300k eth2 validators, Aave coming to StarkNet & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #324 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where you cap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony designer and today's the 28th of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so over the last i guess a few days i think maybe a couple weeks now this has kind of been going on there was a very very hyped up uh nft project called pixelmon now i think they've been hyping themselves up for many months now uh they had their nft mint where they raised i think 70 million plus dollars worth of eth so it was a as far as i know a 10 000 kind of like uh mint 10 000 item mint at 3 8 per item so obviously raised a lot of money there um and what ended up happening was that the art got revealed for or the nft kind of like i

got revealed for this project and it was nothing like it was advertised i'm sure you guys saw the memes it was very very low quality pixel art that looked nothing like all the marketing that pixelmon had put together now i put out a tweet over the weekend and i basically said 70 million dollar nft mint reminds me of the insane excess we saw in 2017 and 2018 from certain icos it basically always ended badly for the bag holders now the floor price for these nfts uh is about 0.368 so or an 88 loss from mint price if you've got a floor uh floor nft obviously the rares are probably going for a bit more but still i don't think they would be going for 3 8 most of them so a loss for basically everyone

involved except the people that did the raise obviously they're the ones who ended up with the money they're the ones who ended up with the eighth and they would be flying right about now right so i don't know if this is this project's a scam or anything like that uh or an outright scam or anything but uh yeah the the thing is is that pretty much like everyone who bought into these things or most people who bought into these things from from the mint would be would be completely underwater which is which is the sad state of affairs but the thing is we've seen this play out plenty of times before especially during ico mania during 2017 and 2018 where there were a lot of icos that i mean towards i guess like the end of ico mania they started going really bad where they started selling below ico

price and most of them did this and there were so many scams there was mega razors that have tokens that over the years have just completely failed to to accrue any sort of value have dumped really hard against um usd and even harder against eighth of course so it's just kind of like this is all just reminding me of back then now i think the most egregious example of of the ico mania going really bad and pear-shaped for people was the eos sale hosted by or run by block one the company that was making eos now for those of you who weren't around back in 2017 2018 eos was the first quote-unquote eath killer that people really talked about and that's because they claimed uh they were going to be super scalable they were going to

do everything that 8th couldn't do they weren't going to have high fees because even back then during the icos fees would spike because of the fact that the train would get clogged right um and you know they had all this fanfare around it and they what they did is they did a year-long ico and while the ico was running you could trade the eos token so you would throw in eth into this kind of like um into this contract it would spit out eos at a certain time interval and then the exchange price in the ico price will get arbed against each other and there'd be a little bit of profit to eke out now what this would do it would encourage people to actually to get that profit put eth into the ico contract um and keep doing that but basically a lot of

wash trading going on and what ended up happening was that block one raised over four billion dollars worth of eth for the eos project now obviously as time went on the eos project has completely failed and the eos token is down very very badly against usd at 90.7 percent last time i checked and against a30s down even more now what happened to that eighth that uh block one raised well that eighth went to go and buy bitcoin so a block one all throughout 2018 and i think some of 2019 were selling their eighth and they had millions of that and you know not just them a lot of icos were selling their eighth and this is a big reason why eath fell so hard in price fell 94 in one year or less than a year in 2018 but i mean to be fair eth

going up so much was also due to ico well in large part due to ico uh demand i think so kind of like give and take there but still what what ended up happening was that block one obviously didn't do anything for eos uh eos completely failed and they ended up with 163 000 btc which is 6.2 billion dollars today and now that is just sitting in their treasury so really at the end of the day the eos project took eighth from you know honest people who just wanted to kind of like invest in this sort of thing traded it for bitcoin and in the end block one made it out with a massive bitcoin treasury and all the eos kind of like holders that didn't sell and still holding to this day are completely wrecked and a lot of the people uh guess trading eos and relying on and trusting

in the eos project were completely wrecked as well so not to pick on eos as a particular project yeah there are a lot of examples of this during ico mania but they were the most egregious i'm pretty sure they were the biggest ico ever there were others out there that raised hundreds of millions of dollars i don't know if there were any other billion dollar icos i don't believe there was and there were some that kind of like delivered and are above ico price even years later the i think an example of this is polka dot where polka dot i think ended up raising 200 million dollars in 2017 or late 2017 and it's still above ico price uh today now i don't know about against eighth but against usd it definitely is because the ico price was about 30 cents uh if you adjust for the token split

that they did and current price of polka dot is what between 15 and 20 depending on the day that you check and it was higher than that during the mania so i guess there are some out there uh that kind of like survived and some came back i mean ave for example a perfect example ave is one that came back from the depths of hell and ended up kind of like being worth a lot more than uh than ico price obviously and and it's kind of like highs that it reached back then but for the most part for 99 of projects back then in ico mania basically went to zero i mean given that like nothing ever goes truly to zero but the liquidity just dries up you know there was a lot of just stuff that just completely died uh same is going to be true for most of

the nft stuff and that doesn't mean that icos in particular were bad i think there were some icos that did really well obviously ethereum wasn't ico right well the first ico obviously that's done very well for their investors um and then they're a lot of nft projects that have done quite well but the thing is is that because there's so many things coming out all the time because the propensity for scams is so high the the losses are going to be high as well and i guess like my overall point here with this sort of stuff is that this ecosystem has a really really shitty problem with wasting money on shitty things like 70 million dollars to this nft mint to these pixelmon people the people behind it who i saw on chain have already started kind of like using that eth to buy other nfts and just spending it as

they so wish um the thing is is that like when have you ever seen this amount of money raised for people like core developers who actually create the infrastructure that make this stuff possible you know even if they these projects should be giving back to public goods like could you imagine pixelmon being like okay well we're gonna donate one percent of you know of this 70 million dollars to core developers right that's that's a lot of money that's 700 a thousand dollars to core developers they could donate more if they wanted to but i'm just using it as an example now imagine if every raise did this just one percent to public goods funding not necessarily core developers just public goods in general it'd be tens of millions of dollars if not hundreds of millions of dollars um and one day maybe billions of dollars donated to public

goods and we wouldn't have uh you know such an egregious thing going on here with these with these kind of raises but i guess the incentive is just not there people are super greedy people just don't care about about doing this and it's kind of sad really at the end of the day like the amount of money that gets wasted here and the amount of money get they get sucked out of the ecosystem because as i've explained before the reason why prices come down so hard after going kind of like up i mean there's there's two major reasons one a lot of people want to take profit um and you know there's never enough liquidity to to kind of like service all that those paper profits all those pepper gains and i think the second biggest reason is that it just people run out of money

right like we suck out all the noobs money the the the more experienced players take from the noobs the scammers take from the noobs and then we're back to square one where we're like okay well everyone's gone now uh i guess we'll wait around for the next cycle for people to show up again and that's just an unfortunate reality of this ecosystem it's been like this for as long as i can remember i before ico's birthing it was like this i guess generally a lot of different markets uh are similar where kind of like the more experienced players will take from the noobs i get that but in crypto it's just very transparent and it's i guess much more pronounced because it's so easy for people to spin up things like nft mints and icos and build hype around them really at the end of the day all you have to do

for to build hype about to to raise a lot of money is build hype around something you just do some marketing you know even if it's paid marketing uh you know maybe get some bots to follow the twitter accounts that you set up because i i think um not pixel models another nft mean invisible friends or something they had 400 000 followers i'm like nah they don't have 400 000 real followers no way i know it was hyped up there were a lot of real people behind it and excited about it but a lot of that was bots now sure enough from what i saw the mint from mint like kind of like dumped it was too hyped like what happened with mecca verse a few months ago it's just it's so insane like the upside is insane for the people creating these things and the downside is insane for

the people participating in them and it just keeps happening like i you know and the reason it keeps happening is because it's particularly newer people and then it's also people who are thinking that they can outsmart everyone else but i'll get in this and i'll get out before um you know everyone else has an opportunity to get out i'll i'll be the one who wins this musical chairs game and maybe they will right but it still just perpetuates the cycle that we see with all these sorts of things but anyway i'm going to leave it at that there for now i just wanted to kind of like talk about that a bit today because it is an issue i think it should get better over time as the pro the um i guess like opportunity for profit from these things gets i guess less over time

but i mean we're going to still be putting up with this for a while i think for the foreseeable future at least all right so on to some more positive news another fresh post from paulinha around the end game bottleneck being historical storage so poner shared a tweet saying looking at the very long term as roll-ups and data availability a service sampling in tandem reach massive global scale the final bottleneck becomes historical storage now if you don't know what that is definitely give paulina's blog post to read but the trdr is that blockchains traditionally have had to store all of their history forever right like this is why ethere the ethereum blockchain is is so big and it's it's it's forever growing same with the

bitcoin blockchain same with pretty much like most blockchains out there they just grow and grow and grow and grow if you want to uh sink a full node now the i guess um the the the ideas around kind of like pruning history or at least um doing uh data availability sampling or doing kind of like um uh data availability checks and and things like that and also her stock uh as i said like wiping historical state and stuff is that if something isn't being used regularly then it shouldn't exist in the active state it shouldn't have to kind of put the burden on all the full nodes to sync it every time a full node wants to come online or to hold it in its kind of like i guess storage now for example there are a lot of dead smart contracts

out there they got deployed once they maybe got used once and that's it or maybe people deployed them as kind of like testing in pride and no one ever uses them now why do they belong in the active state they don't right and this is this whole kind of um i guess like thing about historical storage and like pruning a lot of the old storage or if you kind of like aren't keeping a contract active because it's just not being used then yeah as i said it shouldn't be part of the active state so this is definitely you know if we don't prune historical storage it definitely becomes a bottleneck because what ends up ends up happening is that you need to kind of like limit the size of the the growth of the chain because because there's no there's no expiry happening so for example if the chain is growing a

terabyte a year and there's no expiry happening it means that you if you increase the block size by 10 you you add another 100 gig on but if the state is expiring every month right if if you're kind of like expiring half of the state every month then it kind of like works out a lot better you can increase the the block size so to speak and you can you can store more because you know that in a month's time some you know the the storage is going to be pruned there and you'll you'll be better off for and and the chain size won't get uh unmanageable so uh anyway i suggest reading polynomials blog post here this stuff about data availability sampling and historical storage and stuff like that this is i think one of the most complex things to do like statelessness as i've ex as i've

explained before state expiry all that sort of stuff is some of the most complex stuff within crypto i believe it's going to take a lot of kind of like people's work and a lot of research development to get us to the stage where this stuff gets implemented um but it's coming it's coming along with all the other things that i've talked about like dank sharding and stuff like that but uh but yeah to stay on top of it polynomial has pretty much been covering it a lot lately their blog on medium is obviously one of the best places to follow along with this stuff i'll link this in the youtube description for you to go give it a read all right so fresh what's new in eth2 from ben edgington uh over the weekend i believe so i have talked about ben's newsletter a lot on the refuel obviously

highly recommend you subscribe to it but as i've said before it's the best way to keep up with eth2 or the consensus layer as we're calling it these days literally i mean i'm i i do a pretty good job of keeping you guys up to date with eth2 related stuff and merge related stuff and all that kind of kind of stuff but ben goes above and beyond like ben he's always surprising with how much he's able to pack into this and that's because he's much closer to it than i am i believe uh he works for on the um the teku client so and he's across like pretty much everything to do with eth2 so i mean he is probably the number one person in the ecosystem to be putting together something like this and i'm glad he does because that keeps me up to date but i just wanted to give

another shout out here because you guys just need to go and read this and get and kind of like subscribe to this and and keep this uh you know uh on your radar because this is the bleeding edge at the end of the day like i think the bleeding edge for eight two at least and it's gonna keep you across everything it's gonna keep your prize and everything so you won't be surprised by any i guess like movements in the e2 arena and even you know sometimes the eighth one arena as well so definitely a go uh check this out i'll link it in youtube description all right so a tweet here from superfiz over the weekend that he tweeted out that the beacon chain has reached reach three hundred 000 active validators now i mentioned this i believe last week that we had almost reached that

milestone but we're there huge milestone 3000 active valid 100 000 active validators the most of any i think proof of stake blockchain in existence now fresh reminder here a validator does not equal a full node there are obviously two parts to ethereum proof of stake the validators and the beacon node one beacon node can host many validators and last time i checked they're around four thousand beacon nodes so that's basically i guess four thousand beacon nodes is the the full node of the consensus layer that we currently have um and you know three hundred thousand validators are kind of like talking to those four thousand nodes so to speak so that's kind of like how it works um but still i mean this is a huge achievement because it just as i

mentioned last week we achieved like the 10 million eighth state uh kind of like milestone um counting the rewards the staked as in kind of like the effective stake is 9.6 million that should be 10 million soon and uh the beacon chain is just kind of like prodding along really really nicely it's going very very well it's getting ready for the merge itself right and everything's happening in that arena too um and it kind of just came to be chugging along without without instance now without without kind of events happening so that's really really awesome and awesome to three the three hundred thousand uh validated milestone and speaking of milestones rocker pool has achieved over 100 000 eth staked today so another awesome milestone for rocker pool they're growing really really quickly for such a

young protocol i mean as i've been saying for a while they've been building since 2017 but they've only been live for i think three coming up on four months now on mainnet and uh obviously a new protocol people are kind of like weary about putting their ether in but a lot of people are putting their atheist regardless a hundred thousand staked a million hopefully soon right i mean probably uh probably another few months before we hit a million here but it's great to see them growing because as i mentioned before rockapool is a decentralized ethereum staking protocol they're trying to basically make it so that you don't have to stake with a centralized exchange or a centralized service provider if you don't have 32 8 which is obviously very very awesome uh but yeah congrats to rocketpool on this milestone and finally uh with regards to

proof-of-stake we have a new fresh guide from super fears on reddit called how to stake on ethereum march 2022 edition so in this post superfiz goes through how to stake as a solo staker as a mini pool operator as part of rocketpool as an r8 holder with custodial exchange staking and uh and and then he's got a bit more information in here about other things so i think you can go through the comments read super fizz's post here if you are getting started with staking you should definitely give this a read because he gives you a breakdown of each of the different types and kind of like what he recommends obviously being a decentralization maxi he recommends staking on your own or staking with rocker pool i am the same guys like this that's my kind of tr like solo staking rocker pool

uh centralized uh all kind of like re holding r82 you get exposure to it um centralized exchange or centralized service provider staking uh and yeah that's kind of like my my hierarchy there now obviously solo staking is out of reach for most people totally understand that i mean buying 32 fresh eats today is not something that a nor a regular person can do um but that's why rocker pool and other kind of like similar tools like that exist so give this blog post from super fizzer read if you're an aspiring ethereum staker or eth staker because it's a really great one all right so i came across this blog post from average dros crypto going over the arbitrary ecosystem so this is basically a post uh detailing everything happening on arbitram from it's it's

growth uh kind of like what it's doing what it is how it works or a lot of the apps on there uh kind of like you know how to access these apps what each of them do this is a very comprehensive blog post so i definitely recommend checking this out for yourself but i i really like this sort of stuff because at the end of the day we are still lacking like the google of crypto where you can go to a one one website you can kind of like type in what you're looking for and then get it we don't really have that there are some sites here and there that list things obviously arbitrary has their own portal for the projects on there and they have like a sorting list but as far as i know there is not like a google for crypto where you could say

okay well show me the protocols that i can use to uh you know lend my assets on or show me the highest kind of like yield i can get in crypto right now or show me this or show me that as i said there are tools out there that do some of this and i think there's a lot of fragmentation there to be honest so i'm curious to see when we when we will see kind of like a google for crypto maybe we won't maybe the fragmentation will just exist and what will end up happening is that like third parties or other kind of like interfaces would just sit on top and everyone would just know about those i've spoken about this before where i've said that something like a zapper right that tracks your portfolio that lets you kind of like um follow other people in a

social way and eventually if they do their own kind of like wallet and things like that i mean they let you zap in in and out of things right now but uh you know basically acting as like an interface for all of these things for you to get into so instead of you going to the yearn website or the other website or the unisoft website you just use zappa to to zap in and out of these sorts of stuff or to to basically swap on different indexes and you know i've used this tool plenty of times myself it works really well uh so maybe we don't need a google for crypto maybe the google for crypto is the interfaces that sit on top of these things but anyway getting a little bit off topic there i just wanted to yeah give this blog post a shout out

definitely go give it a read for a pretty comprehensive overview of the arbitrary ecosystem you know as i've mentioned before there's so much happening on these l2s now that one person can't cover all of it so i'm sure there's projects missing from this blog post but uh still it's it's a great read definitely i highly recommend going and checking it out all right so uh greg vardy here put out a tweet from the nevermind team put out a tweet today saying that ave is coming to starknet because the governance proposal passed yesterday so uh next week a bunch of people will start phase one dev which will be followed by the deployment of ibv3 plus some goodies that aren't possible on our one on starknet awesome i mean as we know ibv3 was deployed to uh the evm compatible chain test nets a couple of

weeks ago i believe two or three weeks ago at this point so you know the l2 is like optimism and arbitrary the uh other kind of like evm chains or evm sidechains like polygon pos chain and other l1 ecosystems as well but now they're going to start net which is not as you guys know an evm compatible chain it is built on cairo where but the thing is the reason why greg's helping with with this and is because he works at nethermind who is building the warp tool which allows our solidity code to be transpiled into cairo code in order to work on starknet so this is going to be pretty big i mean if this becomes something that's relatively easy to do like transpiling rv to stock net then i i will i can see a lot of the evm native apps being transpiled to stockinette and

being deployed there and then it really at the end of the day guys it really just becomes a customer experience kind of thing between these l2s where they all compete on fees and they all compete on usability and user experience and that's it really i mean at the end of the day look most people aren't going to care about decentralization from the get-go i think they eventually will but from from like the surface most people just care about cheap fees and ease of usability which is totally fine like that's what they should care about now that's what those l2s are all going to be competing on they're going to be competing on basically the same thing fees are going to go practically to zero as polynomial has mentioned before he or that he also expects fees to trend towards zero and then everyone every one

of these kind of like as we call them execution layers at that kind of like layer two is just gonna compete on uh on on user experience so that's gonna be really awesome to see how stark net goes faring against some of these evm compatible l2s because as i've said before we don't want everything just to be evm compatible we want to experiment with more stuff at layer 2 because you're not tied down to the evm at layer 2. you can do anything at layer 2 as long as you settle your transactions and your call data and all that good stuff to ethereum layer one as a settlement layer you're free to do whatever else that you want which uh you know which turns out is a lot so very very excited to see uh ave go live on stock net i guess other v3 go live on stock net

because that'll be a big win for that ecosystem all right so speaking about polygon here so if you've been using the polygon pos chain over i guess the last few months six months maybe you'll have noticed that there have been errors with the public rpcs where you won't when able to get your transactions in and increased reorgs on the chain as well so the polygon developers account has tweeted out an update here with you know investigating these issues with the reorgs and the rpc issues so if you're interested into why this is happening and what uh the polygon team is doing to mitigate this you can definitely check out this post the reason i bring it up is because i see a lot of you kind of like complaining about this in the discord channel obviously a lot of you use the

pos chain i mean i use it as well and i've experienced these troubles before too um but you know this is kind of like i guess what happens with just more quote-unquote scalable networks that rely on their own consensus mechanisms is that it becomes very hard for them to stay in sync and that can lead to these long reels where reels can happen like 100 blocks into the future and if for those of you who don't know what a reorg is it basically means that and this is totally normal for blockchains but it basically means that it reorganizes the chain and the transactions that aren't included in the canonical chain don't ever happen so it actually can affect users like for example you can do a trade and then that trade could be real 10 blocks later like it never happened that's obviously a really

shitty experience for users uh and obviously exchanges have to be careful about this because if they accept deposits and then people cash out and then it gets re-orgged well that's not good for anyone right so uh but as i said like this is why this sort of stuff tends to happen on things due to consensus issues due to things not being able to stay in sync and because of that uh uh you know there needs to be mitigations put in place now long term i don't believe any mitigations any amount of mitigations can be put in place to stop this from happening on any of chains that deal with consensus that's why we keep the ethereum l1 are kind of limited because we don't want to have these issues and everything will just be moving to l2 anyway and that's why l2 is the kind of like long-term

goal here uh that i think that's a perfect example of everything that i've been talking about lately uh with regards to the modular stack because it just me it makes so much sense to me like i've never come across something in crypto that makes as much sense to me as the modular scaling stack does and i think a lot of people feel the same way and really we're just kind of like arguing over the implementation details at this point we really do know that splitting up the concerns can retain composability and interoperability while giving you the massive scale that you need without having to run into issues like rpc issues and real issues you know to be fair you'll probably still see rpc issues on on the layer twos if they get really hit because at the end of the day an rpc is just a node that relays your

transactions so if they start getting hit and and dost you can see these things kind of like fall over for example you know arbitrary sequencer fell over because they've got doss and things like that um but real should definitely uh kind of like not really happen or you know uh kind of like uh i i guess look i'm not totally sure how kind of like this works at layer two but there could be instances where things kind of like get get i guess quote-unquote re-orgs or kind of um get dropped and stuff like that but it's very different to how a layer one would handle it and at the end of the day if ethereum layer one had a 100 block real yeah forget about it i mean that's a long ass reel guys like if you're unblocks are 13 seconds so that's a 13

minute um i'm not even doing the math right right now i i i just did 100 times um times 13 there but that's uh that's a long that's a long real that's a you know a few minutes or whatever it is uh and and that is really really bad obviously because there's a lot of economic activity that happens on ethereum layer one so we obviously don't want that to happen and the re the way to keep that from happening is making it really easy for the full nodes to stay in sync and making it really easy for the miners that are talking to those full nodes to not kind of like go off and and essentially real the chain uh and as i said reorg is totally normal but real gov like a block right or block or two within ethereum's case um uh any more

than that is is pretty bad and it works differently for different chains obviously the pos chain has faster blocks the polygon pos chain has faster blocks than ethereum but uh but still i mean a hundred hundred plus block real orgs in polygon is not good for users either so so yeah definitely go check this out i'll link it in the description but i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone