Everything a Solo Staker Should Know for the Next Phase of Ethereum by Pol | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] convinces this last group of people that this might not be the best decision for ethereum and that it's actually not that hard to take cards into your own matter and to actually start doing it yourself so yeah let's go for it um this is what vitalik published not that long ago and this is the road map of ethereum and solo stakers are people that are not professional stickers they're not professional validators they're people that have their own jobs there are people that might or might not have children they might have hobbies they might have other things to do than just keeping up with this so how the heck are they supposed to keep up with all of this and that's the purpose of this talk we're gonna try to lay down in the next 25 minutes um the next things that are going to be huge and that are going to impact us all as solo stickers and that we need to take into account um and how to react with it so first of all um let's to try to convince these people that are still sticking with Kraken um okay so it is vital that there are more solo stickers the reason of this talk is because we need to convince you that you can stake and that is actually worth it it is valuable it is vital for ethereum and it's actually an existential threat to ethereum if we don't have enough solo stickers so we all have seen this um we'll have seen how a very few entities control a huge majority of the uh of the validators um who he remembers the steam Fiasco the blockchain steam Fiasco right so actually having centralized validators or centralized centralized um with it actually can can do things like we're just in Steam Fiasco was just in sunbot steamit which was a company that was behind the blockchain Steam and there were some people that were that did not agree with him so he basically went to poloniex and a few other exchanges and said like hey Greg hey guys take this couple Millie and we're gonna vote for an invalid State transaction when the accounts of these opponents of mine are going to be emptied from one block to another imagine your ethereum accounts emptied like this invalid State transaction this is what happens when we got centralized validators so yes it is dangerous okay but not only this there's even a more Insidious thing that's happening in ethereum right now right now we have compliant block production through things like Mev boost we have a 32 percent of the blocks being produced in ethereum right now at 32 percent of blocks produced that are ofac compliant that means that if you have ever used tornado cash there's a 32 percent of the blocks where your transactions are not going in did you know that did you know that you're being censored in 32 of the blocks this is huge and this is Mev boost and if we go into the Meb boost produce blocks this is 87 are come from relayers that have said that they are going to comply with ofac this is why it's so important right Okay so brief uh brief introduction to dab node dabnode we're here to make it easy we're here to make it easier for people to run nodes we provide a UI you don't you need to be technical there's auto updates so you don't need to like do the testing we test for you and then we push the updates and it will be updated this saves about 72 hours of devops for the of those work per year only on gas and prison for example um then there's like all sorts of nice beautiful things like a web 3 standard that holds the keys for you etc etc and there's a huge community of thousands of validators um that are doing exactly the exact same thing as you and where you can just lay it rely on them ask for support Etc this is one of the things that we have done um this is what you need this is what you see this is the UI that you will use in order to set up a validator you need to choose your execution client choose your consensus client put the keys into the remote signer or use optionally Meb boost okay enough the thing that the solo Staker needs to know is that you are the key for the future of ethereum right mov ing uh okay so Mev MV stands for maximal extractable value and the first thing that we need to know here is that the value is extracted from who from the user and people say like oh Mev um but they're doing nice things they do Arbitrage between dexes so we can like if I have a token my price will be the same everywhere yeah that's a good thing right but how about everything else you've got price execution in every trade that you do in a decks you got gas Wars and network congestion whenever there's like a juicy Mev opportunity you get the potential and the threat of chain reorgs if there's something really juicy and the conditions are right and the validators are incentivized to attack themselves so if I come after uh the a block where there's a really juicy Mev opportunity I mean send device to screw up the guy that comes before me so I can keep the Mev opportunity right okay so yes uh how to map all of these related to me beef so mainly for me and for most of us maybe it's not a feature it's a bug it has a lot of implications on the ethereum design because of that because it's something that is leading in a in the wrong direction so mainly PBS has formed to try to mitigate this situation PBS proposal block separation and we are going to talk about that later on uh so that is why the concept of the community and the refer to try to mitigate as much as we can they may be and that is why we are starting to see new uh proposals like single slot finality uh single slot finality is a proposal to be able to have finality in just one uh Epoch and the idea is to to remove these opportunities from from the protocol itself but also the single secretary leader election that is related to the validator anonymity is something that is also resetting right now and we are talking later on so mainly we are seeing how the Syrian Foundation is trying to find uh ways to mitigate this situation at a protocol level but there are something that we cannot mitigate so far we have seen that is really really hard to find a solution to Meb so that is why the PBS or maybe smoothing is a way to make this uh more fair and try to mitigate the situations right so what do you need to know for Emily so so yeah so I mean maybe is a centralizing force it's a centralizing force um because I mean researchers will not give you as a solo Staker a juicy 10 million Mev opportunity because you as a solo sticker that has only 42 000 uh 32 each in this uh