Unchained - ETH Denver Debate: Should Testnet ETH Be Free or Have a Price? - Ep. 464

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

LayerZero launched a testnet bridge that allows users to swap mainnet ETH for Goerli ETH (GoETH), which led to a sudden emergence of a liquid market for GoETH tokens. This was a hugely controversial decision, as many in the Ethereum community believe that testnet tokens should remain free. At ETH Denver, Laura moderated a panel discussion about this hot topic with Bryan Pellegrino, cofounder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, Greg Markou, founder of Chainsafe and Matt Garnett, software engineer for the Ethereum Foundation. Show highlights: why LazerZero launched a testnet bridge for Goerli ETH (GoETH) the three reasons why Greg is opposed to Goerli ETH having a price why Bryan believes it is impossible for a permissionless testnet to have free tokens  the three types of constituencies that use testnets  whether the Sepolia testnet solves the issues with Goerli the upcoming Holli testnet and the problems it aims to solve how to create a permissionless testnet that takes into account the needs of developers from all over the world whether LayerZero’s move will create more problems in the future Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com FTSE Halborn Panel Bryan Pellegrino, cofounder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. Greg Markou, founder of Chainsafe Matt Garnett, software engineer for the Ethereum Foundation Links: Unchained: Goerli Testnet ETH Is Now Being Monetized CoinDesk: Start of the End? Testnet Goerli Ether Spikes to $1.60 as Traders Jump on Opportunity Meant for Developers LayerZero blog post: Public Goods by LayerZero. Alchemy: What is the Sepolia testnet? Ethereum (ETH) Developer Announces Plan To Launch New ‘Holli’ Testnet Later This Year Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You should not be arguing against permissionless structures ever. Virginalists will always be better than permission, period. Hi all, today's episode, recorded live at ETH Denver, is about the recent drama in Ethereum over TestNet, in particular, ETH on the girly testnet. These are the test blockchains that developers use to simulate their projects, whether they're the devs working on the main software clients for the blockchain, or if it's the node operators, stakers, and miners, or if it's the application developers.

As you'll hear, the question of whether or not there should be a monetary value on TestNetEath quickly became an extremely contentious issue, which is why, at the last minute, I was invited to moderate a debate at ETH Denver on the topic. I hadn't been intending to go, but I spontaneously decided to, two days in advance, and I'm so glad I did. The debate at ETH Denver was pretty heated, as you'll hear, and I myself am undecided about the best way to proceed. tweet at me or the Unchained Twitter account to let us know what you think on the topic.

The debate participants are Brian Pellegrino, chief executive officer at Layer Zero Labs, Greg Marco, CPO of ChainSafe, and Matt Garnett, software engineer on the Go Ethereum team. And now on to the show. Web3 projects lost nearly $4 billion of crypto assets in 2022, but nothing is more expensive than losing trust. Secure your company with Hallborn's best-in-class security advisory solutions. Visit halborn.com for more. Futsi Russell, a leading global index provider, has applied its trademark expertise, governance, and structure to digital assets, offering institutional quality data to build, manage, and measure investment portfolios.

The Exchange-Vetted flagship index series measures the investable digital asset market, from large cap to microcap. Get your index data from a market leader. Find out more at Futsi Russell.com slash digital asset. Buy, earn, and spend crypto on the crypto.com app. New users can enjoy zero credit card fees on crypto purchases in the first seven days. Download the crypto.com app and get $25 with the code Laura. Link in the description. So the Ethereum community has been up in arms about something that Layer Zero did a little

over a week ago. And I think that the reason people feel so passionately about it is because it really gets at what the values of the Ethereum community are. Why don't we have Brian just start with your story of the problem that Layer Zero Labs saw and what solution it was that you thought you could offer? Yeah, sure. I mean, basically, pretty straightforward. It was like near impossible to get early, like very, very, very difficult. We, as we were building, you know, you'd go to the faucets, faucets are down, faucets are broken, faucets are out, you write scripts to camp the faucets.

You have to sit there for multiple hours slash days sometimes to get enough to deploy contracts, to put into contracts to actually do things to test. Like, it was just an onerous process. And just to set the stage, so Gurley-Eath is for a test not called Gurley. Yep. Then we have to going to Twitter and be like, all right, who's got Gurley-Eath? like how can we get some and ended up OTC buying from somebody on Twitter to get Gurley-Eath? Yeah, I mean, that basically, that was a base problem, very, very hard to get.

Basically, the most asked-for thing. So we service like 30,000 contracts on TestNet right now are built on layer zero, like thousands of unique applications, hundreds of thousands of users, millions of messages. By far, the most common thing we get is, like, can you give us some Gurley-Eath, right? like universally very annoying to get. For us, it was just like, okay, like, why should there not be some permissionless construct? Why do I need to go beg on Twitter and do this? Like, let's make something that just allows people to just get it on demand when they want.

And so for us, it was solving a pain point that we had as developers. And that was like, that was the intention behind. It was nothing more than that. And so basically at that point, you made it tradable. And so there was a price on it. And what eventually happened is, of course, speculators came in and the price went up and it became very expensive to obtain this. So this was... Very expensive is debatable. I think it's like 13 cents right now. So you can, for like

four cents you can get enough to deploy a contract. So there's like some excess fees you get in, but like very expensive is a spectrum. Yes. I think at the high it was like $1.60. Yeah, which means it would be like 40 cents to deploy a contract. But yes. Okay. So Greg feels very strongly that this was a bad move. So Greg can you explain why. Yeah, so I think from like a historical context, you know, when it comes to test nets and especially testes on Ethereum, we've always, like there's always been a maintained stance that, you know, this is a free public good for developers to access. And historically, it's always been a little

challenging to get, you know, test net eat. It's been kind of cyclical. But the core philosophy here is that it should be free and it should always be free for people because we don't know, you know, like to test and to experiment, like shouldn't have a cost associated to it. To assume that we can just like buy ETH or sorry, buy Tessnet ETH is also a bit of a privilege, right? Like I don't know what everybody's situation is. I don't know if you're able to spend money to get ETH. You might not even have ETH on Mainnet, which is like already the first. problem, right? If you can't even, if you're not even onboarded and you're just trying to

experiment as a developer new to the ecosystem, that is a barrier to begin with. The other problem that did arise with and where like I was pretty strongly on it was just like the negative criticism towards like the Gurley team as well. You know, we've been trying to fund people and give it to people who can distribute it for us as well as, you know, the final thing that like I made a smaller point on, but I didn't address because I'm not in that subject match field, but it's, you know, what do we have like tax liabilities and, you know, that come up and arise due to the fact that we're now putting a market and a price on this ETH? Does it only affect the people that bought? Does it affect everybody that's been

holding? It becomes a super tricky situation. And so that's kind of some of the three, you know, main points that I stuck with there. Go ahead, right. Yeah, we get pretty contentious already. All right. So my main point here, which I think is like pretty interesting, is like a blog. blockchain in general provides like one discrete unit of value and that unit of value is block space, right? Like block space is inherently both limited in supply and scarce. Like we none of us can like change Gurley to have a thousand X throughput like block space is the unit of value and block space is inherently scarce and finite. So there's like three ways you can do you like in an ideal world you would have a permissionless construct where anybody can get test net for free. But the problem and the reason you can't do

that is because if there's a button when anyone can get unlimited test net for free, then what happens is everybody pushes a button and now it is literally zero cost to spam the networks. Every block is filled. The mempool gets entirely stuffed and basically nothing can happen. Like you cannot have it be permissionless and free because it won't function. It's like a very basic construct of any blockchain. Like block space has value. So there's two things you can do after that. The existing construct that we had was permissioned and free, right? Where free is that you know there,

permissioned is there's a select group of people who get a large amount of girly eat. These are maintainers. These are whoever. And it's up to them to kind of dole it out to the people that they see fit or set up faucets or do whatever at a rate that arguably keeps the blockchain working, right, so that it is not free and unlimited and people aren't doing it. The problem is the faucets get spammed, right? All the faucets were getting drained. They were getting bought it. It was almost impossible to use the faucets because it does have value because the block space has value. And then faucets get more and more restrictive. faucets, you have permission faucets where you need to docks yourself. You need to docks your Twitter.

You need to dox your GitHub, whatever it is, to be able to get the Eath out of it. And at that point, you're getting 0.2 girly eth per day out of this. So that is one construct you could have, where it's basically permissioned but free, but there are gatekeepers and your gate kept on time, access and like social circle of the ability to like reach the people on Twitter to say, hey, I'm a dev, like, please give me some of this. The third option is permissionless, but you give it an explicit value. The block space has value. No, matter what. There is no like making block space less finite or less scarce. It has intrinsic value. And when you make it permissionless and explicit, you just expose what that value is based on the

market. And so like the argument that there should not be a permissionless construct and it should be permissioned is very contentious to me on my end because like on the base point that you will never be able to make it permissionless and free. It cannot happen. You will not do it. You can't do that now. You can't do a Sepulia. You can't do it with any chain. Yeah. So Matt can probably speak to this a little bit more clear, but we could very well have a function implemented and a custom op code built in pre-compile whatever to do some sort of drip where anyone could call it. That would be very manageable at the protocol layer. It's a question of whether that will be, wants to be implemented as a custom function for Tessnet specifically.

But then it will just get budded and again, the block space will get taken up. There's a There's only so many transactions you can fit into a block. There's demand for the filling up the blocks with transactions. The more application developers that build on the network, the more demand there is for that. And so like even if you drip, it's like minting money, right? You can mint unlimited money, but like the cost of a gallon of milk is not going to stay the same. It just gets more expensive. It will cost more expensive to insert transactions. I think you're really over-indexing on like the value of Gurley. And I think that the reason we're having a lot of the problems that we have today is that a lot of people think the girlie's not going anywhere.

They think I need to start acquiring girly while it's possible to acquire girly because it's going to become valuable. Either somebody's going to create a bridge to main net where I can sell this or this is going to be the only test net that we have for the next 10 years. I think if we create a system where we're actually deprecating these test nets over time, it's like why would I try to acquire a lot of girly ether, supposedly eat? Because we're just going to destroy it in three or five years. So I have another contentious point to this in that.

So test nets, go back seven years, go back even four years, 2018, there just weren't that many smart contracts written. Test nets were primarily for client devs to basically say, hey, the merge is coming up. Let's make sure Geph doesn't break and, like, bork the entire network as we go through these changes, right? That was the reason we had test nets, and those were the primary people using test nets. Now today, we have a huge number of application developers, and like, it sucks as an application developer to deploy UniV3.

They spin up pools, you spin up pools. People compose that, start having applications who are testing that, and then like, oh, network's deprecated, shut it all down and, like, migrate to a new network. Like, the application developers need a software cycle that goes alpha, beta, release, just like we have in normal software. Like, you have to have a production or semi-production environment to test this in. And if you need to, especially in a situation, this is why you're struggling now to get, like, chain link and all the infrastructure to move over to subpo.

I got them on in two days. You are getting them now because there's a big movement, but it's a manual movement. and all infrastructure needs to move. And like that is like a horrible experience for devs. You have to spin up this environment, strip it all down, and do it every time we duplicate a time. So before we keep going, I think something that would be super helpful for people to understand

is there's kind of like three main constituencies that use the test nets. So why don't we just explain that so we can kind of understand like there's competing interests and that's another reason why people are so mad about what's going on. So who wants to? Actually, Matt, why don't you do it? And while you're doing that, why don't you also give your take on how layer zero suddenly made Girl Eats tradable? Because we didn't get to hear your take on that.

Sure. Okay. So let me say my take on the test net bridge, and then I'll say, like, you know, my role is a core developer and how we use the test nuts. So my take on the layer zero bridge, I think it's hilarious. Like, this is what I think about in these systems. These are permissionless systems. Anybody could do whatever they want. I don't know, like, what kind of conversations you guys have.

over time when you were talking about this, but this is something that we anticipated happening at some point. Like, I think Dean Eigenman said two years ago, like, I'm going to build a TestNet Bridge for Gurley. And I was like, where is it? I can't wait. It's going to be great. But the thing that I kind of drew, you know, a little bit of frustration with was, like, announcing it and sort of virtuous signaling that this was a public good for everybody. I didn't really feel like the TestNet Bridge itself is like this public good. I think it's great for Layer Zero. I had no idea what Layer Zero was.

Probably not a fault of yours, probably a fault of mine. I don't know how Bridges worked very well. I think it was a great marketing scheme. It's created a lot of interest in layer zero and girly and all these things. And obviously we're on stage now talking about it. And this is a lot of free marketing. So I think it was like an surely great play. But I don't think that it was like something that's valuable for developers.

Maybe for a handful of developers is valuable. Okay, you can respond to this. Let me just say how I use test nets as a core developer. You're right. The test nets in the early days were very much like, let's make sure that the clients all work on these things. We use this to test syncing. We use this to test client compatibility, interoperability between all of these things. And today it's a lot less about that.

It's way more about application developers. And when we think about how to do test nets, how to deprecate test nets, how to add new test nets, we're very much thinking about how do we do this in a way that it's useful for application developers. It's still very important for us as core developers to use as a platform where we get to upgrade, we get to upgrade these networks before we upgrade main nets. Absolutely. I think that this is pretty much completely orthogonal at this point, though, to how application developers use it. So I don't really feel like as a core developer, how we feel about the

test that's is super important. I think we just need to be thinking, how is this useful to application developers? What do we need to do to make this useful for application developers? And I'm happy to talk more about things that we've talked about to try and remove this situation where there's a finite amount of test net tokens and people are trying to get them because we have talked about a few different ways adding an op code, having different withdrawal mechanisms from the beacon chain. We can get into that later. And 100% agree with you on the needs being orthogonal and that there is like a very, very real demand for client devs to be able to test. Like we need to make sure these things are not going to break the network. They're just different audiences in terms of what the developers need. Yeah. So does one of you want to then also describe the application developers and then the node operators who are also using these and what they're using it for just so we can like cover that to explain. Because the other thing is this wasn't that big of an issue until recently. So we need to explain how that. So yeah, start with the two other groups and then why it became a bigger issue recently. Yeah, so one of the other groups obviously is application developers.

Those are people building DAPs, unit swaps, the compounds, the defy NFT projects. They need a lot of test in ether to do run simulations and stuff like that. The other main group that is unique now, and this is really where the girly like strap came and started choking the supply. is from the amount of L2s and apps and POS. So anything that requires stake and lock, like POS, completely locks up a huge swath of Gurley, like 600K just to start the beacon chain. I sent that off two, three years ago,

and that was how we said. So there's like millions locked that we can never recover. Well, we can eventually recover with withdrawals. and then when we have other L2s and 1559 burning Tessnet ether constantly, it makes for the environment there to be very difficult. And, you know, when we built Gurley, we didn't anticipate it to, you know, go on this long. It was a hackathon project. It wasn't supposed to be serious. And, you know, there's a lot of ether from 2018 that's missing from that project or 2019.

I can't remember. Yeah. So those are the other two and kind of where a lot of the supply is. So one thing that people, you know, realized was, okay, this is a thing and we need to make sure the next test net kind of addresses this. So Sepolia was supposed to do that. And so when I was talking with some people who maybe, you know, aren't and just don't love what layer zero did here or oppose it, they were like, why can't they just use Sepolia? That's what people should be doing. So, Brian, do you want to address that?

I mean, like, at the end of the day, the problem we had, the immediate problem was getting Gurley Eath. That was a hard thing. That's where all the applications were. That's where our developers were building and interacting with constantly, because that's where most of the infrastructure is. Very, very easily could do it to Sibolia as well. You know, there is no hurdle to doing that. There's no hurdle to doing this to any chain. So I think most likely the reality is like moving forward, this sort of thing is out of the box. This will happen on almost every test. Like like it or not, there will be permissionless structures. So I think like the focus is like, as Matt was saying, is like, how do you build a better

test net? How do you actually build a test net that functions and serves the needs of application developers, which is a super important conversation to be had? Right, but am I, so can somebody explain? I thought Sepolia kind of had built in a, you know, a better way to distribute the coin so that there wouldn't. No, Sepolia has a way that validate, I believe that validators are like a select group, again, permission structure to basically mint Sepolia on demand.

but it doesn't change the amount of block space there is. It doesn't change the amount of like what can be done. So you can inflate the supply, but you still need to like, one, in some permission manner, distribute the supply and to ensure that, I know, the blocks, there's still value to the block space. So the same reason there were OTC markets on Gurley Prior. I mean, how full are girly blocks right now? Burly blocks are, I actually actually, actually, the bullet blocks are not full. Yeah, Supply blocks are definitely not full. There's a lot of subpoly blocks based on.

So Gurley blocks actually one application that we deployed, one single application, which was like the test net of CCTV, the circle thing, basically bricked Gurley for like two weeks. Like every single block we're full. There were like five days, like we were like falling behind and inserting transactions to be able to process them. So like there are periods where Gurley is like completely, completely full.

I actually just ran yesterday the number of transactions per block, but I don't have the exact number. I could pull it up. But like, that's just how, like, Ethereum-based blockchains work. Like, they will fill up and they will fall down. Like, it's going to be cyclical. It's always going to be cyclical. I think, like, the bigger problem is that, you know, by suggesting that there's,

and hey, there's free market. People can do whatever the hell they want. That's literally the point of why we're doing a lot of this. But, like, the problem I have is going, if there's going to be bad behavior or, like, where we're, and I'm defining bad behavior as like putting value to something that should be 100% free public goods so that we can try and actually onboard developers get people testing. If you're going to like, if we're going to have that because there's like OTC happening, I don't see why we should be like promoting further bad behavior by like further enabling it.

Like if it's going to be free, make it free to insert into blocks and every block will be full and spammed. It will be completely unusable. I mean, if we had a hundred and, if we had a hundred and twenty eight test net, chains, I don't think that we would be having this problem. Sure. In the value in the open market of those test net Eath would be effectively zero, right? It might be one, one hundred millionth of a cent or something.

So why did we not create another 16 chains? Why did we create a bridge? I'm very supportive of that. I'm unsupportive of saying having a permission structure where we need to dole out and decide who gets test net Eth, who can participate, everybody needs to come to us to get it is not the correct way. Having a permissionless structure where the value is driven to almost zero because it's a and people can test, 100% is the right way, and that is what we should be trying to do.

So you would be supportive of having proof-of-work test nuts? 100%. Why not? And it doesn't matter. You can spin up, right now, you have, I mean, you have L-2s. You have four different L-2s right now tied to Gurley. Like L-2 in demand, like demand for block space should move over. If you want to spin up 128 test nets, what the problem is for application developers is that, again, you are not going to have this consolidation of like a Composable infrastructure. What they want is to go and test chain link oracles in their application. They want to compose univet three pools. They said multi-chain was the future SuperChares. We can make that easier, but it's not there in general. It is not like what people want to test. So just to go back to this polly a question though, because when I did like the pre-interviews yesterday

there was a somebody made the point basically that like there's a lot of demand and girly, but really the application developers should be using Sepolia that that test net is like more for them. Is that not a thing or is that a thing? Yes. So for since DevCon and Bogota, we've been trying to tell people that Gurley is meant for staking. It's meant for people to test their infrastructure on staking infrastructure and for the time being the L2 infrastructure. And that Sepolia is meant for application development. and we've been saying this even before that,

simply because we've been watching the supply constraints happen. And it's been an ongoing issue because we haven't been able to get custom code built for a test net like Gurley implemented as something like Goetherium where we can try and solve some of this problem, retop up the faucets indefinitely. So we've been trying to push everybody to Sepolia for that reason. Okay. And is my understanding that, Brian,

you guys weren't doing that because you don't have the network effects on Sepulia that you need to do the kinds of tests you want to do? Not at all. Again, we can support, there's not a problem in getting Sepoliath right now because nobody uses subolia. There may be a problem getting subpoly eighth and whatever, six months from now, but there was a problem getting girly eat. That's the problem we felt that's the problem most of them.

Right, right. But what I'm saying is so, because what I've heard was, oh, they should be using sepolia because we have this problem with girl eat and you're saying, what is, what is, they should, right? It's not like there's not some dictatorship that says like, here is how you use blockchains. Like yes, Cipolia has attractive features for certain things. I think people should move to Cipolia, but people haven't. Right.

And you were saying you don't want to use it because there isn't that. We absolutely will use Cipolli. We support like 35 test nets right now. We will, we will connect to everything. Like we will use Cipollos. So why put the effort into creating the bridge for Gurley Heath rather than putting the effort that you spent on that, on, hey, guys, we should all be deployed to Cipolia right now. now. Gurley is kind of broken for us.

We did a public deprecation as people who are running Gurley nodes back around DevCon and so this launched well after that, after Gurley was already deprecated, it seems like if the real motivation for doing this is trying to create a permissionless system,

trying to get everybody on board, getting the right test entity to the right people, that saying, hey, let's move over to Sepolia and helping them would have been like a more collaborative and the real motivation was fixing a problem that was broken. Developers are on girly. But you're fixing a problem on a deprecated thing. That's great. In a year, maybe it won't be a problem, right? It's a problem now. I don't

disagree with you that there should also be a movement of like move to Sepolia. Like great. Everybody can encourage that, but there is a problem on girly now and developing now. So we can either say, hey, don't do this or we can say like, here's a way to make it easy. And yes, this is being deprecated, but like everybody should start migrating when they migrate. But people have applications that are going to main net in a week, in two weeks, in three weeks, and like they don't want to migrate everything to finish up their testing before they move to mainnet, right? Amazon presents Jamal versus the Shih Tzu.

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Link in the description. So, question for you, do you feel that once you put a price on the girly Eath that you got the result that you wanted. Do you feel like this, the experiment was successful? Or do you feel like there are certain things that were bad side effects that in, you know, in retrospect, you would have done something differently? My expectation was that it would open, it would be driven to literally zero. Like, we burned our LP. We put everything else were going directly back into the girly pool. Like to put in perspective, the girly faucets prior to this were emitting 0.2 girly per day. There is currently 1.1 million girly available in the pools that weren't available to devs

prior, that's the equivalent of 15,000 years of Gurley available for Devs to like going by. The number of devs who have hit of us and said, like, thank you. This is like infinitely, go look at the Twitter comments of actual application developers. Like, it is significantly easier now for anybody who is testing or deploying on Gurley to do that. And like, that was the goal. So yes, successful. What I thought would happen is the price would be some sub fraction of a cent as everybody who had a ton of Gurley would just dump it because like it's deprecated and why are you hoarding it?

Why is anybody holding it? why does anybody care, just make it open and super easy for people to have. And like, the test net will be dead in some fixed period of time. So that didn't happen very much not what I expected, but like, did it have the end result of like making Gurley more available to developers? Absolutely. Do you find speculating speculation though being an end result? Because I personally got spammed, MP got spammed.

We all got attacked and basically being told, one, we're hoarding, which we weren't. If you look at what we've been doing, hold up, hold up. And how many people, after I posted this tweet that we're going live today, literally said I'm scooping up Gurley Eaths so that I can go and speculate on this. And that's the point. When you create a market, you then disingenuine why we have a test net, which is free access to a network.

And I'm sorry, the block space argument is a bit loaded. Like, this is a test net. It's a test net. Like, it's for five years, we have not had this problem. For five years, we have had cyclical up and downs. Unfortunately, unfortunately a year and a half, unfortunately a year and a half ago, we had a 2x, a 3X in developers that came in,

which made this incredible, became a much bigger problem. We've been talking about the repos, the Ethereum GitHub repos and the PM repos and the Tessonets repos, where you could have contributed to try and actually help us. Instead, we have a speculative market.

We have price action put to this. We have people speculating on this token now and who are actively telling us on Twitter they're speculating on this token, which I'm sure there are a lot of devices. developers that have grabbed, I saw you say like 200 contracts deployed or something like that as of yesterday or something like that since, great. But like we are still putting price action. I still have Heath Global calling me and saying, hey, my developers don't want to go and buy

Gurley Heath. Can you go and dump us? And I go and like dump them like 10,000 tokens, so the hackathon they have it, which is what's always been going on. It's like you go to the, there's resources available. You go to the PM repos. Like there's discussions about how we can try and solve this. But a permissionless structure doesn't exclude people from giving it away for free. Like we would be more than happy to donate $50,000, $100,000 to somebody who's well-resourced to vetting, giving out grants to disenfranchised developers. Like let Gitcoin do that. Let people donate.

Like, I'm not for keeping developers who don't have the ability to pay whatever it is. No, but that's not the problem. The problem is like now there's such a large, vast of like Gurley Eat that has a price on it. and the circulation circling, people don't know what to do. People actually don't know about tax liability. Genuinely concerned. It's a genuine concern. It's still, again, you will never convince me that a permission system is better than a

permissionless system. Like, you just won't. That's not an argument I will ever... How is girly permission, though? Permissioned because you and a couple of few people had a ton of girly, Ethan, it was your job to fill up certain faucets and make the faucets docs because they were getting bought it and give it out to people. It's your position that...

We dumped over like 20 minutes. in six months and we've been dismayed. It still was broken and it wasn't enough. I'm not saying you weren't doing it. I'm saying people had to go to you. That shouldn't be the case. Nobody needs to go to somebody in the Ethereum construct to get ethon Ethereum. Like we, like you should not be arguing against permissionless structures ever.

Prishisholess will always be better than permission, period. And I'm not saying you didn't have the best of intentions, but it was entirely a permission construct. I had to go on Twitter and beg people to give me girl Eth. I had to find the right developer who had the girl Eith and say, okay, you were given it in the pre-mine or you were giving it in the pre-mine or you were giving in like as this spun up. Like, welcome to 2018, 2017. This is what we've been doing for Rinkby, Robston.

Until and again, now, back then, how many smart contracts were there? They're actually live in production. Like, yes, defy summer happened. NFTs happen. There are a lot more developers now, which is something we should embrace. Like, that's a good thing, but it means there needs to be a different construct for how this gets distributed. Not every artist who's spinning up in NFT and wants to test something on test

on test, make sure they don't bork things, knows everybody in the ETH Foundation to go to and hit up and be like, hey, I heard you have girls. can you give it to me? Okay, so let's do this. So, Brian, you very clearly articulated the problems with trying to get the scarce resource that, you know, developers want to use. So Greg and Matt,

since you don't think it's a good idea to have a price on these things, which, by the way, is, you know, at least in other blockchain community, is a perfectly legitimate way to run a test net. Obviously, people probably know about Kusama, which is a test net for Pocod, and there is, you know,

a price on Kusama tokens. So Greg, Matt, since you guys are opposed to this notion, how would you kind of solve this problem while at the same time, you know, furthering Ethereum's values around easy access to developers like in developing countries or whatever? I think this is something that we're just still discussing on the right solution. And we need people like you who have a lot of developers that you're working with who are on the ground, interacting with developers,

seeing these types of problems, and have your voice in the conversation about how to solve the problem at the protocol level. Ultimately, a test net is going to be a permission thing unless we use proof of work, but there is still the permission aspect of creating a genesis, and when you create a genesis, you almost always create a genus allocation with some eth,

and we just need to figure out a better way of doing these things. I think that putting a value on test net eath is a dangerous thing, for a lot of reasons. We can't stop anyone from doing it. I think it's hilarious. Like, it's going to make my taxes so much harder to do this year. Like, I'm teaching a class at CU Boulder, and at the beginning of it, I sent him all one girl, Eve.

And now I'm like, fuck, what am I supposed to do? Do I tell them they all have to file taxes now because they took this class? So, like, it's funny, but it's going to make things much more difficult. And I want to find a way where test nets don't have value, because I'm very much against test nets having value in general. The reason I'm against this is because once testes start to have value, they start to lose the functionality of being a test net. The ultimate thing is that we want to do things on test nuts

that we're not ready to do on Maine yet yet. So this is me speaking as a core developer. I want to be able to upgrade early. I want to be able to update Sepolia and be pretty confident that the changes that we're doing are correct and they're going to work, but they might not. And fortunately, we've been fortunate that we haven't had any kinds of crazy types of rollbacks,

but I think this is my problem with Usama and the Nosis chain, things that are saying that we're canary networks. We're going to do things first. Once there's enough value in the system, people are like, wait a minute, we don't want to be the first one to do it, right? Like, let's spin up another thing so they can be the first thing, something that doesn't have any value. And so then it defeats the purpose of being a test net in the first. And so maybe Gurley ends up being like a valuable thing. That's a very real possibility, and we have to just create more test nets that don't have value.

But I think that that's like an unsolved problem. It's like how to do test nets in the right way where it works with developers. And I love like more engagement from people who are having these problems. Because I work at the Ethereum Foundation. When I need Gurley 8th, I asked him to Beko, and he sends me Gurley Eve. And I'm like, what's the problem? Like, there's so much Gurley Heath around. And then I talk to developers and I'm like, oh, this is really difficult to get early.

So we need like more engagement there. I haven't seen a lot of people engage. And I think that having more test nets is like a good solution because I do think you're right. I think that test nets have some value. But I want to dilute it so much where it's like so little that no one cares. For what it's worth, completely supportive of that, like 100%. How about I talk about what we're doing now to try and move forward?

from here because I think that's Matt covered pretty much most of the points I wanted to talk about. Right now, Gurley's slated for end of life Q3, Q4. You're using it, get off. You're going to lose all your value in state, your state that's there. It's not worth it. We're moving to Suppolia as of two days ago because I thought people were actually deployed on it. We've started to migrate everybody. We have people like Chainlink the graph, alchemy, chain stack.

They're fully live and running right now in Sepolia. AVE, Maker, and a couple others pool together are starting to deploy and get going. We should see everybody in the next week to two weeks fully deployed so you can have your composability. Right now, the big question is what do we do about transfer, about actually getting ether into the right hands? That's a really good one. MP, Mario Paula, who has been taking the most amount of heat.

We love you. Okay. She's dumped on the layer zero bridge and has amassed enough money to give out grants for people who want to look into faucet design and equitable ways to actually distribute Eath. Well, I was going to also ask because I think this, is it called Holly TestNet that's going to be launched later this year is going to try to address some of those issues. So can some of you talk about the way that that's being designed and throw in other suggestions. Yeah, I can talk about it a little bit because I spoke to Tim a bit on this. Like, it really solves the problem of like bootstrapping the network with a pre-mine. And the idea

behind it was take everybody who's deployed a contract on the last series of test nets and on main net, take all of those addresses and basically give them test net-eath. Like that's how you bootstrap the pre-mine, right? So all of them get test-neteenth, which is everybody who's like a verifiable developer. So who you need to catch up from that point are strictly new developers coming in the ecosystem. And that's who you need to figure out like how to get too rather than like here's all the test net each to 10 people like please get it to the developers give it to everybody who's deployed a contract and then they do it now I do think this solves like this is a nice warm start to solving part of that problem I do think it will help I think with longevity of that test net you will start to run into the same problem over time but like it's significantly better than what we've had over the last couple of series of them it's specifically here to replace girly so as kind of like the next staking main chain to use for like staking providers and stuff to test out their systems. Yeah, this is something we didn't touch on.

I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but I just wanted to say that there's like two main types of test nets. The first one is like the permissionless validator sets, which if you think about the test nets before we had the merge, this was like proof of work test nets. Anybody can contribute proof of work at any time. And by contributing proof of work, you could get validation mining rewards. And so this was our permissionless test nets. And then we also had permission test nets.

The permission test nets have always been focused on being stable and robust for. application developers and so Gurley was one of like the first like really big application developer focus test that ran the click protocol there were some problems with the click protocol we occasionally had locks the click protocol now that we've moved into the merge and we have this beacon chain this proof of stake protocol we still have these two types of protocol permission and permission list but for the permission protocols we have a validator set that's fixed with known people who are running like a handful of validators who are known we can

we have a telegram group with them we can make sure that they They're very good uptime so that application developers never have to worry about huge reorgs, never have to worry about the network shutting down. And then we have permission list test nets. Maybe put that in air quotes because there's still like these huge, crazy, unequal distributions of tokens at the beginning. So it's not like truly permissionless. The, you know, people who start the test net have a lot of these tokens.

But the Gurley has like moved from a permission click test net to a permission list test net. And the permission list testes are the places where we want people to practice their staking setups, anything that has to do with running their own validates. That's where they should be doing it. And on the permission test nets, we want to have people who are building applications there. Because that's where we are very confident that it's going to be very robust. It's always going to be up and it's always going to be available for them to submit transactions. So to go back to the values question, because Ethereum does really put a focus on making things accessible.

I mean, some of what you mentioned, like, okay, they seem like somewhat small initiatives, in my opinion at least, to addressing that. you addressing that, but I don't know if any of you have like bigger ideas around how to get more of this test net eth into the hands of, you know, more kind of underprivileged people. I mean, I think one thing that I thought of what we were talking is that if the goal is adding a permission and list mechanism to access test net ether, I would rather see people submit proofs of work on chain to a smart contract that's imbued with a huge amount of value at the beginning than creating a valuable market. There have been proof of work faucets.

So, like, this definitely happens, for sure. There's proof of work faucets, but I would rather see it as a smart contract. Completely permissionless in that sense. Don't need to send messages to people to get TestNetEath. I think that, you know, Greg, we talked a little bit about this. We could have a split contract that the validators of the set just say, I'm going to send all my validation rewards to the faucets. I think these are all good ideas.

But I do really think I would much rather focus on other alternatives to permissionless access to testing to the East than creating a valuable market because this just makes it difficult, in my opinion for a lot of people to figure out like, am I going to interact with this chain now that I probably have a tax event? So basically to boot, like how we're trying to do the initial bootstrap of some of the Sepulia, Eath, is basically every team that starts, as they start redeploying, we're going to just be giving them because most of them have foundations, grants, programs, whatever.

They're all going to be getting it to try and distribute it to the team building on them so we can try and create a natural tree of distribution. And looking into things like Matt said, like X-S splits, where effectively we can constantly just dump it at everybody, everybody, because it even splits out and goes through so that we can try and get in the right hands of people so they don't have to pay and, you know, like problem Matt said, we've talked about earlier. Okay, last question to close out the panel, and it's directed at Brian. Brian, if this becomes an issue on a future test net, is layer zero going to do the same thing?

Yeah, again, so it depends on how easy it is to get. test net eat, right? Like at the end of the day, if my options are do proof of work, submit to this faucet, get a tiny drip or do that, or pay like three one hundredths of a penny to get the eth that I need to do it, like I or other devs should have the options to do that. You should have, like, they're not mutually exclusive. You can have the ability to have these structures that people who cannot afford the X cents, X dollars to do it, to be able to do it, right? There's a tradeoff of time. I don't necessarily want to spend a huge amount of time trying to get the ETH that I need to build Stargate pools to, like, test if Stargate is going to break

or function on a new feature. I need to have, you know, there's just like things that you need to do with certain functions. And so like, I would gladly pay. This is, again, what most people did via OTC markets on Gurley ETH. And again, I want to be clear, like, Gurley ETH had value before. There were separate markets that people participated in to buy this for this exact problem. The tradeoff is time versus value, and the goal is drive the value to as near zero as humanly possible. But again, it can never be free because the block space is limited. Okay, Greg, Greg, go ahead. Because you said that before. Go ahead, Greg. You looked like you wanted to respond. Okay. Again, it's a test net. We're dealing with test net block space.

It's a public good. The reason it exists is because we are bootstrapping it for people to use. There are people like in Fuera alchemy who probably spend like hundreds of thousand a dollar as a year to just keep this thing up and running so that it's free for people to use. Right? So, like, that blocks-based problem is not going to be a problem as long as we have massive node providers bootstrapping this thing. But it is. Are you with the demand?

Like, there is literally blocks being filled up on Gurley, not because of speculators, but because of application developers, writing applications. Yeah, and 1559 drops it right back down after because the base fee goes up. Like, no, I'm sorry. But, yes, it just gets more expensive. It doesn't solve the problem. They're still limited. And the test net

eath will get more expensive. Okay. You know what, you guys. I think it's like a typical debate. Nobody changed their minds. So we're just going to have to call it here. This was a fascinating discussion. I have a feeling we might see

an issue like this again in the future, just my opinion. But thank you for attending and thanks for giving me your thoughts. Can I say one last thing? Oh, sure. Not financial advice. own decisions, but withdrawal is activate on Gurley very soon. Two weeks.

Ideal outcome. Price near zero. Accessible to everybody. I have 180,000 Gurley Ethan validators. I will be dumping into the pool. For what it's worth, every, we've already committed, but every dollar from the pools, we burned our initial LP, but all the additional LP, we've added everything. Every dollar that is generated from that, we've already said we're granting to Ethereum development. So, like, anything that is generated from this will go directly back to grants. on Ethereum anyways, which is what I think the nature of the change should be. I do think people should have access to those things, but I think the end result should be going to grants

and going to furthering the ecosystem with developers. Okay. Okay, it looks like everybody agrees on one thing. That's a good way to end. Thank you. And just a special shout out to Laura and Brian. They flew in literally just for this. And we managed to make this happen last minute. So just a round of applause for them making the time. Thank you, Laura, for hosting. Thank you, guys. That was the spiciest panel of the day, maybe of the week.