the Eigenlayer smart contract. The secured protocol does not control the assets.
After depositing restakers then opt-in if they are willing to secure the new protocol. They accept the offer made by the protocol, run the client and secure the network and are paid for this service according to the terms.
There will also be operators that run the clients for you. So the restaker deposits, but delegates the actual management of the clients to a 3rd party. In that case you obviously trust someone else to do the job of securing correctly. Just like you do with LSTs or dPoS in other ecosystems. These operators of course ask for a fee to do that.
If they behave according to the protocols rules (= they secure the protocol as intended) they are paid. If they misbehave (=they attack the protocol they are supposed to secure) they can be slashed just like someone could be slashed on the beaconchain.
So how does the slashing work now? If they are caught, the protocol can ask Eigenlayer to slash the restaker. Eigenlayer right now has a âslashing committeeâ (my term, donât know if thatâs the real name of it). This committee basically checks if the restaker really misbehaved and if the slashing request is fair. So right now a protocol canât just slash you as a restaker, there is a (centralized!) security mechanism in place.
If the restaker indeed attacked the network, they canât withdraw their LSTs and the LSTs are slashed. If they have a validator right now (!) no one can force them to exit the validator, so they can continue validating Ethereum. But when they want to exit, they will withdraw to the eigenpod and then the Eigenlayer protocol can slash the portion that is supposed to be slashed before the restaker can withdraw the rest.
I donât know what happens to the assets that are being slashed. Maybe someone can add that? Are those burned? Going to the protocol that did the slashing? (That would be a strange incentive, but maybe thatâs the case)
So where does the yield come from?
First of all: There is no yield by just depositing. Only if you start securing one (or more) protocols, you will receive yield. This also means that right now there is only smart contract risk, no slashing etc.
This yield is what these protocols offer to restakers for their service securing the new protocol. It can be paid in different tokens (or a mix). Could be new issuance. Could be from their treasury. Could be part of the fees they make with the product running on top.
-â
But Benido, this all sounds great, I was told Eigenlayer is a huge risk, I donât get it, that is like risk free yield on top of risk free yield?
If you were around in spring of 2022, you might remember 3AC (Three Arrows Capital). They were long when the market was going down and at one point lending firms ask for more capital from 3AC. What did 3AC do? They used the same collateral over and over again. So what happened? All lending firms found out that the collateral they thought they could liquidate (âslashâ) was posted as collateral with other lenders as well. 3AC basically ârestakedâ the same collateral over and over again. No lending firm could liquidate the collateral and they all went tits up, the whole market crashed and it was a dark timeâŚ
Of course this was off chain and Eigenlayer is onchain. With restaking we know how many times a certain asset is used to secure a certain protocol. But in the end something similar could happen. Deposit asset X once, attack several protocols and all protocols find out that they canât slash, because it was slashed already.
On top we could see borrowing and lending protocols that allow LRTs (Liquid Restaking Tokens) to be deposited. So an attacker could even borrow against it to acquire more and attack cheaplyâŚ
Using the same collateral several times is something that can be abused. Yes, itâs onchain, so more transparent, but that doesnât make it bullet proof. We will witness attacks. This might lead to a cascade of liquidations and could take down so many protocols⌠and always remember: These assets started as stake to secure Ethereum, in a worst case scenario ETHâs security might be diminished and attacks might be possible in ways we canât even imagine today.
-â
I hope this explains restaking, but it might just be more confusing because I am missing things, the structure sucks etc., I donât know. If you have questions, post them!
Exciting news for the POAP enthusiasts!
Poap Global, a project which is not officially related to POAP but rather a community project that utilizes the POAP tools, just had their official launch!
(Before publishing this comment, I asked Patricio Worthalter, the POAP founder, regarding the projects legitimacy, and he gave me a thumbs-up: "Yes! We support them. The founder is a valued member of the official POAP curation body. This is a side gig")
So, I went through their website and will try to explain what they are, and what it is that they are launching!
What is Poap Global? Itâs a "a groundbreaking extension of the proof of attendance protocol concept operated by hodl labs. Imagine being part of a worldwide irl scavenger hunt. Only in this game, the treasures are unique digital collectibles at every landmark, and the playground is planet earth"
How do you participate? âYou can either â****host****â a poap at a location of your choice or travel and collect other peopleâs poaps!"
Hosts
You can âhostâ a poap at a location of your choosing. Whether itâs a favorite hiking trail, a landmark, or a hidden gem in your city, you can make it a part of this global game.
So, how can you be a âHostâ? Well, there are 3 steps:
There is also a Global Leaderboard (in the works) to "showcase top explorers and collectors", and a âdynamic globe that pinpoints where all the poaps are hiddenâ.
Collectors
As a traveler and explorer, you can embark on a journey to collect poaps from various locations hosted by others. Itâs a digital treasure hunt that takes you to new and exciting places.
The idea seems to be a perfect use-case on how to further utilize the POAP protocol. I jumped right in and bought a small number of the NFC dispensers.. I plan to âinstallâ them at my home town center and at my local sports teamsâ soccer grounds..
Folks here understand and are comfortable running an ethereum node but sharing my learning and experience in running a non-staking node.
There is a learning curve and documentation needs some improvement, knowledge is silod within discord and in some case you are at the mercy of support from dev team. I learned a lot, definetly more comfortable sharing and talking about different clients, node and confident that I can help someone strugling with running a node. This was a test run on my Pi, waiting for proper hardware to test the script again.
Without the support and motivation from the members of this wholesome community, I would not have considered heading in this direction. So, thank you, my dudes.
Naw, this is pretty wise, even though it means you wonât get an early participant advantage IF restaking is successful.
In 2009, people who took a risk on bitcoin did well.
In 2014, people who took a risk on Ether tokens did well.
In 2015, people who took a risk on The DAO weâre bailed out in a one-time network fork.
In 2017, people who invested in ICOs like EOS lost lots of money on products that never materialized.
Thereâs really no way to say what will happen with restaking. Iâm not convinced that thereâs a large enough market to support whatâs being built- maybe it will develop or maybe itâll just trend toward other solutions. All of this is a risk and itâs wise to wait and see. As Iâve said publicly, Iâm okay missing a huge win, and Iâm going into all of these opportunities with a total of about 1% of my coins. Iâm okay with any outcome.
I can sense that a lot of my investment-oriented friends think Iâm just being negative, but Iâm here for the long term success of Ethereum, not the flavor of the week. Just be who you are đ
Green day on the client diversity front!
A month ago, Gethâs market share was 84%, yesterday it was 78%, today it is 73%.
And also good news, the 5% difference between yesterday and today went to Nethermind, which makes the execution layer clients list as follows:
Geth - 73%
Besu - 14%
Nethermind - 12%
Erigon - 2%
Iâve not been able to identify the provider(s) that kept their words but Iâm hoping one of our experts will soon be able to tell.
Toni and Vitalik put together an ethresear.ch post on increasing the block gas limit. This topic had moment in the spotlight a few weeks ago when Vitalik suggested we might be able to handle a block size increase and kicked off a flood of discussion. I havenât seen as much social media fuss recently, but with this post weâre getting into the research of if to do it, and how to do so safely. Their strategy for increasing the gas limit? Decreasing it first! Kinda.
The trouble is that large blocks are possibly an issue today, even without an increase. Thereâs a great figure in the post showing that reorged blocks tended to be almost two times larger (in bytes) than blocks that get finalized. Discussion about confounding factors aside, it does seem to suggest that a naive gas limit increase would hurt consensus health.
But block size comes in a distribution. The biggest blocks are a problem, but the median block size is 14.5x smaller than the maximum possible, very conservatively low. So what Toni and Vitalik are aiming to do is decrease the maximum block size and reduce variance so that we can safely increase the average block size.
With blobs coming up soon, the central idea is to increase the gas cost of calldata, the current way of getting data to the EVM. Increasing the gas cost of calldata means that blocks can hold less before they fill up, so we get a reduction in max block size. Then we could feel safe increasing the gas limit somewhat, presumably making space for more EVM execution, rather than data storage, to occur. And possibly make room for more blobs per slot.
The post has 5 different suggestions for how to do this. Personally, I like multi-dimensional EIP-1559 with a separate market for calldata, but the post argues that may be overly complex.
After many years in crypto. I seem to have run into the first instance of âlosingâ my wallet which is an account abstraction wallet from Particle Network(Ally.build created for the Linea tasks) created through signing in with email or twitter/discord, but Im unable to recover it for whatever reason. Apparently I may have used a different email or social account but I doubt that - I have tried logging back in with all my accounts and various combos, but it only loads a brand new wallet and not the ones which had the funds in it. The particle network discord is filled with people complaining about losing access to their wallet and the only reply they are getting is âread faqâ
If you are a crypto native, using an AA wallet seems rather pointless - not only does it create a dependancy on a centralized wallet provider (another example is people losing access to Argent) but also bugs and or glitches can lead to you losing your wallet
Update: Particle wallet seems to be extremely poorly designed. There are multiple channels on their discord with people complaining about being unable to access their funds. Seems signing in with the original social media/email account sometimes results in a brand new wallet being created, and not the earlier wallet that was in use and funded by users. Whats worse is that the team is not willing to accept there is an issue, but instead seem to hold their ground that everything is working as expected - despite hundreds of users complaining about being locked out of their wallets. The fact that so many people have the same issue in accessing their wallet at the very least requires the wallet team to look at the issue more closely, instead of firing off âRead FAQâ template messagesâŚ
Its shameful that Linea are using such operators for points scheme where scores of users are unable to even access the wallet they created earlier.
At this point I can only warn others from using any wallet related to Particle network including Ally.Build
Caught up on the last few dayllies and Iâve seen a feel people lose a lot. Can we talk about securing our bags a bit and thinking of how to avoid losing the entire stack? yes, itâs an unpleasant to thing to think about but Iâd rather do it and not get rekt completely.
Iâll start with some of the things that I do and remember off the top of my head and feel free to chime in w others.
Whenever the link is needed, especially important for airdrop claims or something big money related, go to the official source and even 2 to double check rather than clicking on whatever you see or someone sent you.
If somebody or something is rushing you to make a decision quickly - quite likely it is a scam. Even if itâs not a scam, you are losing out on a potential opportunity (no matter how gen wealth that opportunity is) but saving your bags. If you still have the bags then you can capitalize on future opportunities.
Donât download anything thatâs given to you in the crypto world. Sometimes people dm me with links and even trusted people and I tell them I wouldnt download any files even if I trust them cause what if they got hacked and now somebody is targeting me.
It has been a long time since Iâve made a top level post here it feels like. Alas, thatâs what medical school does to a person. I am back to share with everyone my first major writing piece in over a year -
Hybrid Theory: Rocket Poolâs Middle Way Between Native Liquid Restaking and Pure Staking.
The Rocket Pool pDAO will soon be voting on allowing, alterning, or denying my proposed integration bounty. This essay outlines why I think itâs a good idea for Rocket Pool, Eigenlayer, and Ethereum writ large.
The broad idea is that we can enable node operators to join Eigenlayer without adding risk to rETH holders if we integrate in a way that retains senior debt for rocket pool. I dub this hybrid restaking. The essay goes through all the different ways people can restake today and outlines their flaws.
Hybrid restaking enables permsionless node operators to be sustainably profit maxi without harming rETH. Rocket Pool node operators could experience many airdrops and yield from different AVS services.
I am happy to answer any (sincere) questions.
https://mirror.xyz/jasperthefriendlyghost.eth/Xv7lLt8SVTfCaFnVie50IvvFrI4-TkQTgZcxb\_omEnA
Special guest Lucas from PODS, a new way to publish, discover, and own your favorite podcasts.
Announcements
Ethereum
$2307.80
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The hacker running,
While the tables are turning,
Ether is burning.
Every day thousands of validators are forced to toil away in centralized server farms under the dangerous working conditions of using a supermajority execution layer client. For just 32 ETH, you can give a validator a home and keep their stake safe from harm. Please give today.
You should know that the tide toward client diversity is changing dramatically. Iâd like to thank the folks who have supported this work and those who have provided great updates here and Iâd 100% encourage you to continue engaging in that community service role.
On January 22, 2024, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase responded to DCInvestor to say that he was taking a look at client diversity within Coinbaseâs staking operation and theyâll report back in February. If they continue to suggest that other clients arenât mature enough, weâll wonder why Coinbase is utilizing open source software without contributing back to the code base as would be expected.
AllNodes, p2p.org, and Anker announced switching to minority clients within the past 24 hours. This switch is a great illustration of how efficiently large operations CAN shift clients if they choose to. The value of these victories, and the contributions by their respective contributors cannot be overstated. Thank you, Allnodes, P2P.org and Anker.
After an initially tone deaf defense, Stakefish seems to be changing its tune a bit, but despite a reference to the responsibility of client diversity, thereâs little apparent commitment to make real changes, so lets watch this one closely.
Lido operators represent the largest group of validator operators, and our data suggests that theyâre still highly reliant on geth. /u/yorickdowne has been a great advocate for decentralization from within lido, as a node operator for reducing the supermajority client, but the push hasnât been very successful yet. Iâm optimistic that at some point theyâll act in their own best interest.
Hanni Abuâs ClientDiversity.org is our best view into client diversity, and the execution client data currently sourced by word of mouth. While I look forward to more and better data, I deeply appreciate and value this source.
Iâd like to send good vibes to everyone who is working on this front, groups like EthStaker, led by /u/nixorokish, Jasper the Friendly Ghost, who is pouring his passion into this [and I sure af hope heâs still thriving in med school], and Anthony Sassano who, through The Daily Gwei, beats this drum CONTINUOUSLY, also /u/interweaver for reaching out to providers and educating about the risks of a majoriy client fault. And perhaps the biggest thanks to /u/hanniabu through EtherAlpha who tirelessly develops data that enables all of us to see the threats ahead of us. Without his efforts weâd be flying blind toward a black hole.
None of this even mentions the deep and detailed academic work and research going into client diversity. Thanks to /u/haurog for providing insight into the academic and EIP efforts.
For my part, Iâm continuing to go back to home stakers as the best future for the network. Giving lots of control of the network to third parties with little or nothing at stake is dangerous and undermines the goal of a decentralized network. If you have any way to stake from home, as a solo staker, Rocket Pool operator, DVT operator - whatever - I really encourage you to do that.
Iâve started a very [very] basic document to help us track these events, please feel free to hop in and help develop it as you see fit.
đ More good news on the client diversity front!
About 4 days ago, both u/0xboba and myself (following the news that đŚ/Consensys have began offering their users the ability to stake through their âownâ validators), were wondering if anyone knew which Execution (and Consensus) clients Consensys Metamask Staking are using..
So, I contacted Consensys, who directed me to đŚ support.. I asked the following:
âWhat are the client combinations (EL/CL) that my validators will be running? I understand from some (very) basic information the MM Staking web page provides, that youâoperate diverse validator clients and distributed infrastructure hosted across multiple regions and cloud providersâ, but in light of the recent software bugs in Besu and Nethermind, I need to know that my capital is not at risk by depending on a super-majority client like Geth"
They answered by just pointing me to some vague articles on their support page.. I pressed on, asking for details, and they just answered!
"As a company, Consensys is deeply committed to client diversity: we are developing an Execution Layer client (BESU) and a Consensus Layer client (Teku). Consensys Staking infrastructure uses an algorithm to distribute validators across multiple Execution and Consensus Layer clients. On the consensus layer, we run 2 clients for validator duties: Teku and Lighthouse. Our algorithm allocates new validators to Teku or Lighthouse to maintain a 50%-50% split between Teku and Lighthouse across the entire platform. On the execution layer, we currently run the majority of Geth. Our top priority is to increase BESUâs footprint: we aim to reach 50% of BESU in the coming weeks before the end of February. After the Merge, Consensys Staking evaluated the use of BESU and provided feedback and support to improve performances, in order to optimise rewards for End Users. The BESU team worked tirelessly, releasing new features such as a fully flat state DB and other improvements that bring BESU much closer to Geth performances. We started BESU rollout across our platform and will iteratively increase BESUâs footprint to reach 50% of all validators we operate before the end of February 2024. This progressive rollout aims to ensure no or limited performance degradation for our users. Beyond client diversity, Consensys Staking validators are distributed across 2 clouds (Azure, AWS) and 6 regions (2 in the US, 2 in Europe and 2 in Asia)"
đ
i tried out the keystone hardware wallet and wrote up some thoughts on it: https://twitter.com/nixorokish/status/1751319725274214825
i had more criticisms than praise and feel pretty lukewarm on it
summary:
I doooo like
kinda wanna try the Hito next. what i REALLY want is for Grid+ to make a smaller, travel-friendly wallet
Huh! I actually saw your comment during Xmas (the one telling us you were going to try it..) and.. bought one right there and then!
I was actually meaning to ask you about your initial impression!
Personally, I have been more than happy with it. To the point where it has replaced my Ledger play-money wallet!
I too encountered an initial software upgrade problem, but everything worked at my second attempt.
I see what you mean with the too-much-QR codes, however that IS how the device works.. And on that note, Iâll add that both the scanning by the device (of the laptop QR) AND the blurred scanning by my laptop (of the wallet QRs), works flawlessly and super fast.. I find myself going through txs much faster than with my Ledger..
I do agree with you on the âstart pageâ point. It IS quite confusing. I too initially wanted an âanchorâ type of screen. Possibly (as you said), with a clear list of my wallets..
However, after reading more on the way the device works, I came across the article which explains the security provisions for multiple wallets.. The device loads each wallet with a different (seed phrase) AND pin. And you can only have one wallet active.. This is quite logical, as only YOU know the number of wallets (seed phrases) that are loaded (but hidden). This wouldnât be possible with an âanchorâ screen.. And even if users did not care for all their wallets to be listed on that screen, theyâd still need to input a (different) pin, each and every time they went back onto that screen and selected a wallet..
My screen has not been scratched so far, but I do see your point here.. I am very (too..) careful while using and storing it.. I already ordered the pouch from their website..
I do also like the screen size, the clear signing info, and most importantly the biometrics..
One other thing I have to add, is that I got really really confused when trying to connect it to my (already Ledger-connected) Metamask extension.. As in super confused..
So I downloaded Rabby (thank you u/superphiz), and started fresh.. Everything made sense right there..
Most people confuse the different penalties the protocol may apply, because we tend to be a bit lazy with the penalties and call everything slashing. But there are different penalties. Slashing is just one of them and is almost impossible to trigger by a bug. And even when it happens due to operator mistake it slashes for 1 ETH. Just so you can see it directly, here is a very recent slashing.
https://beaconcha.in/validator/1061987
This validator lost 1 ETH (and a bit extra due to missed attestations after, but rounds to nothing) and is exited. But if there had been a mass slashing affecting many people, then the correlation penalty and inactivity leak kicks in, thatâs what can take you to total loss of capital.
So as I was thinking about it these days I noticed that mixing all the penalties under slashing might be partly why we have supermajority issues. Nobody wants to lose money for something they donât have control of. Much like people tend to fear traveling in airplanes more because the situation is out of your control. So losing your stack because of a bug you have no responsibility of is avoided, and everyone flocks to the client that is perceived safest.
But this is the wrong mental model of the network penalties, the network is not gonna punish you for uncorrelated issues because itâs designed to work under imperfect conditions. So this doesnât really bother the network. If you have a bug with a very minor client you may be offline and missing attestations a few hours, maybe a day. Thatâs nothing, penalties for that are very small. You would need to be 60% of the year offline to lose money for inactivity. Thatâs how small those penalties are, a few hours here and there is not even something you can feel.
But if it loses at least 1/3 of the validators then the protocol gets pissed, because it cannot fulfill its duties. And then punishes, and can punish very heavily. The penalties here are the inactivity leak and the correlation penalty. This is what you should fear.
So the TL;DR of the story is that you shouldnât fear client bugs per se. You should fear having the same bug as many people, thatâs what triggers severe penalties. And the good news is that you have total control over it. You have the choice to not suffer significant loss of capital. Itâs entirely on you. Choose minority clients.
Hey all. After Vitalikâs roadmap update, I took a stab at putting all the relevant information I knew of in a single place. Some of the sections remain a WIP, but Iâm mostly happy with the layout.
Iâm looking for feedback (or even contributors) to help make it better. I have thick skin so feel free to let her rip.
Whatâs not here that you think would be useful? How would you like to see each section fleshed out more?
Do you run Rocket Pool minipools? Or are you interested in learning how to do so? EVMavericks have spent the past year and a half building Rocket School, a video course about Rocket Pool, and we need your help reviewing or testing it!
See the main post in r/ethstaker here: https://reddit.com/r/ethstaker/comments/1ae56h9/do_you_run_rocket_pool_minipools_or_are_you/
I would highly recommend anyone interested in Ethereumâs upcoming upgrades read Christine Kimâs notes on this weekâs ACDC call. They contain a fantastic review of some of the EIPs under consideration for the Prague/Electra small-feature hardfork currently being targeted from the end of 2024, prior to the Verkle fork coming after it.
Only a few relatively small (but important) EIPs have been tentatively scheduled for inclusion; some of the slightly larger ticket items are still under debate, mostly because client devs believe including them would push Prague/Electra into 2025.
https://www.galaxy.com/insights/research/ethereum-all-core-developers-consensus-call-126/
I usually think of the minimum requirements for a PoW system as:
There is basically infinite work to do. We canât have the consensus of the chain halt because itâs waiting for work to arrive.
Anyone can do work and submit a proof of that work for verification. If this was limited to known entities they could form a cabal that halt or at least slow the chain at will.
Anyone can verify/validate how much work was done objectively (at least statistically). We have to be able to reach consensus on how much to reward each miner. Again, anonymity and open access prevents effective conspiracies.
Validation takes far less time than it took to do the work. A system that relies on massive redundant computation for consensus will have to compensate too much per unit work done to be economically effective in the long run (looking at you Bitcoin).
In my previous post I talked about GenSyn which swapped out useless hashing for useful model training and the economic potential of such a solution. AI training just happens to be a task that meets all these criteria. There is basically infinite demand for AI training. I can think of a few other tasks such as protein folding (folding at home) or private key cracking but most computational tasks donât meet these criteria and even some of those that do wouldnât have much economic value. As such, while Gensyn seemed to have a neat idea, it didnât seem to be a paradigm shift so much as a cool footnote in history. However, what happens if we relax requirement 3 a bit and allow for subjective consensus?
âBut Logris, what the hell is subjective consensus?â Glad you asked! Basically itâs group think for deciding on things with no objective answer. The most common example of this is every oracle youâve ever known. Smart contracts can only refer to chain state. They canât see BTC price feeds on Kraken for example. All data that is off-chain is subjective from the perspective of the chain. Consensus on that data is decided subjectively by oracles. But not all oracles work alike. Chainlink is optimized for a small number of data streams with high liveness. UMA is optimized for the long-tail of queries with latency that can be measured in days.
The interesting part about UMA in my opinion is they apply a commit-reveal scheme and use stake to keep people honest. All participants submit their data in an encrypted way before a deadline, then submit the decryption keys for that data after the deadline when no answer can be changed. The do something like average the result and people with answers too far from the mean lose some of their stake. The obvious Schelling point for a submission is the truth. Expecting the average to be anything but that requires a conspiracy of submitters to distort the data. Unless you believe such a conspiracy exists, the rational answer to submit is the truest one you can find. All youâre really doing is measuring what you believe everyone else will believe, but in practice this works well when there is an objective answer rather than something either unknown or disputed. You could imagine how this could be used for anything: âDid Trump lose the 2020 election?â. I expect youâd get a very different answer if you shoved that question through this system than if you polled the average US voter. Honestly, I expect youâd get a better one.
So what would happen if you applied something like UMA consensus to a PoW blockchain? Addressing the points above in order.
You would still need a stream of continuous work for miners to do. Either that work has to be submitted by validators or it needs to be self-evident to miners. Nothing here says the work has to actually be useful, just eventually verifiable.
You still need permissionless mining but if the work isnât self-evident the network may need some type of sampling to throttle the participants which means youâll need miner stake for Sybil resistance.
Validation would still be permissionless but validators would definitely need stake for subjective consensus to function.
This is basically unchanged but I will note that nothing says payouts in a blockchain have to be immediate. Itâs totally fine if people receive their payout a couple days later. That said, you want consensus to happen continuously so you probably want each participant running a program rather than manually voting.
What types of tasks could you now do that you previously couldnât have? In order of least to highest villainy:
Miners provide DePIn resources like data availability; Validators validate using data sampling.
Miners submit a predictive price of the S&P 500 for the next day; Validators grade it retroactively. If this ever gets competitive it will distort global markets as large players buy and sell to make their predictions come true.
If youâre willing to have the validators create synthetic work to fill in any gaps as well:
âBut Logris, who would create such an evil thing?â Glad you asked! Before you say this is far-fetched and sounds terrible, this is in principle the concept of BitTensor. So, uh, this is happening today and the payouts right now are about $25M a day. Just your heads up that weâre heading into hell!
I know you like the darker stuff /u/nixorokish so here you go!
Because of the recent push for client diversity, Iâve been researching a few of the alpha and pre-alpha EL clients in the works, and the Silkworm Ethereum client has me really excited. Iâm always looking out for new and innovative projects that can push the technology forward.
Silkworm aims to be the fastest Ethereum client while still maintaining high code quality and readability. That combination really appeals to me - performance without sacrificing robustness or security. The fact that it builds on top of the well-regarded geth/Erigon codebase, but uses a completely different programming language gives me confidence that the developers know what theyâre doing.
I also like Silkwormâs use of more modern C++ standards and the libmdbx database engine. Adopting C++20 features and leveraging a high-performance embedded database seems like a recipe for speed.
Iâm eager to try it out once testnet builds are available. The documentation around building and testing Silkworm locally is already pretty good.
Overall, I think the team has laid out a compelling technical vision with Silkworm. If they can deliver on faster sync and execution times without reducing decentralization or security, it could be a big win for Ethereum. Iâll be following the project closely as it develops.
Tim Beiko published the âProtocol Guild Pledgeâ yesterday, his quantitative framing for why projects built on Ethereum should donate 1% of their tokens to help onboard and retain Ethereumâs unbelievably talented core protocol contributors:
https://tim.mirror.xyz/srVdVopOFhD_ZoRDR50x8n5wmW3aRJIrNEAkpyQ4_ng
For those who prefer to watch/listen, a great summary by Anthony Sassano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlSaGTDtDXA&t=715s
Timâs announcement was front-run by Ether.fi, announcing theyâd allocate 1% of their upcoming token to the Guild, and there are a few other (major) projects who are waiting in the wings to make the same announcement! đ
If you know of any projects that would like to host Protocol Guild for a community call or Spaces, please feel free to DM me here or Twitter or Farcaster!
IMO, points have been developing a bad rep mostly for nothing.
(Though I will say, there are two fairly different approaches, and one is worse than the other).
Whatâs good about points:
-they let teams be explicit about the sorts of user behaviour they want (to drive adoption or growth)
-they allow teams to evolve and develop those goals in a way that supports real-time testing and feedback (so for example, âhow will user behaviour change if we tweak these variables and incentives?â)
-they give teams a chance to âclaw backâ or change these metrics quite rapidly if needed (something that is harder to do if a token incentive program is already live and running)
-they reduce Sybil airdrop farming because they generally relate to actual capital (x time) being put in, or at least, to behaviours that are deemed desirable and useful by the protocol team
-they give users who are keen to pursue a token allocation some transparency, prior to token generation (meaning you can see where you sit overall relative to other users, and you know what behaviours will be ârewardedâ and whether your time and effort is being well directed).
For all these reasons, points seem to me to be (on balance) a logical development that has mostly been positive.
However - what I will say is that it begins to cross the line once too much gamification is brought in. By this I mean instances in which teams make their points program too complex, too casino-like, and too demanding: countless fancy ranks and tiers, NFTs and badges, quests, pointless or tangential tasks (daily check-ins??) super aggressive referral programs, etc.
These are the ones that (to me) feel exploitative and annoying. Iâd sadly put EtherFi in this category, even though I think the team is legit and the core product makes sense. Orbiter has trended this way too.
Eigenlayerâs points, on the other hand, look simple, justifiable and useful.
So next time youâre thinking about points, start by asking - whatâs the point? Sometimes there is one! âŚbut to any devs out there - donât make it a carnival game, please.
A Huge shoutout to u/Twelvemeatballs for preparing our substidoots đ and maintaining the impeccable use of emoji shorthand âď¸ while Tricky_Troll was on the frontlines âşď¸
Credit to u/usesbinkvideo for the gem of a suggestion âPut that name on a McDonaldâs nametag for himâđ
Special guest Kevin Owocki joins us from Gitcoin and Green Pill, a network-society that exports regenerative digital infrastructure to the world.
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Seek consistency,
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Bring persistency.
When you were partying, I studied the blade. When you were having premarital sex, I mastered the blockchain. While you wasted your days on crypto twitter in pursuit of vanity, I farmed eigenlayer points. And now that the world is on fire and the soylana manlets are at the gate you have the audacity to come to me for airdrops.
Good Morning. I just wanted to say how truly grateful I am for this group from the bottom of my heart.
The folks in here are caring, sincere, curious, and hungry for the truth. In this world we live in, itâs really a rarity to have this quality of human concentrated in one place.
Yesterday I got hacked through my own fault and signed off-chain approval for 2 assets that were drained from my wallet. This was my first time being scammed/hacked.
Somehow, they also managed to pay down a significant portion of my USDC debt [huzzah!] from my AAVE position by withdrawing/paying out to get my ETH- so it did not end up being completely catastrophic. I still donât fully understand what happened with this piece of the puzzle.
No less than 8-10 people reached out, offered help, pointed me in the right direction, and that means the world to me. I know Iâm not getting the tokens back.
Last night I wrapped my head around what happened and tossed back a bunch of beers with friends in real lifeânothing like joking about it to get over it mentally.
Just wanted to say thanks again to everyone in here that makes this such an amazing community.
Iâm here with a new Rocket Pool update!
