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The Daily Gwei Refuel gives you a recap every week day on everything that happened in the Ethereum and crypto ecosystems over the previous 24 hours - hosted by Anthony Sassano.

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Timestamps and links 👇

00:00 Introductory song
00:09 Devnet testing indicates early ’24 for Dencun
https://twitter.com/M25Marek/status/1709972302907978192
08:51 EthResearch bot using GPT4 for summaries
https://twitter.com/ethresearchbot/status/1709596033284530465
09:54 zkUniswap details
https://twitter.com/0xfuturistic/status/1709898389910176208
13:40 Offchain labs Prysm quarterly update
https://twitter.com/OffchainLabs/status/1710010779725131982
15:09 Validator entry queue should be cleared in a few days
https://wenmerge.com/
19:29 Nethermind client synced w/ mainnet & base
https://twitter.com/NethermindEth/status/1709941498563944762
20:00 Taiko - Based Rollup FAQ
https://twitter.com/taikoxyz/status/1709917721750585834
21:37 Optimism over the ;past 5 months summary
https://twitter.com/binji_x/status/1709984597780435421
26:29 Market talk & bad takes about other things on crypto twitter

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DISCLAIMER: All information presented across all of The Daily Gwei's communication channels is strictly for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Daily Way Refuel, where we cap the latest news in the Ethereum ecosystem.

I'm your host, Ian The Designer, and today is

So first up, we have an update on Denkun testing.

So as you guys know, DevNet 9 for Denkun is basically up and running now.

It's been running for, think about a week or probably more than that.

And this update comes from Marik, who is a team lead, who is the team lead at Nethermine.

So he said here, our spamming blob tool showed issues on DevNet 8.

We ran it again on DevNet 9 and encountered issues in various client pairs, including a few broken nodes and missing slots from many clients.

There are more things happening with fuzzing testing and MEV boost testing and all that.

And they found bugs in the Nethermine implementation, but have been fixing those bugs and continuing testing here.

So this is basically what testing is all about, right guys?

Finding these bugs, finding these issues, ironing them out, obviously, before anything gets to mainnet or even like the public testnets, because as I said, this is a devnet, this is not the public testnet yet.

And yeah, this is just a great little update here from Marik.

Now, of course, someone asked in the comments, are we still go for 2023 for DENKUN or not?

And Marik said, my best guess is early 2024.

So yeah, definitely not going to be 2023 at this point in time, I think, especially because, as far as I know, there has been no public test nets being scheduled for Forks yet.

As I said, they're targeting early to mid-November for that, so it's definitely not gonna happen in October, I don't think, but we'll have to kind of keep an eye on that and see what the timing is around that.

But yeah, it'll be early 2024 now, which, as I've said plenty of times before, it doesn't really matter.

I mean, the fees are so cheap on L2s right now.

If you're worried about or not worried about if you're excited for 4844 to go live like I am, too, and for that to drop fees a little bit more on the L2s there.

But the L2s right now, they're so cheap to use.

I mean, you can actually look at the website, L2fees.info, I'll bring it up on my screen here, just to see how cheap they are, right?

Like you've got, let's look at the most popular ones.

You've got Optimism, which is 6 cents to swap tokens, and you have Arbitrum 1, which is 9 cents to swap tokens.

And all of them are under 15 cents, basically, to swap tokens here, except, I guess, like Loopring, but that might be a bug.

Now, you know, some people will say, well, it's not as cheap as we can get it.

And it's obviously not as cheap as we can get it.

Right, we're gonna get it much cheaper than this.

And it's also not going to be affected by how 1 gas spikes when 4844 goes live.

But I think, as I've said before, it kind of goes back to this discussion of how fee sensitive are the users that we have right now, right?

Because if you look at the fee sensitivity of users, I think that the difference between like 5 cents and 1 cent isn't that big of a difference because if you're a user that doesn't have that much money to play around with, you're not going to be doing like multiple swaps per day, right?

You're probably going to be doing a swap, maybe 1 swap a day or 1 or a few swaps a week.

Say you're using crypto as like payment rails, for example.

So I think that it's kind of negligible, the difference there.

Not to say that we shouldn't get fees lower than what they are, but you have to kind of realistically look at the current user base and the potential future user base and see where we land there.

And at the end of the day, the future user base where the ones that are like extremely fee sensitive, let's say they need things to be completely free and fees not even to be something that they worry about, that's going to be into the future as well.

