 Thank you so much all of you folks for coming and especially thank you so much for our panelists that you made it here and I'm very excited to have many interesting people on the stage here today so yeah let's get into it I would say let's start with a round of introductions so please tell us what project are you from what you work on within the project and we are a DEF CON so mention maybe your favorite cute animal or something like that favorite cute animal of yours sure my name is Paul Hauner co-founder of Sigma Prime which is the company that maintains Lighthouse also I guess a co-founder of Lighthouse I've been working on Ethereum staking since about 2018 was involved in founding Lighthouse I've written a good chunk of the code on that and now in the day to day I'm kind of I guess overseeing project managing still engineering as much as I can my favorite animal is a quokka Australian animal I love quokka so much yeah okay hi I'm Chris I'm co-founder of company called L2B and the tool stands not for Ethereum 2 but for layer 2 so we're working on researching and providing analytics for different layer 2 scaling solutions and we're also running a bunch of nodes including if to point out node there is no hello I'm Diego from Ethereum now the founder of the project our main goal is contribute to the decentralization of of the field network by providing some kind of images for for this kind of devices like a Raspberry Pi or rock 5 and turn them into a full Ethereum node pretty much automatically and this way I make it easy for for regular users from users to run a full node in these low power and resource constraint devices and so this way we can facilitate this for for people to run to run also come in my name is Nick Sorkish I am I work at East Acre I think staker is a completely volunteer run organization and we facilitate community education and staking encourage people to stake we provide guidance and do technical support for stakers so we're just connecting stakers to the appropriate protocols that they can use to stake oh my favorite animal can I be boring and just say a cat my favorite animal is the cat as well I have to wait I have to oh I love cats and three cats it's amazing I think it's kind of right Ethereum culture vibe but there are so many cat people here and I mean cats are a great source of entropy right I mean it's also something which is which is important okay anyway thank you so much for the introductions and I'm Mario have a line from Ethereum Foundation the protocol support and yeah so the merge that's something which I've been also contributing to it congrats oh yeah congrats whoa it happened but we celebrated a lot the merge so like we are over all the celebrations and now I think it's time to discuss what's next because the merge the merge was just the beginning there is no time to rest and we need to build right and yes so maybe let's start with some reflection so how how is the merge for you for your project but especially what it changed was there some challenges that you had to overcome and now after the merge what are you facing some some new issues new challenges new changes in in your projects yeah and from our side we were running nodes on Raspberry Pi's we have several several boards and after the merge we were facing too too many issues first of all we we've seen from some clients some issues with performance and later we realized that the Raspberry Pi was a little tight because the hardware requirements after the merge rise a little so this is a device from 2019 and it's a little old and we are struggling to get nodes in sync with a Raspberry Pi we really achieved this with geth and and in boost but it's it's becoming a little harder for us to to keep up with the chain on on a Raspberry Pi but hopefully there is a new device coming up this this month called rock 5 that is much more powerful and actually we are validating with this with this device and with Bessio and Tecus so it is a really powerful device and it's running great so for one side hardware problems in terms of performance but from the other side we're still can run full nodes in Ethereum with these kinds of devices so okay I guess that's my turn okay so as I said probably I'm the least experienced person here in in terms of if POS but like just barely like one month ago I was pinned up about you know if POS nodes to to prepare for the merge everything went smooth so my experience with the merge itself was was really great but in my previous life I was a DeFi engineer I worked at MakerDAO and now I've started running a survey within my colleagues you know blockchain engineers DeFi engineers like do you know how if works after POS and the answers are no they don't have a clue and I I know like 50 percent about I think the word after POS I think the biggest challenge now is like education there's a lot of like you know talks about if to point out whatever but they are outdated because you know the spec changed so much and yeah that's that's that's a huge challenge I think right now I'm gonna echo that just because progress is happening so crazy quickly everything becomes so out of date so quickly that people come to us and they say I'm using this guide but this thing didn't work and all of a sudden this command is different and so education is one of the things that Eastacre focuses on and it hasn't really changed before or after the merge we did have a month or two around the merge where we were helping people prepare for the merge but now it's it's just focusing on education documentation and matching people to the appropriate protocol cool yeah so working on a consensus client implementation the merge was kind of like a four-year project for us so it's been going for a while it's been stressful it's been fun it's been really enlightening the merge itself was it was a little bit of an on event actually which is kind of what we wanted it went better than any of our tests so yeah it's been it's been interesting just trying to figure out what to do in a post merge world there's plenty to do but yeah just picking them picking up the paces doing a lot of monitoring analysis keeping the lights on yeah thank you so much for all the answers we well we touched many important topics there and I would start with with the node requirements so or also complexity of running nodes right so now after the merge we need a bit more complex setup before I was doing workshops for running nodes which is like download and run this right maybe with specific comment and now you need to download two things you need to figure out the TWT path and and also the hardware requirements would up like a huge goodness to determine arm on for for being able to validate on on arm devices but so what is your take on this what do you what do you think is now how can we tackle this challenge of not just the node requirements it's more like the protocol topic but especially especially the complexity of running basically different piece of software at the same time in terms of validators is very important because we want easy home-staking experience so yeah how can we achieve this what what is happening there and with L2s by the way it's also it's all that is this because especially with optimistic collapse we want to be able to run L2 node we want to be able to create fraud proofs and should be also easy experience so yeah how do you how do you see that how do yeah I I think that complexity is it's not a problem here because the difference between running a node permitting post merge wasn't that different but what we've seen in particularly in our discord channel is people that as they cannot get in sync the notes and they are struggling with with concentration layer execution layer they they they were stressed because the validator were offline and and that's something that concern us because yeah if you cannot get your body later online it's it's problem because people get the stress I mean for us it's not a problem because we are in IT maybe 15 20 years we are used to it but regular users are not and my main concern is well if there are no much difference between running a node at home a validator at home why I don't go to a pool I take my 32 years send it to to a pool and and and that's it I don't take this responsibility I don't get a stress so that's a concern in terms of of synchronization of a stake yeah and I think that it could be really great if there's some way of incentivizing the stake at home I don't know a protocol level or how but it could be great because if not maybe people are going to go this way of go to to to pools or or these greatest changes that give you the service so yeah it's it's my main concern after the match a little bit of history on me I I got into Eastaker because I started staking and when I ran a validator I saw a lot of comments in the subreddit that I was using to set it up that like oh you have to be really good with command line to do this you have to have Linux experience you have to be a developer and I was like I am none of those things I I successfully set up a validator and so I started commenting in there and being like no this can be done by anyone there are lots of tools to reduce the complexity of it and we do need to like support those tools support those tools more so that they are well fleshed out and have good documentation and Eastaker aims to maximize the decentralization of the network which means that we want people not depositing their 32 ETH and all in a centralized exchange for example and so we really just need people to we need a centralized a centralized place where people can go to to get the information that they need because right now there are a bunch of different protocols putting out a bunch of different information and it's really difficult to find all of your options all at once and find what the best option for you is like you don't have to be you don't even have to use command line really to set up a node if you use DAP node or any of the other avado or Wagyu or any of the tool staking tools that are built out and so that that sort of needs to be illuminated a little bit better yeah I echo that I think the I think the clients generally are not particularly good at making things usable for non developers I think the the way that we hire is usually for people who are more systems programmers so people who are like kind of thinking about you know like what it what are the bits look like coming out of your networking interface and we're not it's not something we're interested in and in generally and not something that we're particularly good at is is like thinking from the perspective of someone who doesn't isn't familiar with using the command line and stuff like this so we really like we do our best to try and make it so that it's some like it's straightforward and it's clean and that usually leads to it being simple but I think it's really a place where the community needs to come in and help is when it comes to usability so like at stake with like supporting with people how to use things and I know there's like nice nose and some other initiatives out there to make it so that you can kind of wrap the creating a node into a like a user interface or something that's easy to use I think it's a really good place for people to come along and and innovate because if you think about it the amount of people who are like comfortable with maintaining a node on command line interface who are also interested in Ethereum is such a teeny tiny amount of the world and who has 32 that's like already a teeny tiny amount of the world yeah so if we if we try to keep it at the people who can like run a validator a 32 week validator with a hundred percent effectiveness you're going to get a very centralized set of operators yeah thanks so much right it's I noticed this totally on the workshops when I'm setting up help somebody to set node and the command line comes in and just wall just get scared like that's that's crazy thing why would I use this this devils for the command line yeah that's that's too much for most of the people and I really very much appreciate tools which make it easy also to remote arm I mean just fleshing it and and running it's it's it's there are other options like that don't go about or that make is they have for this great interface web with many or is this two clicks and you have a node so yeah I mean there are other solutions as command line our project is yeah it's focused on on this kind of devices a lot of devices but overall there are other places that make it easy for users to to run a nodal or validate so I mean even with Ethereum on arm or this eat dockers kind of stuff it's still command line but it's minimum amount of commands right so it gets like doable even for people who can get scared first yeah I think that people with without the technical skills would be able to run and if you don't know yes it's documented it's you you have to follow the guide and and yeah I mean it's better that you have if you have Linux experience for example she said but yeah but yeah you could even even run a node with with no with no technical skills so I have pretty fresh experience of running if POS node and actually that the biggest problem for me was that you know you need to realize that now you're running two pieces of software together right like consensus client and the execution client and I think like the documentation that I read didn't make it like crystal clear for me and that was like one thing but then you know the marriage I was totally not sure if it's gonna work if it's like correctly configured because it's like it's it's it's been working but I wasn't sure if like that you know the engine RPC works correctly like I think after merch it's like gonna be easy to realize that it doesn't work because it's not gonna be thinking but you know during the match I was like okay I have totally no clue it's gonna work like we're not staking so it's not it doesn't take a huge deal but still it was kind of stressful and you know like now we have like you know this modular to two parts of the client and in the future we're gonna have new module new layers like I know a data availability layer on top of VIP 4844 and it's gonna be even harder for people to run all that stuff so yeah again docks we are getting there and yeah first I want to ask what kind of documentation you read whether it was prism okay okay I wrote the Ethereum org documentation or running notes so I wasn't clear yeah but I was I had trouble explaining it like I realized how much how much complexity I'm adding to the documentation there but like so just to sum it up what I believe we agree on it's very useful to have the automatic setup tools which minimizes the technical requirements also because like I'm not sure if I said up correctly or I leave some security security hole there and so on and also the education it's really important huge good as to eat steak or for that and now so regarding upcoming stuff now like the merge opened many doors opened many interesting possibilities and like generally before 4844 we already mentioned one thing but but are there any other than that or even even including this what are you now excited for or maybe afraid of what are the biggest biggest upcoming things for for the Ethereum which will influence you this coming yeah okay I can kick off this discussion so for me like I was surprised to learn that you cannot stake more than 32 if at the same time right right now I mean you need to have separate like validators validate the clients yeah yeah and I found it quite strange especially for like you know this big staking post like and I'm excited that this is gonna be fixed I think in the in the future even your future I'm not sure here but that was something unexpected to me and also like you know the reasoning behind like you cannot do this right now was also pretty interesting to learn thank you so coming up soon in the protocol will be withdrawals which I think are pretty exciting so there's an EIP out there that is pretty well supported by the teams and it seems like that's gonna happen so that'll be automatic withdrawals to the execution chain so it means that if you've already withdrawn or if you do withdraw and then at some point your it's just gonna appear as in your F1 address and you can claim it and then for people who are still validating once you get over 32 F maybe once every couple of months or something like this it'll be just kind of dropped into the execution chain and you can get at it so that'll be pretty exciting I think I think the panel is only inspiring people to build things is that is that right let's say yes yeah okay so the what's interesting with that is that it'll dump the F into a an address but it won't trigger any code it won't do code execution so typically like in a theorem if you do an F transfer you can you can when it lands in the account you can trigger some smart contracts to create a log and then people can know that they got the rest that won't be the case in this event because it's just just to clarify like because it's kind of country initialized by the protocol right so that's the current specification yeah that's right so there is a slight complexity to it that when in the early days of the beacon chain we weren't sure how withdrawals are gonna work so it was a BLS key that you put in as your withdrawal credentials that's now what people now we decide that we're gonna withdraw into an Ethereum address so that means that users are gonna need to users who have used the BLS withdrawal credentials which is probably most we'll need to submit a message on chain signed by that key that that that elects a Ethereum address to receive those funds so I don't know how far I want to go into it here but yeah that so what once users have done this kind of once-off action then yeah the the withdrawals are gonna be automatic and they just land in there which I think is really cool because it's less for people to do it's less stuff happening on the network it's cool so you mentioned that the withdrawal can be yet another way to force if into an account without code execution it's like the self-distract trick now that's good to know it's actually how coinbase works at the moment so the mining reward is delivered in the same way so it's not it's not too too weird that next you had a question no no question but a comment go ahead following on the withdrawal topic I'm actually really excited for withdrawals because a lot of when people when the beacon chain launched there were very few options to stake and since people have staked they have not been able to withdraw and maybe change which protocol that they're using if they're not running a full node and so there's gonna be a lot of opportunity to shift things around and maybe address some of the centralization risks that have been brought up and so I'm excited for that and I'm excited for any documentation that's gonna be written up prior to that in about how to withdraw correctly and what protocols are the best protocols to deposit into if you're not running a full validator at that point or there could be people who have stacked 32 Ethan that time and want to run a full validator yeah from from our perspective after the merge realizing that you could create a block in this and in Ethereum with a device that consumes 10 butts was like whoa I mean this is this is amazing this is great this is feels great I mean yeah we didn't propose a block yet but we are still waiting so and on the other hand I am very interested in in two use cases that I I hope that once the merge went through and and tools are thriving that they were part of of the initial if in the sign this web 3n sorry stores decentralization it was swarm protocol we have IPFS as well and and decentralized messaging I think that these two cases are I hope that in the coming months or years get an impulse because I think that they're very important to success for for Ethereum yeah I'd love to see non-financial use cases I did really never imagine myself in a FinTech role yeah so I started here so I became to everybody asked you what are you doing on the blockchain what can I buy I mean well no no this is not about that I mean yeah that's why we're saying this thank you so much for the answers so yeah we tackled few important things here and there is actually big discussion in the community right now so what should be the priority whether it's for it for for whether it's withdrawals with the we should try to put them together in Shanghai or separate and so your voice of communities folks so what do you think has the priority for you what is considering maybe the complexity and whatnot what would you find more important and doable right now whether it's withdrawals or for it for for which I mean there are many other things but I will mention these two because we get into them and yeah so I guess for me obviously it's for eight for four which will help us with scaling Ethereum and I guess you know the the teams working at working on different client implementations can have like you know better knowledge about what to prioritize but the funny thing is that prism got pride apps got acquired by our bitch so I guess there will be more consensus there about prioritizing for 844 but yeah like I believe that you know Ethereum in the past failed scaling in scaling game and that's why not only things like you know Solana not only exists but also got traction but also things like polygon rights I changed and like you know user may my users might not realize that all the different security properties of associated with using these different blockchains or solutions so I think that should be like the the very high priority on Ethereum devs to solve or improve the scaling of the whole system and 4844 is like the easiest way to to accomplish that yeah I don't have a strong opinion about that but I would say that if if 4844 means scaling and lowering fees I would offer that yes from the perspective of running the node what do you think about it for it for like whether I mean there is a big overhead on the consensus client side by storing more data maybe Paul maybe Paul can consider it is it that significant polls I think I think it's the numbers haven't been chosen for 4844 but it's looking on the order of maybe like 200 to 400 gig extra disk space there'll be some more network usage as well so we're very sensitive to these things and we really don't want to set them high so I'm one of the guys that wants low values so yeah let's let's use it but yeah we're still figuring it out but there'll be an impact on disk and they'll be impact on network I think that the bottom that wouldn't be a problem with with network on this so I think it would be we will be good with this I'm not gonna pretend I have enough expertise to talk about what should be a priority at the protocol level but I would say not at the protocol level I think that just abstracting the technical barriers from the user or from the staker is the things that I see like an interoperability I don't know if you guys have had any issues but like when you make a deposit to the deposit contract going through like ledger metamask the deposit contract can have all sorts of issues and it would be great if those teams focused on the interoperability of those things yeah sure I thought I should let everyone else speak before a client has talked to hear to hear what people want because that's what we should be driven by and so the question of withdrawals or 4844 for me personally I am prioritizing withdrawals I feel like the mergers not really done until withdrawals are complete because I think that we're kind of we did the beacon chain on this promise that will let you withdraw one day and the longer that we do that it just feels a little dishonest to me so in my opinion the next fork withdrawals have to happen and then it's a question about whether or not 4844 comes with it yeah I think myself and the other developers kind of flip back and forth between like yeah yeah we can do 4844 no no no we can't do 4844 so yeah I'm not sure we're like we've we've had a bunch of meetings on it this week making progress checking it out be cool if it came in not explicitly for it or against it yeah thank you yeah so like considering the topic should be like what to build after the merge right I think we mentioned many great things I mean contributions on the protocol level to withdrawals to 4844 the testing and the staker infrastructure the education there is so many things to do right now one thing I wanted to add is light clients which after the merge can actually become usable thing and and that this can all I believe also largely advance the experience of running the node or just being able to participate without a third party right do we have time five minutes so I have one more question but maybe are there any questions from audience as well feel free to raise a hand just wanted to give a space yeah hi thanks for all the work all you and your team to do by the way curious what you think about home stakers and their folks using MEV boost and if you have any concerns around that yeah I mean I definitely have concerns about MEV boost and MEV I have been a little disappointed with how MEV has gone since the merge I think it's probably not anyone's fault perhaps of the way that we we coordinate the merge but I think that MEV has kind of showed up not in the same readiness state as the clients have so there's been some problems with MEV boost that have been a little disappointing from my perspective things that should have been caught already things that should have been caught with testing so I like I have a lot of respect for the flashbox team I think they've done a lot of good stuff but I'm still very very cautious about any MEV boost I also worry we've also seen some problems with other builders where they've been unable to produce blocks and they can get themselves in a position where the validator is already committed to a block and then they fail to actually follow up on their part and produce it which means the validator can't actually produce its own block so we've seen missed proposals due to MEV we're seeing a lot of late blocks due to MEV so yeah and I've also seen some of these scenarios where MEV like MEV boost or MEV builders have problems and they don't alert the community quick enough they don't come out with an announcement saying hey like we have a problem and we're not critical so please just turn us off until we fix it I haven't seen that from them so yeah I'm I'm actually a little bit unhappy with MEV in the state of it I think it'll get there my advice to people would be like if you if you cannot run MEV just don't because like it's better for the protocol and you're also not like you know sandwiching people just trying to like you know sell their money so but I can also totally appreciate why people would do it and I was one of the people that pushed for including the builder API into like including support like I pushed for consensus clients to support MEV boost because I knew it was gonna happen by some people and I wanted it to be safe so yeah that's that's my thoughts on it I'm particularly concerned with censorship because some some relays that are running on on countries like USA that you know some regulators says now that tornado cash is legal so these these builders will not include this these blocks with sorry these transactions with the tornado cash and this bothers me because if we are using MEV with for example flashboots are we are we censoring transactions maybe so if we are using their layer so it's it's a little concerning yes thank you so much for the question by the way it was that was my last question the censorship I wanted to drop the negative bomb on the end right but yeah so like the like you also mentioned it like there are because of the MEV boost because of the these relays the validers are currently censoring blocks and it's over 40% right now of blocks which are over compliant so no good and there is a the PBS which is I would say just a meme right now it's just like yeah there will be PBS will somehow solve it in the future but like the problem is that the longer we wait the harder it might be to solve right so Paul thank you so much for mentioning or like encouraging people actually not to run the MEV boost or I would say you can use non-censoring relays there are these options do you have do you have any other other yep sorry Paul the idea is to include MEV in protocol level I'm right or so as in what I said about including it in the consensus client yeah so the so well so pre before the merge we had MEV geth which was like if you wanted to do MEV stuff you needed to run this fork of geth in order to like to do this stuff and a lot of people were running it which meant that a lot of people are running a fork of a consensus client by a team that is not considered to be client developers so I thought that was not great so what we did with the consensus clients was was to add was to get flash bots to instead create a separate service and then we support an API to talk to it so what this means is that like flash bots no longer needs to fork all these consensus clients and then like either do a lot of work or jeopardize client diversity and it also meant that now the consensus clients choose when to use these builders is MEV builders so we have like fail safes in there to say like if the chain is unhealthy in a particular way then let's just like cut MEV because it could be the problem for it so at the moment like the protocol doesn't support it that the implementations kind of acknowledge that it exists and try to and try to do it safely I like my the way that I think about it is like drug use like it'd be great if it didn't happen but it's going to so let's make let's make it safe great yeah and then yeah and then in the future the protocol wants to support the ability for the validators not to be the ones that that build the blocks so whether those blocks contain MEV they probably do but that that'd be a bit of a better solution to it and if you to add folks if not I think we are yeah we are past our time and I would say huge thank you not just for attending this panel but especially for all the work that you do in your project it's it's what pushes the Ethereum well to succeed right so thank you so much again for your work for being here and yeah thank you so much for attending the panel