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🟣 Run, Ethereum, run (with EIP-7781)

🟣 Run, Ethereum, run (with EIP-7781)

Plus, Polymarket hits highs in daily trading

Donovan Choy
October 07, 2024

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A new EIP to make Ethereum faster
Chart: Polymarket all-time highs in daily trading volumes

A new EIP to make Ethereum faster

Everyone wants the Ethereum network to be faster. This can be achieved in one of three ways:

Reduce slot times (i.e. the time intervals between newly proposed blocks).
Make blocks bigger by increasing gas limits.
Improve blob (Binary Large OBject) transactions capacity, a temporary form of data structure introduced in EIP-4844 that allowed L2s to settle to Ethereum more cheaply.

This weekend saw the emergence of the newly proposed EIP-7781 aimed at the first.

Proposed by Ben Adams, co-founder of Illyriad Games and Nethermind contributor, EIP-7781 wants to shorten slot times on the Ethereum L1 from from 12 seconds to eight seconds.

The proposal cites EIP-7781’s impact as an improvement in overall throughput by 33% and reduced latency for based L2 rollups, which roughly translates to a hypothetical gas limit increase from 30 million to 40 million or a blob count increase from six to eight.

Since block sizes remain unchanged, aggregate peak bandwidth demands will not rise either.

In other words, Ethereum would be faster, without increasing the bandwidth requirements on individual nodes (though the impact on hardware is up for debate).

The new proposal has received the approval of Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, who agrees EIP-7781 would roughly increase throughput by 50%, make DEXs like Uniswap roughly 1.22x more efficient and reduce confirmation times of L1 contracts by one-third.

If passed, EIP-7781 would have significant positive impacts on based rollups like Taiko, whose architecture leverages the sequencer of the L1 (and thereby is constrained by L1 block times), as opposed to traditional rollups like Optimism and Arbitrum, who run their own centralized sequencers.

It’s a welcome change but one wonders if it’s just another EIP on an Ethereum roadmap already chock-full of EIPs waiting to be implemented.

Recall that the upcoming Pectra hard fork (with already 20+ EIPs) that was scheduled in early 2025 was split in two during the last Ethereum All Core Developers (ACD) call.

ETH Core Dev Alex Stokes, who moderated the last ACD, cited Pectra as “one of the biggest hard forks we have had in Ethereum history.”

— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)

Is AI x crypto overhyped? Permissionless is bringing you the highest signal conversations at the nexus of these two nascent technology sectors.

Polymarket hits all-time highs in daily trading volumes:

Source: Blockworks Research (h/t Dan Smith)

Polymarket is racking up all-time highs in daily trading volumes. On Sunday, 82% ($79.3 million) of volumes came from the “elections” category. The biggest market by far is still the “Presidential Election Winner 2024” prediction market, with about $1.38 billion worth of bets riding on it. It’s right now giving Trump a 51% lead compared to Harris’s 47.9%.

— Donovan Choy

The oracle landscape is changing rapidly as crypto upgrades from DeFi 1.0 to DeFi 2.0. Given these new dynamics, Total Value Secured is no longer an effective metric for evaluating oracles. Total Transaction Value is a more accurate measure of oracle fundamentals, as it is more strongly correlated to frequency of oracle price updates and therefore oracle revenue.

In a recent report from Blockworks Research, research manager Ryan Connor explains why moving to this measure meaningfully recalibrates our estimates of oracle market share, revenue potential, and the potential for oracle commoditization on a go forward basis.

Kicking the tires on this bitcoin bull market

Why bitcoin’s major run may be later than usual.

Funding Roundup: Crypto companies raised $823M in September

Thirty-three DeFi companies announced raises last month, data from the TIE terminal shows.

Seen on @Optimism github:
"Also introducing ICrosschainERC20 interface... to be cross-chain neutral and extensible to other L2s"
I think people are sleeping on just how much Ethereum infrastructure players really *are* willing to cooperate and build a unified Ethereum ecosystem
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin)
5:46 AM • Oct 5, 2024

DeFi on Solana doesn’t get enough appreciation — there are now 7 protocols with publicly traded tokens generating ~$10M or more in revenue and growing triple-digit percentages annually.
Jupiter and Raydium leading the way with $75M and $63M, respectively.
— Ryan Watkins (@RyanWatkins_)
5:00 PM • Oct 4, 2024

I think previous cycles were also 90% meme 10% product. My theory is that memecoins today have completely absorbed the meme energy that drove other cycles, like DeFi summer. Now each product has to make it purely on value. If that’s the case, it’s a good thing for the industry.
— toly 🇺🇸 (@aeyakovenko)
5:54 PM • Oct 6, 2024

0/ @blockworksres analysts are *deep* in the trenches, covering every inch of crypto capital markets.
Below is a quick rundown of some of our favorite ideas & theses over the past ~month
— Ryan Connor | BWR 🟪 (@_ryanrconnor)
7:19 PM • Oct 4, 2024

The insights, views and outlooks presented in the report are not to be taken as financial advice. Blockworks Research analysts are not registered broker/dealers or financial advisors. Blockworks Research analysts may hold assets mentioned in this report, further outlined in the Firm’s Financial Disclosures.