in your validator you would be you would be happy to take this 10 million shut down your validator and go live in the Bahamas for the rest of your life so it is a trustful system and as a solo sticker you cannot access Mev opportunities if you don't use Mev boost right now in the future PBS provides the same separation of powers and allows for easier Builder decentralization and removes the need to trust the the builder of the block but right now Mev is a huge centralizing Force um that uh but yeah that's that basically um uh makes that us as solo stickers will only have um two sources of revenue which are block production so block reward and transaction fees and the big companies the big trusted companies that can sign agreements would have those two plus MAV opportunities so Mev boost is for now as solo stickers the only solution that we have to access this um this Revenue yeah and mainly the feeling that we are having with semi B is that we are putting the incentivation in the ground place we are intimidating people to extract this value from users so that is why we should try to find a way to remove these from the protocol okay DVT DVT is the next Hot Topic and it's distributed validators so right now there's uh there's this equality of uh one validator key one validator client which basically means that whoever runs the machine whoever runs the validator client also has access to that key and can do all sorts of bad things to this it can it can slash you it can Ransom you it can just exit you it can just shut the validator down so you get inactivity leak and DVT comes in so the the DVD comes in um so you can split the validator key in different key shares and distribute it over many validator clients this allows for high availability but because imagine these validator shares as a sort of like a multi-sig so if three of these Shares are online out of four so if one of them are offline we can still continue validating it also allows for different trust assumptions because you can distribute these shares so nobody with with one of these shares you can't do or you can't slash people you can't uh exit you can't do all of this stuff so actually we do not require so much we can afford to give these keys to other people and not require so much collateral right now rocket pool still requires a somebody to put 16 e huge amount of collateral because that's what they can get from That's how much damage they can do so um with DVT we get a different trust assumption and uh the potential for lower collateral requirements moreover um those who run already run nodes and already have a validator setup they can monetize through DVT Technologies on top of their validator sets so it's a way to bump up your um your your rewards for having a validator okay so exactly that's that's exactly what you need to know about DVT you'll be able to monetize your machine by leveraging other protocols on top of it these Protocols are like SSV Network or opal or Diva and that people will be able to participate in validation even with less than 32e because you can do a setup and then you can participate in this which is great for accessibility because we're making part of the benefits of running infrastructure to people that do not that are not rich people do not have 32 each so it's great for accessibility all right withdrawals yep with roles with roles that's what all we're waiting for right like we've got this 32 withdrawals are going to be a new system level operation which will have no gas cost and it will they will not even go to the evm they will increase the uh the balance of the withdrawal address automatically um it'll be a limited block per block just like right now um joining as a validator is also limited block of work there's a limited amount of uh of people that can join the validator set the same thing will happen with withdrawals and what we need to know is that we will be able to get our money if we want to now there's something more interesting to think about here which is what will happen when people are able to take this will um staking pools be uh will people take out of sticking pools and start solo staking that's what we're hoping or will the opposite happen so what's going to make it easier to convince people to take out of staking pools and centralized exchanges and um and start running instead of writing it themselves yeah all right so yeah now it's time to talk about product line charting and the future of overthem so mainly uh the the roadmap Institute changed uh completely at the moment that vitalik make these uh credit post so mainly we realized that if we facility they have better scalability and potential that the previous execution shouts so mainly everything changed at that moment we forget about having execution on the charts and we move to a way to provide data availability for other layer 2 applications that are going to happen during these years um so mainly mainly the thing that happened with the product and starting is that uh instead of providing more space for transactions we are we are going to provide more space for data that the layer 2 Solutions can use it in the future so the idea is mainly that the execution is going to happen on these uh SQL VMS and prolapse uh keeping the execution part of ethereum as it is um mainly from the point of view validator um is just a way to validate the data that is available so it's not going to the include the need of um validate this this data as in the state of ethereum um so yeah what do you what do you need to know about this um chain is going to store these new blocks and um the data is going to be stored it's going to be used by the roll apps so mainly the idea is that um you get a vertical tree approved of this data and you can use a break compiler smart contract in ethereum that validates this data allowing them to verify verify the state of these Layer Two Solutions um yeah mainly mainly the idea behind this is like a solution like the Chicago VM uh like a polygons yesterday that uh are going to be able to have a proof of the state and take the security of the Syrian inside this layer two solutions so mainly its region is trying to provide these new tools for this kind of solutions making the scalability going in that direction so what do we need to know we need to know that those blobs those new Blobs of data will be stored in the beacon chain which will mean that our Beacon chains as validator service takers will grow will bloat but hey it will not grow indefinitely because this data will only be stored for about a month so that's great so we'll have the hour Beacon change will not just continuously grow and grow and grow at least the part of the blobs but every month um we will will be deleting this data so it will grow but it will now grow indefinitely all right yeah next big topic anonymity yeah that's also a critical point of the network so yeah the thing is since we are using random in the we can change to select the validator proposals it's possible to know beforehan who is going to be the next one and since we are using lip to be Network to communicate with this node it's also possible to get the IP of the nodes so mainly the thing is that uh since we have also myth in this situation um people want or could try to attack this node because they can get the minor attraction value the maximum extraction value from the block so at the end is the the same problem that before we are putting the integration to attack the network so we are making um yeah right Integrations for for the The Source takers um but this is not just that the thing is um the secretary single sector leader election is a protocol that is going to allow to hide who is going to be the next proposal uh and with that you can protect this kind of attacks and this is something that is already in development in the protocol and it's probably very important to protect the privacy of the validators so what you what do you need to know about this um yeah because the list of proposal of the new ebook are now it's possible to be uh targeted by these attackers uh Disney protocol protects the privacy of the evaluators at the moment uh to proposal the block but we need also new ways to hide the communication between nodes because that is still spouses so that is why private Solutions like Hopper or other can provide this kind of uh privacy protection at IP level right next Hot Topic statelessness and PBS yeah a good one so yeah this is how this has been a Hot Topic uh in the research part of the protocol from uh several years ago so mainly the thing that uh we have now right now is that we need to have all the state of execution client to be able to be to be able to verify the next block so this is a problem because we are taking all the complexity all the historical data uh from the ethereum and we are need to store this in in our devices to be a solo stickers so mainly the The Proposal is to try to remove this complexity uh with the idea to be able to verify a block without the need of having all the state so the big idea is just to have a goodness of the state at that moment uh and if you have this proof and it's written it you can validate that the transaction from one state to another one is is correct so mainly the good part of this is that we can remove all the state of ethereum and just to have a a very small proof of the current state and be able to verify a block so either you're telling me that we if we create a block through this um through this witness and through this proof we can prove the only the parts of the state that we need to prove that this block is valid and included in the block itself so a validator of the block will be able to look at the Block in itself and be able and it'll include this person you'll be able to tell if it's valid or not yeah exactly which means which means that we need to link this with okay so we're we're starting to separate who thus all of these proof production and who does the validator work so yeah PBS PBS is going to be also a very important part of the protocol uh because they think that Paul just mentioned so mainly the idea is that we are going to split the roles on the network we are going to have proposal and uh and blood producers so my lead idea is that the block producer is the one that is going to create all of these to generate the equitness and and is the one that is going to take this uh High computation um we don't have too much time right okay um so yeah the idea is just to put all this computation in the block producers and the validators are going to be more or less the same so they only need to validate this proof in a short way so what do we need to know yeah mainly mainly that the hardware government for holding the state disappears and that is really really good and also if we link with the blocked things it's like oh okay we are getting more space here and we are putting block there so more or less we are going to be the same uh he's going to increase the bandwidth uh but not too much because we are going to move for from producer medical trees to Vertical trees that are more efficient ways to prove the state uh so mainly as a validator I think the result is going to be more or less same uh it has been always a a need that evaluators needs to be running Uh custom Hardware so we keep on that level okay I'm gonna take the Dan shot the Dank sharding and data availability sampling um okay so this is going to be the last thing and the key part to that solo stickers need to know right now about this is that we do not know which are the consequences that it will have so we cannot possibly know right now because there's not a specific implementation of the data availability sampling so database example what it will allow us is to remember those Blobs of data that we have mentioned before so these Blobs of data will not necessarily be uh fully downloaded we will be able to just prove a sample of this to take a sample of this data and prove somehow that um that this exists and this is valid and available for download but we do not know yet what's going to be for solo stickers because there's too many there's too many moving pieces and this is way too far away so for the moment for Solace takers what it matters is the Proto dank sharding the existence of this data blobs Etc so to summarize very very quickly on the topics that we have spoken Mev it's a bug not a feature it's a centralizing force and it screws up our Center our censorship resistance for DBT we will be able to leverage our setups to earn extra rewards for the withdrawals pretty self-explanatory we'll be able to take our deposits Out product sharding our consensus layer will grow with these Blobs of data validator anonymity a single secret leader election will save us from the Mev extractors that come behind us and they wanna get us offline to get the Mev opportunities statelessness is that we will have less less Drive requirements but we will have more bandwidth and dunk sharding that we don't really know so in 25 minutes this is everything you needed to know about the next phase of ethereum thank you very much [Applause]