A few weeks ago, I mentioned the process for new tokenomics had started. We were looking for (and still are, I guess) submissions, and we got over 20! These range from changing collateral systems, new RPL rewards dynamics, MEV theft protections, and much more.
A new committee to analyze the submissions has been created with 5 members. Youâre welcome to follow along (and provide feedback on the submissions if you are interested). There are three community members and two team members. They will inspect every submission, rank them, and make suggestions. This process is expected to take place over the next few weeks.
Next, it is likely the new tokenomics will be a blend of the outstanding submissions. We already have one community member share ideas on what they think the new tokenomics for Rocket Pool might look like. This is all still very early, though, and there are going to be many changes and suggestions in the coming weeks.
This whole process has been hugely exciting (for tokenomics nerds like me haha). Iâll let you all know what the outstanding submissions were once we get some clarity on that and what direction the next steps will take.
Iâm curious as to peopleâs thoughts on the ethics of airdrop farming after a discussion I had deep in replies yesterday.
Firstly, I have two airdrop farming wallets. I try to stick to projects I like and not get too degenerate. This helps it feel legitimate to me as the original airdrop idea was to give shares and a stake in the platform out to the community. But two wallets? A true sybil resistant system would call me out for that and either penalise me or only reward me once. Is having two wallets being greedy? Maybe. Personally it feels like a rational balance between the following:
Fighting airdrop farmers with dozens or hundreds of wallets who might be diluting my share.
Not blatantly farming/sybil attacking the drop mechanism.
Not spending too much mental and financial overhead speculating on something which may not happen.
On the other hand, to me, the idea of having a dozen wallets or more to farm an airdrop feels wrong. The developers will set a certain amount tokens to the community and if you game their mechanisms and qualify on 10 wallets, then you get 10 slices of the pie instead of 1. This adds 9 more slices to the pie than an anti-sybil minded developer would have ideally intended. Since this has no effect on the total number of tokens in the airdrop, your sybil wallets have eaten into the size of the slices of everyone else. In short, airdrop distributions are a zero sum game and more tokens for you means less for someone else.
Now Iâm not trying to virtue signal or shame anyone for having 10 wallets. Thereâs no ethical code about how much free money someone is entitled to. Furthermore, there is a justifiable and rational argument that since others are sybil attacking, you need to too. After all, youâre not eating into the average Joeâs piece of the pie, youâre eating into the faceless big airdrop farm in China with 1,000 wallets run by a computer program. At the end of the day, it is the developerâs job to ensure that the distribution is sybil resistant and makes it to the community and not the spammers.
This is in the same vein of human coordination problems we face with MEV â an arms race appears to capture economic value as no amount of virtue signalling and solo stalkers opting to build their own blocks will be enough coordination to stop rational actors from doing what makes the most economic sense. In fact, being virtuous just leaves more profit for the âbadâ and less values driven actors. So with that said, does that make being virtuous and leaving more value on the table actively counter productive for our values? In the bigger picture, this is why we need things like proposer-builder separation. To remove as many of these mechanisms of value capture which involve some kind of arms race. This is because in these areas of competitive value capture, there is almost always a centralising force over time towards those who are the most successful and in some cases, the most brutal with their tactics (see block proposal timing games for the latest development here).
To get back on the original topic, why two wallets? I guess itâs just the way I was raised to not be too greedy or selfish in a zero sum game. As I said above, Iâd be taking more from someone elseâs slice. But on the other hand, Iâm not lost in an idealistic world. The rational side of my brain sees how the game theory plays out and says farm that airdrop and take a slice out of the big boysâ pie as theyâd only spend the money on stupid things anyway. So here I am, somewhere in the middle. Iâm definitely putting effort into farming airdrops and with 2 wallets, maybe taking a larger slice than Iâm fairly entitled to. However, it is still less than I could get if I really wanted more.
All this is probably a similar reason to why I just want a house in the countryside somewhere and not a gazillion rental properties, a ferrari and a yacht. I would get very marginal enjoyment out of such fancy things and that marginal enjoyment nowhere near equates to the amount of good for others which those millions of dollars could do if they were put to more productive work. After all, spending money tells society where to put its effort. Collectively we get much more from feeding and housing people than we do from vroom vroom shiny car go fast. But still, even 90% of the world arenât lucky enough to own their own home and live in a safe, stable, country. So at this rate Iâll likely be getting a bigger slice than Iâd be fairly entitled to if the worldâs resources were split evenly. But in the situation I have been fortunate enough to find myself in, I donât feel overly greedy and I hope thatâs good enough.
Anyway, thanks for reading me share my thought process. I learned a bit just trying to articulate this. So let me know, where do you lie on the scale of u/Superphiz to hyper-capitalist rational actor? Or what are your thoughts on any of the above. In the end this discussion covered way more than I thought it would.
No flowery preamble because my wife is demanding that I get in the shower for a day trip. I do adore you in so many ways tricky, and Iâm honored that you consider my positions and our alignment. Here are too many bullet points that will definitely make me late for the shower.
I donât want anyone to exaggerate my wholesomeness and assume that I am too âgoodâ to airdrop farm or use multiple accounts. I definitely have and will continue to use multiple accounts if it appears that those mundane actions will increase my qualifications for an airdrop.
In general, I see airdrops differently than other people. I donât typically view airdrops as a benefit to the end recipient, but as a combination of a VC liquidity tool, or an engagement farming technique that allows startups to more easily create a case to VC for additional funding or valuation. I guess what Iâm trying to say is that youâre probably not abusing the airdrop, but in most cases I think the airdrop is taking advantage of you by farming you. Theyâre trying to pump key metrics through farming user activities, this lets them prove to VC that their platform really is worth funding.
My recent pushback against points is along this vein - if youâre farming away for imaginary points but startups are using your metrics as proof of success to VC, then thereâs a good chance youâre just straight up being abused. Do you know what VC likes even MORE than users who exert little outflow on a startup? FREE users. If a startup can generate a ton of activity for ZERO cost AND have a rabid user base, theyâre going to win big. I really adore big winners, but I want those winners to be good products, not just good incentive farmers.
Iâm really just encouraging people to take their own farming to the next level by engaging intelligently with projects that they like rather than being mindless zombies jumping through hoops. I donât know why, or if it even makes sense, itâs just where Iâm at right now.
I feel like EVERYONE thinks Iâm targeting eigenlayer, and Iâm not. I have hesitancy about Eigenlayer because of its impact on the security layer, and I accept it as a natural evolution of our space. I have no intention or desire to target them for their airdrop mechanism, other than to say, farming for points can be risky and create a house of cards in certain cases.
Regarding the greed issue (ferraris and yachts), I definitely align with you - I want to carve out a fair share and leave enough pie for others, but that doesnât mean Iâm some kind of altruistic monk. I DO enjoy the benefits of wealth and I do hope to continue building wealth, but itâs true that I take a more socialistic approach than many others. I feel like if we build Ethereum to be super powerful and valuable, then we will also benefit from that value; but if all of us focus on greed and extraction now, everyone will suffer in the long run. I prefer to think of cryptocurrency as a nascent project that has 1000x growth potential (platform, not price) if we foster healthy growth, or it can have a quick death if everyone extracts without regenerating.
Finally, I want to remind everyone that value and wealth are represented by more than money. Money is fun, but money is only useful when itâs used in an environment where it can bring you benefit. As a worst case scenario, money was useless in the stone age because it couldnât bring benefit. I have a real belief that if we bring blockchain developments to fruition, then the entire world will have access to more benefit. NFTs are a horrible (but useful) example of this. Prior to blockchains, you could have billions of dollars, but still no access to NFTs. Money could not provide that benefit because blockchains hadnât been developed to the extent that they were possible. There are MANY other developments that will be possible in the future if we continue developing this technology, and when we do, our money will be even more useful than it is today because weâll have access to more value from it through blockchain developments.
Assumptions:
If a Nethermind fork happens (this is what actually happened today):
If a Geth fork happens (exactly like what happened today, but just swap geth and nethermind):
TL;DR: Stake with nethermind, a nethermind bug causes you to lose 0.0005 ETH. Stake with geth, a geth bug causes you to lose 28 ETH.
Disclaimer, this is all to the best of my knowledge and I donât consider myself to be an expert in this.
Perfection is an illusion.
No software is perfect.
When a system is built on a software monoculture, it will inevitably fail when that critical software inevitably fails.
When a system is built on a diverse polyculture of software, it becomes resilient enough to not fail overall when any particular piece of supporting software fails.
Ethereum is too important to fail. Itâs too important to the future of money and the internet, too important in the fight against Moloch, and too important to the inhabitants of a world that is becoming more and more centralized as time goes on.
If I were on the side of Moloch, if I were going to attack Ethereum, I would do exactly what a sophisticated attacker might indeed be doing: releasing blocks designed to give minority clients issues, in the hope that people would be scared back onto Geth, in hopes of shutting down the nascent polyculture that its proponents have been desperately trying to cultivate before itâs too late.
I would tell people that itâs much more important to avoid the possibility of a few hours of downtime once or twice a year than it is to avoid the permanent destruction of the chainâs Lindy and legitimacy.
You all know Ethereum is too important to fail. Of those of you running nodes or especially staking, most have done the responsible thing and run minority clients.
Donât let anyone scare you into switching back into the supermajority. Donât let the occasional minor hiccups distract you from the looming impact of the supermajority bug asteroid that weâre desperately trying to divert from its path towards planet Ethereum before itâs too late.
Embrace the fact that no software is perfect, and that helping run Ethereum will always mean the possibility of unexpected adventures, no matter what software you run. But itâs your choice whether those adventures will be a fun afternoon resyncing your execution client in the good company of your fellow client users, or a less fun loss of every single Ether you staked, while the community fractures around you and all of our dreams for a better, more decentralized future lie in tatters around us.
Choose wisely.
Here is a list of some node operators with a lot of ETH staked using Geth. The easiest way to fix the EL client diversity issue is to knock on their doors and let them know why it matters. If you are staking with them, be aware that your stake is at risk if a bug in Geth would cause a mass slashing. You should unstake with them and let them know why you are doing so.
I have added client teams staking with Lido in there because I find it particularly problematic that they do not lead the charge of client diversity with their example. Them more than anyone should be aware of the risks.
Operator | Total ETH Staked | Estimated Geth usage |
---|---|---|
Coinbase | 4400000 | 100% |
Kraken | 860000 | 100% |
Binance | 1000000 | 100% |
Nethermind | 10000 | 68% |
Prysmatic Labs | 10000 | 100% |
Consensys | 10000 | 100% |
Sigma Prime | 10000 | 70% |
Kiln (Lido) | 10000 | 100% |
Kiln (non-Lido) | 790000 | 100%? |
Allnodes | 700000 | 100% |
Bitcoin Suisse | 550000 | 100% |
Stakefish | 370000 | 100% |
These guys together represent 1/3 of all ETH staked. If the do something about it the problem is gone.
Sources:
https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking
https://execution-diversity.info/
https://www.stakingrewards.com/provider/allnodes
Just to recap Coinbaseâs public statements about execution client diversity (to my knowledge):
Viktor Bunin, head of the Protocol Operations team at Coinbase Cloud (Coinbaseâs staking infrastructure provider), May 31st, 2022:
Thank you and yes, weâre looking at supporting other execution clients :)
Will Robinson, VP of Engineering, December 9th, 2023:
We do care.
Thank you for the push. Ethereumâs client diversity is one of the most striking manifestations of its commitment to decentralization.
Jesse Pollak, creator of Base and Head of Protocols, December 12th, 2023:
i hear you - lots of internal conversations ongoing. appreciate your patience as we work through it!
Viktor Bunin again, December 12th, 2023:
Thanks! Weâre looking into it, but nothing to share at this time.
Will Robinson again, January 2nd, 2024:
Weâre going to do it. Timeline is still TBD. I want to under-promise and over-deliver. :-)
Ben Rodriguez, Senior Protocol Specialist, today:
Hi! Iâm a Protocol Specialist here. I have been pushing for this and we are actively pursuing it.
And now Brian Armstrong, CEO, today:
Catostrphic.
2 tornado cash devs that got in legal trouble are looking for donations
https://twitter.com/rstormsf/status/1749490246000238942
links to:
and then to:
You can donate Eth and get an NFT.
[https://juicebox.money/@free-pertsev-and-storm](https://juicebox.money/@free-pertsev-and-storm)
Alternatively Go fund me or directly through justicedao.
The precedent set in that legal case might have a significant impact on the future of ethereum.
I dont see any Monero/Zcash donations so far. But maybe that wouldnt be in their best interest anyway.
I wanted to write a small post-mortem on the Nethermind incident, as a small solo staker.
Nethermind started having problems around block 19056922. Block sync became more infrequent than usual, there were some missed attestations, but the node somehow kept up. Finally, 1h and 50 minutes later, Nethermind started reporting âNo incoming messages from the consensus client that is required for syncâ and Prysm âExecution client is not syncincâ, effectively putting the node offline (letâs call this T+0).
I became aware of the issue at about T+45min. Tried restarting the services at T+50min, but quickly found out that this did not resolve the issue. After that, I checked if Eth prices had crashed to see if the whole blockchain had been attacked and brought down, but saw no price action. Then I went on discord, and found out that this was a Nethermind-specific issue.
After reading that a full resync might solve the issue, I rebooted Nethermind into a fresh data dir at T+1h20min, to begin the process. I was shocked to find that at T+2h23min the node was already submitting attestations, only 1h and 3 minutes after starting the sync from scratch. The first time I did this a number of months ago, it took more than 10 hours to get to this point. The node was not fully operational yet (I think block proposals would still have failed), but at least I was back attesting the network.
At around this time the Nethermind team announced that a fix was released (at T+1h40min apparently), but it took a while for the ubuntu repo to propagate the last version. My node was already attesting, so I was in no rush to update. About 1h later, I applied the fix, reverted back to the old database, and the node was fully online again.
In total, the attestation downtime made each validator earn 0.0007 eth less that it would have in normal operating conditions. This comes up to $1.57 per validator at todayâs prices, quite literally pocket change. Of course a missed block would have meant a much larger missed cost, but the chances of getting a block within the downtime window were quite low.
All in all, the issue was identified and fixed by the Nethermind devs incredibly quickly for a Sunday evening, and only caused a few hours of downtime. If anything, the speed of the fix only gave me more confidence on the Nethermind team, now that Iâve seen them working under fire. True, if I had been running geth I would have avoided this incident, but if Iâd been running geth and there was a similar incident with that client Iâd probably have lost most of my eth.
A few weeks ago a wrote a blog post about my experience with the various execution and consensus clients as a solo staker and the small differences they have. I never shared it here. It grew out of a longer message I wrote on the gnosis chain discord and it was well received there. It is a personal view so I am definitely missing a few angles, but hopefully there is no wrong information in there. If you think something could/should be improved, please let me know. I wrote it shortly before the Besu bug, so nothing about the recent bugs is discussed. I am still debating if I should add a short section about the bugs, but at the moment I leave it like that.
In pursuit of client diversity, I simplified the open source client-switcher and removed any code that wasnât absolutely necessary.
