The Good Stuff
EGL Genesis had exceeded our expectations, and ~11,000 ETH had been staked by Genesis participants to bootstrap EGL. These 11,000 ETH were matched with 750M EGLs and deployed to Balancer, creating a $100M ETH-EGL market (as of today).
If you don’t recall, this entire liquidity pool belongs to the Genesis participants (gradually released over a course of a year) and it is crucial because it creates a venue where mining pools can sell their EGLs. This is a good thing! Mining pools are not “dumping on EGL”, the EGL protocol incentives pools to set the gas limit by awarding them EGLs, which they do because these EGLs have value and they can be sold.
EGL Voting had a real effect on the gas limit, which is W-I-L-D!!!
If you don’t understand how wild it is, you must be living under a rock and missed the storm this tweet raised.
Pools are listening to EGL. Most hashpower had already tried following EGL, and we’re in close contact with them regarding continue doing so (see details below).
The Challenges
The number #1 challenge EGL had is with communication.
Following EGL’s success, many core devs had raised their concerns whether EGL can be abused to increase the gas limit to unsafe levels. We took the time to analyze these concerns and address them here.
A second challenge we’ve seen is that post-1559 gas fees had increased to 100–150 gwei, compared to 10–30 gwei pre-London. Mining pools are still glad to follow the EGL vote to collect EGLs, but they need to be compensated with a lot more EGLs just to break even, and even more to be worth their while. We address it below.
A third challenge was the design of the EGL-sweeping transactions, which always sweep EGLs to the coinbase address, which allows a transaction created by one pool to pay for EGLs swept by another pool, and complicate the pool operation as it requires sending EGL from the address they use for pool-miners accounting.
The Roadmap
Here’s what’s coming to EGL in the short and medium term
Short Term
We are working hard an aim to soon release a technical proposal to improve EGL’s mechanism. Specifically we aim to:
- Avoid sweeping EGLs every blocks, and instead use an on-chain “sampling” of the hashpower of each pool and how closely it follows the EGL vote.
The sampling will test 1% of the blocks, reducing the cost for pools by x100, and significantly reduce the amount of EGLs they need to be awarded to be incentivized - Allow pools to only sweep EGLs if they are the ones to receive them, and specify once the address they wish to receive the EGLs they receive
Medium Term
- Keeping an open communication channel with core devs is extremely important. different core devs have different opinions what the gas limit should be, but as a group they remain the beast beacon (no pun intended) for the community to navigate its path.
- In our recent post, we explored multiple solutions to the concerns raised by core devs. Among them we consider giving “Signals” — core devs who use EGL to share their view on the gas limit with the community — a “Killswitch” to turn EGL off if majority of Signals feel it is being abused.
We intend to explore these solutions and see which solutions will be best for EGL and the ETH ecosystem as a whole.
We‘ll publish more details on our progress in the coming weeks.
🦅 Keeping soaring higher!🦅
