Aztec details zkRollup, Zapper Activity feed & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #580 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily refuel we recap the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host and this is honor and has the 5th of May 2023 alright everyone let's get into it so something funny happened today that I didn't think was happened happened as quickly as it did but I'm sure you guys saw some of the drama around git coin now there is a currently a git coin grants around going on and there was a bonus round announced called the Dei round or diversity equity and inclusion round now this riled Affair for people up and I'm not going to speak to exactly you know the the exact issue here I want to use it as a springboard for a different discussion but the reason why people were riled up is because in order to have been eligible for this grant round 50 of the Project's

team must reflect the diversity of the community they serve with a particular emphasis on women black indigenous people of color individuals with disabilities and members of the LGBT btq plus community so as I said people people got riled up about this you can see you know there's 370 quote tweets you can go read those if you want I'm not gonna debate the debate this at this point what I want to say is something that Jimmy ragosa said here in his quote tweet he said and that people is why we burn the erp1559 base fees instead of funding public goods with them uh and I I saw this I was like oh well I spoke about this like two days ago and we've already seen it play out uh you know in in the kind of like real world here now what I guess like Jimmy is basically

saying here is the same thing I said a couple of days ago where could you imagine if the 1559 burn went to some community pool uh that people had governance control over and could spread it out to whatever they wanted it would get extremely murky very very quickly and the money would just get looted to be honest right and this is just one of those things that shows that because at the end of the day humans uh have emotions humans are subjective creatures uh and it would compromise the credible neutrality of ethereum if we allowed These funds to be controlled by any one party and that's exactly why the one 559 base fees burned as I explained the other day and one other point that I wanted to mention here before I move on

because I'm not going to rehash all my other points from the other day was that I think it's funny how certain things uh you know are important to some people certain things are important to other people and that's just the way of life right like not everyone cares about everything and there are some things that people don't care about at all I mean there are people that are single issue voters and there are people that are many issue voters when it comes to politics and things like that but I think at the heart of it all is the fact that because of that because humans have different wants different desires to each other because they have different views different opinions and everything it really hits home the fact that if you want to fund things like public goods it needs to be done uh outside of I guess

like the core protocol itself right outside of ethereum itself because of all that subjectivity because of all that murkiness and essentially uh if you were to do it at the core protocol you would have erode not only ethereum's credible neutrality as I as I mentioned before you would just arrive Road where ethereum is all together because it all what would happen is that every conversation would be dominated by what happens to that money like seriously it's a lot of money it's billions of dollars and in perpetuity right because the the fee bone goes forever so literally you'd be getting you know millions of dollars a day into this fund and then every single day you would be having arguments as a in the community about what to do with this money who gets this money how to control it and who would even have governance over it

right like who would have the right to spend that money would it be some kind of Dow with like another token attached to it or would it be like eath holders that were able to vote on where it goes well then you just have the largest etholders voting to give probably give themselves more money or give things that they care about more money it's not necessarily in a public good then it's really just like um a a kind of like a treasury that just gets looted by private interest so to speak right so it's it's not good no matter which way you slice it I don't think I I personally can see a workable solution for for that and I'm very very glad that we did just burn the base fee that is the most credible neutral way I think to to do it and I'm glad there are plans as

well for things like Mev burn too I I I think that I mentioned it maybe yesterday and I mentioned it before but this was basically a proposal that was put out by Dorothy who who is a pretty active person in the daily great Discord Channel now works at the ethereum foundation but he put out this proposal and Justin Drake and him and I think a few others have been working on this and basically the concept is to do to the gas fees what what um you know to do to sorry um Mev what we do to gas fees essentially burn it right make the Searchers and the builders compete for that Mev um uh and then essentially burn most of it right really at the end of the day which is a more kind of like neutral incredible neutral way of doing things so that's another thing obviously to

keep an eye on but just figured this was worth mentioning to I guess like reiterate my points over uh that I brought up a couple of days ago all right so Preston Van Loon from the pry Labs team here has put out a tweet today saying the inflow of validators greatly exceeds the mass Exodus of validators that some people claimed would immediately follow the capella Shanghai upgrade the activation queue is over two weeks long while the execute is less than four days I I've said it before many times and I'll say it again it's still hilarious to me just how wrong people were about shapella and how wrong people were about there being this Mass Exodus Exodus of stake but honestly like it's pretty funny how how um the the activation