Itâs now a basic Python script of 439 lines that does the following:
1) Prompt user for inputs and validate inputs:
2) Remove old client and install new client
3) Create new service files, reload daemon, print final results
Thatâs it! Same process as Somerâs guides just simplified and automated. The switch takes 5 minutes with validators attesting again in ~2 hours (nethermind).
Thereâs a CLI (terminal) and GUI version to fit various setups and preferences.
Itâs all open source, so you can check github or ethstaker to view detailed images and review the code.
Iâm working to get it audited asap, but any help in the meantime is appreciated.
Special guest Mike Silagadze joins us from Ether.Fi, a native liquid restaking protocol.
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Ether beats the odds,
Upscaling the rollup squads,
Welcome to the blobs.
Today is a banking holiday in the states and because of that I cannot:
Deposit/withdraw my monies
Receive direct deposits of monies
Have any monies cleared/settled in my accounts
Buy the stonk :(
THE FUTURE OF FRANCIS
In the spirit of client diversity, I created an open source tool that allows anyone to instantly swap to a minority client with 0 configuration or effort. Just 1 click, new client.
I added a simple GUI, so switching clients can now be done with 0 programming experience in under 30 seconds.
Installation is based on Somer Esatâs guides and works with Geth, Besu, and Nethermind on both mainnet and testnets.
Feel free to check out the ethstaker post or see the details on Github:
These are personal projects that have not been audited, but the code is open source and fairly easy to understand. Any testing or feedback is always appreciated!
I created an open source validator updater that allows home stakers to update their entire setup in a single click with almost no downtime!
Github repo: https://github.com/accidental-green/validator-updater
Validator Updater Summary:
Once complete, restart the services and ensure the validator is still attesting.
The updated binaries are installed at /usr/local/bin to be compatible with Somer Esatâs guides, but can be adapted to work with non-standard installations.
Feel free to review my other validator related repos below:
Validator Install: Fresh Ubuntu to syncing validator in 1 minute
Validator Controller: Validator GUI for easy operation (start, stop, journals, etc)
Client Switcher: Instantly switch between Execution Clients
The code has not been audited, so use with caution. These are all open source community resources, so testing and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Cheers and Happy Staking!
Going to bring this up again: I strongly think we need to increase the gas limit, and Dencun is probably the best time to co-ordinate around this (although a HF is not needed for validators to increase the gas limit).
A few things to point out again:
What problem does increasing the gas limit solve?
Increasing it definitely has a downside. State will grow faster, sync time will get slower quicker, DoS potential will grow. Would be nice to have a number on those.
That said, what does increasing the gas limit net us?
I feel weâre kind of yoloing this. Do we have the monitoring and metrics in place to see how things evolve? If not, IMO we should fist have tooling that can point to the effect of a change before making that change. Otherwise itâs gonna get summed to âlook, not dead yetâ.
If we had a solid monitoring, we could just bump by 1M, see what happens. Nothing gets wonky, ok, bump by another 1M.
Going 10M in one go hoping nothing will get borked in the next 5 years is a bit too optimistic to my taste. Even though it might as well be the case
- Geth Team Lead - PĂŠter SzilĂĄgyi
https://twitter.com/peter_szilagyi/status/1745374731824439531
What are your thoughts on this? It does make sense and I understand why he is annoyed. He is the one who has to deal with the impact of the increase in state size.
On increasing the gas limit, I agree with Francesco and Dankrad (researchers at EF).
My take is similar:
Bumping the gas limit just as EIP-4844 is about to be shipped which already increases storage and network bandwidth costs is a bad idea
this isnât the right time at all
given the better hardware argument, we should definitely be increasing the size of blobspace (not blockspace). But only after the Deneb HF.
The result from the OP RPGF round 3 is a big motivation for me because it shows me that if we coordinate as a community, we can really get things done and improve the ecosystem.
I believe $STRK is around the corner. The snapshot for the airdrop is in according to an official tweet beginning of December 2023. The last upgrade allows tx to be paid in $STRK (but you obviously still use ETH as well). And afaik $STRK that lived on L1 for a long time now also is briged/ deployed on starknet.
I am also rather sure that $STRK will be a governance token because it is a governance token now and there are delegates participating in governance already, see this vote/ example.
So here are some questions:
Who has used Starknet a lot and knows the ecosystem? (whatever that means, hard to answer tbh)
Who has the time, energy and willingness to act as a delegate for starknet?
I think it would be great if we could informally agree on 1, 2, 3, x delegates that could represent this community in the starknet ecosystem and governance. That obviously doesnât mean that you canât delegate your $STRK to someone else outside of this community! But if we agree on candidates beforehand, those potential delegates can setup everything when the token drops.
So a quick update on the $STRK delegate search I started on Friday:
We have a first candidate: u/Tricky_Troll is interested and I would probably borrow $STRK to delegate even more to him! (I wonât, but I think Tricky is a great first candidate!)
But letâs not stop here, I think we should have 2 or maybe even 3 candidates. First of all it would be great if we as a community had a choice from ETH Finance (and let me get that straight: not because I think Tricky is not a great candidate, as I said I would delegate to Tricky without thinking twice!). More importantly though, I think we will likely - as a community - have a lot of $STRK power that we probably should spread across at least 2 delegates. So I would be really happy to see more people coming forward!
Also u/bob-rossi said that he would be happy to share his experience with people thinking about being a delegate. So if you wanna understand what it is like before you make a decision, feel free to contact him. Maybe a channel in the EVM discord like he suggested also makes sense and maybe other delegates would have a look as well, to share their thoughts. In a best case scenario âourâ delegates not only receive voting power from Eth Finance, but maybe the more experienced delegates can tell us how they convinced people to delegate to them!
So: I would be very excited if some people thought about being a delegate and of course best case share their interest here so we can coordinate.
Letâs go!
Discussions on the next version of the Arbitrum grants program have been underway and I wanted to share this for two reasons.
It is currently in the Snapshot voting stage. So, if anyone here is involved with projects that are interested in that type of thing it might be a good idea to start coordinating what an application would look like. I donât believe they have any official application template just yet, but Iâd imagine it will be pretty similar to the STIP rounds. This new round already has some changes that should hopefully make it less chaotic then the first STIP grants.
One of the changes is creating a 5-member council that gives a first pass at all applicants. The goal here is to cut down on some of applicant volume so when delegates vote they can be less overwhelmed and have the ability to review the proposals a little more thoroughly. And then they are adding 3 âApplicant Advisorâ roles as well. That group can help assist projects with polishing their application for a best chance of success. I wanted to mention that specifically for any projects that may apply, that the assistance is there. Both are an elected and paid position.
Relating to point two⌠part of my post is to let everyone here know I will be running for one of the council spots. Iâm not sure how successful I will be honestly, but I wanted to at least make people here aware since Iâm sure many of my delegates come from here. I actually applied a week+ ago, but wanted to wait until voting was closer to âannounceâ.
Iâm trying really hard to toe the line between being the overbearing âhey vote for meâ guy while still being effective at least getting the word out. So Iâll leave it simply at this - if there are any questions you have for me relating to my application, or even just any thoughts on what a successful council would look like if I got elected, please let me know. And of course, if you do decide to support me always know I will be grateful!
I really, really wish I could link the post⌠but probably easiest to find more info about the grant program would be going to the Snapshot Vote and clicking the corresponding link to the main Arbitrum governance forum. Then if you are interested in who is running for council, the 17th post in that thread will have a link directly to the âLTI Pilot Program Position Application Thread". Which alternatively can be found by going to the main forum page, clicking under the blueâDao Grants Program" subsection, and finding that thread near the top. Sorry for the runaround, but Reddit does really make it this much of a painâŚ
By now Iâm sure weâve all seen Larry Fink, CEO of the worldâs largest asset manager Blackrock (with $9 trillion in assets, 3 times Franceâs entire GDP), saying that the future of france is tokenization of assets âon one single ledgerâ (source). More specifically, he talked about bonds and stocks.
But what could this âone single ledgerâ be?
In this other interview, Fink again mentions stepping stones towards tokenization right after speaking about an ether ETF.
Since that Iâve read a few Ethereum detractors saying that thereâs no way tokenization of stocks and bonds will happen on mainnet Ethereum, because issuers will need an environment they can control. And this is probably sort of right.
But what theyâll also need is an environment that fully communicates with the leading tokenization platform.
Ethereum currently holds 55% of all of defiâs TVL, hereâs your leading platform. Thatâs the âone single ledgerâ Fink talks about. And thatâs without counting rollups and sidechains. And before a 10x scaling of rollups in a couple of months.
But interoperability and control, how to you reconciliate these two?
In the past banks have created their own permissioned Ethereum clones (Hyperledger, Quorum, ⌠more about these here). They looked like intranet, closed and safe versions of the internet. But have you heard of projects that crossed the chasm and made it to mainnet? I havenât. Just like intranet, these projects were fun playground but didnât take advantage of the full potential of Ethereum. What good is a website others canât reach?
Today, the scaling solution(s) chosen by the Ethereum community happen to be absolutely perfect for reconciliating interoperability with control. A rollup, a volition, a validium or any other hybrid solution is just whatâs needed to solve this problem.
You can be part of the ecosystem, but still retain some degree of control.
Not only that but the cost will soon basically be net zero: we can safely expect that launching your own L2 on Ethereum will be as trivial as launching a smart contract: copy some open source code and let stakers manage security for you through Eigenlayer. How much did Hyperledger and Quorum cost to create and operate? I couldnât find figures but a shitload Iâm sure. How much will launching a rollup cost in 2 years? 1,000 or 10,000 less?
I donât like Fink and probably never will. But it truly amazes me how far weâve come.
Today, the CEO of the worldâs largest asset managers sees the future weâve seen for years, a future of finance with Ethereum at its core.
I wanted to repost the article u/vvpan provided the other day about the progress and interest in tokenising securities by institutional firms.
In this case Brewan Howard.
I wanted to repost it because I really dont think it got the recognition it deserved. You know those âstepsâ Larry Fink talked about which eventually culminate in full tokenisation of everything. This is the next big step
And as I said I believe this usecase alone, if eventually succesful at scale (such that it picks up a network effect) could swell Ethereum to unfathomable degrees. I truly think this is being slept on by us crypto natives.
This is the âcrypto taking over tradfiâ moment. This is the âEthereum is the new internetâ moment. If it succeeds.
âProduct market fitâ? This is it.
Iâve provded an archive link to bypass the paywall and Iâll paste the artivle text too.
https://archive.ph/v4BVk#selection-4891.0-4891.13
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/crypto/brevan-howard-joins-in-on-institutional-push-to-tokenize-funds
Brevan Howard plans to tokenize at least one of its funds through a partnership with a startup backed by Nomuraâs Laser Digital, making it the latest financial heavyweight to experiment with putting money on blockchains.
Libre Capital, the startup which includes Laser Digital and the Alan Howard-backed incubator WebN Group as investors, said it will offer zero fees to asset managers who tokenize funds on its namesake platform. Brevan Howard, along with Hamilton Lane, said theyâll be the first asset managers to do so. Libreâs public blockchain technology is supported by Ethereum scaling firm Polygon.
âThe tokenisation of funds allows us to offer investors a new way to access our strategies, providing them with optionality, and further develops our platform to serve client needs,â said Natalie Smith, head of strategy and client partnerships group at Brevan Howard, in a release.
Brevan Howard is one of the earliest Wall Street participants in the digital-asset sector. Its digital-currency fund rose 44% last year. Even so, this will still be the Jersey, Channel Islands-based investment firmâs first tokenized fund. The process has been promoted heavily recently as one of the few viable use cases for blockchains. Citigroup estimated the tokenization market could swell to $5 trillion by 2030.
âUltimately, our goal isnât to make money on the distribution side,â said Avtar Sehra, CEO and founder of Libre, in an interview. âFor us, we want to take the money and the operational costs as close to zero as possible.â
Libre also plans to launch collateralized lending and automated rebalancing of separately managed accounts later in 2024, according to Sehra.
With Libre taking zero fees from fund distributors for tokenization, Sehra anticipated that the company will profit mostly from the lending and SMAs businesses.
I often find myself thinking that eth is a natural solution to a lot of global financial problems. The latest is the fink tokenized asset commentary.
Another was the issue of central banks not having a fast trustless way to trade currencies. To an eth enthusiast, this is an obvious fit - issue currencies as erc20s, and let the trading simply occur in a trustless format.
The imf didnât even consider this, but instead addressed all kinds of cbdc variants. The obvious problem is that theyâre all trusted, and countries simply donât trust each other enough to use one anotherâs private chains. The imf briefly addressed bitcoin as a possibility before dismissing it.
I wonder if a lot of this reflexive hostility to eth and permissionless programmable chains is a response to bitcoin and its dominant narrative. Bitcoiners talk about fiat being worthless and central banks as enemies - of course central banks are going to view this with hostility. They view an attack on their fiat as an attack on their sovereignty. The digital gold/SoV approach makes much more sense for how bitcoin is set up, but also is less of a direct challenge.
Anyway, all this to say that closed eth clones are always going to have the problem of being trusted, and if youâre not part of the consortium running the chain, youâre ultimately at their mercy. Now matter how big that consortium is, there will always be some outside it, thereby limiting its network effects.
Security alert!
Bungee / socket being exploited.
Revoke contract 0x3a23f943181408eac424116af7b7790c94cb97a5
source Spreek
https://twitter.com/spreekaway/status/1747337879771033632
Edit: Only mainnet exploited, other chains could be exploitable. Same contract on other chains, 0xaDdE7028e7ec226777e5dea5D53F6457C21ec7D6 on zksync era.
Edit2: Afaik if you used bungee you should be fine, as their webapp does only approve the amount you like to send.
Edit3: https://twitter.com/SocketDotTech/status/1747349422730813525 Socket confirmed and paused the contract.
Edit4: Hopefully last edit. Revoke cash has created a tool to easily check. Although contracts are paused, itâs recommended to revoke if your address is affected. It could also happen that you bridged with services like zerion or rainbow. [https://revoke.cash/exploits/socket?chainId=1
Fast reaction from Bungee.
This sent me on a revoke binge regardless. Itâs easy to get sloppy for the sake of convenience. The other day I mentioned using Odos rather than other aggregators so I limit my approvals. Of course, this requires actually revoking previous approvals!
I like the idea of a 2 addresses setup, to limit risk. Address A holds all funds. Only ever sends and receives tokens to address B. Address B is the trader. Approves everything, does the swaps, gets into the tokenized positions, transfers everything back to A once each series of operations is done. This protects against many hacks since A holds everything and approves nothing.
However⌠Itâs hard to have the discipline to stick to this. It would be fantastic if there was wallet software to automate this behavior. You âstart a sessionâ and this triggers A sending whatever to B, then you operate B as a normal wallet, then as you âclose your sessionâ this triggers a transaction of B sending whatever newly acquired funds back to A. Even restricting any action from A thatâs not send to B (unless you enter a password to override, or whatever).
Probably hard to build but man I would love this.
Guess what, I had a u/seamonkey82 moment today, and helped find a client bug! Story time :D
Some of you may be aware that thereâs an ongoing debate about whether Ethereum can handle a slight increase in its block gas limit. This would make L1 gas slightly cheaper by creating more blockspace, at the expense of being harder to keep in sync with the chain for the weakest machines on the network.
