← CRYPTO 101
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- [00:00]
Preston Van Loom
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Host
Welcome back to the Crypto 101 podcast. We hope everyone is having a fantastic week. No matter where you're coming in from and when you're coming in from, you're in the right place because this week we have Preston Van Loom on. He is an Ethereum core developer at Off Chain Labs and and he even led the engineering team that helped transition Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake. So a household name here in the house and we are glad to have you on here with us, Preston.
- [00:38]
Preston Van Loom
Hey, happy to be here.
- [00:40]
Host
Absolutely. So tell us about that. Let's talk about that headline first. Leading the Ethereum team from proof of work to proof of stake. That was a big deal. I remember when this happened, it wasn't too long ago, I think it was like a year or two or maybe, maybe even a little bit more at this point losing track of time over here. But that was a really, really big transition. Like what was that like? And I guess also like why did we do that in the first place?
- [01:09]
Preston Van Loom
These are great questions. I look back at the switch from proof of work to proof of stake as one of our biggest achievements in Ethereum. It's obviously one of the most complex things Ethereum has ever done. My role, I'm a core developer on Ethereum. I work on the Prism consensus client. Cool thing about Ethereum is they have this kind of insurance policy on client implementations where we have this idea behind client diversity where we build multiple implementations of the same thing and the idea there is to have some redundancy so that when there is any issue with one particular client that we have an alternative to quickly switch to. This favors liveness of Ethereum. That's really the most important thing. Through all these upgrades we've had, Ethereum's never gone down. It's been online ever since it was online 100 uptime. So when it came to switching from proof of work to proof of stake, well, walking a step back is we started out wanting to scale the L1 through sharding and the idea was to add more shards, like basically more L1s to kind of work in harmony together to have one big horizontally scaled blockchain. At the same time we were working on the switch to proof of stake, which is a better way that we believe a better way to secure the blockchain as like we iterated through these designs and the research, we said let's just start with proof of stake and get that done. That being like the biggest low hanging fruit that we can get done. So in 2018, I would say we really started putting some hands to the keyboard and getting stuff built. Our team, the Prism team, we were one of the first, maybe the first team independently to announce intentions to build out proof of stake for Ethereum. Just a couple of guys online, like in the chat rooms saying, like, I'm really interested in building this. Is anybody else working on it? Five strangers come together, we form the Prism team, we just start building and building proof of stake. We were funded through grants, through the ef, through donations. This is very much like a moonlighting project to build something of value. And this, we're not going to monetize it. It's just free open source software. It took three years, I think three years to actually launch the. Maybe it's two years. It took a couple years to actually launch what we called the beacon chain. And this was a kind of a, I guess a side chain, you might call it. It was another version of Ethereum run in parallel to the proof of work Ethereum. And all it did was come to consensus. All it did was do proof of stake. Very simple. There's no like EVM or anything in there. And we let that run for a few, a year or two to really get this idea validated. Say, look, look, it works in production, it's working. Once we were satisfied with that, I think it was 20, 21 or 22 a couple years ago. It's all kind of blurry these days. But we finally did the switch from proof of work to proof of stake. And the way that we did that was we we merged these two chains together so we had the beacon chain that was running alongside the proof of work chain. And today they're all tightly coupled in one where the proof of work component is removed and now the blockchain is secured by the proof of stake component through the beacon chain that's been running, you know, ever since then, for many years. And we've gone through several, several upgrades since then. Petra being the next biggest one since the merge. Just a lot of really exciting stuff. But that was, I mean, that was, like I said, a highlight of our careers, I think, because it was like the analogy people use is we were upgrading an airliner jet, changing the engines in flight like you can land and take off again because there's just too much going on. Had to do it on the fly. And coordinating a truly decentralized protocol is very difficult. So yeah, that was a really, really interesting time for us. And it went flawlessly. It was great.