queue is so long because what this tells me is that I think a lot of people that were exiting before are now re-entering and this includes people that had been Force exited from staking services like Kraken this includes people shuffling their eth from another service to uh solo staking or to to another you know different service than they were with uh and I think that's what we've seen here I don't know exactly how many like Net News stakers there are it'd be quite hard to track this um and what I mean by net new is basically people who weren't staking before right who aren't just coming from another service and and changing to a different service and exiting or answering I'm talking like net new Eve stakers that are entering for the first time I'm sure there's plenty of those as well obviously because I I've said many

times that I believe chappella wasn't massive de-risking events for the uh for kind of like ethereum staking but it's just great to see that we've basically we're basically um uh restarted the up only that we were before with Eid staking and I I don't foresee this slowing down anytime soon to be honest I I foresee it going up to 30 million each staked at least I think that uh I've explained the reasons before why I think that it wouldn't go I don't think it can get to like 70 80 million anytime soon uh but we have services like eigenlayer going live soon there's more staking protocols going live more lsds going live all this sorts of stuff happening in the background that's just going to add to that I guess like a

stake pressure that we're seeing on the network but yeah just thought this was something cool to speak to thanks to Preston for putting this tweet out all right so Trend fan apps shared something today that apparently the core devs are rethinking EIP numbering so for those of you who don't know the way EIP numbering works right now is it's based on the GitHub pull request number so essentially uh there'll be a number associated with the GitHub pull request and no matter what it is that's that's kind of like how it follows so for example erp1559 was the 1559 pull request on uh the ethereum GitHub repository here now obviously this numbering system isn't ideal it leaves a lot of dead numbers around

because a lot of eips that uh that just kind of get submitted sorry a lot of pull requests that kind of get submitted that aren't erps things like that as well so uh Danny Ryan here is actually proposing to change this so he recommends one of the two following options uh from the latest EIP assigned to start assigning purely sequentially plus one from there so if there is the latest eip's Erp 10000 we would go to EIP 10001 instead that of if there's another EIP is you know created later and it jumps to Erp 1050 because there were like 49 uh pull requests that that weren't eips you see how that would be a better system there uh and then the second proposed change would be to go back and fill in all of the gaps leading

up to the latest EIP assigned but this hurts the meaningfulness of the time relationship between erps but it's a nice use of a scarce resource I I think that like the first option is the one that really makes the most sense here obviously this is not something that the community is going to be involved with or it's not going to be a community governance process it really is just something that the core devs and researchers and people close to that Circle would um would kind of have an opinion on and it doesn't really affect anything out of just making it easier for people to track the EIP process which obviously is a huge deal um but not unless you're like working on this stuff day to day you're probably not going to notice anything here but you can check out the discussion thread for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube

description below all right so Tony here from the mebboost.picks website has shared a new kind of uh infographic today or I guess like new visualization today so this one shows block Builders racing to land blocks on chain as the competition competition heats up over time so this is a time lapse from I believe it starts at the uh first of the first 2023 so it starts at the beginning of this year and then goes to basically I think three days ago and you can kind of see over the course of the video if I click watch again no that's not going to work and be if I refresh the page I kind of bugged out Twitter's video yeah if you kind of refresh the video here you can see how the Builder landscape has changed over over time so at the top here we have

built uh Beaver build uh flashbots and build the x0x69 but I think that changed quite uh uh quite dramatically so uh you can kind of see that uh they're the top three right now and if I skip ahead on the video uh they're still the top three actually yeah I guess this because this is cumulative blocks built here but I think like the the smaller ones uh you know the ones that aren't in the top three moved around quite a bit but you can see here that you know flashbots that I I think are beaver build and flashbot started off neck and neck here and then over time basically there wasn't really much change between the top three whereas the rest of it changed um quite frequently as you can see from the for me just scrolling through the video yeah but you can go give the video

a view for yourself if you would like to I'll link it in the YouTube description below um but yeah I mean it's always good to see healthy competition among uh these sorts of things especially because the Mev ecosystem is or the Mev boost ecosystem is so competitive it's great to see that new entrants can come along and actually eat into the older entrance market share and it doesn't seem to be a static thing outside of the top three uh and I guess like the top three it really just speaks to them being the um uh you know the most I guess uh what's the word I'm looking for the the most sophisticated builders on the network and that doesn't mean that they're always going to be there but they have held their their kind of like lead for quite a while now so we're gonna have to

see how that evolves over time but anyway link this tweet in the YouTube description below you can go check it out for yourself all right speaking of Mev Frankie from Paradigm has announced that they uh that Paradigm is open sourcing Artemis which is a framework for writing Mev bots in Rust they built Artemis to make it easy as possible to get started with searching and design the library to be a simple modular and fast so uh I I've mentioned before how Paradigm have built their own execution layer clients in Rust called ref well now they have their own framework for writing Mev Bots are called items built in Rust so obviously these things are supposed to go hand in hand here now I was just talking about how more competition in the Mev boost ecosystem is very much welcome while

stuff like Artemis allows for this competition to actually uh Thrive and flourish and allows people to get started making kind of Mev Bots uh much faster than they would have in the past and you can read more details about this in Frankie's thread here as well as the blog post which is I think a four-part kind of blog post here uh no no it's just that's just the content so uh there's like a you know they go over why they built this what is Artemis artemis's architecture and next steps and you can actually visit the the project Repro for yourself at the GitHub the GitHub patreon if you want to check that out but this may be something that you're interested in if you've thought ever thought to yourself well I wish I could write an Mev bot you know I want to take the I want to take advantage of

all that potential money I could be having from being a builder or something like that this may be something that you're interested in so I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right so it is the sixth anniversary of the launch of ens today well yeah still today uh well I guess like it was May 4th for ens it was May 5th uh uh for me but uh yeah so it's it's awesome to see that ANS has been going so strong for so long now like six years and they are one of the strongest uh apps on ethereum obviously uh non-speculative By Nature because you're just kind of registering names obviously people can trade the names but it's supposed to be something of a of a utility for the ethereum network a public good for the

ethereum network here so you can actually collect a special edition pop-up at anniversary.ans.domains um you will need have to have certain in it an ens name your primary name and an avatar uh in order to do that but those things are pretty stock standard and I think it's actually good that they did this because it encourages people to use the ANS interface and see how just how easy it is to set these things so you can go check that out uh for yourself there and and Nick one of the founders of ens and the current lead developer uh has put together a thread about DNS as well so you can go give that a read for yourself now before I move on I wanted to give a few of my extra thoughts around ANS I think that ANS has been such a beacon in in the ethereum kind of

ecosystem because as I said it is not speculative by Nature yes people could speculate on names and they can buy and sell them on on nft marketplaces because their names themselves are nfts but generally when you have an ens name you have an identity attached to your ethereum address so for me sasol.eath I can go to anyone and say Hey you know if they need to send me money like or if they want to send me an nft or they want to donate to me whatever they want to do I can say yeah just sasol.heath right I don't have to go and copy paste my address because there's no way in hell I would ever remember an address right um they don't have to double check anything or they can check it for themselves on either scan if they want but it's not like they have to be very

careful about the characters and things like that they can simply just know okay sasol.if yeah and then then it's become my identity as well because it is my Twitter name I don't even have my real name on Twitter like on on my profile here you can see settle down eighth with the the bats the the bat signal on the speaker Emoji for the ultrasound money that's all I've got I have no um uh I don't have Anthony sassano there I used to but then I thought you know what I I don't think that's relevant sasol.8 is who I am it's my identity and I have a profile picture attached to that ens name as well I use it all the time and it's just a really cool way for people to know uh you know about me and especially when it comes to governance things like all my op and ARB tokens on

sasol.ether delegated to various uh delegates in those respective uh in those respective Dows and then people can follow that and say oh okay well uh sasol.eath um uh uh you know or Sasso kind of like delegated his tokens to to this delegate uh I'm gonna look into them as well because I you know maybe they trust me they trust my judgment on these things so those sorts of things I think are really really cool and it's had a whole ecosystem built up around it so yeah I just wanted to give a few thoughts there but uh kudos to ens on their sixth anniversary or sixth birthday technically are really really great to see that what all right last thing actually on ens Nifty chart has uh said that on Nifty chart all usernames are ens names or