The gas limit is currently at 30M units of gas per block (which means 15M units is equilibrium). Some folks are proposing raising it 33%-50%, to e.g. 40M-45M, while others oppose any raises, especially in light of the upcoming EIP-4844, which will raise requirements a bit too.
The fun thing is, individual stakers actually are able to change this number themselves whenever they propose blocks. Unlike many other changes, you donât need a hardfork to accomplish it. Rather, individual stakers can pick their own âtarget gas limitâ, which their client will attempt to move the gas limit towards. The protocol allows the block gas limit to change by 1/1024th of the previous blockâs value, per block. In this way, if the majority of the stake decides on a new number, the value will start random walking its way to that new value, and stick there more firmly the greater the consensus. This mechanism is a holdover from the days of mining, but itâs pretty neat.
Anyway, as a solo staker, I decided to YOLO raise my own limit last month, and set it up to 40M. This involves setting some flags in your execution and consensus clients. I run Besu/Lodestar, and set their flags appropriately.
Since then, I proposed (at least) one MEV-boost block. As expected, that blockâs gas limit was 30M + 30M / 1024, i.e. 30029295 units. A slightly less than 0.1% increase over the standard amount. It isnât much, but it helped make Ethereum L1 slightly cheaper for that block and (indirectly) the next few! Cool, everythingâs working!
Since then, I proposed (at least) one locally-built block (I have a min-bid set, like most responsible solo stakers who care about avoiding too much censorship, and it triggered.) As a reminder, locally built blocks are constructed by your execution client, in my case Besu, from the contents of their public mempools.
My locally built block(s), upon examination, looked great, except for one thing! Rather than 30029295 units of gas as expected, and rather than the 30M units of gas I would expect to see if I had misconfigured something, my locally built block(s) had a gas limit of 30001024. WTF? Itâs supposed to change by 1/1024 of the parent block, not by 1024!
Some in-depth adventures into the Besu Github later, I confirmed that indeed, there was a bug that was causing all Besu locally built blocks to only be able to shift up or downwards by a maximum of 1024 units of gas, rather than the (at present) 29295 units of gas expected. Put another way, Besu stakers with locally built blocks would only be able to move the gas limit about 3% as fast as locally-building stakers running other execution clients.
Jumping into the Besu Discord, I reported this situation, and worked through it with Matt Nelson, one of the excellent Besu team members who can be found there. He confirmed the bug and figured out the needed fix, and that should be making it into a future Besu version.
So anyway, moral of the story is, just YOLO changing numbers is apparently a great way to find client bugs, with your face :P Hopefully as the gas limit discussion continues, this means Besu stakers will be fully equipped if there is more of a mass movement in the direction of increasing that limit!
I am glued to this Coinbase case today. You couldnât have asked for a friendlier judge. The judge was practically feeding arguments to Coinbase. Gensler should be screaming at the screen if heâs watching this.
The only argument Coinbase made that bounced seemed to be the major questions doctrine where the judge is hesitant to remove the authority of anyone but Congress to regulate anything about this space.
However, the SEC has completely failed to define why a baseball card or fantasy football team wouldnât be a security but tokens would. The SEC wants any anon trade on Coinbase to be a security contract if someone promoted it on Twitter. Coinbase wants a security contract to include at minimum some type of contract or legal right. Unless the token includes inherent rights like on-chain governance and a claim to dividends itâs hard to argue you are entering a contract when purchasing a token.
Promising start to the SEC/Coinbase Trial:
Judge Failla is on fire right out of the gate.
She says to the @SECGov lead lawyer, and I paraphrase: The âDeFi peopleâ gave a âreally fineâ amicus brief explaining what staking is and what the wallet is used for, âarguably betterâ than how the Commission explained it in its briefing.â
She also says the @SECGov hasnât presented an opposing narrative for the legal foundations of Howey in its briefing.
<3 all you âdefi peopleâ
Looks like the SEC is not done losing, they are looking to take another big L in the Coinbase / Staking case
https://x.com/eleanorterrett/status/1747641703626924431
BruhâŚ.
Failla then addresses the Howey Test: âWeâve had a god run. Weâve had 90 years where these securities laws have been able to apply to these markets. But now we have something new.â
Holy smokes, hope the judge rules this way. This is the equivalent of complaining about someone encroaching on your parking spot only to end up losing your home in court
https://x.com/RSSH273/status/1747647514302689553
Favorite moment of argument so far:
SEC â âthe tokens themselves are not a securityâ
Failla â âthatâs what the folks in the back table think (Coinbase). And they are wondering why we are hereâ
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Current Twitter experience as a long time crypto user. Seeing this same scam ad for a fake ZKsync airdrop every ~5 tweets, and some other scam ad every other 10 tweets.
Just got this now, my heartâs full of joy, what an amazing day đ
lol; At least a/b test the copy scammer guy I really canât imagine this headline works that well
(I still love crypto Twitter despite how god awful the spam has gotten on the platform)
So many people hyped into the swETH EigenLayer contract that it has seriously affected the swETH peg. Prior to the EigenLayer deposit opening people were chain minting swETH for Pearls then selling it to ETH at almost a 3% loss. That is to say the market was speculating that the pearl to ETH ratio would be about .0015. As recently as Dec 10th swETH was at about 1.01 swETH/ETH. Right now itâs sitting at almost 1.05 (the native rate is 1.0471). So just holding swETH in the past 4 weeks has made you 4% almost on your ETH (more than an entire year of solo staking). It has also largely drained the swETH liquidity as apparently LPs exited their position to pure swETH and deposited the whole stack into EigenLayer. You can see volume hugely spiked, right around the time TVL halved.
Larger LSTs are less dramatically affected but thereâs the same phenomenon are still visible in them. In many cases the lower liquidity has significantly improved the liquidity farming rates. Some of these new combination pools like cbETH/wstETH/rETH are yielding over 12% APR (like 5x solo staking). Even most of the older pools are still at or above 7.5% after accounting for the native appreciation of the LST in their yield.
Note: While Eigen Layer was specifically mentioned, I believe these are inherent risks to all restaking
suggest everyone interested in privacy preserving technology read this update (from early December) around Railgun V3. Railgun is a privacy layer you can deposit to and withdrawal to any address, and now they are going to help incorporate defi onto the privacy layer so all your swaps and farming can be shielded.
Also Nocturne just launched a working product last month (which is I think maybe what spurned this update article, friendly competition), and itâs nice to see privacy projects still building even if the USG is trying to chill everyone away from the space. Vitalik is a known backer of Nocturne as well.
[EDIT Nocturne Announcement Article]
https://dailyhodl.com/2023/11/15/nocturne-launches-on-mainnet-to-bring-private-accounts-to-ethereum/
lastly donât forget that Aztec network is supposed to launch sometime this year. we may have lost Tornado access in the US temporarily, but it didnât shut it down (not even close) and more and more of these privacy solutions will emerge making it even more and more difficult to deter. at the end of the day blockchain doesnât work without proper privacy being an option. I urge everyone to learn about and explore these tools.
This wasnât how I intended to spend my Saturday, but it looks like the sub already is aware of the mainnet block that halted besu this morning: https://etherscan.io/txsInternal?block=18947893
What you might not know yet is there is a hotfix release out that prevents this from occurring in the future for similarly crafted blocks. If you are running besu on mainnet, even if you have already addressed the problem and are caught back up to head, you should upgrade to this hotfix release:
https://github.com/hyperledger/besu/releases/tag/23.10.3-hotfix
Please excuse this minor pause in bullishness and meme sentiment while I vent a bit and reflect on larger problems.
I often think about how inefficient, backwards, corrupt, and self serving politicians of the world governments are; particularly my own. Without getting specific and political, there are so many obvious problems that politicians refuse to address, or canât, due to clearly perverse incentives that drive them and make them worse over time. Itâs one of the things thatâs drawn me most to crypto. The guys at Bankless and others in crypto have stated many times that crypto is speed running the lessons learned from traditional finance. More importantly I think itâs speed running lessons around incentive alignment. When everything is financial, the incentive problems and consequences of system design become much more explicit and quantifiable than they are implied like many of the problems in meat space. Governance issues have been rampant in crypto, donât get me wrong, but experimentation on a smaller scale creates lessons learned and informative feedback that could ideally be applied to broader government systems.
Unfortunately I often times think that weâre too far gone, or late in this game of informed discovery to be able to actionable apply these learnings to larger legacy systems. Iâm not even sure weâve discovered ways to solve a lot of the problems in crypto let alone the broader physical world. Internally crypto can feel fast moving and iterative at a blazing pace, but it also feels slow to me in aspects like these. I feel that if crypto came about 50 years earlier, we might have had a better shot at rethinking the way we govern as a society; that weâd have been able to take more preventative measures or seen problems coming much earlier as a result.
If there is a hope here, Iâm confident it will come from younger generations and the lessons they learn from this industry. Everything is driven by incentives, and game theory should be considered everywhere when governing. Hereâs hoping the US and other governments nurture innovation in this space going forward. Despite the scams and problems we have here, it is still the breeding ground for the ideas and minds that have the chance to turn things around. It is for this reason, among many others, that choosing pro-crypto candidates is a much higher stakes battle than I think many people realize, even in our industry. It is one of the most important aspects of candidates I will consider voting for moving forward. Long live crypto. Long live Ethereum. Long live innovation. Long live experimentation.
A few further thoughts and opinions on the Besu failure yesterday. I think there is nuance in this situation that got overlooked. But before I begin, letâs get some facts straight - and these are well known and not up for debate:
1) No client should have a super majority.
2) The current, and wholly inappropriate situation with Geth is based on i) itâs code maturity and empirical reliability; ii) a completely unacceptable level of laziness, wrecklessness and short-term greed by large staking entities. (Which is sadly ironic because at least one of those is tied very closely to the overarching security mechanism of PoS - another example of how we cannot simply âcode inâ all required incentives.)
However, for some stakers, namely solo-stakers (and possibly other smaller, more responsible staking entites), the situation is much less clear. I think itâs fair to say that Geth is indeed a much(?) supererior client to the competition. Should, therefore, a solo-staker take on a more philanthropic role by worrying more about network health by say, running Besu - a less mature client - than their own immediate needs? In terms of measurable risk for them (as far as we can calculate) running Besu would seem to be a disadvantage. E.g. the probability of an event like yesterday for Besu (or NM?) is clearly higher, and their ability to recover from it expediently compared to a larger provider, probably much lower (hence larger losses in time, stress and income). Moreover, as stated at the outset, the systemic risk from the Geth super majority is not driven by solo stakers, and so solo stakers are not meaningfully mitigating that risk by avoiding Geth. (This is like the problem with global warming - we should all try our best, but in reality at this stage, due to the tragedy of the commons, the biggest, and possibly only meaingful improvements can be made by societal policy shift in law).
So, solo-stakers in particular have a question to answer. Should they willingly chose a client that is measureably poorer and riskier for them, basically in support of the âgreater goodâ? Or do they stick with Geth, which is likely to be more reliable for them, and basically push the job of reducing the Geth majority onto the larger stakers (who are clearly much more culpable)? Ultimately, this is something of a subjective choice that boils down to estimates of risk, reliability and person attitude. Yes, Geth could fail in a catastrophic way, but Besu did fail in a catastrophic way. The (empirical) probabilities speak for themselves. Sadly, there is even a worse outcome here, in that (the short sighted) large stakers will now be extremely glad they were running Geth, and not Besu, because imagine having thouands of validators going down on a weekend, with no clear fix for ~24 hours. That would have been extremely costly. Bullet dodged.
In summary, if all clients were demonstrably equally reliabile, the choice of client and question of majority would be more straightforward. But they are not equal at the present time and pragmatism will prevail.
Due to the recent Besu issue, I found a bug in the Lighthouse VC.
If you are interested, the full details can be found here > https://github.com/sigp/lighthouse/issues/5044
As we enter the early stages of the next bull market, please remember to keep your crypto wallet secure. While I canât get into the specific schemes I use to keep mine secure, here are some general guidelines I follow that have worked for me since I created my first crypto wallet in the early 2010s.
Always prefer open-source over closed-source. Never trust closed-source software with your main stack. Only use the most popular, well-vetted open source software.
Strike a balance between safety and recoverability (make your keys safe enough that they donât get stolen, but not so âsafeâ they you lose the only copy of them).
Have no single point of failure, wherever possible. Split your assets across addresses. Split your key across physical locations. But itâs gotta be more sophisticated than just putting 12 words in one place and 12 words in another, because afaik 12 words can be bruteforced. Wish I could be more specific about this. Some wallets support Shamir, which can be a good way to do this. Gnosis Safe is less flexible but perhaps the only smart contract out there to be trusted with someoneâs main stack.
Do not use the same PC user account for crypto that you use for your daily tasks. Ideally, have a crypto-only âonlineâ computer that runs something other than Windows. Maintain a minimal software footprint on it. Log into it periodically to keep the OS up to date.
Also keep a crypto-only âofflineâ computing device that never touches the internet. If itâs a PC, it needs to be running a very mainstream very publicly-audited version of Linux like ubuntu, fedora, debian, etc. A hardware wallet counts as long as the design is open and the firmware is open-source, but it has some trade-offs youâll have to weigh for yourself.
Do everything (concerning your main stack) in multiple batches. Everything. Even the most simple transfers from one address to another that seem like they would be impossible to fuck up, because trust me itâs possible to fuck up - if not by your own accord, then by some tricky dicky scheme whereby a hacker replaces addresses in your computerâs memory or uses some other silly scheme to bamboozle you. Itâll be more expensive to batch things as far as transaction fees, but itâs not possible for a single huge fuckup to ruin you. Nobody is perfect, but managing crypto demands perfection. If you send your entire stack off to some rando etherscan spoofer or directly to the token contract itself, thereâs no getting it back.
When youâre confirming an address, check it from two different devices running different OSes. One device can be compromised; two heterogeneous devices are unlikely to be compromised by the same hacker at the same time.
If your wallet looks a little different than it usually does, panic. Youâll need to learn breathing exercises to panic properly without harming yourself too much. But the 1% chance you catch something malicious is worth the 99% of the time where a wallet software update changed things around a bit.
If your seed phrase has ever been typed into any device that physically has a wifi chip in it, your keys are compromised. Generate a new seed and transfer things.
Corollary: If you did something âcleverâ like write your seed phrase into a poem, itâs still compromised. Weâre in the AI age now, so you have to protect your seed not only from malicious actors but from their smart AI bot armies who you have to assume will be combing through that poetry you wrote in 10th grade thatâs in that dropbox account you forgot about, trying random combinations of words in hopes that it derives an active private key.
If you have ever said your seed phrase out loud in earshot of a device that has a microphone and a wifi chip (cell phone, non-airgapped pc, smart tvâŚ), your keys are compromised. Generate a new seed and transfer things.
If your seed phrase has ever been in view of any camera on any device, your keys are compromised. Generate a new seed and transfer things.
If your seed phrase ever looks at you a little cockeyed like he wants treats, but you already gave him his treats today, heâs compromised and sadly you need to put him down.
If you do not know the specific method by which entropy was collected to generate your keys, your keys are compromised. The gold standard is to use physical dice to generate your seed phrase, and make sure you roll âem around in your hands a lot. Bitcoin OGs remember Diceware.
If your ETH is wrapped in some way or another, you donât own ETH, you own an IOU for ETH. You are owed by a company and/or a contract. Companies go bankrupt, contracts get hacked. If you must hold IOUs, spread them out, but beware correlation risks that may be hiding themselves (ftx/celsius/blockfi/voyager/genesis/3ac is a great example of a hidden correlation risk).
You need to learn the basics of cryptography. Creating and managing keys without knowing cryptography basics is like trying to drive a car without knowing the rules of the road.
You need to learn the basics of computer security. Learn what makes hacking attempts successful. Learn what CTF is, and learn about the ways hackers and social engineers typically gain access to systems. Imagine you are a hacker with full pwned access to your own main daily driver computer, and imagine how you would try to steal your crypto.
Keep yourself up all night worrying about your wallet security. If you wanted to have a peaceful low-stress life, you should have gotten a government 9-5 instead of getting into crypto. If you really need some sleep, buy some melatonin and a weighted blanket. Donât fuck with Ambien - the government puts chips in the pills that program you to go get your seed phrase in the middle of the night and text it to the cia.
Donât fuck with Ledger.
Donât fuck with Binance.
If you are a regulatory agency, use 2-factor auth on your fucking twitter account.
My general paranoia has saved me several times since I started investing in crypto in the early 2010s. Remember, they ARE trying to get your keys. Always. You need to be perfect every time to win, they only need you to fuck up a single time to win, so the game is tilted in their favor. They will never stop, so you have to never stop defending.
Today the SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.
The approved Bitcoin ETFs will be subject to ongoing surveillance and compliance measures to ensure continued investor protection.
https://twitter.com/SECGov/status/1744829327294837236
The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.
https://twitter.com/GaryGensler/status/1744833049064288387
You canât make this stuff up.
Spot BTC ETF approved. This is good for ETH.
As you may/not know, [u/austonst](https://reddit.com/u/austonst] and I run the Aestus relay. To be frank, itâs been a hard hard slog in terms of funding and weâve paid for the whole thing ourselves out of pocket this last year +. Well. A few months ago u/benido2030 raised this in here and practically pushed me into working through the OP rPGF round 3 process. I had assumed it wasnât worth it. Today we found out that weâve just been granted ~100k OP tokens (đ¤Ż). That is an ungodly amount of money for our little project. I donât even know how to begin to say thank you, but none the less thank you, thank you and thank you to him, u/superphiz and everyone else that voted and pushed this through. đ¤
ethereum
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ETF approved,
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2013 : âWall street bonuses/chinese new year red envelope moneyâ
2017 : âInstitutional Moneyâ
2021 : âETF inflows right around the cornerâ
2025 : " 5% pension allocation across the board"
2029 : " Gov. crypto funds for all nations "
2033 : " Vitalik crowned god-emperor of mankind"
2037 : " Fully automated luxury abundant gay space communism crypto utopia as humanity spreads across the stars"
âŚ
2100 : âETH/BTC ratio surpasses 0.10 this cycleâ
Saw it mentioned yesterday, but I think Vitalikâs latest thinking on Ethereumâs positioning within the blockchain trilemma design space deserves further discussion. For me this feels like it has the potential to be a large pivot in core Ethereum philosophy and my initial gut feeling is one of discomfort.
Ethereum has up until now allowed anyone with 32 ETH and moderate technical ability to run a validator. At least two of the options discussed by Vitalik in his post would reduce the decentralisation of Ethereum.
The Ethereum community are a pragmatic bunch who donât see things in black and white. Technical solutions require compromise and decentralisation is a spectrum. Even so abandoning the principle of a relatively small fish being able to validate within the network without having to trust 3rd parties feels like a real departure from a long held value.
The Best Staking-as-a-Service (SAAS) Providers
In approximate order, based mostly on their reputation among Redditors (I read more than I post). For each of these, the user controls their withdrawal keys.
Allnodes
Itâs $10/month for their Advanced plan, which is the cheapest one that includes MEV (itâs worth the extra $5/month). Thatâs equivalent to a fee of only 0.16%, close to zero! Theyâre a top-15% performer on Rated Network over the last 30 days, and mostly use the Teku (a minority client) consensus client; theyâre also large, if that gives you comfort: 2.6% of all staked ether.
Ethpool
They charge 15% of MEV (10% for 3 nodes, 8% for 30 nodes). That comes out to about 2.9% of all rewards (so yes, about 18x Allnodes). I canât find them on Rated Network. They use minority clients: Lighthouse and Nethermind.
Blox Staking
They have a 0% fee forever (not a typo). Their effectiveness rating on Rated Network is below the 50th percentile as I write this. The company behind them is probably more focused on their new SSV Network now. I noticed that their website gets barely any traffic anymore (it ranks in the millions), but Rated Network says they still stake about 0.53% of staked ether, and they have an active Discord. They use mostly Prysm (the most popular consensus client).
Best solution for leftover amounts when youâve staked all your 32-ETH blocks:
Competition in staking is heating up daily (e.g. with DVT solutions coming online), but Iâll nominate StakeWise v3. You can stake any amount and donât need to get an LST. You get to choose an operator. Perhaps 4% fees is typical, but I see one offering 1%. Some reputable operators to consider are x (please reply with your opinions).
Some reasons you might want to use SAAS:
You donât want LSTs because youâd have to generate a capital gain when selling ETH for them; and they have high fees, typically 10% for Lidoâs stETH.
You donât want to solo stake because you may not feel technically competent enough; you may have unreliable internet (or limited capacity) or electricity; or you may not have a stable place for your node (e.g. youâre a digital nomad).
I had a shower thought that I wanted to crank out before I forget it. I probably wonât format it well, just trying to dump the idea.
Smart contracts are the basic building blocks, not the infrastructure of web3.
Smart contracts are more like transistors.. or more realistically simple circuits. They can do very small tasks, but having a box of simple circuits doesnât really give you extraordinary power. Imagine having a bunch of 555 timer chips - itâs a simple but powerful tool, but by itself itâs not revolutionary.
The power of simple circuits comes when you string a bunch of them together to do something even more powerful.
Weâre at the beginning of smart circuit development - when several contracts can work together to complete more powerful functions. From where weâre standing this seems difficult and complex. The Intel 8080 processor had 6000 transistors, but the i9-13xxx series have 25 BILLION. We havenât even reached the capacity of building a smart circuit that includes 10-20 smart transistors/smart contracts yet.
Another way to imagine this is from an evolutionary perspective. We think about this stuff called Primodial Soup, the idea that a bunch of the right building blocks (amino acids) in the same place at the right time can give rise to more complex biological compounds. Our current primordial soup is the library of smart contracts weâre building now, and in time these basic building blocks will evolve into highly complex organisms.
All of this to say.. weâre at the beginning of all of this. We have the foundational building blocks to build complex contraptions that we canât even imagine yet, but given the historical context of building blocks that get organized, itâs exceedingly likely that weâre on the cusp of rapid evolution in smart contracts.
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/12/28/cypherpunk.html
This is why itâs valuable for Ethereum to have a strong social layer, which vigorously enforces its values in those places where pure incentives canât - but without creating a notion of âEthereum alignmentâ that turns into a new form of political correctness.
I already felt some influencers were wielding âEthereum alignmentâ as a weapon to criticize projects and L2s. Sometimes itâs warranted and sometimes you could feel that they were just posturing for their brand. You can feel the âsliminessââŚitâs just off putting. Like seeing the the lazer eyes profile pics.
My favorite section is What are some of these values?
Vitalik prefectly describes what brought so many of us into crypto when it was solely BTC and dreams of what crypto could eventually do.
A few years later and the space has evolved so much - taking steps towards achieving some of those grand visions. But in taking those steps, we sacrificed the values that gave crypto any real meaningful value. Why remake the the same thing but worse? The values he outlines in the section are core to crypto and give the space value. Devs need to embrace it and figure a way to make it appealing to consumers. The easy path is centralization. The rewarding path is decentralization.
It is very possible to build things within the crypto ecosystem that do not follow these values. One can build a system that one calls a âlayer 2â, but which is actually a highly centralized system secured by a multisig, with no plans to ever switch to something more secure.
One can build an account abstraction system that tries to be âsimplerâ than ERC-4337, but at the cost of introducing trust assumptions that end up removing the possibility of a public mempool and make it much harder for new builders to join.
One could build an NFT ecosystem where the contents of the NFT are needlessly stored on centralized websites, making it needlessly more fragile than if those compoents are stored on IPFS.
One could build a staking interface that needlessly funnels users toward the already-largest staking pool.
Resisting these pressures is hard, but if we do not do so, then we risk losing the unique value of the crypto ecosystem, and recreating a clone of the existing web2 ecosystem with extra inefficiencies and extra steps.
Beautiful. You could tell it was something that was bothering him for a while now. So much passion and humility in his writing.
2023 is coming to a close and I want to reflect on what Ethereum means to this community. I have two questions.
Why do you hold Ether?
What is something that Ethereum could accomplish that you can look back in 50 years and say âI held through the bear because I believed in Ethereumâs âŚâ Or âEthereum is a success to me because it âŚâ?
â
For me, I got into crypto in general because I believe that the global financial system is rigged. Anything worth owning became more and more expensive every year, and the dream of owning a home or land became further and further out of reach. It felt like I was on one side of a ballon and my dreams were on the other side. The balloon was being inflated, and it felt like my dreams were literally being inflated away.
Bitcoin struck a chord in me because it espouses transparency, fiscal responsibility, and financial freedom. Here was a money that couldnât be printed into oblivion. Here was a money that wasnât first distributed to the mega-banks and the mega-rich where they buy up assets, creating inflation before finally filtering down to us little people. Here was a money that couldnât be confiscated because the owners embrace ideas that werenât popular. Here was a money that could be sent across the world at the speed of light, 24/7. Here was a money that was controlled by everyday people and not some nameless, unelected, unaccountable, government bureaucrat.
I believe that Bitcoin ossified too soon, and r/Bitcoin started banning anyone who suggested that the code should be upgraded.
Thatâs when I found Ethereum. It was a project that had similar characteristics and desires of Bitcoin but, unlike bitcoin, it was going to continue developing. I hope for Ethereum to become a neutral, global settlement layer. I hold Ether because I want to be a part of the money revolution. I want my children to inherit a world with a fair financial system where the average person can get ahead by saving their ether because the value of their ether isnât being inflated away.
Alright Iâll bite, with the preface that a bunch of this is at least inspired by if not outright copied from posts from other people writing about Ethereum.
For me it is about increased coordination/cooperation. Iâd been reading about bitcoin for years and didnât really care about it because discussion was often centered around antagonism: a big bad âTheyâ that controlled this rigged system versus the persecuted victims seeking a new beginning. To me, btc has always seemed more like religion than anything else.
It wasnât until I starting reading about Ethereum that I saw the value in the underpinnings of this new religion. Blockchains, when well designed and implemented, allow people to interact/transact without centralized actors.
People get more done when they work together and the history of human progress is in my opinion the history of humans learning how to cooperate more and kill each other less. Unfortunately, working together usually means giving power to a small group of people that oversee things and are given a mandate to make choices on behalf of others. These centralized actors all too often become corrupted, and the biggest man-made disasters would never be possible without a bunch of centralized actors abusing or misusing their power (âlol lets go kill all the sparrowsâ).
Ethereum obviously is not going to solve the problem of centralized power on its own, but it is one of the few developments that I have seen during my life that allow for improved cooperation without increased centralization. To me, thatâs big and thatâs worth sticking around for.
It is unfortunately also why I havenât been as bearish about Ethereum in the past as I am now. A few years ago the question was âHow do we implement this new tool in a credibly neutral way?â, a technical question with a relatively easily definable answer. Now the question seems to be âDo we really care about decentralization/credible neutrality or do we just want memecoins?â. To me (and I suspect most others here) the answer is clear but we have some convincing to do in the broader community.
So I believe in Ethereumâs credible neutrality. If we somehow manage to maintain that for the next 50 years, weâre golden in my opinion.
TLDR: Ethereum is potentially one of the all too few positive recent developments that might bring humanity forward (even if only by a little bit).
I may have a massive misunderstanding on how the L2 to eth chain relationship works/will work, so I was hoping for some clarification.
Currently, I need to bridge my eth over the the L2 chain which costs a relatively high fee. I can then interact with the L2 and eventually bridge back if I choose to. My understanding is that this is the currently the only way L2 talks with L1. Is this correct? If this is the case, I do not see how Ethereum fees will ever get down to the prices of other L1 solutions which I believe is needed for mass/mainstream adoption since we are currently performing about 15 tps.
Is there someway Ethereum (L1) is getting this data in real time that I am missing? If not and you are forced to stay on L2s (more centralized) to have reasonable transaction what is the benefit of this setup over other L1s like Solona, Polkadot, etc.
Any explanation would be greatly appreciated.
I think your understanding of how the rollups operate. When you bridge the only communication happening is the rollupâs balance sheet is updated to reflect the addition/withdrawal of this transaction.
In terms of consensus, for optimistic rollups (e.g. optimism, arbitrum) all the transactions happening on the rollup are compressed (like a zip file) and verified by L1. For zkrollups (e.g. zksync, scroll) a mathematical proof is created for all the transactions and all L1 has to do is verify the proof.
As L2 blocks get more transactions, the cost per transaction goes down as the shared costs are spread out across more transactions (economies of scale).
(Tangent: The compression of optimistic rollups requires less of the L2 and more of the L1 (and hence more cost). For zkrollups generating the proof requires a lot of effort from the L2, but is very cheap for the L1 to verify.)
L2 blocks donât happen at the same time as L1. They vary depending on the rollup, but I think most have a target of 2 seconds per block. Ethereum blocks are 12 seconds, so thereâs 6 L2 blocks in each L1 block.
So L2s benefit from math and compression for more efficient settlement as well as economies of scale to provide cheaper transactions. This will get even cheaper after the update in the next few months (~april 2024) by creating a separate fee market for L1 blockspace specifically dedicated for L2s. So they no longer need to be competing with L1 transactions for blockspace. This change also makes transactions costs more predictable for rollups, rather than needing to slightly overcharge to account for any potential unexpected gas spikes.
After this update L2 transactions will get cheaper (estimated at up to 1/100th depending on rollup design), falling in the range of a few cents to maybe even less than a penny in some cases.
Hey EthFinance, happy 2024! I have some good news to start off the year :D
Something like 15% of all staked Ether is staked through Coinbase, and only a little over a month ago, they posted in a blog post that theyâre using 100% Geth to operate that stake.
Weâre still in the grips of a Geth client supermajority, with an estimated 75% to 85% of staked Ether using Geth under the hood, so Coinbaseâs 15% stake using 100% Geth is a big impediment to bringing that number down below 66%, where weâll be safe from an instant catastrophic fork if Geth has a forking bug.
Over the last month, some of you who are on Twitter/X may have been following my campaign to tweet every day at Coinbase to try to get them to diversify their Ethereum execution clients. This was partly an informational campaign to make more people aware of the issues supermajority clients like Geth present, and partly a gentle pressure campaign to get Coinbase to consider switching.
Today this campaign led to a clarifying tweet from Will Robinson, VP of Engineering at Coinbase, that Coinbase is definitely planning to diversify their staking execution clients!
Thereâs no timeline associated with this, so I expect it might still take a few months, but itâs very exciting that theyâve finally publicly confirmed that they are aligned on client diversity, and are working towards that goal internally.
I donât think my daily tweets changed any internal Coinbase policy; theyâve likely been working on this for a while already. But it did enable us to get a public statement from them on their client diversity plans!
If youâre interested in my (now concluded) tweet campaign, you can see my most recent one here, with links to the previous tweets.
Thanks everyone who supported that campaign, and also for every one of you whoâs running a node with minority execution clients! Iâm super hopeful that we can finally get Ethereum to a place of full client diversity in 2024, with resilience against any single clientâs forking bug.
Happy 2024, EthFinance!
I made a longer post on this below but it looks like it might be hidden, so Iâll just share the punchline -
Coinbase (or a high-up employee, rather) committed today to diversifying their staked Ether away from supermajority client Geth!
This is amazing news given theyâre currently running 100% Geth with 15% of all staked Ether.
Iâm considerably more optimistic now that this year will be the year Ethereum achieves full client diversity!
Oh, itâs a complex one.
tl;dr; There are two types of approvals. Donât sign what you donât understand. Otherwise, youâll be fine.
Signing is all that your wallet do. If you prepare a signature of a tx, someone else can send this out. So the rule of thumb is - donât sign anything you donât understand. I.e., avoid signing âhexâ data that is not translatable to human-readable text (e.g. donât sign â0x2b3cf00321aâŚâ but sign âI agree to terms and services of xyzâ).
When it comes to approvals, these are NOT part of the Ethereum protocol! What we come to understand as approvals, is an ERC20 method to allow other parties (mainly contracts) to move your funds. In most (if not all) of legit ERC20 contracts/tokens, it works as expected, and in scamy ones - you donât care about them anyway. It is good to understand what and how a malicious signature/transaction can do to your funds. Considering above - it can only drain ERC20 that youâve approved. If you hold more exotic items in your wallet, then its up to you to verify how they act.
When it comes to approvals, there are two main types out there. The first one is the standard âapproveâ function of the ERC20 spec, which sets on-chain record of whom and for how much, can move the token in question. The second one is âpermit2â introduced by Uniswap and slowly adopted by other dApps. It extends standard approval systems and allows off-chain approvals, which I guess is what youâre asking about.
Hereâs the ninth edition of the monthly staking update
First monthly staking update for 2024. Obviously the state of staking will be something to watch this year. A lot of people expect way more ETH staked, especially if there is an ETH ETF and it is allowed to stake the underlying ETH. Lido dominance will be something to have an eye on. Then there is eigenlayer of course⌠And maybe if there are some solo staker airdrops, we will also see new inflows from âsmall guysâ. So letâs dive in!
Validator overview - total: 1051685 validators*
â
The validator set keeps on growing. The growth isnât crazy and there are also continuous exits every month, but generally speaking number go up. Right now we are at 24,2% of all ETH staked. In my opinion, thereâs nothing really âfancyâ to see here.
Client diversity numbers**
Consensus
Execution
Client diversity is more or less the same it was at the end of last year. Nimbus slightly gaining share, which is good, but not really important, since Consensus clients are looking okay.
Execution keeps on being an issue. Gethâs share with a constant 84% is still way too high. How can we change that?
Pool distribution***
With the launch of Blast Lido was gaining market share last month. This has stopped and interestingly Lido is basically back to 31,x% like before the launch. Now obviously we canât really tell where it would be without Blast, but my guess is lower and in a best case the launch only pushed it up temporarily and market share will continue to fall.
Obviously we should not rely on the market handling it! If you have (w)stETH please think about withdrawing from Lido and/ or depositing into Diva. If you participate in the âDiva vampire attackâ you will not only receive a new LST but also Diva tokens. Interestingly Diva already has 0.4% market share and hasnât even launched yet. Letâs make that number go up!
All percentages are rounded, so this is not 100% accurate, but should be good enough to show changes in the coming months.
* https://beaconcha.in/validators#all
** https://clientdiversity.org/#distribution
*** https://dune.com/hildobby/eth2-staking
P.S. Completely unrelated, but Murs 3:16 (The 9th Edition) produced by 9th Wonder is imo still one of the best LPs ever. 9th is an incredible producer and I really like Murs flow. Heâs probably not the best lyricist, but innovative and even had a track about Bitcoin in like 2016 or 2017.
Two days ago I wrote in the daily about how I lost all of my holdings. The next two days were the worst in my grown up life, just hours of hours of despair and sleepless anxiety. The worst part was seeing all of my ETH in that foreign wallet address, so close, yet so far away.
Today is better. The sun is shining. I have my little apartment and my family and friends. I did realise some gains during the last bull run which i reinvested in something safer. And my sister still have her holdings, and I will enjoy seeing her get rich during the upcoming bull. She deserves it.
So take my carelessness, my stupidity, as a warning. If you are not careful, you will get recked.
Upcoming Guests
Ethereum
$2355
0.055
Turning up the crowd,
Blackrock goes blockchain aloud,
Excitement allowed.
Grifting 101
As ever, I wish we had more discussion around here about app developments on Ethereum rather than⌠whatever the depressive topics have been the past few days.
In the spirit of being the change I want to see in the world let me plug Gearbox V3. Basically Gearbox is a leverage application that removes the leverage component from the underlying application and allows you to apply leverage using Defi legos on their own. Think of it like âmodular Defiâ. The key insight that enabled leverage is that when you borrow funds, the funds arenât given to you, they are held in escrow by the protocol so you canât just run off with them. Now, thereâs no sense having the protocol just hold onto borrowed funds. The reason youâre borrowing is to do something. So, since you arenât being given the funds the protocol has to do that something on your behalf.
For older leverage applications, the something they would do on your behalf was the application. You could use dydx and get leveraged price exposure to an asset but the leverage was tightly coupled to a dex. This leads to liquidity fragmentation. While the nature of the price exposure mechanism changed with apps like GMX, perps still tightly couple the liquidity source for leverage with their application. By contrast, Gearbox allows you to execute leveraged strategies that actually execute against Curve or Uniswap.
To execute a strategy with Gearbox you put up your collateral, borrow the funds required to execute your strategy, and then execute it using a plugin to any Defi application they support. For example if you wanted to go 3x long, you could put up 1x collateral, borrow 3x whatever youâre shorting, swap to 3x of your long asset using any supported Dex, and hold that position while paying interest on the borrow. When plugged into something like Aave this also letâs you do fancy stuff like profit from interest rate spreads or leverage your way into a Curve LP Yearn pool which auto compounds rewards back to you. The potential here is open ended and incredible.
Gearbox v3 does a few cool things. First it allows borrowers to have better granularity on which position is secured by which collateral. The basic idea is they create a smart contract with your name on it that is executed according to a strategy you configure. Second it enables lenders to underwrite their own risk and choose what types of risk their funds are exposed to. This is a common trend Iâve seen lately in Defi. We are steadily moving away from pooling everyone into the same risk bracket and moving towards programmable money where everyone can adjust their own risk.
If you have time Iâd suggest you dig in or you know, try it yourself. Itâs far more fun to focus on exciting things happening at home than to focus on narrative noise from CT and bring it here.
Alright so got hacked for the first time
Well âhackedâ, I accidentally approved something in metamask that allowed them to take all my eth and one NFT.
Like 24k USD worth in total, which isnt the end of the world luckily enough. Luckily my main stack isnt on this adress.
I got fooled because I was trying to do the Frame airdrop and when looking at their twitter (the correct twitter) a fake frame account with a check mark (thanks for that Elon) were in their replies and I wasnt observant enough.
idiotic of me, but anyway
I still want to utilise this adress to claim airdrops and the like but I obviously cant do so when I have this hanging over it. Iâm looking at the approvals checker on etherscan but cant find any approvals I did today or any access given today, so this fraudulent acces/approval isnt there.
Does anyone else know how I do/how I should do to remove their access to my address?
Thanks for any help
Edit: Also I suppose it doesnt matter now so for any interested sleuths heres my address for your perusal: 0x139373F9FFeDCf909518096fC165f3b87fD7046C
After looking over it it doesnt seem like I have any offending approvals. Is it possible for a phisher to have some other kind of access still?
Edit 2: The offending transactions seem to have been these ones, in this chronological order:
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x07344545d7b3e3ce7032dc5319ee9e3dbce291bcdbe3b798982055bb7b6a6567
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x4b7a6c41aed26af4280b24c7da787b0b5732a43e34bf81d6cea79c02857c2bed
https://etherscan.io/tx/0x8c374ec10e5254289a4c224e6dfae6c0a76a0466f0ab4bf7d803844f05c421f3
What Iâm worried about now is that the scammer can repeat some function in order to drain my adress again in the future, if I fill it with some ETH for gas for example
If anyone with that are above my hobbyist level of ability could help tell me if anything in these transactions point to this being repeatable I would greatly appreciate it! (or just point me in a helpful direction would be really nice too)
There have been too many people being scammed out of some of their crypto holdings with the recent frame airdrop. The frame airdrop is legit, there are just too many fake claim websites wanting your money. If you use the network please consider installing/enabling transaction previews. These help you understanding what you are actually signing before it gets broadcasted:
Either use:
Rabby Wallet which has this included in their wallet already. It is on the very paranoid side, so maybe you start clicking the warnings away automatically after some time.
Use Metamask snaps which provide this. I shortly tested Wallet Guard which does the job. I am sure there are other good options in their security section: https://snaps.metamask.io/explore/
Install an additional extension like pocket universe or fire. I use both of them in parallel for many months now. Every time I receive a signing request they pop up and inform me about what I am going to sign.
All of these solutions put another actor in your signing process which could get attacked. Be aware of that. I am also not sure how much information is shared with whom in all these solutions. The additional extensions have served me well in the last months in combination with the frame wallet. I think the Rabby wallet is the most user friendly one, but a bit too paranoid for my taste, especially if you are using very new protocols.
I tested all of these solutions on my go-to scam website I found some time ago, a tornado cash fork, which wants to steal all my funds. All of the above solution told me exactly what I sign and Metamask even wanted to prevent me from visiting the scam site.
https://etherscan.io/tx/0xde92b790ebd82fa73b69b3f1d32d1f5b3d11649971da43e20593c7e7099a0fba
We got married onchain yesterday!
So if Iâm reading this proposal correctly:
Beacon stakers would no longer receive MEV rewards
MEV relays would sort of be replaced by execution ticket markets. This opens up the possibility to introduce burn on what today is MEV rewards.
Block builders would buy execution tickets and run execution proposers
EDIT: I think Iâm making some assumptions on number 3, because the proposal says this is orthogonal to PBS. So number 3 could involve multiple parties or it could not.
EDIT2: Before stakers get up in arms about MEV rewards going away, this proposal would open up a new avenue for speculation on execution tickets: âExplicitly defining an execution proposer lottery allows validators to participate only by choice. If they like the idea of flipping a coin and getting a high-value slot, they are free to buy execution tickets.â
EDIT3: More stuff is sinking in now. You could in theory choose to run your validators in a mode similar to today by configuring them to purchase an execution ticket for each upcoming slot, but the cost of that ticket will be market driven while today they are essentially distributed uniformly and randomly.
Latest on the ETF front: issuers have until next Friday to amend their filings. The SEC wants cash create only, and AP agreements. Whoever gets these done, will get a âgoâ.
Also, Blackrock will seed with $10m on January 3rd (subject to change).
Also, they have an Ether ETF filing. ;-)
If you frequent crypto Twitter and are feeling doubt about ETH, and FOMO or anger over Solana, itâs worth checking yourself and asking why youâre invested the way you are, and why you feel like that way. Personally speaking the vast majority of my stack is, has been, and will remain ETH because I can hold it and sleep well at night expecting it to go up over time with minimal downside risk relative to other crypto assets. It has arguably the best fundamentals of any asset, not only in crypto, but in any market. On short time horizons it wonât always or even often perform the best, especially in a bull market where narratives rule the day, but it will provide the best risk adjusted returns imo, and wealth preservation can be just as difficult if not more, than capital appreciation. Iâm still buying.
Â
Having said that, The recent performance of Solana, and other tokens that are purely speculative bets, is a great example of why it pays to be open minded and why it can be helpful to diversify. I maintain a percentage of my portfolio for speculative bets, trading, gambling, etc. Doesnât work for everyone, you have to be honest and cut yourself off if youâre just burning capital, but itâs fun, curbs FOMO, and ideally lets me capture some additional upside from narratives or short term plays. I missed Solana, but made some gains on WIF, and had some fun shit posting with friends about it in our own internal group chats. Also have some medium-term holds and narratives I plan to dabble in this bull market.
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Itâs easy in crypto, especially if youâre on CT, to feel like youâre in a rat race against everyone else, look at gains someone else has made off of something you consider vaporware, and let it upset you. Even easier to let narratives that ETH is dead and that X-coin with no fundamentals is the future of France upset you. Donât. If youâve been here for the bear and have been buying ETH then youâre up too. Normies arenât even here yet. Enjoy the ride. Be happy for newer or smaller participants coming into money for the first time. This is how crypto grows. Most importantly do not feed into tribal hate. Talking down about the ecosystem that just made users money doesnât attract participants to our ecosystem or encourage learning, it just pits you against them and feeds into negative sentiment. Be welcoming and focus that energy towards more productive endeavors. Learn from Vitalik. Itâs impossible to hate a guy that is perpetually positive towards others. And he does an excellent job framing all of crypto as an âusâ vs the them, if I do say so myself. https://x.com/matthuang/status/1738810362022232210
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In the end I think the Ethereum ecosystem will capture Solanaâs moat, but that time is not now. If you too think that time will come, good news, you can position for it. These are my biggest catalysts for ETH this year:
Â
Basically what Iâm saying is this: we should all be happy that the bull market seems to be back, and that we all have the opportunity to make money again in the coming year. If you disagree and are still bearish than maybe this post isnât for you. Either way, enjoy the holidays, and may golden showers rain upon /r/ethfinance dailies every week for the next year!
In the spirit of year-end reflection and New Yearâs resolutions, I am looking for feedback / suggestions regarding my delegating duties of ARB and HOP Iâve taken on this year. Asking as Iâm still relatively new to this and want to improve when I can - donât be shy or holdback anything in feedback. For some context, my goal has largely been to take on these roles to help get some of the great minds on r/ethfinance a way to feel represented in governance. Iâm not sure that has happened to the extent Iâve envisioned, but hopefully Iâm making some impact and will grow into that in the future.
Obviously, I have no way to tell who actually delegates to me, but Iâm assuming a bulk of the people are those who post here. So figured this was the best place to ask. So in short, do let me know if there are things you think I can improve on or ways you felt Iâve let you down. As well as things Iâve done that you would like to see me keep doing. Even if you arenât specifically a delegate to me.
Some thoughts / questions of my own:
Voting Transparency â I do try to post DAO updates here both for informational purposes and to keep myself transparent. I know following actually Tally / Snapshot votes is a pain, so I hope this helps. Unfortunately, ARB is a little difficult since the forum links are shadow-banned. I do try to comment in the Arbitrum / HOP forums on my votes where it feels warranted (or on the actual Snapshot votes themselves). No good way around the ARB problem, but I do link the votes and do a summary of decision here to help with that. I also try to wait until a few votes have passed to âbatchâ my updates and avoid clogging up the daily toooo much, however if people would prefer immediate updates (say, within a few days of the vote ending) I can switch to that.
Voting Participation â I do try to vote on everything that comes up, since that is ultimately the fundamental role here. Regrettably, I did miss a few votes over my time doing this. I think about 5 or 6 overall earlier in the summer across both DAOs. No excuses, and Iâve made sure not to miss stuff going forward. Iâll add, the Arbitrum STIP voting I did probably vote in maybe 1/4th of the total pool of candidates. The structure was a major issue IMO, which I brought up in the DAO forums. Expecting delegates to vet and vote on 100+ projects in that timeframe was impossible, and it does sound like future STIP / LTIPs are making note of that. And Iâm not sure many delegates did vote in 100% of those (hats off to those who did). Sort of a one-off, but wanted to clarify that situation, and I do wish in hindsight I took a little more time for that.
Calls â I do try to attend the ARB and HOP calls when I can. I work full time, so itâs as schedule permits (although ARB does record the call and HOP has notes). ARB Iâve been admittedly lacking, but Iâve been better having joined the last 2. This is one of my top goals, to have better attendance here. My Q here is this - do people want updates on this type of thing? Is that too much? It sort of goes along the lines of r/ethfinance input as Iâll discuss below.
r/Ethfinance Input â I know sort of the point of being a delegate is so that people donât have to worry about day to day minutia. However, I do want to feel out peopleâs opinion on this. For notable / larger / more controversial topics should I try to reach out for input more? Do people rather just me âread the roomâ and vote that way. I try to vote in a way that is best for the particular DAOs & the Ethereum chain, but again I want to leverage the mindshare that is here to do that as I am still only human. Also, I want to re-iterate that I welcome people to reach out. that doesnât happen much, so if there are ways people think I can be more inviting, for a lack of a better word, let me know. Iâd love to be able to be a bridge between ideas here and ultimately discussion in front of said DAOS.
Updates â Basically, a mis-mash of the above. I want to walk the line as best I can between over and under updating on issues. So thoughts on this would be appreciated!
Twitter â I donât really like Twitter, but I made one as I canât stick my head in the sand. I donât really use it that much⌠Iâd be curious to those who think if I should use it more? Iâm thinking maybe just doing updates there as well for those who follow. I donât want to dive into CT degeneracy, but I probably should use it as a space to get updates out?
And finally, a thank you! There isnât a day that goes by where Iâm not aware of the number of people that trust me with this. I know governance isnât that sexy of a thing, but itâs really cool that people feel they can trust their vote with me and that isnât lost.
It would be great if we could give Arbora.eth a bit more publicity for his campaign to have Coinbase switch away from Geth.
Interesting youâre saying this today, I was just thinking about how lost a newcomer is in this space. Even if they found this subreddit, (could you imagine the lost faith in crypto if they visited r/cc or even r/Ethereum first?) Iâm not so sure it would be obvious this is the place to trust or realize this sub is putting out the most critical/thoughtful info/discussion.
Imagine someone out there today (which Iâm sure happens everyday) says, today is the day Iâm going to get into crypto. Ugh, Iâm getting a migraine just thinking about being that person.
Legitimately, im wondering where that person goes. The options are wild. Crypto Twitter, YouTube, reddit, discord, overall asking Google? Ooof. All of those can be very hit or miss with more misses than hits. Even finding coinbase and reading through their learning center can lead you down the wrong path.
There is just so much to comprehend on a fundamental level, then deciphering what is a quality crypto and why? The space is so polarized. For someone brand new, how quick would they learn the differences between ETH and BTC or XRP for that matter, or literally any other crypto. Whatâs the chances of them learning about LSDs or even the basics of Defi? Where is the drop off on the learning curve for most people?
Thinking about if I was brand new, jumping into âcryptoâ today, what would be the most helpful thing for me to learn and understand.. and how would I find it?
Off the top of my head, personally, I would like a flow chart. Something that could help me visualize the crypto space. Maybe a few versions of the flowchart, basic, intermediate, advanced .. clickable keywords that give a popup of basic definitions.
How would I find it? Idk, maybe this is where the Maverick funds do some SEO and try to find itâs way on the first page of Google.
Some thoughts on winning
When I was a student, online poker became popular. By chance (I donât even remember how) I found an online poker school that handed out 50$ for free after passing a quiz. I started playing Fixed Limit on the low low stakes (well, because 50$ isnât a lot) but learned a lot, became better, moved up. When I reached 5/10$ (still in FL), I couldnât handle the daily swings anymore. After all I was still a student, had like 750$ a month for everything from rent to food to cloths to drinks. So being in a position of losing 1000â +â onanygivenday,âbasicallywithin30minswastoomuchforme.Iplayed3/6 for a long time, switched to NL at some point and made it to NL200 games, but felt uncomfy again. I think I was a decent player (but nowhere near the best players on the high stakes) and could have moved higher with my bankroll and skill, but never did. I met a lot of high stakes players that made a lot of money (e.g. I am pretty sure I talked to Hasu a few times). A lot of friends made a lot of money just playing mid stakes, not even grinding nose bleeds. Later I lost interest, because I started working and didnât want to grind at day and night.
As my second job, I joined a startup rather early, just after they had secured the first significant funding. The startup had created a new product, which turned out to be very successful, used the funding to do performance marketing and within 3 years, the company grew from basically 100 to 1000 FTE. A lot of âhigh profileâ people were hired, earning a lot more than I did, despite being assholes, not being a cultural fit and also not delivering any meaningful results. But they were great politically, knew what to say, when to say it and how to impress the (also rather young) founders. I was living the culture, delivering, but earned like 50% and hated everything about the bullshit bingo guys.
When a very good friend of mine quit his job, he still had some free time before his new gig started and he asked me what to do with it. That was at the end of 2017/ beginning of 2018. I said âthereâs this crypto thingy, seems to be interesting, maybe dive it?â. We decided to invest 1000$ together. I was still very risk averse and didnât feel comfortable putting money into something that went up and down so fast, so I was happy we did it together. We bought the literal top in January 2018. Got like 0.7X ETH on a Friday, which made +100$ until Saturday. I still remember the euphoria, that day marked the literal pico top of the cycle. I learned a lot, eventually started living on-chain, but never really participated in farming, cause I still dislike spending ETH for tx I donât really need to do for a potential airdrop I might or might not receive. I did receive a lot of airdrops, but I am also pretty sure that compared to others here, my airdrops are tiny.
Also I had a neteller credit card connected to my Amazon account and basically ordered stuff for free as a student and bought a new (small) car just after finishing university, because I had made 50k in online poker.
While I was âonlyâ earning 50% of the supposedly high flyers, my salary 2,5xed within 3 years and I had way more money than I needed (and you are probably aware by now, that spending / investing money is not a strength). I also started as a senior role, but at one point managed 150 people and three departments.
While I probably should have invested more, invested earlier, farmed more and should have way more ETH than I have now, I have received a decent amount or airdrops that are a huge boost to my portfolio. More importantly, I have learned a lot, about investing, finance, how poorly I invested before, how many basic concepts I didnât fully understand and how important it is to make conscious financial decisions.
Donât compare yourself to the guys that make more money in poker, at work or in crypto. Compare yourself to the guy in the mirror that wouldnât have played poker, wasnât lucky to join a growing startup that allowed you to grow a lot in a short amount of time (both financially, but also when it comes to responsibilities and hence your CV), or wouldnât have invested in crypto because that friend you needed would have said ânoâ.
If there is one thing that I have learned itâs that comparing usually wonât help you. It usually doesnât motivate. It actually kills motivation. It gives you a hard time emotionally. Donât compare yourself to the guy on twitter that brags with that 7digit PnL. Donât blame yourself for not receiving the next airdrop on 5 wallets instead of one.
Comparing doesnât make sense, because your risk appetite is unique. If you accept that you are defined by who/ how you are, you will be able to accept outcomes way better. We canât expect to make millions if we donât invest a lot (of time, money, ETH). And thatâs okay!
Celebrate that one airdrop like it was the lottery. Be happy about your first ETH like it was worth a million. Donât try to be/ act different then you truly are. And youâll be winning!
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Sold my ETH for a 2020 Honda yesterday. Iâm out of crypto entirely now (gladly). I know the used car market has been hot the past year but Iâm betting it has some room to run. IF I buy into crypto again (with my used car profits) itâll be a basket of sub 1000 MC coins with 100x potential and some SOL/AVAX for stability (theyâre the new BTC). Iâll be fine with a 10x tho. Regardless Eth is done imo and everyone here is wasting their time. Advice (not financial) get out before the inevitable epic crash and buy something with more upside. Aside from used cats, garbage pail kids (first edition only with stickers intact) are looking strong.
EDIT: meant to say used cars in that last sentence, but used cats also have more potential than ETH so not gonna correct.
EDIT2: meant this whole post is a joke. Bad timing I know but hoping to lighten the mood a bit
I am tired. Hyped, cause I believe 2024 will be a good year, but more tired now that itâs still 2023. I think thatâs partly the bear market which is exhausting, because I promised myself to learn a lot and pay attention to benefit during the bull market. But probably also just psychology cause the year is coming to an end and humans are strange. Itâs an arbitrary date, but still it feels significant, I guess also because of the holidays. In any case this year was my favourite year in crypto. I have learned a lot, developed new interests (eg for the importance and details of governance) and the past 12 months made me feel like home in ETHfinance. I love this community since I joined (2019 or beginning of 2020, donât remember) but somehow 2023 was special and I would like to thank all of you!
That being said Iâll post less for the next 2 weeks I guess, but Iâll stick around, will read and will be back in 2024. love you all!
There seems to be some confusion around terminology. Maybe the terms have been diluted from when I learned them, but this is how Iâd define these terms:
In my understanding the solana parallelism relies on the transaction submitter to tell them what contracts/states they touch. It is assumed that they are honest. The attack vector on the paralellisation then goes like this. Just tell the SVM you are touching all AMM contracts, even if you do pretty much nothing in your transaction. The SVM then cannot process the other AMM swaps in parallel, but has to wait until it has processed yours before it can do the other swaps. You force it in doing at least one step serial. Transactions are cheap, so nothing stoping you spamming the network reserving resources left and right. I do not think one can bring Solana down with such an attack, but it would slow down the SVM quite a bit.
If you want to learn about some real issues with solana in the consensus mechanism they use, there is a recent conference paper by the distributed computing group at the ETH, a university, in Switzerland: https://tik-db.ee.ethz.ch/file/9d40dad802dd12d9ba1f1b7c1759920c/
I only skimmed over it, but here are some juicy bits:
App devs might want to develop on SVM for its speed, but to be honest, there are not that many dApps on Solana, so it seems to be difficult to find dApp devs. They had quite some incentives in 2021 I think to onboard people, but it was a limited success as far as I remember. Maybe now with the renewed speculation they might attract more settlers, but we will see what happens. I guess generally Ethereum people are interested in Solanas tech, because they implemented things which need to be solved on the Ethereum side as well. In my opinion, parallelization is not the bottleneck on Ethereums side just yet, it is probably more important for L2s. The Bottleneck is rather the state size and how it is stored/accessed which needs to be solved before one can reap benefits from a fully parallelized EVM. And I am not aware that Solana has solved that issue, but as always I could be very wrong there.
Surprised there isnât more talk about the SEC decision today against Coinbaseâs petition. This is over a year in the making. Essentially, they are going against Coinbaseâs view that:
"the Petitionâs assertion that application of existing securities statutes and regulations to crypto asset securities, issuers of those securities, and intermediaries in the trading, settlement, and custody of those securities is unworkable
Coinbase has appealed and will be taking them to court. This will probably be the most important court case in cryptoâs history.
In my mind, when Ethereum held its ICO, it was probably security. IANAL but a brief look at the three prongs of the Howey test makes ETH sound like a security offering back then. BUT, Gensler I believe has said before that something can start out as a security and âbecome decentralized enoughâ to become a commodity. Donât quote me on that.
Itâs been about two and a half months since the holesky testnet re-launch, and all is quiet on the western front. My several thousand holesky validators are choochinâ away with no significant hiccups. Running geth/lighthouse at the moment. Still havenât gotten around to setting a withdrawal address for them. For some reason I started having a difficult time picking up peers on this machine. Since launch I have been stable at 1round 15 peers, but over the last week that has dropped to 1-2 and sometimes 0 peers. Surprisingly, and this is more of a testament to the design of the network, my average effectiveness hardly dropped at all during this. I remained in the mid to high 80âs.
I did do some changing of my network setup and for a few hours I had the holesky machine connected to both wifi and ethernetâŚI believe the machine had two IP addresses assigned to it and that may have caused some wires (or em waves?) to cross.
I decided to go ahead and forward the ports associated with the EL/CL applications, something I have not had to do with the rocketpool or solo machines. Both of those machines have 50+ peers running out of the box setups and nothing besides a static IP assigned to them. Anyway, running this setup overnight has brought the machine up to the max specified 50 peers and I foresee no other changes needing to be made as far as networking goes.
The other fun part about all this is that I have finally pulled the trigger on a nice little rackmount setup. Not necessary (by a longshot), but a lot of fun for a self-proclaimed computer enthusiast. Over the last couple years I have collected some rackmount equipment that I have come across for free/cheap. UPSâ that are being tossed just needed a couple new batteries. Gigabit switches that just need a new SFP adapter, etc. Color coding the patch cables and swapping out USB/HDMI/ethernet keystones to make it all look neat and professional. I made a custom mount for a gas spring arm for a monitor on the back of it. There are these cool 1U flip up monitors you can buy that are like 700 quatloos âŚ.yeahâŚ.nahâŚ.Iâll use my free, collecting dust in a corner monitor instead. I have discovered that any normal computer component becomes 10x more expensive if it has âenterpriseâ or ârackmountâ in the name.
I am trying to convince another local ISP that I am a business so they will install a fiber line directly to me. My understanding is that the install would be free, and the monthly cost would be more than what I am paying now, but not wholly unreasonable considering how much time and bandwidth I use. I have been close to picking up a dream machine pro because of the sale ubiquiti has had on itâŚapparently they never do discountsâŚbut after perusing through the rest of their hardware if I fall down that rabbit hole itâll take eth breaking 100K before I can pay off the credit card bill. Theyâve got some good lookinâ hardware. That saidâŚif I am a business, then that can all be written offâŚso less taxesâŚand there I go talking myself into it again. Iâll stop now.
The nodeset machine is up and running as well, just waiting to be assigned. I am looking forward to that launch nex