MERGED with Tim Beiko & Danny Ryan

Hey Bangless Nation, welcome to another State of the Nation episode where we talk about something big that's just happened. Get into the details of it. And David, what could be bigger than the Ethereum merge? Five days ago, proof of work was abandoned. Proof of stake executed, implemented. We merged the proof of work chain and the proof of stake chain, and we're here to talk about it. This is kind of a post game show, I think. Who do we have on? What are we covering today?

Uh of course, none other than Danny Ryan and Tim Baco, the two lead coordinators of this whole entire merge effort, uh, who have been just shepherding the many parts of Ethereum to get this done. And there are many parts of Ethereum, so this coordination effort was no small feat. Uh, and so these people have been, uh Danny and Tim have been at the spearhead of this whole coordination effort. And so we're just gonna talk about what are they feeling right now post merge? Like, and also what are they gonna do next? When they have been thinking merge, proof of stake, beacon chain for the last you know over a year now. Uh, what's on the horizon? And also, what drink did they drink after after they merged? So, all of these super important questions and more uh when we finally get to uh Tim and Danny.

Yeah, these are the important questions, I think, David. Um, and uh in addition to that, I th I think we want to ask what the future of uh Ethereum is. So this is a major milestone, and now it's in the rear view mirror. Where do we go next is the question. And I actually think one of those areas we go next is we need to work on decentralizing our staking providers, in particular our staking pools. David, gotta ask you the question, but I think it's pretty obvious what of the state of the nation is today. What is the state of the nation, though, David?

Oh Ryan, the state of the nation is merged. Importantly, past tense. The state of the nation is also proof of stake, as in much of the uh DeFi economy was previously proof of work and is now proof of stake. Uh so Ryan, the state of the nation is uh merged with the future, merged with proof of stake. Overall, just merged in general. Uh yeah, there we go. How'd you like that one?

I I I I love it. It's uh music to my ears, and we are going to be right back with two of the individuals instrumental in making this happen, Tim Baco and Danny Rhine. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Bankless Nation, we are excited to introduce you yet again to Tim Baco and Danny Ryan. These are two of Ethereum's lead coordinators. They've helped shepherd the Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum itself into the future, including implementing most recently the Ethereum merge. Danny, Tim, welcome to Bankless. How are you guys feeling?

Yeah, thanks for having us. Pretty good, uh, honestly.

I had a I had an inclination.

Huge relief, uh, very exciting. Um, you know, it's culmination of quite a bit of work from quite a bit of people. So,

and it it it went well,

I would say.

I think uh going going well might be sort of uh an understatement in some ways, because this thing was like smooth as butter.

And I'm wondering if that was kind of like what you anticipated. Uh I'm sure it was what you hoped for. That was on the optimistic side of things. But um did you think it would go as well as it seemed to go?

Danny first.

I thought it could go as well as it went. Um, I thought there was, you know, a non trivial chance that

a a client of moderate use would have had.

More substantial error where you know there's a bit of scrambling, maybe a quick release, or maybe like telling 10% of the network you have to restart your node or something like that. But

uh the fact that, you

know, I think we saw like a four percent drop. I think we saw

some intermittent uh node failures on one client that a few people did have to restart their nodes, but just like

it was very

it was it was the dream. Yeah.

Tim, how'd you

Yeah.

about this? Was it a dream?

Yeah, it was like I,

you know,

historically when we have an upgrade, I have to do something in the next couple hours, whether that's reaching out to some operator or client team. Like,

you know, I didn't expect the network to go down. I I was incredibly confident we'd like finalize and all of that, but

I expected

that somebody somewhere would have forgotten something quite important and like we'd have to reach out to them and you know coordinate. And that didn't happen, which was kind of wild. Like that he said, you know, there were some minor issues, but like

Even that 4% drop, I think in a matter of hours, it was back uh

and and potentially less than that. So

um

yeah, I

I don't think it could have gone much better. And it went pretty much better than like most of even the shadow forks and whatnot that we did. So

um

But I think we've had like one or two shadow forks go similarly as well. Yeah, you know, and and and ones later in the process, but just like we've had plenty of times where you're like, oh, 20% of the network's off, the network's fine.

yeah.

As a whole, but like we need to we need to go triage an issue, but we we didn't have that.

Yeah.

So uh one of my questions was going to be what did you think

you would be doing immediately post merge versus what you were actually doing? So Tim, it's it sounds like you were about to be, you know, picking up the phone, calling a particular like client team, perhaps or messaging them and saying, hey, this thing's gone wrong, we have to troubleshoot this. But instead

Uh, you were just watching the merge and nothing nothing going wrong, I guess. Wha how long did that take to set in before you realize like wait, we had a a you know, a perfect merge? How how long until like were you in disbelief? Like what was going through your head at the time?

So we we kind of knew.

As soon as we finalized, and even before we finalized, so there were some people from the research team who were looking at the attestations kind of piling up on the epoch. So before it had officially finalized, we

sort of knew we were good.

That was that was like a pretty big relief. Um

yeah.

Each block, like so you see the first block,

and and then there's slots, right? Slots are kind of the ticking of time every 12 seconds, and

um

you can have a block or you could not have a block at each slot. And so we had a block,

and then we had a block,

and then we had a block, and then we had a block, and like every every slot that ticked by that we had a block and we had no miss missed slot, you know, it was an indicator that like.

The network's online, the network's very healthy, and like this thing's going through. So, like

iteratively through the course of like 20 minutes as we're waiting for finality, I think we're just more and more like,

okay, it's working. It's still working. And it's still working. I think we missed maybe one slot, maybe two slots between

the beginning of the merge and finality. Um, you know, and it was only like on the 30 epoch or something, which is normal if you have you know 95 to 99%

online. Uh but just like,

It's kind of shocking.