wallet addresses but uh unfortunately ANS names cost money meaning 66 of their 12 000 community members don't have one uh but starting today anyone can claim a free ANS username on Nifty chat so if you have not uh I claimed this yet you can there are there are two ways to get one you can claim one in an active giveaway in their Lounge here and you can ask by sending a message to niftyachat.e now this is a uh not an ens name where it's like you know your name.eth it is a subdomain so it's basically your name dot nifty.ef here but still it's free right and we all like free things here and I should disclose actually I'm in a an investor in Nifty chat uh uh for those of you who don't know uh there but but yeah you can

go claim this for yourself um you can go click these links in the YouTube uh the thread will be linked in the YouTube description below for you to do so I think this is another cool thing that I didn't mention like the the fact that there's a sub note domains here so you could basically have a name that's on Nifty chat and people can know you by that name on Nifty chart and they can interact with you on there and I and you can get it for free right there's no need to to basically spend gas fees or spend uh fees on this uh you can get this gasless from Nifty chat so you can go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so a major announcement out of Aztec so I I basically discussed I think it was maybe a couple of months now that

Aztec was shutting down their Aztec Connect app because they were going to go all in on this new ZK roll-up that they were building this layer two obviously ZK Rob that they were building for privacy well that's not the only thing that they are doing so they announced today their roadmap for what they're building here and apparently they are building something that they're calling a hybrid ZK roll-up enabling both public and private smart contract execution in one of one environment and they're saying it's ethereum encrypted so not only are they making a a privacy layout they are also doing it in a uh doing it in a non-evm compatible way because it's not a ZK evm so they're building this this from the ground up

right they're not building it as an evm or like um like uh like arbitrum optimism and all the ZK VMS are they say here Aztec is a zero knowledge execution environment meant it is not a ZK evm because they believe that the evm is not privacy compatible it is not uh it doesn't do enough for privacy which I've heard from multiple people before um and uh they're they give more kind of like um uh in details in this thread here and they've also got a road map so they say here that users and developers can expect and to access a fully fledged public test net by early 2024 um and developers can have a local test net by the third quarter of 2023 and but here's the the kind of road map here to that I don't think there's any main Nets

uh yeah there's no main net on this roadmap it's basically all the test net stuff with Milestones but that isn't too far away for a fully kind of private ZK roll-up that is not evm that is not a ZK VM and they're doing something totally different here and Pauline polynia actually had a um a tweet about this uh basically summarizing exactly what they're building here let me see if I can bring it up over here quickly um because it's hard for me to find uh one sec I'm just bringing it up on my other other tab here so yeah Pauline is says Aztec is the most ambitious the most technologically advanced blockchain ever attempted getting you programmability Economic Security and encryption all at once uh and then Paulino says whether

it'll gain adoption I don't know but talk about shooting for the Stars this is it and I agree here from from my reading of this this is one of the most ambitious undertakings that I have seen if not the most ambitious undertakings I have seen in the ethereum layer 2 Spacey and I should disclose that I am an investor in Aztec as well uh but I'm a very very proud investor because you guys know the two things that I care most about uh is scaling and privacy within the ethereum ecosystem outside of ethereum core protocol stuff and Aztec is doing both so of course I want to be as involved with this project as as possible and they've just blown me away with this new announcement today and and what they're building so you can read the Twitter thread you can read the blog post to get more info on this the blog

post is quite lengthy as well it's got a bunch of details in there for you to check out but I'm super excited to see these be built out because ethereum really does need a fully private layer where people can transact without having to worry about doxing themselves so uh good luck to Aztec on this I think if any team can do it it's definitely them all right speaking of and using the layer 2 ecosystem op Labs announced today a major milestone for decentralized identity in the optimism ecosystem the attestation station which I have talked about in the past I think I've talked about a couple months ago has been upgraded to the ethereum attestation service standard giving developers one common standard for issuing and reading attestations that interoperate across the ecosystems now I

have talked about EAS or ethereum at a station station before uh I've I've said that I'm a really big fan of what they're building there I'm I said that it's a public good and I was hoping that it would become a standard well it seems like it's well on the path to becoming an attestation standard here because op labs are putting their way behind it and changing from their own implementation which was attestation station to the ethereum attestation service is a huge Road of confidence for EAS and I'm super excited to see two of my favorite teams teaming up to do this so you can read more about this in the blog post and and Twitter thread here which I'll link in the YouTube description below but if you aren't following along with I guess EAS or attestations and all that stuff in in that kind of like uh in that ecosystem I

suggest doing so because it is another one of those non-speculative use cases that has Real World um uh impact as well because attestations at the end of the day are all around us right in the real world the governments the that we are kind of like under so for example you know I'm Australian but the Australian government is my government they attest to many different things about me they attest to my identity right they're the one who issues me a passport basically saying you know that we attest that uh Anthony sassano is this person he had you know this is his date of birth this is his uh you know all of his names this is uh uh and this passport is valid until such and such date whatever so basically attesting to my identity to

the rest of the world and obviously other examples include driver's licenses um other examples include like credit scores right which come from private companies of course and it depends where you are in the world but it came come from private and public there but just they're all around us right we're all and and even just like around us in an informal capacity where you have friends that basically uh attest to you to you to other to their other friends say you're meeting one of their other friends and they introduce you and they say you know you're awesome or something like that well they're attesting to your awesomeness so I know it gets a little bit funny when when thinking about things like that but that is really what it what it's like so how can we bring all of that on chain well we do that

with an attestation standard and right now the ethereum attestation service is by far the front runner on this uh on this front and I actually think they understand the team behind it understand that an attestation um service needs to be a public good it can't be something that is kind of I guess like uh a profit maximalist thing that wants to suck as much money out of the ecosystem as possible it needs to be a credibly neutral public good that can team up with all the various uh kind of projects within the ecosystem that need attestations which is pretty much every project I think uh because it ties into identity and stuff like that and that's exactly what they're providing so I am looking forward to EAS continuing to get more adoption and I'm very glad to see that optimism has decided to adopt the

standard here all right so Zappa has a big and a feature released today so their on-chain activity feed is now here you can build your own ethereum feed at zappa.xyz uh and here are the features in their Twitter thread here so basically what this is it pretty self-explanatory and it's an activity feed it shows you what's happening on chains you can see things like who you know who sent uh uh ustc to who who minted this nft who sent this nft here who registered this ANS name blah blah right and there are different kind of uh bundles that you can have as well on accounts that you can follow so there are curated lists here where uh you know some of them are called CT personalities or Founders or ethereum ogs or defy whales and you can

kind of track all their activity right in your Zappa dashboard and Zappa has also partnered with Degen score to create a a custom created list as well because djen score builds reputation systems to identify and reward on-chain native so and the list service is the top 25 djan so you can go see what they're up to so this is available I believe to everyone at zappa.xyz you a lot of you are probably already Zappa users so you've probably already seen this by now but if you haven't yet go check it out I think these activity feeds are pretty cool but at the same time the funny thing is is that there's activity feeds are cool but what happens when we get to like a fully private uh ethereum layer like for example what happens if Aztec is like super successful a lot of people move

there well you couldn't have something like this on Aztec because there'd be no activity to to monitor to see really you would you would get maybe like a muted version of it for example you would get something with its metadata removed basically you would be able to see something like this address sent funds to this address but in an Ideal World you wouldn't be able to see the amount of funds sent you probably would be able to see what the funds were but you wouldn't be able to see the recipient uh the center in recipients identity any of that sort of stuff there so in that world it's a bit different but I guess like right now in most of the worlds everything is pretty much public so an activity feed works very well uh here so you can go check this out for yourself

it's just that Zappa dot XYZ and I'll also link the announcement thread in the YouTube description below all right to round this up here for this week actually uh it's Friday I just just realized uh Paulie and I are had another tweet that I wanted to go over where they said there's absolutely zero evidence that crypto assets are some new paradigm the basic realities of demand and Supply apply exactly like any Market over the Millennia if there isn't a clear economic sustainability model or plan you the token holder of subsidizing the project so I think this is a really strong statement that I think a lot of people get confused about and aren't paying attention to essentially putting polynard's tweet a tweet in a different way what they're saying is that in