- [05:57]
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- [08:33]
Host
Yeah, I mean it was a massive upgrade. I remember when that happened, like that was the talk of the town. And what that does is that allows people to come in here, not only changes the consensus model, but it allows people to earn passive income on their Ethereum through the staking mechanism. And we have seen a huge shift, I'd say over the last five to six years of people getting away from the proof of work model and kind of either go to some sort of new consensus model, but primarily proof of stake has been like the go to consensus model, right? That is what I would say. The majority of altcoin projects, the majority of new layer ones, like everyone's kind of viewing that as the standard moving forward. So it was a massive step for all of crypto history and I think it also set a whole new standard for altcoins from that point out. It was like, hey, if Ethereum is moving from proof of work to proof of stake, that sets a new precedent for all altcoins that are being developed from there on now. And now we really see it as the, the go to model. But like you said here, we just recently had the latest of the Ethereum upgrades. And so I want to talk about Petra now. In fact, I'm sure some of the viewers out there, a lot of them probably are aware of it. Maybe they know a little bit about it. There might even be some viewers coming in and they didn't know that Ethereum got an upgrade. Maybe they've been disconnected from the space they're coming back in. Ethereum is, at least at the time of making this, it's having a really strong rally back to the upside and getting a lot of positive attention. What is the PETRA upgrade?
- [10:17]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah, so the, okay, the PETRA upgrade, this is the most recent upgrade we did. It is very large, just the largest one in terms of improvement. IPS that we have. Proposals, improvement proposals. The largest number of proposals of any upgrade we've ever done. When we look at the simplified roadmap of Ethereum, there are three things we want to do. We want to scale the L1, we want to scale blobs, that being the available data that the chain can Provide. And we want to improve the user experience of all users of Ethereum. So this upgrade targets two of the three things in particular. It increases the scale of blobs and data availability and increases the user experience for validators and users. So I can dive into that, each of those pieces. So what we saw here is, we'll take you a step back. What Ethereum provides is they provide block space. So block space being space for transactions to occur and be processed. And that's what we generally think of when we think of the EVM and execution. And then separately we have a data layer, the data availability layer, which is leveraged by protocols like L2s, where they can settle onto Ethereum. And there's this ephemeral space, the data that sticks around for only a couple of weeks or some short amount of time, data you don't need forever. And the canonical example is you have an L2 this, this other blockchain that basically batches and settles its transactions to Ethereum. It only needs to provide that settlement proof for a couple of days or maybe a week. And then after then that data is kind of obsolete. So having ephemeral Data space for L2s is really important. It's a separate fee market from the EVM as well. As we saw before we introduced blobs last year, is that the L2s were competing with L1 users. So when there would be a cool app that's going on, like maybe a token sale or an NFT drop or something exciting on the L1, L2 users would feel, actually feel that in their pricing, because they're competing for the same space now it's separate. So L2s are sort of have their own fee market in terms of posting data. And so that kind of helps with the UX of L1. But in Petra, what we did is we said we can, instead of having three blobs as a target, with a maximum of six, now we have nine. So we can have more, more blobs per block. So more data per block. And that's just like having more supply with a similar demand. Means this fees or fees are going to go down for L2s, and then those L2s are growing. So then eventually they'll meet the supply, will meet the demand again, and then we'll be continuing scaling on the blobs. That's sort of like looking into the future. That's some of the next. I mean, the next upgrade after Pectra is almost entirely focused on scaling blobs. But in terms of the other side of Petra. So we also have a lot of usability upgrades that actually are, I think the more exciting thing, scaling blobs is great, but as like a user of Ethereum, what I'm really thinking about right now because fees are low, I don't not really worry too much about scale at the moment. Although it is a big long term thing like today, what do I care? I care about ux. So there's two users I'm thinking about when it comes to UX and Petra and that's the validators that run on Ethereum. They've got a few user experience upgrades and then the actual, I guess users of the chain, like people with wallets that are doing transactions, they're both getting different UX improvements, user experience improvements. I'll start with the validators. There are three things I want to highlight for validators. The I think the biggest one that's most exciting is an increase or the ability to increase the maximum effective balance. So what that means to normal people is that when you run an Ethereum validator you, you have to have 32 ETH. It is the minimum you need to start a validator and is also the maximum to start a validator. And what that means is that when you're earning interest, that sort of passive interest you just mentioned earlier, yeah your balance goes above 32 and that balance above 32 is not compounding, it's not recycled back into the validator. In fact it's, it's usually withdrawn out and then those users are waiting until they accumulate enough ETH to start another validator. But that, that takes a long time. Like, like validators that have been running since Genesis since, since 2020 have earned maybe like 6 or 7 eth, like still not enough to start another validator. Maybe if