But as it exists, the current user base and the near future user base that I think we're gonna be onboarding, they're not going to be sensitive to fees like this.

Like 5 cent, 1 cent, I think that's basically the same thing, especially because you also have to look at like the expected value from a transaction that you're doing.

So for example, I use this example a lot in the past, if you're claiming an airdrop, and let's say the airdrop is like $100, right, $100 worth of a token, you're claiming it, and it's costing you like even $5 or $10 in gas fees to claim it, you're going to spend that, right?

You're probably going to spend up to like a certain amount, like whatever you feel like spending, but probably even more than $10, $15 on fees to claim that airdrop, considering that airdrop is free money, right?

So at the end of the day, it really is about the expected value of the transaction and what you're willing to pay for it.

And that goes back to, I think, everything in life, right?

Like you buy things that you, so you pay for things the amount of money that you think is worth it, right?

Sometimes you buy things out of FOMO, sometimes you do it and you regret it later, but a lot of the purchases that we make are dictated by how much we wanna spend on them.

We look at something, we look at a product, and we're like, okay, well I wanna spend this much on this product because this is how much it's worth to me.

The same is true for BlockSpace because as I've said before, Ethereum and its layer twos, they sell BlockSpace.

And it just depends how much it's worth it for you.

If it's worth it for you to claim $100 airdrop because you claim the $100 airdrop, maybe it costs you $10 to claim, another $10 to swap it to Ethel USDC and then send it to an exchange to cash out the fiat or something like that.

Like even if you spend $25 on fees, you're still netting out $75, right?

So it's all about the kind of expected value from this.

And of course that's like a very easy thing to work out because you can put a monetary value on it.

Obviously using the analogy of like, I guess real world purchases is a bit harder.

Like for example, you go to the grocery store and you have to choose between 2 different brands of rice and one's, you know, half the price of the other 1.

And, you know, you would, depending on what kind of like value you're getting out of that, or what you feel like doing or what you feel like purchasing there, you either go for the cheap 1 or the more expensive 1, but there's not, I guess, like a monetary thing there.

Whereas with claiming an airdrop, for example, there is.

Like, you know the actual monetary value and it's a very easy calculation to do.

But I think when it comes to other things, it becomes a little bit harder.

crypto, like airdrop is just the most obvious example.

There are plenty of other examples For example, let's say you want to buy $100 of a token and it's going to cost you $10 to do that Well, if you expect to make more than 10% of your money on that token on speculating on that token Maybe but maybe more than that if you account for selling it back to ETH or USDC.

So let's say more than 20% because let's say it costs you $10 either way.

If you expect to make more than that, then it makes sense for you to pay that.

And it's the same with like centralized exchange fees, for example.

I see people who are investors, not traders, traders are more fee sensitive here of course, but I see a lot of investors say, oh, I got charged a 1% fee here, but only 0.5% fee here.

Does that really matter in the grand scheme of things?

Because if you think about it, right, you, even if you're paying like a 1% fee, if you're buying ETH today, you're obviously expecting to make more than 1% back on your investment with ETH, right?

Like, you're expecting to make a lot more than that.

So again, it kind of comes down to what you're willing to pay.

And obviously other things go into it as well.

Like with centralized exchanges, it's not just the fees.

It's also how trustworthy they are, whether you wanna leave money on them or not, or have money on them at any given time, things like that, right?

But it's always funny to see people's different opinions on things and kind of like how they value different things depending on both from an investment perspective but also from kind of a discretionary spending perspective where buying your groceries is not an investment, right?

Maybe you could say it's an investment in yourself, like you buy groceries and cook dinner at home instead of eating out because it's healthier, right?

I guess like that is a different form of investment, but it's not a monetary investment, right?

And you can go down this rabbit hole in any different number of ways you want to about value.

I think that the term value and like the concept of value to humans is incredibly interesting, to be honest.

And I could keep going on about this forever, but I'm not going to.

But this is generally how I think about it when it comes to fees, generally, right?

People will pay what they are willing to pay based on the expected value and expected outcome here.

But that's not an argument not to lower fees.

But at the same time, as I said, you have to kind of see what the user base is today, what the short term and near term user base is, and then you can kind of say, well, it's not like a huge deal that DenKun, and I'm going back to the main topic I was actually talking about.

It's not a huge deal that Denkun is not coming out, you know, in November.

It might be coming in like January or February, right?

It really doesn't make any difference in the grand scheme of things.

