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In this installment of "The Protocol," hosts Brad Keoun, the founding editor of The Protocol Newsletter, and tech journalists Sam Kessler and Margaux Nijkerk, explore the following stories:
Censorship on Ethereum is Becoming a Problem
Four of the five biggest "block builders" on Ethereum are excluding transactions sanctioned by the U.S. government, data shows.
Bitcoin Mining: CENSORSHIP OR 'SPAM FILTERING?'
Opinions are divided in the Bitcoin community over the efforts by a new mining pool called Ocean, guided by the feisty developer Luke Dashjr and backed by Block Inc.'s Jack Dorsey, to weed out NFT-like transactions the project characterizes as "spam."
Columbia CryptoEconomics (CCE) Workshop 2023
This two-day workshop brings together practitioners, researchers, and academics to discuss challenges, recent progress, and opportunities in the economics of blockchain protocols.
PROTOCOL VILLAGE SEGMENT
CoinDesk’s Most Influential of 2023 - Fifty people who defined the year in crypto.
EPISODE LINKS |
Ethereum's 'Censorship' Problem Is Getting Worse
Bitcoin Inscriptions Divide BTC Community Amid Network Congestion, but Are 'Unstoppable'
Jack Dorsey Aims to Create Anti-Censorship Bitcoin Mining Pool With New Startup
Hot from Columbia University Crypto Economics
Most Influential 2023 by CoinDesk
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The Protocol has been produced and edited by senior producer Michele Musso and our executive producer is Jared Schwartz. Our theme song is “Take Me Back” by Strength To Last.
Audio Transcript: This transcript has not been edited and may contain errors.
Brad
Hello and welcome to the protocol podcast. I'm Brad Kahn here with my co-hosts, Margot Nykerk and Sam Kessler. First, please do not forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the protocol on coindisc.com. And now let's dive right into it with the latest news and developments in technology behind crypto and blockchains. In our first segment, we're gonna be talking about Ethereum's censorship problem. Sam, this was a story that you wrote yesterday as our feature for the protocol newsletter. Super interesting. I mean, high level topic blockchains. People think of these as, as networks that are free of censorship, or at least that's a, that's lot of the, the talking points behind them. And maybe what the promise is that it's not going to be governments or banks or whatever deciding who gets through, but your story showed something else is happening, Sam. Why don't you tell us about it on Ethereum?
Sam
Yeah, so I think you hit on the main theme here, which is that blockchains are kind of viewed as, the word they use is credible, or the phrase is credibly neutral. The idea being that governments, companies, regulators, so on and so forth are unable to sensor, like block or even treat transactions from one party differently than from another party. At least that's kind of the idea.
And that's just not how things have broadly worked out as a result of regulations and as a result of specifically government sanctions. So basically what this article is about is when tornado cash that, you know, Ethereum mixer program used to hide where transactions are from and to was sanctioned by the US government last year, there was a trend which we covered where some of the operators of the Ethereum certain sanction transactions, transactions that touched that tornado cash program in accordance or in accordance to their interpretation of the government sanctions. And that problem has, it seems, after getting a little bit better, gotten a little bit worse. And it all has to do with how Ethereum's block building apparatus works, which is a confusing jumble of words that we can talk about.
Brad
And you had some percentages in your story about kind of what we're seeing, Sam, which I think was kind of like the news of your piece, right? What did that show?
Sam
Yeah, so what we're seeing now is that 72% of blocks that are assembled for MEV Boost, which is a program used by all the validators or virtually all the validators, more than 90% that run Ethereum, 72% of these blocks that go through that program are coming from block builders who censor in the interpretation of one of our interviewees or filter transactions affiliated with Tornado Cash, presumably to avoid running a foul of OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Margaux
I thought this was really interesting because we spent a lot of time, I think, last fall talking about this, right, when these sanctions happened and there was like an almost like it seemed like it was like so existential in crypto Twitter, especially like in the Ethereum communities. But I wanted to ask you what's there's this disconnect, right? Because you do go to some of these censorship monitoring websites like I'm thinking of MEV watch info and I and I just logged on to it and they're saying here like oh It's only like 33 percent because it's on the relay side So like how do you square how do you explain this to people that? You know on the one hand when you're monitoring this stuff It doesn't seem it seemed like there's been this improvement, but on the block builder side you're talking about a different story.
Sam
Yeah, so that's a great question, Margaux I think there's two pieces to it. So the first piece is this problem, if you wanna call it that, of quote unquote censorship, has, like you've mentioned, shifted from one party to another. It used to be relayers, which is some class of operators on that MEV boost program, and now it's shifted to builders, which is a different set of operators on that program that are, are quote unquote, censoring. And to really tackle this question requires explaining at a high level what MEV boost is. And what it is, and I know you've written about it too, is it's this program designed to optimize the blocks that validators propose to Ethereum so that there is maximum or maximal extractable value rewarded to validators and other operators within the ecosystem. And all that is maximal extractable value MEV. It's this thing where you can preview upcoming Ethereum transactions and then profit accordingly, front running transactions, back-running transactions, adding transactions right after a transaction is about to hit. Um, and so on and so forth. So that's what the MEV boost program does. And it's cemented this whole layer of operators on the Ethereum blockchain. before transactions actually hit the ledger. And that's the most interesting part of this story in my view, which is like, there's only a few parties that are actually running this program that are running the entirety of Ethereum.
Margaux
That's really interesting. I mean, I guess this like brings us into this next scope of what you wrote about, about this like block builder side. Talk to us a little bit about like what this landscape looks like. What does this mean for in terms of like Ethereum and is it going down a path of like a big just, is Ethereum just in the hands of like a multiple of couple block builders basically?
Sam
Yeah, so there's a big concern in the Ethereum world that the chain is becoming more centralized because of this thing, MEV. So the way that Ethereum works at a high level is when users submit transactions to the chain, it used to be, and it still is, that they go into this pool of yet to be processed transactions called the memepool. And then validators, the operators who stake Ethereum and run the blockchain and validate transactions, they go into that memepool, scoop up transactions, and add them to Ethereum in a block and they get the corresponding fees and Ethereum rewards. Now that's all been messed. It's been made way more complicated by MEV because when transactions go into the memepool, MEV boost swoops in. So a marketplace of builders are the ones who are outside of the blockchain, not doing this on chain, but off chain, looking at the memepool and then scooping the transactions into MEV optimized blocks and then handing those blocks to Ethereum to its validators through these things called relayers, which just do that handoff. And so builders, relayers, those are two, and then there's these things called searchers that kind of snipe these MEV opportunities. All three of those new roles are kind of opaque. It's hard to see exactly what's going on there. And there's only a few parties that are running those new layers of the blockchain. And they have a ton of influence over what kinds of transactions make it on chain, because block builders now are the ones, not validators, deciding if your transaction gets added to the next block, meaning you can get certain transactions slowed down or more expensive if there's quote unquote censoring.
Margaux
I wonder, just like to close this, or go further into this, I wonder from your reporting, you talk to some really cool people in this piece who are like, it seems like very knowledgeable and very passionate about this topic. What in their opinion, if you talk to them about this, like still needs to be done to sort of fix this issue, or, sorry, did you get that? I don't know. What in your opinion needs to be done to fix this issue? And, and, Where is this going? Like what are they most concerned about if you know if this continues to go down where it's going?
Sam
Yeah, so censorship is, and centralization are top of mind for Ethereum's core developers, Ethereum's builders. And Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, he has put a big focus on this problem in the roadmap that he proposes and periodically updates that kind of serves as a sort of guiding post for Ethereum development. So there are certain updates there that are meant to address this. One is something called in protocol. Well, it's refers to in protocol proposer builder separation, which is this set of updates that could bring essentially what MEV boost does on to the Ethereum blockchain. Another thing that we're seeing is private mempools. The idea being that instead of submitting your transaction to a global Ethereum memepool, you submit it to a private pool of transactions that can't be censored or filtered or so on. But this specific update that I just mentioned goes into why this is so hard to tackle because it does move some of Ethereum's problems elsewhere. So if you use a private mempool, now you're probably paying a fee to somebody. And so you get middlemen just like you had in web two. Or it makes things more opaque. It's pretty transparent for all transactions to go.
Margaux
Mm-hmm.
Sam
You know, to the same memepool. And that's frankly not happening now. There has been a big shift in favor of these private mempools to get around these MEV problems of censorship, centralization and so on. It's really interesting.
Margaux
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Brad
You know, one thing that I think is interesting is just to step back and you have a lot of the ideals, a lot of the talking points on blockchain and it's so complicated and you start to really dig in to the details kind of get into the nitty gritty and you realize it's so far from those ideals, right? And its current state of development. But also, as the industry evolves, new instances of centralization pop up, right? So even just this year, we've seen LIDO kind of burst onto the scene and they're
Sam
Mm-hmm.
Brad
Okay, you know, it's super interesting. You have these ideals and then you start to really dig into the details of what's going on. And you do find how different things are actually from those ideals. And you have to really, really get into it and understand it and kind of start to see, okay, yeah. There's centralization there. You know, it's like whack-a-mole, right? Also the new episodes of centralization will pop up as new things come along. I think that's pretty interesting. It's not just on Ethereum. We've been covering this story this week about what's happening on Bitcoin, of course, the Ordinals inscriptions that some people love. They talk about it as NFTs on Bitcoin, but it's created a lot of congestion and a lot of the hardcore Bitcoin maxis really hate this stuff. And so there was one mining pool, it's the one that's backed by Jack Dorsey that just raised a ton of money run by this guy, Luke Desh Jr. is sort of the leader figurehead there. But they were trying to...get rid of these ordinals transactions, but they call it spam. And they've changed the tweak on their mining pool so that it avoids, they use this implementation called knots instead of the usual Bitcoin core that actually filters out what they call a spam. So, you know, some people would say that censorship, they call it spam filtering, you know, so it's just something that all these blockchains are facing. It's kind of centralization hunting, is what we're doing here. But all right, let us move on to the next topic, which is, you know, Margaux, you were at this conference this week, yesterday at Columbia University, their blockchain conference. Any heavy hitters there? Tell us about that conference.
Margaux
Yeah, so I went to the first day of the Columbia Crypto Economics Workshop. It is organized by the Columbia Engineering School, I believe, alongside with the Ethereum Foundation. So this is the second year running. I think last year, what I heard was that it was a lot smaller. It was like 50 or so people. I don't have the exact numbers, but I'm in the Telegram group and there's about 230 people in the Telegram group, so it's grown. it was really interesting, I only went to the first day, the second day is today. There's a lot of, like it's sort of at the intersection of crypto and blockchain technology as well as academia. So a lot of like well known industry folks who, you know, do research who teach, have like came to our at this conference and they're giving lectures to some pretty like hardcore blockchain, Ethereum, like Ethereum focused enthusiasts. I think they tried this year to make like some emphasis on not just Ethereum, like they had someone from, or they have someone from Solana who's there today.
And yeah, it was pretty cool. It was like, I felt like I was back in school because you just like, they're just sitting there all day long listening to like different lectures for like an hour and a half. And you know, and then you can get up and ask some questions and you have like a 20 minute break, but it's like pretty serious. Like it's pretty like hardcore.
Brad
And who are some of the key people there, Margaux?
Margaux
Well, OK, so I pulled up the agenda. From the Ethereum Foundation, I mean, I spoke to Justin Drake for a little bit. He's helping organize it. It says Danny Ryan's on this. I wasn't able to talk to him. I also didn't run into him, so I can't confirm or deny he's there, but he's on the agenda. So I trust that he's involved in it. And there's Ed Felton from Off Chain Labs, the developer behind Arbitrum, Ben Fish, who's the CEO of Espresso, which is looking to decentralize sequencers. That's also a bit of a hot topic right now. I spoke to Sriram from Eigenlayer. He spoke a little bit about re-staking. Who else? Ari from Chainlink, who's teaching at Cornell Tech as well. He's the chief scientist at Chainlink.
And then I ran into some folks who work at the EF, Blocknative, I spoke to some folks, who else? Starkware, I ran into someone I knew there. So yeah, there's some pretty hardcore people. And even just the presentations itself, it's not like your intro to blockchain kind of lectures. It's like there's complex equations, and I have no math background, okay? I look at this and it's a little bit gibberish to me.
Um, but yeah, it's, it's definitely, um, not for the week, but it was really cool. It was really cool. Cause you get a lot of like FaceTime with these people. Um, and it's still quite small. So whoever's listening, you want to come next year, I highly encourage it, but like, please don't make this too big. You know, like I, I loved having that like FaceTime. So if you're listening, yeah, if you're listening, like great, come along, but don't tell your friends, don't tell your friends.
Brad
Right success could be the biggest killer. Yeah
Hahaha
Sam
Did you get the sense that there were any specific topics that people were super interested in this year? I know like at all the conferences I've been to, it feels like there's always like some theme, like last year, a lot of these conferences were all about zero knowledge. Before that, there was a bunch of stuff about scaling and layer twos generally. Was there anything like that here?
Margaux
Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I've only went to day one, day two today, and I'm not really planning on going, so I can only speak for this one day. I would say, like, zero knowledge was not a topic this year. I think that we've moved past that in this phase of where we are in Ethereum. I think, yeah, I think restaking, I think when it comes to sequencers, like a lot of activity that's happening sort of around the L2 space, also MEV.
Sam
Interesting.
Margaux
I think is still of interest and sort of the infrastructure layer, things like that, were a bit of a focus for day one.
Sam
Now I'm curious, did anybody talk about the price of any of these assets at this technology conference?
Margaux
I actually didn't hear anything about Price itself, which is interesting, right? Because they have Crypto Econ in the name, but yet it's the engineering school that's working alongside it. It's not like the economics department at Columbia, though again, I don't speak for Columbia. I didn't really talk to anyone who's organizing it from the Columbia side. But...
Brad
Economics.
Sam
Mm-hmm.
Margaux
Yeah, so it was definitely, I mean, I think overall, I have noticed that there's a little bit more of a light hardness when it comes to the crypto space because of these prices that are bouncing back up. I think I spoke to some folks and they were like, yeah, it's been like a rough six months with winter, but I feel like over the last two weeks, like people started to ask me just generally again about crypto. So you know, there was like a little bit of a like a cautious optimism going around. Maybe it's just the holidays, you know, maybe we're just in holiday mood and everyone's happier.
Brad
I mean, haha, kaput!
Well, I mean, one of my talking points is, you know, blockchain is the only is kind of the only technology, you know, maybe in history, this is probably not true, but I mean, in recent history, that has had its own market for speculating on itself. You know, usually it's Wall Street every other technology that's coming along. Here you have crypto speculating on crypto. And so you have these people who are super hardcore, programmers and entrepreneurs trying to build these projects. And yeah, there's this like crazy crypto market that's just sort of happening around them. And it's like, if we were in Biddle season during crypto winter, maybe the... focus starts to move away from them as people just start to focus on price go up. But at any rate, all right, well, let us take a break there. When we come back, we are going to have a fascinating recap of some of the blockchain tech people that made it onto CoinDesk's most influential package, which was so cool and published this week. We'll be right back.
< BREAK >
And welcome back. We are going to jump right into our protocol village segment talking about most influential as Coin Desk magazine, managing editor Ben Schiller wrote this in the protocol yesterday, so just remembering that I wrote it. It's a list, not a ranking. People are like, hey, why is he first? But at any rate, it's a list, but there are some people who are at the top of the list. That is true. But at any rate, Margaux, Sam, if both of you actually spent quite a bit of time writing profiles for this, and it is a huge effort by CoinDesk every year led by Ben Schiller. He does such a good job of with Daniel Kuhn. They do such a good job of putting this together. But at any rate, you know, the list
Starting off with Casey Rodarmor, who is, you know, we were just talking about the Ordinals. He was kind of leading that charge. And, you know, it was such a big innovation on Bitcoin. But, you know, a lot of these, the people that we chose to profile in this package are not surprisingly the people who are sort of attached to some of the year's biggest themes in blockchain.
And, well, Sam, what were some of the, you did a couple of the profiles, who were some of the couple of the people that you profiled?
Sam
Yeah. Um, so one person and one Dow, one of the people that I profiled was Martin Kopelman, who's the head of, um, Gnosis chain, co-founder of Gnosis chain, which is a side chain to Ethereum and he's a pretty vocal, um, uh, I guess proponent of the Ethereum ecosystem, but also critic of, uh, certain trends and its infrastructure specifically, um, you know, tying back to what we were talking about earlier today, he was quoted in my piece about the censorship problem and MEV. So he's a big blockchain idealist, one of these people who came at things from first principles around credible neutrality and stuff and has gained an audience as a result. Then the other person or people that I profiled were the Lido DAO, the token holders of the LDO token which is Lido's token that are the governance body behind that organization, that protocol Lido, which is the biggest, if you want to think of it as one staker, the biggest single staker on Ethereum. Pulls together a bunch of Ethereum, stakes it onto the Ethereum blockchain, and then spreads that stake between a bunch of different infrastructure operators, and as a result has gotten about 32%, I think is where we're at now, of all staked ETH, which I think you alluded to this earlier, Brad, is kind of a scary number. But the LidoDAO has decided not to cap that 32% to 33% or anything, the point at which they can start kind of muddying with how the chain operates. So that's why that was one of our most influential.
Brad
Just to take a quick, you know, a lot of this most influential list is people, right? And here we are talking about the Dow. Do you have any kind of the backstory on that? The decision to, yeah.
Sam
Yeah. So, so that is so in terms of, are you asking about that specific decision? Sorry.
Brad
Well, you know, why put an organization on the list rather than a person?
Sam
Yeah. So in this specific case, the reason why we opted to put an organization on here is because in the sort of blockchain world, it does feel like these DAOs, these sort of, in a way, amorphous, you know, groups of people are having a ton of influence and more influence than any particular individuals in how the ecosystem operates. And the reason why I think it's interesting is because like, you know, in reality, there are individual people or big companies that do sit at the core of some of these DAOs because they hold a lot of tokens. But it is interesting to kind of nod towards this new sort of, if you want to call it a corporate structure, governance structure, and so on. It's a nod to how that space is developing, and maturing I wouldn't be surprised to see a sort of like Citizens United of the crypto world at some point as we try to figure out how we think about these blobs of people and whether they're individuals. Anyway, it's kind of just an odd to add to that. And this was one of the most influential ones for sure.
Brad
Well, let's, Margo, let's go over to you. Who were a couple of the profiles that you did for this package?
Margaux
Yeah. So I wrote about Jesse Pollock, who is the head of protocols at Coinbase. He's basically the figure who has led the team at Coinbase to come out with their base layer two network, which was, you know, we've talked about it a bunch on the show that it was, it's the first time a crypto exchange has come out with a layer two. And that sort of started another trend, right? We've seen that with, with Polygon and OKX coming X1 chain and Kraken, which is supposedly coming out with their own. So he's had, he's been, I think, a major influence in terms of bringing this new sphere of builders and innovators to the space. And tied with that, Carl from OP Labs was also featured. And he's the CEO of...like I said, the OP Labs, which is the developer behind the Optimism Blockchain, and they have come out with technology called the OP Stack, that's, you know, that base is built off of. So those two are sort of tied together. It's like a, it's a two-way story. Like, Jesse is credited for bringing this, these new faces to the blockchain, but also Carl is sort of the face of providing that technology, so that these people can, or these exchanges can go on chain, or coinbase can go on chain. That was two of them. And then the third one was Jordy from, Jordy Bellina from Polygon, who is sort of credited with spearheading their efforts for coming out with their zero knowledge EVM.
Brad
You know, just kind of tying back to our earlier discussion regarding the Columbia conference on people talking about things now that may become the hot topics in twenty four. Right. And so if you rewind and think about the folks at Ethereum Foundation laying this layer two scaling roadmap, right? And then this year it happened, you know, and it was, it's just like, we see these things in blockchain where it's just like, it just starts and then it's just mushrooms, you know, now we have so many of these layer twos all of a sudden. I don't know, any insight into that in any of your profiles?
Margaux
I mean, I think we're not done. Like, personally, I think we're not done with this layer two discussion. Like, yes, what we were getting at, like, this time last year, there was a lot of conversation on zero knowledge, even a little bit earlier than this time last year, so maybe a year and a half ago. But I think this is just the starting point. Like, I think, well, Jordy on my list is the only one that is related to the zero knowledge topic. And he emphasized that, like, this is just the beginning. We're going to see an explosion of ZK. And I think he's right. Like I do think he's right and I don't think he's just saying that because, you know, he works at Polygon and has to say that. But when it comes to base and, you know, the optimism blockchain, I mean, like, it'd be interesting. They have their own set of issues that they have to deal with when it comes to, you know, bringing fault proofs to their blockchain. But I think...this is not the, it'll be interesting to see where their projects go as zero knowledge chains become more and more like improve over time and become more used. It'd be interesting to see what happens to these optimistic roll ups. But I don't know, Sam, what are you thinking?
Sam
No, I agree with everything that you said. I do think that we're still in, we're both, we're still kind of in the earlier days when it comes to these layer two protocols because at their core, and if you kind of Google them, it's starting to come up more front and center. There are a lot of elements of this infrastructure that remain centralized. There's sequencers, relayers just the way or lack of the way they do fraud or fault proofs or the lack thereof in some cases, a lot of these ecosystems are still kind of shells or proofs of concept or MVPs, minimum viable products. And yeah, the tech itself still really needs to mature even if we're not talking about it, it's just going to take time for it to get there and for people to feel comfortable enough with the security in order to allow it to, you know, actually go to users because real money is going to go into these systems.
Margaux
Yeah, I agree. I, you know, just to wrap it up, I wanted to ask though, like, we don't like to predict the future, but I guess if you had a feel of who would make the list next year, like, who might it be? Because I will say that, you know, the top of the list was the guy, was about Bitcoin Ordinals, right? And that happened pretty early on in 2023. That was like January or February. I don't know. It felt like it was like the beginning of the year. So if, you know, we're looking at this year ahead, like, what do you think as of now could change? What could still make it into that next year's list.
Sam
That's a good question. I think we might see, hmm. Well, frankly, I think that we might see some industry people, sorry, some legacy financial industry people on the list if these ETFs are in approval. I mean, I don't know if this is as much a technology thing as it is just like a general note, but yeah, if these ETFs are in approval, which is expected between January 5th and January 10th. You know, see some big finance CEOs on that list. It's funny. Also, just looking forward, there's always that joke that the Forbes 30 under 30 list is kind of cursed because so many people go to jail on it. I don't know who on this list is going to go to jail. Hopefully nobody. But if you look at last year's list, I mean, CZ, what CZ might have even been on this year's list, but like Sam Bankman freed, hopefully doesn't become something like that in the crypto world. This most influential list, but that's another forward looking observation.
Margaux
Right. Yeah, well we have Caroline Ellison on the list this year, right? So yeah.
Sam
Oh yeah, sentencing's coming up in March. She did cooperate, so anyway.
Brad
Well, I mean, a couple, you know, we should wrap it, but you know, a couple of big themes that we do know for sure is number one, there's gonna be a Bitcoin halving. And you know, that's often kind of like year two of a four year bull market cycle, or at least that's what it's been in the past. So, you know, we may see tons of crazy stuff pumping in crypto and that could change, who knows how that's gonna play out. I mean, we know how unpredictable this space can be. And then second, there's a presidential election in the United States next year that is going to be not only affecting crypto policy, but just kind of the whole mood of the whole world will be kind of interesting. You got a little flavor of that at the Republican debate last night. But at any rate, it should be quite an interesting year. And, and as I mean, the, you know, the other thing we probably know for sure is that these blockchain technology is just not, you know, shows no signs of slowing down. But at any rate, thank you all for joining us today. Thank you, Margaux. Thank you, Sam. Thanks to our producer, Michele Musso, who makes us sound good in this, in the background. And that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the protocol podcast. If you have any questions or comments or story tips, please reach out to us at podcasts at coindesk.com subject line, the protocol. You can listen to us weekly on CoinDesk podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, please subscribe, please, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter. It's really good.
Sam wrote a great feature for it and that is usually the case. Sometimes Margaux writes it. But it's always really good. You should subscribe to the Protocol newsletter on CoinDesk.com. See you next week. Thanks a lot.
