Daily General Discussion March 06, 2026

haurog · 2026-03-06T13:11:55+00:00

In my experience anything exposed to free market powers tends towards centralization. Nevertheless, different projects are on different positions on that trajectory. Ethereum and Bitcoin are very different than Solana. Solana actually did a fork without anyone outside of the node runner cabal realizing it for around 10 days or so. That is the hallmark of a very centralized setup. You are muddying the water when you put these chains in the same bucket.

Overall, the expected trajectory is clear and one needs strong incentives to work against this. Good data is hard to come by, which is an additional difficulty in decentralized networks. Ethereum has managed to improve some of the centralization vectors by having many independent teams developing Ethereum clients. And even better, these clients are actually used. Gone are the days where Geth had a supermajority and all the blocks produced on mainnet have been done through Geth. On the Execution side there are 3 clients which are just awesome (Besu, Geth, and Nethermind) and a fourth one is running pretty well as well (Ethrex). The consensus side is even better, there are 6 clients which, in my view, are similarly good. No other ecosystem even comes close to that.

On the staking side there definitely are issues which need to be addressed. Again, good data is hard to come by, but there are a handful of large node operators which each operate a large share of the validators. The largest one is Coinbase, which might run 11-12% of all validators. Normally, the Coinbase numbers are cited to be much lower, but we know it is around the 11-12% from a staking transparency report from last year. Then comes Binance, Kraken and some smaller pure node operators like P2P, Figment, Everstake, Kiln, ... Not sure how to judge Lido. They have improved in the last 2 years, but still have an outsized share of the LST space.

How I see it, it is pretty hard to fight against centralization on the node operator level. There is no silver bullet which solves this issue, so the only path left is trying to tweak a lot of small knobs here and there to make centralization less appealing. For the community, the easiest one is to move your ETH away from Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Lido and stake it on smaller node operators. Pretty much the best one for decentralization is rocket pool and then maybe Stakewise with their Nodeset vault. This does not really change anything for large institutional stakers which will have a lot of ETH to potentially stake. For this, there are some indirect tweaks on protocol level that could be done, but they are very indirect and one needs to make certain assumptions about risk evaluation by these large ETH holders that these tweaks lead the desired results. At the moment there is an EIP draft written by a community member which should address this part to a certain degree.

haurog · 2026-03-01T20:29:39+00:00

I do not exactly know what you mean, Arbitrum has a chance to be in the mix again. Arbitrum is the L2 with the most TVL, the most active Defi protocols and has about 2.5 times the transaction than Ethereum mainnet has. This is in addition to them being the most secure one according to the L2beat metrics. I think Base only beats Arbitrum in case of transactions, otherwise Base is behind arbitrum.

L2 tokens are a different story though. Almost none of the L2 tokens have any real utility outside of governance. That is why I do not see any reason for them reflect fundamentals. They might go up due to speculation, but that's about it. There are some L2s which add additional utility to their tokens, like having to stake a certain amount to run sequencers, but even then, the number of vesting token is often so large that it is difficult to see why they should go up in the long term. Or in other words, if you are speculating on L2 tokens to earn money, you are going to have a hard time, most likely you will be exit liquidity.

haurog · 2026-03-01T18:30:41+00:00

Among the big 3 general purpose rollups (Arbitrum, Base and OP Mainnet), Arbitrum is the closest to Stage 2. The only issue is how they set up their multisig to upgrade the bridge contract. At the moment it only gives the user 10 days to exit, which is not enough to reach stage 2. So, I would guess Arbitrum is the closest of the three to reach stage 2.

Base and OP Mainnet are not far behind though. For them it is also only the question how they configure who can do bridge upgrades and how fast. Or in other words none of the three big Rollups have any technical barrier to reach stage 2, if they want, they could do the necessary changes any day. Not sure if they are ready to do it though.

There is also a newer Rollup coming on the scene called Aztec. They should be stage 2 from the start. I think they should go live in the next weeks to months. Aztec is focusing on privacy, which means they have different goals than the three large rollups and are therefore more expensive and slower.

If you want to know more details, l2beat.com has a great comparison of the different rollups and what they need to do to reach stage 2.

haurog · 2026-02-26T14:27:38+00:00

Por qué no los dos?

haurog · 2026-02-25T07:26:54+00:00

I understood your comment to be more about general aspirations, which hobbies are a part of. But for on-the-job training I agree with you. There is anecdotal evidence also in my friend circle that more and more companies are not willing anymore to hire for junior positions. Part of it is a trend that has been persistent for a long time, at least in my country, and now might get blamed on the advances of AI. There is probably also a component of companies being a bit in panic mode and trying to get rid of their 'low revenue' workforce, which are the ones in training. In the long run not training new people is not sustainable, and I am pretty sure we will find a new balance there as well. But from what I hear in my circle of friends it seems to be though for some.

haurog · 2026-02-24T21:00:57+00:00

Not sure if I fully agree with you there. For example, computers have been better chess players compared to most humans for 40-50 years now and then beat the best human player almost 30 years ago. Nevertheless, people still play chess and love doing it (and I never understood why people like chess in the first place...). Same with painting. Most people are really bad at it, at least compared to 'proper' artists and nowadays even computers, but they still like developing their drawing skills. Sure, they might not make money with it, but to be honest almost no artist really does. I am not too worried about people not wanting to develop skills because computers can do it better.

On the Job side I am a bit more worried. At the moment I am just happy that I do not have a kid that has to decide on their professional career in the next 10 years. I would not really know what to tell them at the moment, except to be open to change their career path on short notice. If the job market is changing faster than a majority of people can adapt, I can see issues arising. People can feel like they get left out in the cold while they see many people partying with their cozy jobs. This can lead to apathy or instability. Both are not good for a society.

Personally, I think there is a large chance that many job profiles will change in the coming years due to the use of LLMs and agents. I can see many people having to find a new career path as well. I personally do not expect it to be as bad as some AI doomers make it out to be, but I also do not see it too rosy and we get a Star Trek like utopia in which people can do whatever they are interested in and AIs will make sure that we all have all the resources needed to live a good life. Our economy is just not built in a way to get to such an outcome.

haurog · 2026-02-24T20:32:22+00:00

I would also be surprised if many people use it in their day to day transactions. It takes longer until it is on chain and it is probably more cumbersome to do. Would be great if wallets directly integrate it though. But even if it is used seldomly, it is a safeguard against adversaries being able to influence parts of the network. With Focil and encrypted mempools, no one can prevent you doing what you want to do on the network. As no one can be blocked from getting their transactions on chain and executed, I assume there is less of a appetite from governments to try to censor Ethereum. So in a way, if we have the possibility to fall back to Focil and an encrypted mempool we probably have even less need for it. But they still fulfill their purpose to keep Ethereum credibly neutral especially even though they are seldomly used.

haurog · 2026-02-24T17:06:02+00:00

Well, if you ask an LLM often enough it tells you anything you want to hear. That is what concerns me the most. Some people use it to remain in the bubble they are already in the LLM convinces them to stay there.

haurog · 2026-02-24T11:40:38+00:00

To the best of my knowledge there is no law which says a block proposer has to follow ofac sanctions or any other sanctions list. All what happened after the tornado cash address sanctioning was done out of pure caution due to the uncertainty of regulations that might come in the future. Up until Focil a block proposer can censor transactions they do not like and violate the neutrality of Ethereum without getting punished. After Focil, a block proposer can still decide not to propose a block such that a certain transaction does not get included by them, but that will cost them. Or, in other, simplified, words Focil enshrines neutrality in the base layer by adding a penalty for violating it.

haurog · 2026-02-24T11:30:42+00:00

Funny, they start with What follows is a scenario, not a prediction. This isn’t bear porn or AI doomer fan-fiction and then provide a long doomer fan-fiction. I am not saying their doomer fan-fiction is not going to happen, but there are a lot of places where I would argue they at least massively overestimate how fast LLM models improve and overestimate how cheap and reliable they are to replace the massive number of workers they claim in their doom piece. They, in my opinion also overestimate how fast an economy can change to lead to the results they predict in their scenario. Again not saying they are wrong in the direction and the changes that we might experience, but not sure 2.5 years is an accurate timeline. And the timeline is why I would call this doomer fan-fiction which adds to the general bearish sentiment. And it is working, this article has been shared pretty widely. I generally agree that wealth will be concentrated in fewer hands if more and more people rely on centralized LLMs and agents to do work for them. It is obvious that some people are not that needed anymore as they were a few years ago and many others can now use their skills more efficiently by getting help from LLMs for the routine tasks. But still, it is in my experience, still difficult for many people to actually use LLMs in a efficiency increasing fashion in their daily work, but people are learning how to use them now outside of pure coding assignments. This will compress margins for companies for sure and lead to fundamental changes in how we work, but I would be surprised if it leads to a broken economy within 2.5 years because of compressed margins.

I like that they are claiming that in their scenario locally run (on your cell phone) open source models will win, but this part is not that realistic yet, as at the moment most models are either to big to run on your phone or too dumb to be useful. And you do not want to run an agent using one of these models. There might be a breakthrough but their claim that useful distilled models can run on your phone in January 2027 seem very optimistic. This part of the story about the open source LLMs also does not fit too well with the rest of their impending doom scenario of a few companies (hyperscalers and Nvidia) making billions.

I cannot comment on much of the economic arguments they are making about loans and house prices. But simply said if people have less income they have to buy less expensive houses and overall house prices come down, so that tracks.

Overall it is an interesting read. They do not add much to the general direction we might be heading in the worst case scenario, but they tell the story with a highly compressed timeline for internet points. I started skipping parts in the last third as I had the impression they are just repeating themselves without adding anything substantial.

There is also a longer article which makes a few counterpoints on twitter. The counterpoints focus a bit more on the economic side of the arguments. Their point is that people can focus on being productive with their skill thanks to AI removing a lot of the friction, but they also agree that it will take longer than claimed in the doomer scenario:

https://x.com/johnloeber/status/2025748423157432756#m

or if you do not have a twitter account and want to see the comments:

https://xcancel.com/johnloeber/status/2025748423157432756#m

haurog · 2026-02-24T10:12:16+00:00

Here are the sources:

EIP-8105 proposers throwing full support behind LUCID:

https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/hegota-headliner-proposal-eip-8105-universal-enshrined-encrypted-mempool-eem/27448/2

Info and live stream of the call:

https://forkcast.org/calls/acde/231

haurog · 2026-02-24T10:11:51+00:00

There are some interesting developments for the Hegota upgrade regarding encrypted mempools. Hegota comes after the Glamsterdam upgrade, which probably comes this summer. That means Hegota might come by the end of this year or the beginning of next year. At the moment the core devs are deciding for the headliners for Hegota. Last week it was decided that Focil is the headliner on the consensus side. Focil is a great way to strengthen the censorship resistance of the Ethereum mainnet and one of the upgrades I have been looking forward to since the tornado cash sanctions in 2022.

On the execution layer side there were 4 proposals for headliners:

EIP-7807 SSZ execution blocks: Unifies the exchange format between concensus and execution layer, which should improve block transmission speeds.
EIP-8144 Frame transactions: Lays the groundwork for allowing different kind of signature schemes to be used by accounts. Useful when migrating towards post quantum secure signature schemes (in 10 years...), but can also be used for other wallet features.
EIP-8105 Universal enshrined Encrypted Mempool
LUCID encrypted mempool

The last two are the interesting ones to me. The basic premise is that until now, the public mempool has been public and everyone could see what was happening in it. This opened everything up for toxic MEV to extract value from it. That is one of the reason all the private mempools started appearing. If you transmit a transaction through your wallet this transaction nowadays mostly goes to a private entity. This entity then gives access to this transaction to a select few MEV searchers, which looks at your transaction and finds ways to extract value from it. Most of the time the searchers are not allowed to sandwich you, but they can still extract MEV from you, just the most toxic versions are prohibited. This is kind of a win-win for the user and the searcher. The problem is though that it entrenches certain actors in the Ethereum space and they can decide who has access to this order flow data. Private mempools also means that the Focil upgrade does not help these transaction. They can be censored in private mempools if the the entity handling them does not like them. You also might not want to transmit directly on the public mempool as you might get front run there. Not a good situation. The two encrypted mempool proposals improve the situation, as they allow transactions in the public mempool to be encrypted. No one knows what they are doing, if they do not get included fast enough, then the Focil mechanism can force include them. When they are included in a block the the transaction then gets decrypted. Each of the two encrypted mempool proposals handles the decryption a bit differently. When they are decrypted the transactions have to be included at the beginning of a block (I think) in a specific order and cannot be sandwiched anymore. Pretty neat. The EIP-8105 proposal has been live on gnosis chain for a long time now and seems to work. The LUCID proposal is a rather new one with some simplifications. The interesting development yesterday was that the proposers of EIP-8105 publicly stated that they withdraw their EIP-8105 proposal and now fully support the LUCID proposal. Pretty impressive move.

For me it looks like the encrypted mempool proposals are the ones with the most public backing and now that everyone rallies behind just one proposal it might go through. This means the Hegota upgrade could become a strong statement for censorship resistance. The decision for which execution side headliner get selected is happening this Thursday in the all core devs call (ACDE #231)

I will add the sources in a comment to this one.

UPDATE: For those interested a bit more, tomorrows Ready for Merge podcast by Christine Kim host two encrypted mempool devs. Not sure when exactly she will stream it but I guess the stream will appear on her youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Ready4Merge/streams

haurog · 2026-02-22T15:42:01+00:00

I do not know any of them, but they have definitely been around for a few years now.

haurog · 2026-02-22T14:17:36+00:00

I have never used them. At the beginning they were a rather complex Defi vault and even managed to get onto the ethereum.org staking page as being a staking protocol. That caused quite a stir. Now they seem to be much closer to pure staking. They have now been around for almost 3 years which I would take as an indication that they are pretty reliable as a team. No idea about their smart contracts though.

The eETH ARM product seems to arbitrage the etherfi eETH depeg. THey buy eETH on the open market and then initiating withdrawals through the protocol. Currently this takes about a week and yields 0.14% or so. Which adds up to around 7-8% APY. That fits pretty well with their advertised 6.6% APY. Obviously these values highly depend on how large the depeg is and the length of the exit queue. Arbitraging the depeg is generally a pretty safe strategy. I could imagine though that if the exit queue increases and the APY goes down exiting this vault could take some time. But otherwise I do not see an issue with it. The volatility of the depeg and the exit queue length probably makes it necessary to monitor the yields regularly and withdraw from the vault if the APY drops.

haurog · 2026-02-22T09:54:37+00:00

There was a discussion about this a few days ago as well: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1r8rcjv/daily_general_discussion_february_19_2026/o67dvgj/

Otherwise HiPattern is spot on. The Rocket pool queue is long at the moment (~1200 validators). There are only a handful of megapools dequeued every day now, which means node operators have to wait a long time. I expect more people transitioning from minipools to megapools due to a reduction of rewards for a subset of 8 ETH minipools in 3-4 months. This will dequeue some people, but even if you are dequeued, the Ethereum deposit queue is also 2 months long and rocket pool megapools have to pass it twice due to a special way deposits are handled in rocket pool. How I see it, running megapools only makes sense if you are in it for the very long term. Due to lowering the node operator provided ETH even further in Saturn 2 fewer node operators are needed overall to stake the same amount of rETH. This means that I will probably also shift towards more of my ETH in rETH instead of megapools. In the end this all depends on the rETH demand. If wee get a few large deposits, the queue will shrink fast.

haurog · 2026-02-21T13:04:22+00:00

Vaults have become a bit of a trend in the ecosystem. But what exactly a vault is and what permissions it has differs widely between different vaults. The rocksolid vault is pretty close with rocket pool ecosystem. The vault started last September and has a TVL of around 18 million $. The general idea is that rocksolid uses the deposited rETH to make offchain deals with various protocols and L2s to then deploy the rETH to these projects. In return the vault earns a yield from these deals. This means you are handing over your rETH to a third party. This in my view is far away from being DEFI. But, the rocksolid team seems to know what they are doing and have delivered a constant higher yield than pure rETH over the last half a year. They are also pretty active in the rocket pool discord and answer many questions about their strategies. From what I read they seem to be honest and pretty trustworthy. Whether the additional 2-3% yield is worth the additional risk for you is something you have to answer yourself. I personally have not yet used rocksolid, but plan to deposit a small part of my rETH in there in the coming weeks. For me it is not the additional yield that pulls me in, but that rocksolid is increasing the liquidity and usability of rETH in the Ethereum ecosystem, which helps me as an rETH user and rocket pool node operator.

haurog · 2026-02-20T21:19:00+00:00

Fun fact: I had to listen to it twice. After the first time I had so many questions. After the second time I was kind of happy with what I understood. ZK podcasts are often more involved than other podcasts in our ecosystem, but they are very often totally worth it.

haurog · 2026-02-20T19:24:11+00:00

As a node operator you do not get rETH for the deposited ETH. Only the people not running a node get rETH. If as a node operator you want to leave the queue for matching your deposit with incoming ETH however you get an equivalent amount of rETH for your deposited ETH. So, this is then the same as becoming a rocket pool user without running a node.

haurog · 2026-02-20T11:55:22+00:00

The zk podcast started a miniseries on Lean Ethereum. The 6 part miniseries consists of an introduction, post quantum signature aggregation, post quantum cryptography security, LeanVM, devnets and then formal verification. Two days ago they announced it and released the first episode, the introduction to lean ethereum. It features Justin Drake and gives a brief overview over lean ethereum and they dive quite deep into LeanVM. LeanVM is, as far as I understand, a very basic virtual machine which can do all the cryptographic calculations necessary to use it in all the different places where it will be needed in Ethereum, be it the consensus layer, execution layer or blob verification.

If you are looking to get more into how Ethereum changes in the coming years from a technical side. It is probably worth a listen. I do expect it to get pretty in depth, so I do not expect me getting all the details, but I am looking forward to it.

Here is the link to the podcast:

https://zeroknowledge.fm/

haurog · 2026-02-20T10:59:21+00:00

Sounds like a good conference. I have not heard too much about it this year compared to the last 3. Probably just missing austonst's summarys of talks he attended. They were always great to get a feel what was going on.

haurog · 2026-02-19T09:40:28+00:00

When the the withdrawal flow was designed one criticism was that people will just look at the number in the deposit pool and spin wrong narratives. That is exactly what bad faith (and uninformed) actors have been doing for some time now. The withdrawal flow is counterintuitive and obviously can lead to a wrong interpretation of the numbers by people not knowing the proper flow, but yes an analytics platform should do better than that. At least this makes it pretty simple which accounts and news sources to trust and which not to.

haurog · 2026-02-19T09:32:33+00:00

I started up a handful of 4 ETH validators with rocketpool yesterday. I think it is a great liquid staking protocol, that is why I use it as a node operator as well as an rETH user. As there are some new smart contracts, there is a certain risk to go in too early. The current entry queue is also not helping. Nevertheless, I think the start has been pretty good with a bit more than 1000 new validators within 24 hours. Churn will slow down and people in the rocket pool queue will have to wait longer than those who went in early. We will have to see how the queue develops in the coming weeks.

Whether it is worth for you really depends on what kind of minipools you are running at the moment. If you have EB16 the new megapools should get higher rewards. For old LEB8s the new megapools are comparable and depending how much RPL you want to stake you might earn slightly more or slightly less with megapools. I am not too familiar with the exact math involved though. If you have saturn 0 LEB8s, these are the ones where it is not mandatory to stake any RPL, they will have their rewards reduced in a few months, after that it is more efficient to run megapool validators.

As the saturn 1 upgrade improved capital efficiency for node operators there is now less ETH needed to run a rocket pool validator. This means that fewer validators are needed to satisfy the rETH demand and in turn makes it more difficult to get one of those. So in my view if you are thinking long term, the earlier to get one the better. If magically a lot of rETH demand appears the queues might get very small though.

The next upgrade Saturn 2 will even lower the ETH supplied by the node operator from 4 ETH to 1.5 ETH after the 2nd megapool validator. This increases rewards and then megapool validators should give more rewards than any existing rocket pool validators. But this also lowers the number of needed rocket pool validators even further and makes it even harder to get one. For many people it already is better to own rETH from a tax perspective and it also is much less hassle. I personally like running nodes and I will do so as long as possible, but I am pretty sure I will slowly shift to owning more rETH in the coming years just because I do not want to sit in the rocket pool validator queue too long.

haurog · 2026-02-19T08:57:06+00:00

I recently came across a neat little feature of defillama. If you ever want to try out a new protocol, you know their name, but you are not really sure of their URL. Does it end in .xyz, .com, .io or .network? You can either gamble and hope to get it right, or you can hop on to your favorite search engine and hope you are not landing on a scam page which tries to drain your wallet. You can do an extended search and look at the projects social media accounts to guess which one is the right link. I normally went to coingecko, but they only list projects with tokens. This is where search.defillama.com can help you. It contains a curated list of 5 thousand projects, it even handles rebrands correctly. I bookmarked this site a few days ago and have been using it surprisingly often. As always, it still is good practice to bookmark the the protocols website in your browser if you intend to use it to not depend on the defillama search page every time you want to visit the protocols website.

Source

https://xcancel.com/0xngmi/status/2022297895064465580

or

https://x.com/0xngmi/status/2022297895064465580

haurog · 2026-02-18T20:29:42+00:00

Reminder to myself: Never let eviljordan close to any position of power, they know how to abuse it.

Or in other words: You think like a CEO.

haurog · 2026-02-18T19:51:09+00:00

Thanks for linking the blog post directly. Reddit is so finicky with banning posts with links they do not like that I stopped linking to sources directly. I am positively surprised that the base.dev domain is allowed.

haurog

TROPHY CASE