you run multiple, you have earned a 32 by now and you can start another one. That's not a really great experience. So what the maximum effective balance increase does is, is instead of saying the maximum is 32 now the maximum is 2048. So when you're earning more, when you're earning more eth, that's now compounding, you sort of keep it all in the system without having to recycle it. So that's a nice improvement there. There are other benefits to this as well. Not just like for the small users, solo stakers, but actually institutional and bigger stakers. So on top of saying you can have one these fat validators instead of many small ones, you can now consolidate them. Say instead of running, I don't know 12, I can run one fat one. And what that does is it lowers your networking requirements because Instead of running 12 validators and sending 12 messages every epoch, I can just send one from one fat validator. And it has more weight. It has the same weight that those 12 would have. So in theory and in practice, as we'll see, the networking bandwidth in particular will start decreasing as more and more validators are consolidating. And it in particular helps those really, really big users, but it helps all users because there are less messages flying around. Right. Like even, even just observers have to listen to these messages. So like for everyone's sake, it's going to be helpful as the number of validators will shrink, but the amount of ETH that's at stake will be increasing over time. So it's a really nice improvement there.
- [17:43]
Host
So it sounds like it's increasing efficiency. It's also just more optimized. Does that happen with maybe a small sacrifice to decentralization since we're consolidating into bigger ones? I guess. What does that look like?
- [18:03]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah, yeah. Your question is what's the catch and what's the trade off here? And I would argue that there is none. Right. Because the, the, the decentralization factor here we talk about the, what we think about is the barrier to entry. So what is the minimum I need to be a participant? That hasn't changed. It's still 32E.
- [18:23]
Host
Yeah.
- [18:24]
Preston Van Loom
Which I realize is quite still a large number in terms of dollars. But like it has like Pector hasn't changed the minimum. It just sort of helps with large and small validators in that sense. So I think it's an, I would say there's no like major trade off here. It's just like you have, we, we do the consolidation process is not automatic. Like, so there is some like, work to do and it's an opt in thing. So it only works if people do it. But I mean, Pector's been out for, I don't know, two a week, maybe two weeks. Time's flying by right now.
- [19:07]
Host
I know, right?
- [19:09]
Preston Van Loom
Like one day in crypto is like a, like a week of your life, you know, so well, I, I, I.
- [19:16]
Host
Almost don't know if people truly care. And maybe, I hate to say it, I know in the past, especially for probably the first five or so years, even the first 10 years of blockchain decentralization was like the talk of the town, the name of the game. But as the space has grown, it almost seems like people are willing to, to Trade some of that decentralization for more scalability and more efficiency and some of these other performance metrics. And we've seen that happen with some of these other layer ones. Right. They are sacrificing, I would say, significantly more centralization or they're becoming significantly more centralized than Ethereum is. But the caveat is that they have these really high performance capabilities or scalability capabilities and people don't really, they don't really care that much. You don't see people throwing a fit kind of the same way that they used to. So when I'm looking at this and I'm seeing it, I would agree with you. And for everyone that's listening, you know, let us know in the comments and in the reviews. We're curious to get your thoughts. But I would imagine that people don't really care, you know, if there's an efficiency increase happening here, people are going to be all for that.
- [20:30]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah, it's hard to argue that. And what, when I think about this in terms of Ethereum, when people really care is when things are not going well. Right? So yeah, decentralization only matters when you need it and you're going to need it at some point, Right. I think the trade off is fair when you can still settle down onto the most decentralized and highest uptime blockchain. So I think for Ethereum, what we're going to see in the near future is you can make those decentralization trade offs in an L2 and you can say, I can go really, really fast in L2 and I could do all my stuff, I could do all my high performance trading. I want like the fastest, cheapest, most efficient thing they can do that in L2. And then when it comes to like I want to do, I want to move it back to my cold storage. I'm going to put that on the most secure, decentralized blockchain, which is Ethereum, and settle there. So the trade off with that though is composability. Right. Ethereum's biggest flaw right now, I think with this L2 roadmap is it's an inconvenient experience to have to move between chains. I mean bridging and these things like really smooth out the rough edges, but they're still there because it's not in protocol yet. What you'll see when this, when these standards are finalized and L2s are able to interrupt very easily is Ethereum with all of its L2s as one homogeneous layer, is going to be unstoppable. That's where you're getting the trade offs that people are willing to make and say I'm willing to centralize a little bit to go super, super fast without giving up the security and trust of the Ethereum L1. That's going to be the future. That's why I'm super excited about the upgrades that have been happening with Petra and just the way we're moving with Ethereum, I'm really excited. I think a lot of these concepts are being proven in the other L1s, but ultimately it will come back to Ethereum and Ethereum will be the center of this universe where everything's going to settle there. I do really believe in that future.
- [22:49]
Host
What do you think the future holds? Because you made some good points. What do you think the future holds for Ethereum layer ones and Ethereum layer Twos? Because you mentioned earlier that when a really big event would happen, maybe there would be a bit of competitiveness between the L1s and L2s competing with one another. Do you see both of them existing together in harmony? Could it be a scenario where the L1 takes back as it becomes more scalable and it dominates? Is it a scenario where, you know, the standard gets so high, where people think that L2s dominate because of their efficiency? Like, I guess. What is that relationship? What do you think it looks like going into the future?
- [23:33]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah. So I think the L1 needs to be good at everything and it needs to prioritize liveness and decentralization. Those are sort of the most important aspects of it. And then you bring in scale and UX and these are properties that are really nice. So what you'll see is like the L1 of Ethereum being this ideal like general purpose platform where maybe it's not, it's not the best at anything, but it's good at everything. And then when you say I really need this one thing, I really need to go super fast or I really need to just interact with one app and like that app needs to go super fast. I think that's where you go to the L2s which make these trade offs and make these specializations for a particular type of activity. And then when you get to this like homogeneous layer, like where all the L2s kind of feel like one big space. Yeah. And they can interrupt much better with the L1. I mean it's going to be like a system of cities and highways and it all revolves around the center of the universe, which is Ethereum's L1. And there's like a give and take there. Right. So some things will need to move on this super high performance stuff. Some things don't necessarily need that. You can still do that on the L1, I think it's all additive and it's not like taking away from anything. But you'll see activity move to where it makes the most sense. Right. But it's still all within the Ethereum ecosystem, all within the same root of trust in the same security layer.
- [25:20]
Host
So it almost seems like the goal isn't to make the L1 this just monsterly efficient machine. And maybe it's a silly question, but I was hoping you could clarify because I've had people ask me this. They said, well, with how quickly these advanced modern L1s have gotten, with how efficient they have gotten, what is keeping Ethereum from catching up to them more quickly as they've become more efficient? And I know that there's some details in the nature of how Ethereum runs and obviously it's code and stuff like that, but what would be your answer to that question?
- [25:57]
Preston Van Loom
I think, I think it is significantly easier to start a new L1 with the changes you'd want to make to Ethereum without having, I guess, this like backwards compatibility and all of this like baggage that comes with a legacy system. I mean Ethereum is 10 years old at this point. It's his legacy, code is old. So that is a disadvantage versus a new L1. And conversely, as we mentioned earlier, most L1s are starting with proof of stake. But proof of stake is really hard to bootstrap, especially when it's like maybe an ICO or like venture capital funding and like you start out where like 30% that's just making up numbers. So this is not picking on any chain, but some chain may say like, oh, we have like a lot of tokens to the foundation. The foundation is like delegating stake or whatever. It's like hard to start. It's hard to start a new truly decentralized and mature blockchain. So that would be like the trade off. And when I think Back to Ethereum's L2 centric roadmap, you can start an L2 very easily with these properties and settle on Ethereum and do pretty much what you want to do while also like enjoying the security benefits of Ethereum. So like I think that keeping everything within the Ethereum space, we'll see innovation of people like taking risk and doing bold things while also keeping it within Ethereum where it's like relatively still decentralized in the sense of like I, I always come back to like, what is the weakest link in the chain? And that would be to L1. And if the L1 is really strong, then the project will survive and it can like do, it can do both things.
- [28:03]
Host
Yeah, and I think you make a great point. It's going back to the original talking point, which was if people want that efficiency, then they can go to the L2s. And that's a big purpose of the L2s in the first place. And we've seen those get really cheap and really fast through some of these, these recent upgrades. And you know, looking at them now, you know you can make transactions on these and you're well aware of it, you work extremely close with the Arbitrum team, but you can make transactions now sometimes at a fraction of a penny and it's almost instantaneous in nature. And so, yeah, you know, to all the people out there who, who are wondering about this, you make a good point. Right. The L1 and the L2 can serve different functions and I think you can get hyper specific with the L2s and Focus in on some of those more niche and unique problems. And it doesn't have to be where L1s and L2s are trying to do the same thing because they're not. And they're two different things that are, that are working in, I guess in correlation within the science, within the same ecosystem, but they can be targeting and addressing and fixing different problems. So I really like that answer. You know, kind of my last point on this upgrade was, you know, what were some of those technical and challenges and hurdles and were any of those like reasons that maybe led to any delays that, that happened with this?
- [29:35]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah. So, okay, so the Pector upgrade was like it's been saying, the sort of the biggest one and that took, I think that took a little longer than other forks, maybe not as long as the merge did. But when it comes to any upgrade, we want to test it. We want to test not just that it works, but that it works in the really bad cases. So like if, if Ethereum ever went down, like how long does it take to recover and, and so on. And in fact, when we were doing testnet upgrades, we have these like test environments that simulate mainnet. They're not very, it's not exactly the same because it's all simulation. There's no real money there. But when we go to up upgrade these, we actually had some, some human error mistakes where some developers simply forgot to change a configuration and we saw the change split and Then like people were getting slashed and just sort of like, like, okay, here's the disaster scenario we wanted to test anyway. So it was kind of cool to see it in public, but some people said, oh, wait a minute, this was not, not planned. So it kind of like rocked confidence a little bit. But I doubled down and I said, actually look, it survived and now it's doing what it's supposed to do. So like, this is a better test. We just sort of did it in a space we didn't mean to. So we did still add a little bit of time, like a pattern on a little, a couple more weeks just to like do more tests and get things going through. But I mean, as far as like this fork being really big, I think it still went out in a reasonable amount of time that maybe it was like 14 months or 16 months, I don't know. I think it's good if Ethereum can upgrade at least once a year, like every 12 months would be nice.
- [31:25]
Host
That'd be awesome.
- [31:27]
Preston Van Loom
I'm in the camp of like, let's, let's ship slightly smaller forks but more often. And like the EIP process is kind of going through a rethinking of like, how do we consider things for inclusion and so on. So like, as far as like governance of this, we are thinking about like, can we move faster, can we be more ambitious, can we move more, make changes more quickly? Ethereum is very conservative. They really value that up this uptime, like that Ethereum will always be online. It's your like safety net, your safety blanket. You know, if you, if you're trying things out on L2s or whatever, the L2 goes down. Like that's the whole point of it, of, of this paradigm is you can, you don't have to trust CL2. You could take your money out, you could do, go where you need to go without permission. So yeah, I mean, yeah, well, I.
- [32:24]
Host
Think people would like that. I think, you know, obviously you can only work as fast as you can with the resources that you have. And you made a good point of like, we need to make sure that this thing is safe and it is battle tested before we put it out there because it affects a lot of people. And so I think, you know, hearing that and a lot of the listeners realizing that it makes more sense and they can rest assured that, you know, you guys would rather put in a little bit of a delay on an upgrade and make sure that it is bulletproof than put it out there and have it out in the ecosystem that could be or, and it could turn potentially harmful.
- [33:00]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah, you know, it's, it's, we find, we have to find a good balance. Like we don't like to delay things that if, if, if we can avoid it, but we want to have really good confidence and we have a lot of, like a lot of layers. Like things only go wrong when the holes of the Swiss cheese, I don't know if you've seen that, that are familiar with this analogy where like for there to be a real problem, you have to have like pieces of Swiss cheese stacked on each other and it's only when the holes line up where you had holes in, in multiple layers that you actually have a major problem. So we were trying to just close out as many holes as we can and then hope they don't line up. And that works pretty well with things like client diversity. A lot of the really rigorous testing that the Ethereum Panda ops team does. These guys are the most cracked team out there, really trying to break it as hard as they can and really building on confidence and keeping Ethereum online is really, really important.
- [33:59]
Host
Well, I do think people would like if it's possible to get to an upgrade every 12 months, I think that would be really, really cool. So you know, fingers crossed, you know, we, we can look forward to something like that. A little bit of an off topic question here. Do you think that AI can help with that process? Not only maybe like testing, but also like the actual setup itself?
- [34:24]
Preston Van Loom
This is a good question. You know, I do wonder like what machines can do. They can do a lot faster than humans and we have a lot of like not intelligence. We have a lot of stupid tooling that's like let me just try random stuff to see if I can get farther within the code to find this like really niche edge case that a bug would manifest like only when it's like midnight on a Tuesday and somebody sends a message out of order like something weird like that. I don't know if AI is quite at that level. I do think though like AI can have a profound impact at the, at the code review level. So I have been seeing people add to their projects like an AI code reviewer which comes in and says like, you know, yes, we have like a lot of like static analysis stuff that looks at the code and says if you do this you're at high risk. But it's usually in limited context where an AI could say, I studied the entire project and I'm not just looking at one file but looking at the entire project. And with that context in mind, there may be additional risk if you do this. Or like you might be breaking this use case or like it could be finding bugs sooner. And that's like, as engineers, we want to find the bug as fast as possible and the best place to do it is before it even gets into the client. So that's like at code review or sooner, like as the author's writing it. But code review is like a really great place. You still need humans to look at it and like read every line and kind of like say, I read it, I understand it. But AI is like able to do that a lot of the times and kind of maybe save a, save some time or even just build confidence. Like we could always use a little more confidence in these changes. So that's probably an interesting application for AI.
- [36:19]
Host
Fair enough. Well, I want to transition us over to Arbitrum. I mean you're clearly a legend when it comes to the Ethereum space. And there's all these other layer twos that are out there, right? You have Base, you have Arbitrum, you have optimism, you have Polygon, you have all these new ones that have come up too. Out of everything, you chose to work very closely with Arbitrum. Why is that and what makes Arbitrum stand out against some of these other L2s?
- [36:46]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah, I love this question. We joined Off Chain Labs in 2022. Before that we were just an independent team building open source software. And as Ethereum was evolving, we adopted this roll up centric roadmap saying instead of sharding will act as L2s can be the shards where you have like this horizontal scaling. And at the time, and I think still true today, we looked at the landscape of L2s and said this team behind Arbitrum Off Chain Labs, they are building the best tech. I think they put their principles first, saying like, we're not going to launch until we have like the ability to submit fraud proofs to hold the chain accountable. Right. You have a centralized sequencer that's organizing transactions. But how do you, how, what do you do in the case that the sequencer says, I'm going to just print money to myself and like take everyone's money or whatever it is, There needs to be some way to hold them to account. And I think from day one that was a something that Arbitrum does. And as they're going forward and like since then we've seen a lot of really cool, really cool features come in Arbitrum. So there's Stylus and what Stylus is is it's an extension of the Ethereum virtual machine that lets smart contract developers write code in Rust. And when you write it in the programming language Rust, there's a. It compiles down to webassembly getting some of the details here. But that's a lot more performant than the EVM because the EVM is like this special niche virtual machine and it's slow and it, it prices things differently because of the cost it is to actually verify that. But with Rust and Webassembly it's very cheap to do. So you can do a lot more stuff on chain now for a lot cheaper. So app developers are enjoying cheaper gas costs or execution or things they couldn't do before because there's only so much gas you can spend in one block. That's really, really exciting. And then they're taking some novel approaches to tackling mev. So when the way that Arbitrum works is the sequencer takes the, it's a first in, first out method of ordering transactions. So the first transaction it sees is going to be the first inputs in the block. It's just going to put them in the order that it saw them. And when people try to do mev, which is extract value from transactions like sandwiching. Sandwiching or back running rather because there's no public mempool in Arbitrum, so you can't use, you can't like front run people, but you can back run them. So we were seeing a ton of just spam. Like these bots would come in and say, oh, I saw this big trade and they had a lot of slippage. I'm gonna go do some arbitrage and kind of make a couple bucks. So they were spamming the chain like just making a bunch of failed transactions, just like a bad experience. And then what the solution that Arbitrum has implemented is they have this idea called Time Boost. And, and what Timers is, is it's an express lane for the actors that want to have priority of transactions. So maybe they're the ones that want to do the back running. They can say I'm willing to pay like a toll to get into the expressway. I'm the only one in it for some amount of time. I think it's a minute or maybe five minutes. I don't recall the parameters, but they own the express lane for short amount of time. They can get a 50 millisecond advantage, which is pretty huge when you're talking about block times that are like 250 milliseconds. They're pretty fast blocks on Arbitrum, so they have that just a little bit extra edge to be the first ones to get behind transactions. And that's earning revenue for the dao, which then they can use for further development. And just, it's just a really great way to see them innovating and tackling actual problems that are ongoing, like handling transaction spam, MEV and giving app developers this tool that people have expressly really wanted with Stylus.
- [41:22]
Host
You know, it makes sense and we love seeing the L2 space grow and I think Arbitrum's at the forefront of that. The last time I checked, I think Arbitrim is the second largest L2 by TVL. Not sure if we have that stat at the top, but last time I checked that's where it was sitting. And I mean it has been for a long term, for a long time. A crucial player in the Ethereum space. It's one of the biggest contributors and we love to see all the innovation that's going on over there. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is kind of just Ethereum's path back towards the, the top of where it was at, right? For a while it was the standard for all defi, all depin, all RWAs, all NFTs, all meme coins. Like everything was built on Ethereum and that was the standard. And we started to see a little bit more diversification, I'd say, over the last two years. And maybe that's not a bad thing, right? There's always going to be other names. Ethereum is still remained dominant in terms of market cap and a lot of these other metrics. But there have been these naysayers and I want to clarify, we're big fans of Ethereum over here. We love Ethereum. We like all layer. We like all layer ones, right. A healthy ecosystem has more than one. But what do you say? Because the sentiment has gotten a little bit out of hand here with, with some of these, these anti Ethereum people. Like, what do you say to them? And also what is Ethereum's path to success? To just shut those people up. I know my good old friend and co host here, Bryce Paul, had a tweet out a couple of weeks ago and he's saying Ethereum's revenge arc is going to be glorious. And so far it has been. But going back to the, going back to the original question, like, what is Ethereum's path to success? To becoming just an extremely dominant L1 like we saw a couple of years ago.
- [43:21]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah, you Know, Ethereum is everyone's favorite chain to hate. It's. It's a competitor to everything. It's. It's in the way of everyone's bag, right? Like, unless you're an Ethereum holder, you, like, Ethereum is a threat to whatever it is you're doing. It's. I, I would argue it's a threat to Bitcoin. It's a threat to all these all L1s. It's kind of doing everything that everyone else wants to do. You've probably heard the meme where, like all building the same thing. In the end, we're just going about it in different ways, like maybe prioritizing things in a different order. And what I would say to Ethereum critics is keep, keep the feedback coming, right? Like, it would be naive to say that Ethereum doesn't have problems. There are people that are trolls and like shit posting and kind of just like trying to shit on eth to make their thing shine, which I understand it's not very productive. And I think people with a brain see right through it. We all have a bag bias. I'm here talking about Ethereum. I'm invested in Ethereum. I love Ethereum. I don't have other things. So, like, you know, I don't have much nice to say about other stuff because I just, I don't, I don't care much about it. Right. I think like, the, these things are out there and they are great competition. It's nice to see some experimentation that's happening in other networks. We're all building the same thing in the end. I do really believe that. And like, we're going about it in different orders. So things that Ethereum tries and fails benefit other chains. And things that other chains try or fail benefit Ethereum as well. It kind of goes like back and forth because we're all sharing ideas. So to, yeah, to Ethereum critics, like, I love the feedback. If, if you want to give like honest feedback, I'll listen to you. Like, I've made a couple posts on, on Twitter just saying, like, what is your. What is your problem? You know, like, I understand the cinnamon is down and like, you want change? Like, what is it? Let's do it. Like, where are the problems that you see that I'm not seeing? Because I, I live in a very, very different world than most people. I'm in a research bubble and some people call it like an ivory tower with EF looking down like, you know, making all these changes. I'm not quite there, right? Because I'M more like in the weeds. But I do recognize that I live in a bubble that I don't hear what app developers are building all the time. I'm not building apps and building the protocol. And so when it comes to like, what do people care about? What do people need? What are their problems? I think it's great to talk about that and to express it. I don't necessarily agree with, like, people that are just like, looking at the, the price of Ethan saying, like, well, it's going down, so it's going to go to zero. And then like, that's like a coin, you know, like, and then in the last week we're seeing like, okay, obviously it's not right. It's bouncing back to, to maybe where it's supposed to be. I think it's slightly undervalued, just my personal opinion, but it's nice to see that the, the bleeding has stopped and like, people are like, recognizing the Ethereum roadmap in. I don't think the roadmap's even changed, but maybe it's a clarification on what we're doing. Scaling the L1, scaling blobs, improving UX. It's very simple. And now that we're expressing in simple terms, I think it's kind of dissolved a lot of the FUD that people were expressing and now we're seeing a lot of really cool adoption when it comes to institutions like RWAs like BlackRock's doing their thing and you're seeing major players, like, moving into the L2 space. And like, I really do believe that, like, everything is going to be settled on Ethereum one day. Everything that matters, at least. And that's just like a really bullish future. So it's kind of like hard to bet against eth. I really think it's the right thing to do.
- [47:35]
Host
Well, I got one more question for you before we let you go. You know, I want to talk about the roadmap. You were just alluding to it. What is on the schedule? What is on the roadmap as we kind of move forward?
- [47:46]
Preston Van Loom
We just shipped Petra last two weeks ago and the next thing is mostly on scaling blobs, and that's through a new technology that we're calling Peer dos. It's data availability sampling. The idea is we can double the blob capacity we have or even go farther. We, while requiring that the validators only have to maintain some pieces of information, not all the information, so the bandwidth opens up for more scale is basically the idea there. And so that's coming soon. Like some of us are optimistic we can do it in 2025 this year. Maybe it slips into January. There's like a strong inversion to not ship in. Thanks November and December because of holidays. But I think it would be ready by then. I feel really optimistic about that. And then beyond that, the focus is on L1. If you follow a lot of the research discussions, people are talking about going to 60 million gas. Right now we're at 40 million in gas being the capacity of a block, how big a block can be going to 60 million then 100 million and then like continuing to increase the size of blocks. Then there's also talk about reducing the slot times, the block times from 12 seconds to 8 seconds and making things go just a little bit faster. Like can we start pushing the limits reasonably? Like we're not going to say let's take a drastic jump and go down to like sub 1 second block times. Because the L1 doesn't, doesn't, as I said earlier, doesn't need to be the best at anything. It just needs to be good at everything. So that doesn't mean that we should ossify and never change. We should be continuing, continuing to improve with ambitious goals but with a bit of conscious optimism of like, yeah, we can do this but we don't want, we still don't want to break the chain. So we're going to go somewhere where we feel very confident it can happen. So after Fusaka, which is the, the, the next fork, we'll be seeing a lot more like L1 scaling, more blob scaling and more UX. It's just moving, moving down the roadmap. Well, that's perfect.
- [50:20]
Host
Preston. We really appreciate you coming on here, bringing us up to date on all things Ethereum and Arbitrum. I think it was a great discussion and for any of the listeners that are, that are, that are coming in here and maybe they want to follow you and see what you're doing on your journey. Where can they keep track of you on.
- [50:39]
Preston Van Loom
Yeah, I'm on Twitter or X Preston Underscore Van loon. I'm on GitHub. Obviously we do all of our work in public. We have the Discord channels. You can find go to offchainlabs.com pres prism and you can see a bit about our work. If you're interested in running a validator, you have any feedback you want to talk to me about, anything, I would really enjoy that. So just reach out.
- [51:07]
Host
Well, Preston, once again, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll have to talk again soon once the next upgrade comes around.
- [51:13]
Preston Van Loom
Okay, thanks for having me. This has been really fun.
- [51:28]
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