But yeah, that was the original topic that

But I mean, if you do enjoy those discussions, feel free to continue the discussion in the Dailyware Discord channel about this concept of value.

It's just something that's always been interesting to me and since I've been in crypto, it's obviously been at

the front of my mind for a long time now.

And there's also a anime that I watched recently that explored this concept in a really weird way.

The anime is called Made in Abyss, and this was season 2 of that anime.

I don't suggest watching it unless you're into weird anime, because it really is 1 of those weird ones, but it explored the concept of value, And I just really liked how they how they explored it, even though it was even though it was weird But anyway, I'm getting sidetracked again I'm gonna move on from that 1 to something that I came across today called the ETH research bot So this was introduced today.

They've described it It's a Twitter bot powered by GPT-4 designed to keep you updated with concise summaries on the newest and most exciting ETH research Posts on the Ethereum research forum.

So if you actually click through to the account here I've of course followed the account and

I highly recommend you doing so as well You can see their first kind of summary here So they give you basically the title which is in this case ZK Uniswap Who it's actually by the author and explain like I'm 5 and the important takeaway So this is a really cool bot just for summarizing the multitude of different kind of research posts They get posted to a theorem research over time And and doing it in such a way where they've even got expand like on fives, where they obviously allow you to share this because you can retweet it on Twitter and like it and share it with your friends and I can cover it on the refuel of course, easier for me to cover it here.

So I recommend going and checking it out and actually following the account yourself.

I'll link it in the YouTube description below there.

I think this ZK Uniswap thing is, yeah, I've got it over here, so maybe if I bring this here, this is a good segue into it.

So I actually came across this from Diego who published this on ETH Research.

He said, introducing ZK Uniswap, a first-of-its-kind ZK AMM.

Now, usually I would go to the ETH Research post or read the tweet thread by the author here and try to Understand it myself, but with the kind of like ETH research bot here I don't have to do that I can just look at the tweet from the bot and there's an explain like I'm 5 right at the top here So it explains it by saying ZK Uniswap is a research proof of concept that introduces something called a ZK AMM a variant of AMMs that integrate 0 knowledge proofs in protocol.

It uses a ZK coprocessor to offload the computation of swaps, allowing for cheaper and more efficient execution of swaps off chain.

And then there's a bunch of important takeaways here as well which is very, very cool to see.

I guess my most important takeaway from this, or I guess like my most exciting takeaway from this is that I think that, as I've said before, there is a lack of innovation within a lot of DeFi right now.

I think a lot of the bigger DeFi projects are just coasting along, which is fine.

But the innovation is happening with the smaller projects, with these more kind of pie in the sky things that may not be totally possible today, but exist as proof of concepts and something that can be introduced in the future.

And this concept of like off-chain swaps, it does exist today, obviously.

Kalswap is the premier example, then you've got Uniswap X, and there's a bunch of other ones out there.

But this concept of like off-chain swaps is definitely something that I think is going to be the kind of in the spotlight for the next couple of years at least, because it is also a contentious topic, because there are plenty of people out there who really like off-chain swaps.

They like the fact that it can it leads to gasless swaps.

It allows you to source liquidity from multiple different places.

It allows you to ensure that you don't get failed transactions, stuff like that.

But the concerns are around centralization of course because the swaps are done off-chain.

No 1 can can rug you because you sign what you want to swap for, basically, and there are other incentives in place, especially with ChaosSwap for the searches to actually process your order, But the concern becomes that, and I've seen this concern brought up on Twitter a bunch of times, but let's kind of map this out to what the endgame of off-chain swaps would look like.

There's a possible future where essentially all of the liquidity providers, the off-chain liquidity providers and market makers, have to abide by some kind of like legislation or regulation that forces them to only process orders that they have KYC'd their participants for.

So essentially you end up having KYC liquidity pools and it kind of defeats the entire purpose of decentralized exchanges to begin with.

Because decentralized exchanges live or breathe based on the liquidity that they have.

And if all the liquidity just moves off-chain into these kind of like centralized market makers, then you don't have very good guarantees around the decentralization of that liquidity.

Now, I don't think there's like a particularly high chance of that happening.

I feel like that we're gonna have a balance between on-chain liquidity and off-chain liquidity, but the off-chain liquidity is very, very juicy, especially for things like layer twos.

I've explained this before about how you can have, and we do have things where you have off-chain liquidity that allows you to bridge between different L2s.

And the logical end state of that is basically that you can swap from any L2 and stay on any L2 that you want and source liquidity from any other L2 out there.

Now that is a huge boon, a huge positive.

But as I said, there are concerns around centralization of liquidity leading to things like KYC and also blacklists and stuff like that.

That's where things start getting very kind of murky and stuff that and things that I think as a community we need to be aware of.

But yeah, it may be far off into the future, it

may never happen, but just something to be aware of anyway there.

All right, Offchain Labs has posted their first quarterly report for Prism in quite a while now.

So as you guys know, Offchain Labs acquired the Prismatic Labs team quite a while ago, and Prismatic Labs is responsible for building and maintaining the Prism client while the members of Prismatic Labs, which is now part of Offchain Labs, are responsible for that.

Now in this quarterly update, you can go read this for yourself.

They give us a bunch of different updates on things that have happened for the Prism client here.

They've got a TLDR in the Twitter thread, which I'll link in the YouTube description below.

And you know, it's funny because A lot of this stuff is very technical.

It's not user facing, but it is really great for people who run the Prism clients, even if you notice it or not.

And some of these things, for example, are you've got here boosting attestation aggregation time, beacon API improvements, faster hashing of the beacon states.

You're just making the client more performance.

And then they've got a roadmap for the rest of the year.

They have some exciting features coming with Deneb, which is the consensus layer side of the Denkun hard fork, such as deposit contract snapshot, Deposit tree, backward syncing, Ethereum protocol research, and more here.

Now, so as I said, these are more technical things, definitely not user-facing stuff, but if you're running the Prism client, they definitely help you and make your client more performance and possibly get you more rewards as well by having better attestation effectiveness and stuff like that.

So you can go check out the full quarterly report for yourself.

the YouTube description below for you to do so.

All right, now speaking of Ethereum validators, 1 thing I wanted to go over today is that the validator entry queue, the queue that was at what, like 90,000 at 1 point, you know, a few months ago, is now down to just 7,100.

And according to the whenmerge.com website, if you scroll down here, this queue will be cleared in 2 days and 15 hours.

So yeah, pretty, I guess like fun journey to get here.

The validator queue has basically been empty the entire time, but that entry queue has been full for quite a while now.

But I've explained before how I think that there, that was a one-off thing where we see the entry queue go up to like 90,000 for a bunch of various different reasons.

Actually, I can kind of like repeat those reasons.

If you just give me 1 sec, I'll find it for you.

Yeah, yeah, so those reasons were, you know, post withdrawals, we had the mass reshuffling of stake.

You know, for example, Kraken retail users got force exited and had to re-enter if they wanted to continue staking their ETH.

We had an influx of ETH into staking that was waiting for the de-risking event of withdrawals.

Lots of attention on ETH staking because of that upgrade that went live and then Rockerpool's LEB8 upgrade went live as well, which resulted in more validators obviously being added to the queue

as people converted from 16 to 8 kind of mini pools there.

We're not going to enable withdrawals again, right?

We're not gonna have a massive de-risking event like that again.

The things that might may happen again, maybe for some reason Coinbase caves and shuts down their staking product and has to force exit users, but even that wouldn't put us back to where we were because it would have to be combined with all these other things happening.

Now, typically the counter argument to this is people saying to me, well, what if we get the bull market happens again and yield skyrocket because the on-chain activity goes nuts and MEV goes nuts again and validators are earning 10% plus yield.

Okay, sure, there'll be an influx of validators, but I still don't see us getting to that massive kind of like 90,000 entry queue again.

And if we do, I'm happy to say that I was wrong, but yeah, I don't know.

I'm leaning towards not seeing that again.

But regardless of that, as I said, the entry queue is going to be empty in 2 days and 15 hours, which means if you have been waiting to potentially shuffle your stake around, maybe you were with an exchange or Lido or something like that, and you want to spin up a Rocket Pool Mini Pool, or you want to spin up a Solo Validator, you can do it now, and you only have to wait less than 3 days.

I mean, you don't have to wait until this happens.

But I've also got friends who have been waiting for this, and they're pretty big ETH stakers.

They've been waiting for the queue to go down for them to rotate out of their ST ETH.

So as I've explained to you guys before, if you're a big staker and you're earning a lot of money, the opportunity cost of waiting like 2 months is huge, right, because you lose out on 2 months worth of gain.

So essentially what these people did was that they had their ETH and ST ETH where they were obviously still earning rewards and they're converting those to solo validators now that the queue is basically less than 3 days because the opportunity cost is much lower now.

It's less than 3 days rather than whatever it was, you know, up to upwards of 2 months there.

So, so yeah, I just wanted to give you guys an update on that there.

I also had the Raider.network website up here just to prompt me to remind you guys that there's a lot of discussions happening right now about kind of like Lido and LSTs and stuff like that on Twitter.

I just wanted to quickly remind you that I'm going to be talking about all of this with Eric.

So that podcast or the next daily way drive-thru with Eric will be live tomorrow.

We didn't record it today, but we're rescheduled to tomorrow and it'll still be out the normal time that, like the Saturday morning US time that I said to you guys yesterday.

I don't know exactly what we're going to touch on because we never really have like an agenda going into it.

We really just kind of speak about what comes to mind.

But I think the main points we're gonna touch on is about whether we should enshrine an LST or not enshrine an LST and what the actual concern around LIDO is.

Because I see tons of people always talking about LIDO being a concern, but not many people actually talking about what actual concerns there are.

Like what is the actual attack vector here?

What could light actually do to damage the network?

So we're gonna actually run through those as well as well as the enshrined LST stuff So be sure to tune into that episode as I said, we'll go live tomorrow There now moving on from this to another update from Nethermind.

So the Nethermind client is now synced with the base mainnet and Optimism mainnet.

We're getting, I guess, like client diversity at layer twos as I've talked about before with Nethermind jumping into the fray here.

I think I mentioned this last time on October 3rd, maybe a few days ago when they actually teased this out.

But yeah, if you want to run the Nethermine client and sync with base mainnet and Optimism mainnet, you now can.

And I'll link that in the YouTube description below for you to check out there.

All right, Tycho has a really great tweet thread out today called based roll up FAQ So basically if you want to know all about what a based roll up is then this is the thread for you And and this was something that I think I brought up quite a while ago because Justin Drake didn't eat a theorem research post about This but the TLDR on this without going into too much detail, is essentially that the rollup would be, rollup's transaction ordering would be controlled by the kind of like settlement layer itself.

So by Ethereum layer 1 itself, instead of the sequencer that exists as a separate client at layer 2, right?

So that's like the very high level gist of it, but there's more that goes into it, especially when you start talking about MEV and data availability and stuff like that.

So Tyco goes through this in this FAQ, Which is really great.

Honestly, I highly recommend checking this out.

I'll link it in the YouTube description below But this is this is also falls into the discussion of enshrinement And what I was talking about the other day about how?

There's this kind of discussion about what to enshrine in the core protocol and what not to enshrine The concept of an enshrined roll up is similar to a base roll up except that you would put a ZKVM for example directly into Ethereum layer 1 and it would basically it completely be controlled by a theorem layer 1 there'd be no way to Do sequencing outside of a theorem Layer 1 consensus and there'd be no way to do data availability outside of a theorem layer 1 for my understanding of that so for all Intensive purposes it would be the same thing as a theorem layer 1 because it would be part of the core protocol But that's probably pretty far out don't know if that's even gonna happen It just depends but yeah, if you want to learn more about based roll ups this tweet thread is definitely for you.

the YouTube description below for you to check out.

All right, interesting tweet from Benji here today who works at Optimism Lab.

So he just gave us a update on what the past 5 months of optimism has looked like.

So the optimism ecosystem has been very, very busy.

So you can see here that the fault or fraud proof alpha has been worked on.

And obviously that's live on testnet as I talked about yesterday.

They introduced the law of chains, which was the kind of governance for the super chain ecosystem.

They began the retroactive public goods funding number 3, which is still ongoing, gave away grants, Bedrock launched, of course, it may seem like an eternity ago, but it did happen in the last 5 months.

And there's more in the kind of, I guess, like a Twitter thread here, such as new clients, research expansions, NFTs, so much going on.

I mean this is crazy and you know the reason why I bring this tweet up is because there was a little bit of a discussion I had with someone in the Daily Gray Discord channel if you go to the other chains channel, I had a discussion with RV Deep here about how Ethereum layer 1, he kind of was talking about how Ethereum layer 1 is not moving very fast compared to, I guess like other layer ones, like Solana, for example.

And then I got into this conversation with him where I basically said, well, the whole point of Ethereum layer 1 is not to move fast, right?

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Dencun updates, What is 'value' and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #668 - Ethereum Updates