Francesco ships at insane speed

L1 design is more like city planning than pure software design - focus on the 2-3 things the city can do well for its residents and businesses for it to flourish. Love that the guys at ETHLabs are doing just that: - FCR - faster finality - fast blocks - pushing L2s to fast ZK bridges There’s a risk of turning ETH L1 into a lopsided city where you have 3-4 towering skyscrapers but a city still running on horse-and-carriage on the ground floor. That’s bad for everyone, L2s, their apps and the L1. ETHLabs really gets this.

Happy to report that after a month of work, EIP-8198 aka Quick Slots was merged as a feature spec in the Ethereum consensus specs! Many thanks to @jih2nn and @JustinTraglia for their tireless work as spec maintainers 🙌 What does "merging specifications" mean? Specifying a feature means writing up its behaviour, in code and in English, in a repository that has accumulated the detailed description of every feature since the launch of Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake chain. This is the ground truth of how Ethereum consensus runs, and the model that all consensus clients follow to come to agreement with each other. Anyone can contribute to this repository, by submitting “pull requests” with more code and more text specifying a new feature. Pull requests remain open while the proposed changes and additions are reviewed, by specs maintainers and by the persons submitting their contributions. Once they have been sufficiently reviewed, with edge cases uncovered, the pull request can then be “merged”, and live inside the codebase of the specs, instead of besides it. This is usually a signal that the feature’s specs are now stable enough to evaluate in the context of other proposed changes. In particular, it also makes it easier for clients who want to start prototyping the feature, to do so on specifications that are no longer expected to change drastically. There can still be misses and unknowns, but at least the current thing has passed this first, close review. Importantly, this does not mean that faster slots have made it into Hegotá. We are still two steps away from it: Quick slots were Proposed for Inclusion on August 6th, and next week, on October 1st, we will likely be discussing raising its level to Considered for Inclusion at ACD. Should a decision then be made to include in the fork, quick slots would then become Scheduled for Inclusion, the last step. PFI -> CFI -> SFI. Easy eh? 😅 So this means the job's not done 🫡 We'll continue to advocate for a strong prototype of quick slots based on the specifications. We're continuing our outreach to ecosystem smart contracts and teams for who a slot change may impact their operations. And we're continuing to research the future of shortening slot times with post-quantum cryptography and zkEVM in view, beyond Hegotá. In the meantime, find the specs here: github.com/ethereum/consensu…

In 2015, one private key did everything in an Ethereum transaction: sign, pay, submit. 11 years later, those jobs have split apart. Type bytes, EIP-1559, blobs, paymasters, EIP-7702, and what comes next: frames and delegation. Read more: quicknode.com/blog/evolution…

All tokenization will eventually originate on the L1. What’s the forcing function? The key change is all L2s eventually switching to ~15min ZK native bridges, away from 7 day ones that no one uses (Base already running this in parallel but just not used as default). Why does this matter? Well every non-native bridge just becomes a more risky, centralized and expensive alternative to the native bridge (which has 0 fee and no multisig). Now, here’s the key - if you issued your token on the L1, all L2s will be able to support your token in the native bridge from day 1. You get instant distribution to hundreds of billions of TVL and every app on every L2. With FCR / quick slots, that’s 15 min + 10s to trustlessly get out and into another L2 with 0% fee. There’s a counter that a chain like Robinhood would actively fight against this - maybe trapping tokenized stocks to only its L2 makes the most business sense? However, if you believe in a world of even >3 healthy L2s, it seems very tough to compete with a TSLA ERC20 that’s accepted everywhere and rhTSLA which you can only use on Robinhood chain.

The Fast Confirmation Rule is a new rule that may soon be relied on for millions of $$$s in bridging volume. Here is how we keep it secure. - FCR is an algorithm clients run locally instead of something they read from the chain (like finality). It's more complicated to implement. That is why we advise all users to leverage client diversity and rely on the output of at least two different consensus clients. For example, only fast confirm a block if both Lighthouse and Teku fast confirm the block. - @fradamt is working on formal verification of FCR. That would mean FCR's safety guarantee is proven against the Ethereum consensus spec's FCR implementation (under the regular FCR assumptions). - Both the consensus spec as well as client implementations are now covered under the Ethereum Foundation's Bug Bounty Program. That means bugs found by security researchers could lead to good payouts!

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Permissionless blockchains enable frictionless barter. Specifically, if you can swap your preferred asset positions into whatever unit of account a merchant accepts (e.g., through a DEX) at the point of purchase, then you don't need to hold cash for payments. Economically, this means that blockchains relax the cash-in-advance constraint in monetary economic models.

We’re doing it and want to do more 🫡

A classic observation in finance papers is that people only hold cash if there are frictions. People either hoard cash to spend in the future or face barriers to investing. Crypto companies are removing those frictions. - @ether_fi lets users borrow cash against their investments. You don’t have to sell, which decreases the need to hold cash to spend in the future. - @anvil_xyz lets companies put deposits in yield bearing assets like money market funds. Instead of putting 50k down for an event sponsorship a year ahead of time, you put 50k worth of money market funds down and keep the yield. - @SECGov’s new innovation exemption allows tokenized NMS stocks to trade against money market funds in AMMs. Neither LPs nor swappers need to hold cash to access stocks. People say time in the market beats timing the market. Crypto literally increases time in the market.

Did I mention we want to make Ethereum faster?

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Every day, I knock on doors to help speed up Ethereum. Fast confirmations can accelerate L1-to-L2 deposits. ZK proofs can accelerate L2-to-L1 withdrawals. More work has to be done, but these improvements are happening. But slot time, the smallest unit of time that affects L1-to-L2 bridging time, L2-to-L1 bridging time, L1 UX, and markets across the ecosystem, hasn't changed in years. In Hegotá, we have to take the opportunity to reduce slot time and then iteratively speed up more and more in the forks after that. Don’t just take our word for it. Listen to what founders, engineers, and business leaders from the entire ecosystem want!

Congrats Kyle!

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Faster bridging coming to Ethereum!

Transaction inclusion latency matters. Let's decrease it in Hegota with faster slots

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