crypto people tend to think that because something pumps really hard really fast so for example there's this Pepe meme coin that's been pumping lately but people kind of see this and they're like oh wow you know new paradigm what's going on here this coin went from like zero to a billion dollars market cap in like a few weeks this is crazy I'm gonna get involved with this I'm gonna jump on the train this is Never Gonna you know go down this is up only when the reality is is that's not the case right and we've seen this time and time again and some of you out there who have been around for a long time will understand this better than people who haven't been around for very long but essentially things can can go up in value very very quickly but they can also go down in

value very very quickly so we see this all the time and we and I think the perfect example is is uh what happened you know 2021 where okay the second half of 2021 everything went absolutely nuts there were craziness happening in like the nft space and the layer one kind of tokens going nuts and there was just a lot of meme coins popping up uh popping off and things like that and then in 2022 all these went down like 90 plus percent right uh and it went down in basically the first half of 2022. so the basic rules of supply and demand still exist if there's a lot of demand coming in and the supply is very little because in a bull market the supply is still there this is what some people don't don't understand the supply in a bull market is still there right the the

fact is that there's more demand and then what ends up happening is that because there's more demand and because prices are going up no one wants to sell right so it becomes a the supply actually goes down the available Supply to buy goes down but this is a temporary thing eventually the prices get so crazy and people have made so much paper gains that they want to start locking in profits and then when that starts happening in a large way the and the demand naturally will go down because there's only so much demand that can that can kind of flight into something you have that kind of Tipping Point where something tops out and then it just goes down right we had this with eighth when Heath went to 4400 and went down to 1700 very quickly then it went back up to 4 900 then it went down to

like 880 you know uh quite quite quickly from there right I think it that did it in like seven or eight months or something so it was it was a quite a quick turnaround there uh and it and it felt really bad when it was happening right but this is the thing that people need to understand is that supply and demand always matter and they're influenced by a million different things but at the heart of it all to be a good investor uh not not a Trader I mean Traders at different ball games but to be a good long-term investor all you really need to do and I know I'm kind of watering this down a lot where this is not something that can be learned overnight it's not a skill that's going to come to you within a day of doing research but what you really need to understand is

just supply and demand Dynamics and what feeds into each of them you're never going to sell the top right you're never going to buy the bottom it's very hard like I'm talking like the exact top in the exact bottoms but if you're trying to like sell when the Market's kind of really hot and you think that it's worth taking profits you're trying to buy when the Market's really quiet and people are really fearful and you you feel like there's way too much um uh sorry the the supply side is kind of been exhausted the sell side's being exhausted and you feel like there's a lot of pents up demand out there and you want to get in before that demand comes that's what you do but it works both ways there is no uh kind of magic sources because it's crypto all assets work in this the same way it is always

supply and demand and yes there can be certain things that manipulate the price of these assets for example uh in the property Market in Australia people will say that it's manipulated because the government subsidizes a lot of it I mean that's that's that's fair to say right it's not a truly free market but you'll be hard-pressed to find many truly free markets in the world you could say that trading uh crypto meme coins is a truly free market but I mean is it it's maybe free from government influence to an extent it may be free from um from nation state influence but it is definitely not free from private interests for example a lot of these meme coins are started up by groups who are just trying to pump and dump a coin there are for every one Pepe there are thousands of ones that failed and didn't

go anywhere so there is definitely a lot of uh manipulation that goes on as well but still the the same tactic of supply and demand matters doesn't matter how manipulated it is um so you just need to realize what size manipulated and when and when that kind of uh stops being the case and what what other factors play into things and no one has unlimited money to manipulate it and for an unlimited amount of time except maybe a nation's day and even they don't have unlimited money they can print as much money as they want but eventually it reaches a Tipping Point right now as we've seen in in certain Nations around the world but they enter kind of like hyperinflation that that's the Tipping Point that's very hard to come back from and when you're current and not everyone loses faith in your currency right but anyway I'm gonna

leave it at that because I'm if I keep going I'm going forever about this because there's a lot to talk about there but hopefully that uh that gives you a bit of um extra color on polynard's tweet but 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 it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone