Arbitrum Orbit update, ETHOnline finalists and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #680 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the delway refuel where cup the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Andy s to the 30th of October 2023 all right everyone let's get into it so first up today we have the finalists that were announced from the eth online 2023 hackathon here so there are 11 finalists as per usual I'll link this thread in the YouTube description below you can check out all the finalists for yourself but I mean I say this every time I highlight these threads basically if you want to see what's happening at the bleeding edge of ethereum development whether that be at layer one or layer 2 or really I mean any kind of part of ethereum development generally not just on chain but also the infrastructure that surrounds it then the eth global events uh specifically

kind of the these hackathon events are the things to look at because when you're at a hackathon you definitely don't want to be making something that already exists right you want to be making something that you think is really really cool that you think hasn't been done before and also the fact is is this is not a product that has to be like perfect right it can be I mean a lot of the times it's just a proof of concept where it's just on a test net right it has very basic functionality but it shows basically the idea of what you what you want to achieve here and because of that you get a lot of these cool ideas that maybe later become uh projects that get funded and then eventually hit mainnet and people start using them and they become the next Unis swop right like because unop famously

started out as a not not as a hackathon project but as something that was funded by $100,000 ethereum Foundation grants and then went on to raise money and became the Juggernaut that it is today and uh you know I feel like in terms of uh projects that have been spawned out of different hackathons you know e Global hackathons probably have spawned the most unicorn projects in the ethereum ecosystem uh by far if I had to kind of put money on it um but I I obviously don't have the stats and metrics handy right now but from my experience that's kind of been what's what what's up there so yeah as I said you can check out all the projects for yourself I haven't had a chance to check them out yet and see which ones kind of caught my eye um but they're all listed

here with links to to each of the projects in the thread you can go check them out and play with the demos I mean as as I've said before if you go to the project page Pages I'll just go to one here it usually has like the source code uh a demo if there is a demo available description about the product and and videos and stuff like that as about it as well which is pretty cool um and yeah you can go check this out for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right speaking of cool Innovative projects uh ZK P2P is something that I've covered on the refill before uh and they put out a video over the weekend showcasing some of what they've built here so there is a lot going on in this video uh in the background but basically what they've

built is a way to onboard from USD to usdc in 90 seconds using ZK proofs so for my understanding from watching the video and kind of reading through the replies here what's essentially happening is that they're kind of doing a a request here for someone to send money via venmo so you can see here on the video they're requesting 3 usdc uh via venmo so they've got this venmo order that pops up uh there's a a venmo payment QR code that someone can scan which they do in the demo here and that goes through uh and then they go to complete onramp uh I'm just skipping through the the um skipping through the the kind of video here and then this is where the ZK proofs kick in so they go verify email and then they verify the email via a ZK proof of the email that

was sent of the venmo payment that's for my understanding I may be getting that wrong but that's how I understood it and then once that proof is kind of verified it takes about 30 seconds uh you can see me skipping through the video here once that's done the order is completed uh you know you submit on on chain transaction the order is completed and then you get usdc so that all as I said that all happens in the background what I just what I just discuss for you guys there but essentially this is a USD from venmo to usdc uh on chain uh through peer-to-peer fashion there's no kind of middleman here there's no kind of centralized exchange or ramp sitting in the middle it's it's truly P top peer top through venmo obviously venmo is a centralized app it's kind of technically

I guess a a middleman there but the whole point is to bring I guess like the peer-to-peer nature of crypto and of venmo together in order to create this ba basically what is a bridge right what is kind of like an on-ramp off-ramp sort of hybrid Bridge uh thing that's going on here and the reason why this is obviously super exciting is because if you want to pay someone back via venmo want to kind of like send money to someone via venmo or someone wants you to send them money via uh via venmo but maybe they want usdc instead of USD and they don't want to have to do the onboarding themselves they can do it through something like this right so it basically eliminates those steps then and this is something that I've talked a lot about on the refi before about how we need to eliminate as many steps as

possible to do things in crypto it's kind of that that I guess like uh that that um older adage of like one to two clicks Max to do anything on your on your mobile phone should be the same thing for for uh onchain applications right especially when it comes to things like Finance I mean the trafi uh application oh sorry the the I guess like they call them Neo Banks or like these neoi applications that use trafi rails um they abstract a lot away in the background but they're still using the old rail so they do have limitations of what they can abstract away and there are middleman there as well like for example in the case of of uh of kind of like the banks doing these I guess like doing these instant transfers between each other in some count

um the the middleman just exists there and just takes on the risk right it's kind of like if you want to compare the the the risk that gets taken on there between you know bridging between different banks I guess you can call it it's the same as like bridging between different l2s on ethereum or different I guess like optimistic Roll-Ups where instead of going through the 7-Day withdrawal period you use like hop for example and the LPS take on the risk uh and they basically um give you liquidity in order to bridge there I think the same is true within within tradire in the settlement times are kind of like longer as well but you don't get obviously all the benefits of of onchain stuff like auditability verifiability um decentralization all that sort of stuff there so yeah just wanted to hide this really cool product from ZK P2P which

you can check out I'll link the video in the YouTube description below but also shout out to these guys because um a few of them here in the video uh I think three of them in yeah three of them in the video here of the four uh were at set protocol uh when I was working there and I'm pretty sure two of them still are there uh but and I worked with them so yeah shout out to those guys for innovating here and creating something really really cool all right so arbitrum orbit is now main net ready so for those of you who don't remember what arbitrum orbit is it's basically arbitrum answer to roll up as a service essentially you could call it so they said here you can permissionless build a customized chain using the most advanced scaling technology in the world uh using

arbitrum orbit and there already is an ecosystem of orbit chains out there they seem to be targeting like something different to what op stack is targeting there's a lot of gaming chains from from I've seen here or like nft chains so very different I think to what op stack has been doing um with the I mean it's a mixed bag I think with OP stack for sure um but yeah a lot of gaming chain there I mean you can see them here uh they're Linked In the in this um in this thread here and and there's an explanation about basically what arbitrum orbit chains uh come with like the features such as any trust chain so basically storing data availability not on ethereum but offchain styl which is their answer to um uh to to basically being able to code up smart contracts in different program programming languages

besides solidity such as rust C and C++ while maintaining full evm compatib compatibility and future upgrades uh to Nitro so um the orbit chains can adopt any improvements made to the arbitr nitro tech stack without approval from the Dow uh so this includes features such as permissionless validation M capture further cost reductions uh and more so yeah as I said like very similar I guess um to what op stack is doing to what polygon is doing with their um cdk uh you know to what um Zeke I think zky has a solution for this as well um but yeah this is arbiter's answer to it so you can go check this out there is uh there's the thread and I believe there is a blog post maybe it's kind of hard to tell cuz Twitter bloody they got rid

of the links here um the the link previews but no there's no blog post just yet but basically this is just an announcement that it is main net ready um and ready for people to kind of like build with um and getting in and you can get in touch with these roller poer service providers if you are interested in building with arbitrum orbit chains here all right so you guys know that currently there is a retroactive public goods funding round being run by optimism this is round three uh and obviously the applications are still flowing in here but what I wanted to highlight here is just how many applications have flowed in so there's been over 1,600 applications now you have to assume that most of these applications are spam and that's what they that's what they kind of say in

this tweet here where they said with great numbers comes increased potential for spam applications exactly for this reason there is currently a review process in place badge holders are leading this effort carefully evaluating reported applications to ensure fairness and you can actually see the results yourself at the website here which is retro pgf hub.com review uh yeah I'll link this in the YouTube description below but you can see how many projects uh have been reported so there's 1,38 that have been reported only 64 have been kept so far and 849 projects have been removed with 125 pending review and then you can search through which ones have been kept and which ones have been removed now the thing is is that like even though they're called spam a lot of

it is is basically also flagging these things as being out of scope for what the retroactive public goods funding is and for I guess like what ends up happening with these rounds is that a lot of people submit an application and then they don't meet the criteria but they they they figure that that oh well I'll just kind of like throw this in there as a Hail Mary maybe I get something because I did highlight last time that the rewards in the second round were quite substantial uh like and and obviously that's going to attract people like there's money to be made here but I'm glad that this review process exists because this was kind of a problem that I had with early on with with gitcoin grants I think it's gotten a lot better but early on there was a lot of garbage projects that were that

would be kind of like listed there uh and they would potentially get funded because they promised things like drops or tokens to people who would who would donate to them on gitcoin grants and things like that so it would become very messy and very noisy and it would take money away from the more legitimate projects that actually deserved and actually needed it um and into these other projects that were just opport opportunistic so I think that with optimism's retroactive public goods funding rounds they're trying to achieve the same uh they're trying to achieve a goal here of basically filtering out as many of those projects as possible and rewarding the people and projects that actually fit the criteria now disclosure here I have submitted the daily guay to this as far as I know it hasn't been reported um and I think it has been

accepted and and kept here um and and I submitted that myself but I am also a badge holder um for uh for the um for for the these kind of rounds here as well um but like I'm not obviously going to vote on myself or anything like that I'm going to abstain from that I don't even think I can I think there's there's a rule about that there but yeah I have submitted the daily gay here not sure kind of what rewards I'm going to get from from this but I figured you know what I mean a few people encouraged me as well to submit it they're like you know you need to submit the the daily grade to this like you you know you do a lot of good work you should be rewarded for it blah blah blah I'm like okay I was a bit hesitant to to do it um but

then I was like you know what I may as well we'll see how it goes there so yeah just a disclosure there that I have applied for for this round there um and I I mean I hope I don't get flagged to spam I don't think I will but yeah I think uh if if you want to go through the projects yourself as I said I'll link this in the YouTube description below but if you go through them you can see exactly why they they flagged the spam so it's not just basically badge holders removing things just for the sake of it it's more that as I said they don't fit the scope uh they don't fit the criteria and their badge holders are trying to optimize for people that essentially uh are in it for the right reasons are submitting applications for the right reasons uh and are actually

going to uh be rewarded for legitimate work rather than you know I guess like something that's more opportunistic right but anyway as I said I'll link this in the YouTube description below and you can check it out for yourself all right so there was a bit of Dr last week that I actually didn't end up covering on the refuel because I was waiting for kind of the chips to to kind of settle down there I guess like stuff to settle down generally there but the drama I'm talking about was around layer zero which is a bridging protocol launching a token uh called wrapped St or w s e on various other networks I think they launched it on Avalanche um uh scroll and one other network I can't remember what the other network was it

might have been binance smart chain and they launched this token there and said that oh look you can get now buy you know wrapped staked eth on these networks uh through the the layer zero kind of bridge now the reason why it stirred up a lot of drama at least from my understanding is that this was not sanctioned by the LI OD Dow and they also use the same ticker name as as obviously the ticker name of the official wrapped St right on on layer 1 ethereum and and some other networks out there so that would the the LI odal immediately was just like well this is going to cause a lot of confusion for people this is really dangerous and this is basically not in the interest of creating a standard it's more in the interest of creating a vendor lockin so to speak you know it's more it's it's

more just layer zero trying to create some sort of lock in here rather than working with other bridging protocols and other interoperability protocols in the ecosystem to create a standard and in response to that the other bridging protocols such as connect uh you know leafi sell cross socket uh they're all listed here uh put together a unified call for open Bridge standards where they've got four key points here that they uh posited saying that uh vendor locked proprietory standards are not standards lock-ins create systemic risks token issuers should own their own tokens and open provider agnostic standards encourage healthy competition so I'm glad this was put out because as I was just saying like this vendor lockin stuff when it comes to standards

and bridges and and and and money generally it is just not going to work like it's not going to work because one as they they say here it is a systemic risk um it causes a lot of risk because what ends up happening is that if your vendor locked in kind of token becomes popular and then there's a there's kind of like a major bug with it right then what you are you going to rely on the project to bail you out that you that you kind of like did like would they rely on Lio to bail them out sort of thing um and then it also causes obviously a lot of confusion for users who are just like you know what am I buying basically and if that token is not officially supported by the project then that token will not get probably not get a bailout right and probably not

get any kind of help from the project itself so there are so many just different security concerns here so many different uh kind of con technical concerns that we do need uh open Bridge standards and I'm very very happy to see that these projects came together in order to put this forward which you can read I'll link it in the YouTube description below um but the other bit of drama I think around uh this was more specific to Lio because it was kind of ironic that for the last few months at least the Lio kind of ecosystem not everyone in there but the the just generally had been kind of making fun of the social layer right or at least maybe not making fun of it directly but like watering down its importance in response to all of the talk about making sure that Lido's uh dominance on the beacon

chain didn't go up from here and actually went down um and people were making fun of things like the self-limiting stuff which I have said in the past that I thought was kind of like more virtue signaling than anything else but it was just ironic to see that after making fun of the social AER for so long now they were actually calling to the social layer being being like well the social layer needs to push back on this you know they need to push back on proprietary stands on on projects doing this and that's exactly what has happened with this call for an open bridging standard this is the social layer calling for this guys like yes there'll be technical implementations of this but this all starts at the social layer so I just thought it was just amazingly ironic that that that kind of

happened there uh and I had a little bit of a laugh to myself about it and and with some of my friends but I think that should just kind of reinforce the importance of the social layer to people because I I mean I've talked about these so much on the refuel I think you can even go back to some of the earliest episodes of the refu and and and seei talking about the social layer and its importance because at the end of the day everything just like boils up from there you know the social layer really is the fire that boils the the pot and boils all the the ingredients in the pot like if if you want to use this weirdly loose analogy that I just came up with that ethereum is a stew right well the without the fire the stew is not going

to boil so you need the fire which is the social layer and then and then you build everything else on top basically or you have everything else on top that's exactly what happens here uh the social layer responds and basically pushes back against what Leo Zer L Zer did uh and comes up with a with a technical solution here uh and then pushes that through and works on it for the years to come which I'm I'm I'm sure that it's going to be worked on for for many years here because as I've said before bridging uh especially is not just the security risk uh for the fact that bridges are such like honeypots but it's also kind of like a standards risk because I I think I've articulated this a lot on the refuel but just to to refresh it for people like when you hop

between chains um and when you kind of move assets between chains ultimately the I guess like where where that asset was issued is the settlement layer for that chain right so for example eth on another chain is not eth it's eth IOU from whatever bridging protocol you you've used like for example if you move eth through Wormhole to salana Wormhole technically has the eth right even if you do like a mint and burn um it it and mint and burns don't see I'm getting a little bit off track here mint and burns are a different thing but a lot of the bridges work the way of the example I just gave where that that eth on salana is is not real eth right that eth was

not issued on salana it is it is bridged via some some third party bridge where you basically have an IOU uh whereas eth on ethereum is e that is not an IOU anymore that is the asset that ethereum is the settlement layer for eth the tokens issued on ethereum are the settlement layer for that token but then you have like layer twos that have natively issued tokens where they're not issued on layer one at all then their settlement layer is Layer Two unless they're issued on layer one which they're not right so their settlement layer is the layer two and the layer 2 settlement layer is layer one but that's more so for um for the assets that have been bridged in and things like that like the actual assets on the layer two settle down to to the layer two itself right um and then I mean you can you can

keep going with this and you can keep kind of like daisy chaining the bridging out and kind of getting as complex as you want but that's why you need Open Standards here because you need a way to track all of this you need a way to keep keep a track all of this from an accounting point of view and you need to reduce the risk and reduce lockin and vendor locking because it just doesn't work it doesn't work at scale it creates so many silos and at the end of the day with onchain stuff we try to eliminate as many silos as possible so so yeah anyway you can go give this a read I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to do so all right applications for gitcoin Grants Round 19 are now open so you can go to grants. gitcoin to.co to learn

more and see the full list of rounds that are currently open for applications and if you want to apply make sure this isn't new uh and they say this isn't new because there's a cat kind of like uh applying after the period ended um you have to apply by November 8 for a guaranteed review before gitcoin Grant Round 19 kicks off so yeah if you are building something uh that I guess like you want to get funded U or if you're an individual doing things within the ecosystem whether that's like kind of making educational content or other such things like that you can apply to gitcoin Grants Round 19 here to be part of that round to be part of the matching pool and hopefully get a bit of money to continue the work that uh that you've been doing here um but yeah I did say

that Round 19 the dates for it were revealed I think it was last week I think it kicks off like the 15th of November or something like that um or sometime in no mid to late November there uh so yeah and I'm I'm I'm sure a lot of you guys are going to donate to that once it's live as well but yeah as I said make sure to get your applications in by November 8th if you are uh planning to apply for gcoin Grants Round 19 all right last up here I just wanted to give a shout out to this uh uh this conference this crypto conference that I'm going to be attending in Sydney next month next month being November on the 23rd and 24th 4th of November here and the reason why I'm shouting this out is twofold one it's to give you guys

advanced warning that there will be no refuels I think for 3 days it'll be like uh actually it may yeah know it'll be three days it'll be the 22nd 23rd and 24th of November um they're not technically rug fuels because I'm giving you advanced warning here but yeah I think the 22nd 23rd and 24th of November there will be no refuels because I will be in Sydney for this event here uh and that is Wednesday Thursday Friday and then obviously I'll be back on the Monday there now secondly the reason I'm shouting it out is because if you are looking for a crypto event to attend in Australia and you're either somewhere else in Australia or in Sydney um I can recommend this one this one is being run by the same people who ran the last last event that I went to in Sydney there's

always a bunch of good people there it's not one of those classic kind of crypto conferences that just has Moon boys and you know shitty kind of Shilling no this is like basically a conference where people are in it for the tech they want to discuss the tech uh they don't really care to talk about the price uh and it's a bunch of different people as are it's not just Crypton native people but it's also people working in trafi working kind of like the legal Arena uh working in other kind of um uh adjacent Industries to crypto so it's going to be a really really great uh great thing here so there are two days as I said 23rd and 24th of November which is the Thursday and Friday um the first day I think is the bulk of it the content stream uh day one here which you can

check out I mean I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out uh and there's uh there's more kind of um uh kind of details on the website here I don't think tickets are on sale yet they're on sale soon so I don't think you can buy ticket uh just yet uh but yeah they'll be they'll be kind of like on on on sale soon there um and then also I wanted to to say that I'll be speaking at this event I think I'm speaking alongside Kane uh Kane from synthetics uh and I I I think I've signed myself up to speak as much as possible to be honest because I feel like you can see the list of topics that they want to cover on the leftand side yeah I feel like I could talk to any of these topics and I really want to be

able to educate as many people as possible on you know as many of the these topics as possible especially when it comes to things like layer 2os CU I still think those things have very much misunderstood um things like uh me as well I think is very misunderstood but just just ethereum's road map in general I think is just very very misunderstood and you know this brings me to the last thing I actually wanted to talk about for today um as a pivot from this which as I said I'll link this in the YouTube description below you can go check this out but as a pivot from this and and basically related to what I was just talking about there was this saying that uh us aans came up with like a few years ago I don't know who came up with it or how it emerged but it was this saying of

the most bullish thing for ethereum is for it to be understood because ethereum is inherently difficult to understand I think and I'm not talking about just understanding some ethereum use cases like stable coins and nfts and web 3 and whatever you want to call it I'm talking about actually understanding what makes ethereum as a network valuable and what makes eth as an asset valuable those two things require a lot of context to actually get people to understand why it's valuable because I can sit there and explain to someone what the ethereum network does you know how it works uh what use cases there are why I find them valuable but to get them to actually and I'm talking about like someone totally new to crypto to get them to actually understand it on a fundamental level takes quite a while right and then for them to understand on a fundamental

level why eth is valued the way it is because what a lot of the push back I usually get is people saying well if people only need eth for the network and it's like a fee token why would anyone hold eth other than to use it for fees and and then obviously I have to go into uh give a lot of context around what a store of value is what a money actually is what monetary premium is why people think eth is this and there's a lot of Education that needs to be done there I mean I could spend so long talking to people about this right but obviously I don't have unlimited time with people so I mean a lot of the times I just kind of um I wouldn't say make it up on the spot but I've kind of there's no script about

it I just kind of come uh explain to people what comes to my head uh but as I said it goes back to that saying of like the most bullish thing for ethereum is to be understood because once you understand ethereum as a network once you understand the value and then once you understand um how that value flows to eth then it becomes a thing of wow you know I need to buy eth right that's that's kind of what it's been for me for years now it's like I I need more eth right and I think it's for what it is for a lot of you guys out there and and it doesn't just apply to ethereum it applies to various different projects as well I think that there are big uh ambitious projects out there like chain link for example I mean uh I think chain

link they've been building for so long now and I think people misunderstand that as just being an oracle Network right and this is the same thing where people are like oh chain Link's just an oracle Network where no it's actually much more than that right like much much more than that same with ethereum ethereum is not just a network for people to kind of like gamble on on Ponzi tokens right uh ethereum is much much more than that and is home to much much more than that but for people to understand that they have to actually dive a bit deeper than the surface level stuff so yeah that's why it goes back to what I said about the most bullish thing for ethereum and obviously eth as well is to be understood and and it's in Star contrast I think to something like Bitcoin where the more you understand

Bitcoin I think to a point the the potentially more beish you be you can become in it because I think it's there's a certain type of person that is attracted to to bitcoin as a primary thing uh and attracted to Big to say the asset as a primary thing but if you want to do more if you want to be more expressive about it and you want to kind of like Express um a view more uh you know more openly you can't really do that with Bitcoin right Bitcoin has a very very distinct uh and and I think like monoculture view about what it is and what the BTC the asset is right uh but then when it comes to ethereum it's obviously much more expressive but I think that's to bitcoin's Advantage because it's much easier for people to understand Bitcoin and understand the

value prop of something like digital gold than it is for them to understand something like uh the world computer as ethereum has been known in the past right or a settlement layer as ethereum has been known for and then how ether Cruise value from that so it's just different kind of fundamental value drivers and narratives and stuff like that and there's also kind of a Network effect to it as well where essentially Bitcoin obviously has the network effect has a bigger Network effect than ethereum does and that's reflected in the price of the asset that's reflected in the I guess like uh meme share that it has I think I I use the term meme share to mean kind of like its narrative it's kind of uh mentions outside of crypto because obviously um outside of crypto Bitcoin is a thing that all the mainstream media uh uses to reference

crypto generally but then also I I think I've mentioned this on the refi for until it gets to the day where I feel comfortable telling people that I you know or saying to people that I work in ethereum rather than saying to them that I work in crypto or telling them hey you know do you know what Bitcoin is and then saying oh yeah I work in that that industry until I feel comfortable knowing that someone actually knows what ethereum is and it's become like kind of a mainstream thing uh I I think that ethereum is definitely very far away from being understood by the majority uh and and there's different levels of understanding too of course like you can go as deep as you want with these sorts of stuff but that's my bull case is that more and more people over time understand ethereum understand the value

of eth and that's why over time ethereum and eth get more valuable uh and I and I think that's been true up until today and I think that's going to be true for decades uh to come there but I think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone