Coinbase ERC20 recovery tool, KZG Ceremony Grants - The Daily Gwei Refuel #509 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we cut the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host the analysis honor and since the 16th of December 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so first up we have an announcement from Trent Van Epps today uh he announced the kzg ceremony grants round now this round is being run by the ethereum foundation and grants are up for grabs for people that are doing uh one of two things or both things uh writing your own implementation of the of the ceremony here or submitting entropy generated by non-traditional sources or through a unique process and there's more details about both of these in this blog post and the Tweet thread of course but I wanted to focus on the second thing here which is you know submitting entropy generated by

non-traditional sources or through a unique process this is really fun because as Trent says in his thread here um getting entropy via Randomness Randomness that uh from sources that are really hard to bias mess with uh allows people to get really creative so for example in the zcash sapling setup which was similar to is similar in its nature of being a trusted setup uh two people here Socrates and Ryan Pierce measured radioactivity from a Chernobyl artifact while flying at 3 000 feet to get that source of of Randomness there now as Trent says while they're not expecting every idea to be this involved they do encourage people to think outside the box and be creative like where can you get Randomness that's especially unique to your city and Community what can you

think of of to engage your local ethereum community to help and I think this is cool because not only is it uh I guess providing grants for this sort of sorts of stuff to happen it's also making the Casey Jason ceremony more socially hardened now I've talked about how this ceremony only relies on one honest participant for it to actually work so if you're a participant in it and you trust yourself then uh you can trust that the ceremony was completed uh properly right but the social proof is also very powerful because it means that even people who don't participate in it can can have relative trust in this system as well that is that it was generated using I guess like uh really random data right and I'm and you can

get as random as you want here you can get these sorts of Randomness from basically anywhere I mean cloudflare famously has a wall of lava lamps with cameras pointed at it that they generate Randomness from now I don't know if they still use that but they were using that in a production setting and essentially the way it would work is that they'd take inputs from the lava lamps and then they would do something with it right but because the lava lamps are always random you can't really predict where they're going to go next they have a wall of them and that's their source of kind of entropy that's their source of Randomness right so when you when you I think about it like that you can think outside the box and come up with basically any source of Randomness that you want uh and you can do it locally in

your city you can go somewhere where you think you can get something that's completely random that no one's going to able to replicate uh or it's going to be incredibly difficult for them to replicate uh uh and and go from there right so I think it's just a really fun way to get people involved with the kzg serum money but also add that social proof that's very very important for things like this but as I said you can read a trenched thread here and also the blog post for more information on this I will link both in the YouTube description below and just a heads up there is a deadline of January 31st so you have about six weeks from today to get your applications in here all right so autoscan a new aversion has been released so auto scan has become a

merged Expo Explorer this release introduces the optional Beacon chain integration uh now for those of you who don't know autoscan is an open source ethereum block explorer that you can use locally with your own nodes uh whether they be uh uh execution layer note or a consensus layer node and also validators so yeah this is an alternative to other block explorers like either scan where essentially you get to use your own data produced by your own node rather than relying on third parties yeah and I believe it also works with archive nodes not just full nodes as well here so you can actually get like historical balances and things like that but this is great and this is more this is awesome to say that they're I still actively working on auto scan and it's getting updates because I think that if you want to go like above and beyond

being like a fully self-sovereign ethereum username I've talked about this a lot but being a fully self-sovereign ethereum user means running your own full node right connecting your wallet to that to use it as an IPC maybe even becoming a validator right it's not strictly necessary to be a validator on the network but I guess like if you want to go above and beyond right and then you can do these other things which may seem like something of a soft I guess um requirement but like running your own block Explorer gives you even better guarantees here because you have the data all that your all these auto scan is doing is interpreting the data from your full node for you in a human readable format uh and then obviously as I've said before you can go over even further and do run your own front ends

right or build your own front ends you don't even have to trust someone else's code that's the amazing thing about the ethereum ecosystem is that we you have all the tools available to you if you're willing to put in the work to become a fully self-sovereign ethereum user and as I said as I just said it does require putting in the work I mean I've been setting up my new solo staking box uh on Linux recently and I haven't set up Solo's taking on Linux before I have been using Windows funny enough since Genesis and I've just been adding validators because that's what I was used to but I would rather use Linux because it's better for this sort of stuff so my new staking box uh for a lot of today I've been setting that up and I've been following different Guides Online shout out to the east taker

guides written by Remy Roy and our summer ESAT for his guide uh guides on on media I've been using those uh just just to make sure that I follow the right process with Linux and there's a lot to learn don't get me wrong right and there are other services you can use like dap node but but me being me I wanted to use like I wanted to just do it all on my own uh on my own staking box uh without using a third-party service but there's nothing wrong with dap node or other services like sedge from nevermind that I've talked about before but yeah it does require putting in the work it's not something that the you know your mum's going to be able to do or anything like that I mean maybe if they really wanted to do it if they really cared about being self-sovereign

they would they could learn because all the information is is out there um but as people listening to the refuel I would assume a lot of you are definitely more interested in getting into the weeds and becoming as fully self-sovereign of an ethereum user as you can be especially in the face of things like censorship happening on front ends and also I guess like eat the scan being such a central point I mean ether scan's amazing but it's such a centralized point in the ethereum ecosystem everyone uses it as a source of Truth when in reality etherscan could either get compromised and display the incorrect information it could go offline it could uh the scan team themselves I'm not saying they would do this but they could show you the wrong information or try and trick you into doing different things or seeing

different information so there is a kind of I guess danger there in that whereas if you run your own block Explorer with autoscan you only need to you only need to trust yourself you don't need to trust anyone else right and if you run it with your own full node of course then you're just trust in yourself which is the whole point I mean this is why we built ethereum this is why ethereum is so limited as well at layer one because we want to keep it uh to a point where people can actually run a full node on consumer grade Hardware or even low powered Hardware like a Raspberry Pi uh but yeah I've talked about all that before but great to see this update from autoscan here all right so a pretty massive update from coinbase today and I believe this is the first centralized exchange to do

this so what coinbase has introduced today is a new erc20 self-service asset recovery tool which they're calling a safe simple and secure way for coinbase customers to recover almost 4 000 unsupported ERC 20 tokens so you know how you accidentally or sometimes you accidentally send tokens to your coinbase address and it's not supported on coinbase or that you have to go through support to get them to actually recover it for you well now you don't need to do that anymore you can use their self-service tool to do this yourself now I think that it I mean obviously it only applies to eligible assets here I don't know if this is available to all customers or just us-based customers I believe that those details are in the um the blog post here as long as as well as a how-to guide but

this is really really cool because as I said I believe this is the first time a centralized exchange has done this correct me if I'm wrong in the comments I mean I don't really use too many centralized exchanges so I don't really have land land there but as far as I know this is definitely um this is definitely a first uh and it's amazing that coinbase is I guess like doubling down on user sovereignty here uh they've been doing a lot of great stuff with their coinbase wallets they're now doing this self-service thing where you can basically you know you don't need if you accidentally send I guess like the asset um to the wrong address on coinbase you can get this back yourself without having to go through support and it's not just for like self-sovereignty it's more like the fact of the matter is you'd probably be

waiting lots and lots of months to get it back of going through support and this obviously takes a lot of a load off the support uh people uh with by having this tool and the funny thing is coinbase wouldn't have developed this tool if they weren't seeing a lot of complaints about this to their support pipeline normally with with customer support you will look at the amount of tickets coming in and you will correlate it and you'll be like okay well what can we do to actually automate this so that users don't have to ticket us because obviously getting a human involved is time consuming humans are really expensive support stuff yeah you have to hire a lot of them especially if you have a lot of of users so the scalable approach is to build a tool that users can can use on their own and make sure

that it's easy enough for them to be able to use so huge kudos to coinbase for doing this as I said this is something that affects a lot of users I have done this before like I am not not lately but I've actually done this before in the earlier days when I was just getting started with crypto it is an easy mistake to make for people I remember the stupidest mistake I made was early 2017 I was participating in my first Ico and I gave them uh sorry I sent Heath to it using my poloniex address and then the tokens were sent to poloniex and they didn't support that token and then I went through support trying to get them to give me the tokens that I put my eighth into I put 5 8 into this Ico back then it was worth uh I

think the Ico was when either was like 50 bucks it was like 250 right so obviously not a huge huge thing but as it kept going up in 2017 I was like ah I really want these tokens so I can at least get something back but I never got them back poloniex as you guys know uh kind of went under sold to Justin sun and they were inundated with support requests because they were actually the main Exchange in 2017 until binance came along to trade uh I guess like quote-unquote altcoins um so yeah I mean people do this all the time they send it to the wrong address and having a tool that like well climax has introduced is critically important and I just wanted to give a huge kiddos to coinbase here all right a couple of optimism updates from today so they've announced

something that is coming coming soon uh which is The Optimist nft at customizable profile picture that can represent user identity across the optimism ecosystem and you can see a few examples here of what this could potentially look like and they continue by saying at present the Optimus Optimist nft is in beta and only people voting in the Retro public goods funding round two are eligible to Mint but in q1 2023 minting will be open to include a much broader set of optimists based on participation in the optimism Collective the Optimus nft is one of the first use cases of the attestation station A permissionless Primitive which anyone is able to read add to and build on top of it provides qualitative attestations about Community actors creating invaluable data library for the ecosystem so basically what optimism is

building here if you really dig under the surface which is what Flipside did in their thread and I'll link the flipside's thread as well is that they're building a on-chained reputation system here using nfts which I've talked about before as as being a major use case of nfts and if anyone's going to execute on it it's going to be the Optimus optimism ecosystem because I believe both optimism and arbitrim have been going you know and targeting nft related stuff but at least right now optimism is definitely trying to integrate nfts into their governance framework and then extending beyond that and and making kind of like a social proofs and reputation systems around that as well I'm sure arbitrim has plans for this too but optimism definitely is the leader on on that front right now especially because they also have Italian place they have the op token

right they have a whole governance framework already spun up which I'm sure arbitrim will have in the future but they don't have right now uh but yeah I think this is really cool as I've said before the one thing I want to see with nfts and Dows is experimentation and I want to see experimentation not for that not just for the sake of experimentation I want to see it so that people actually discover new and creative ways to use The Primitives that we already have instead of trying to reinvent the wheel because that's what ends up happening with a lot of these Dows a lot of these nft projects they keep just trying to reinvent the wheel it's like guys like we have these tools let's stick to what we know works and let's experiment with that let's not just kind of start from something that we know doesn't work and

try to experiment with from the base Primitives we have The Primitives we we know you know there's relative best practices here so let's work on those let's build on those let's get po-ups integrated let's get ANS integrated let's not just recreate everything that we've already got let's work with what we've got experiment with it and hopefully work towards a better solution for everyone but anyway you can read optimism's thread to learn more about this and also flip side of cryptos thread uh which which they did as well just a bit more info on the attestation station which is a mouthful uh but this is on the smart contract itself so you can check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so Liam who works in community and marketing at scroll put together a thread today about a list of

comprehensive educational resources to help you get up to speed on how scroll will transform into ethereum's most community-centric evm compatible ZK evm and this is basically going through a lot of the resources that I've talked about on the refill before but in a nice put together thread here which of course I'll link in the YouTube description below but I really like how all of these different layer twos are taking different approaches to things so this is the first time I've seen a layer 2 say they want to be uh you know ethereum's most Community Centric a ZK evm which I think is actually a pretty big uh I guess um total restful market so to speak right where you have an existing ethereum community that has a lot of great values they care deeply about ethereum they care deeply about scaling ethereum and of course all the

projects that are building on top as layer twos as Roll-Ups making sure that they add value to ethereum so how do you get them to use your stuff like how do you get them to use your ZK VM instead of someone else's well there's obviously you know you need to have projects on there you need to have ease of usability on there you need to be integrated with all the existing infrastructure like wallets and rpcs and all that sorts of stuff but you also want to make people feel like they have a home on that ecosystem I think what arbitrim has actually done really well is make people feel like they have a home on the arbitrary Network there's a bunch of projects on there that all work together they're shared communities and everyone's really excited about things happening on there so they've done a

really good job of that but I think that you every single one of these l2s or these these um ecosystems need to do this like this is the lifeblood of their ecosystem at least in in my point of view because you need those early adopters in order to I guess like test your stuff you know put up with the pains The Growing Pains so to speak and make your system better and I don't think I mean I I think that the different L2 and roll-up teams definitely understand this to an extent but it there's there's understanding it and then there's focusing on it and right now I would say arbitrim is probably the leader here optimism is definitely doing a lot of great work they're doing it in a bit of a different way but they're definitely doing great work there polygon also has has a great

um uh kind of ecosystem and Community there too but they're not allowed to obviously it's the POS chain I'm sure that'll translate over to their ZK VMS but yeah in terms of like building that actual core Community uh German optimism definitely the leaders here I mean they've been live for the longest ride and they have all the projects on there but it's going to be interesting to see how these other uh different ecosystems develop over the next I mean I would say two three years to really see them because you want to see them in a bear Market you want to see them in a bull market um but yeah we'll see how that plays out but anyway I'll link Liam's thread in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right Matt Cutler here CEO and co-founder of block native announced that block native has raised an

additional 15 million dollar financing round to build blocks for ethereum maintenance uh so just a disclosure here I am an advisor to block native um but yeah they're doing a lot of great work and have been doing a lot of great work uh for a long time now in the ethereum ecosystem for those of you who don't know what a block native is well they've traditionally been a kind of real-time mempool monitoring platform for uh the evm based ecosystem so on ethereum on polygon or nurses chain and some other chains out there and they also run a relayer the block and 80 relayer which I've talked about before it is unfortunately a censoring relayer but like I mean I don't expect it not to be considering that block native is based in the US and they unfortunately have to follow along with uh what their lawyers

tell them I'm sure their lawyers have said to them the same thing that flashbots as lawyer said to them like you can't you know run a non-censoring relay which is it is what it is but regardless of that uh block native is taking a I guess like more um involved uh participation in Block building that seems to be their net the thing that they're going to be targeting as part of like a core business proposition or Core Business offering for their business here and I think the reason why they're doing this is well at least from from what I can tell uh the reason why they're doing this is because being a relayer is quite profitable right even if you're a censoring relayer right now I mean you're not losing my you know much money if really anything by censoring tornado cash transactions if we're talking about pure economic

incentives here so you're making you can make a stand to make a lot of money uh from these relayers and block natives market share has actually been increasing lately on the relayer front so I think that makes a lot of sense for them to dive deeper into this and be and make this more of a core offering here and it seems that the investors kind of agree with this that's why they've been able to raise capital in the depths of a bear Market as well um but yeah so just a big congrats to them for this really excited I actually was having a really great conversation with uh with Matt today about um about this sort of stuff and about block building he's he's a really smart guy he's really switched on and as I said block native have been doing this for quite a while so it's uh it's

encouraging to see them move more into this market now what does this look long like long term I have talked about obviously how like Mev boost right now is more of a temporary solution where it's like a side car and people use it optionally and then eventually we'll get something like PBS but there are no guarantees in this ecosystem and I think I've said this before PBS in its current form may not even go to mainnet as it currently is it may be completely different by the time it gets to mainnet it may not ever be even be integrated because there is another path where PBS isn't actually even needed and that path is essentially the block Builder environment or the relay environment with Mev boost becoming so distributed so decentralized so resilient that it's

actually better than PBS and CR list and this is something that I was talking to Matt about today and this this actually got me thinking I hadn't really thought about this alternative path that uh I guess like the Mev censorship resistant ecosystem could take so and it's actually better like this too when you think about it because we don't have to just rely on this Holy Grail of PBS and CR lists we also have what we know works right now which is Mev boost with relayers and we know it works because even though the um uh there are censoring relays there are also non-centering lights and there's been more non-censoring ones spun up uh than censoring ones over the last few months uh there have been improvements like Min bid that have come along there have been improvements like open sourcing the building infrastructure the relay

infrastructure so other people can build better relays and better Builders so it's it's kind of this trade-off of do we enshrine Mev boost into the protocol through PBS and CR lists or do we let a I guess like ecosystem of diverse distributed and decentralized relayers develop and and just you know make just basically rely on that instead of enshrining it in the protocol I I don't know what my answer is to that question right now honestly I I really have only been thinking about this today because of my contact session with Matt in this frame of mind so something to think about something to keep in mind um but but yeah I don't have my my answer here about what's better I don't think anyone knows what's better it's more about picking like the least worst solution because even with pbr's PBS and

CR list it doesn't eliminate censorship altogether it still gives the um validators uh sorry the block Builders I guess like a choice to an extent and even with something like forcing the inclusion of of transactions that can lead to some murky kind of like social things as well so it's a big discussion it is not something that's going to get solved overnight there is no quick fist fix there is no Silver Bullet here there is just smart people working on these Solutions and coming up with different ways to do this so we'll have to see how that evolves over time that's a bit of a side track to uh the main announcement here which was the financing round but I think it's very important considering that block native is moving more into block building here and I'm sure they're gonna be there's gonna be a lot more people moving into

block building as time goes on especially at l2s because it can be quite lucrative all right so a second announcement here of a fun race today comes from Aztec and they announced a 100 million dollar series B funding round LED by a16z now I should disclose that I am an existing investor in Aztec here as well I participated in their series a round but I mean this is amazing to see right it's awesome to see that Aztec a privacy preserving layer 2 on ethereum or a privacy enabled layer 2 on ethereum is able to attract such huge Capital injection in the bear Market I'm sure this race was done quite a while ago I mean I know this phrase was done uh quite a while ago right but still I mean

it was done in the bear and it seems like investors are seeing the value prop here now what I like about what Aztec has done here they've done something really smart they're kind of rebranding themselves from a privacy layer to to an encrypted layer too so they're calling themselves encrypted ethereum or an encrypted ethereum blockchain because they're a layer 2 Channel top of ethereum and the reason why I think this is smart is because the the term encryption or encrypted has less baggage associated with it than privacy and this comes from the web 2 world where people understand that encryption and encrypted is needed for the web 2 world to function without encryption we wouldn't have things like online banking we wouldn't even have things like logins

right authentication you and we and and the web just wouldn't work so people understand that yes the term encryption and it comes with some form of baggage because sometimes uh governments and law enforcement will say oh well this thing's encrypted uh that means we can't get into it it means the bad guys are able to evade our our kind of um evadeau controls and there's a lot of this around like Apple's uh I guess like iCloud encryption and the FBI kicking up a fast and all this sorts of stuff so it is in the news but the thing is about the everyday person is that when you say encrypted to them like you know most of the time they're probably not gonna know what that means right like and then you explain it to them while encryption is it works this this and this and and you know your your

password is and your login details um or to the way you authenticate to your I don't know whatever it is is using encryption then they kind of understand that but then when you say something like privacy right and you and you kind of argue the point of privacy it gets a bit murkier because there's there's classic saying of you know you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear so why do you need online privacy who cares if the government can see what you do do you know blah blah and that's a pretty popular rhetoric right so I think just that slight kind of change in rebranding here from a privacy preserving protocol or privacy preserving Layer Two to an encrypted Layer Two changes the conversation a bit right and it makes it more palatable for the people that maybe you know don't really have much understanding of this

sorts of stuff and and obviously makes it more palatable because it's more I guess socially accepted right so I just really like that but uh but yeah that again is sidetracking from the main announcement which is the funding round uh led by a16z with a bunch of other investors uh joining around as well um but yeah this is going to give them a lot of Runway to build out Aztec I mean as you guys know they have azteconnect live on mainnet right now which allows you to basically tap into layer one ethereum liquidity uh well D5 liquidity on layer 2 for supported apps and get full privacy protection there or full I guess like encryption on your transactions I should start using the new terminology here uh which is obviously very very cool and I mean they've got their their new smart contract language that they introduced

the other day called Noir which is a language for zero knowledge and they're building a bunch of other stuff and I'm sure they're going to be hiring like crazy with this new race as well but yeah great to see them raise this money uh and congrats to them on this all right so oh man I gotta it's funny I gotta disclose again that I'm an investor in this project and even the next thing I'm going to talk about I didn't realize I'm talking about all the projects I'm invested in today but it's because they all have major announcements so this project fee uh had announced that they're live on mainnet today and as I said I am an investor in this project so basically it is live on the polygon POS mainnet and what is FIP uh fee right um basically it is a way to

build your own I guess on-chain World using different I guess items you can get for a completing different thing so for example once you load up fee for the first time it has a bunch of different things you can claim based on what you did so for example if you've made a unisop trade uh you can claim the unisop item uh particular UNICEF item if you own a certain amount of Ethan your wallet you can claim an item for that if you own an ens name you can uh you can get an item for that and you know you get my gist here it's basically kind of taking your own chain uh I guess um actions and things you've done on chain and building a world around it which think is really cool that's why I backed this team because as I've said before I'm not big on backing uh or investing

in specific nfts but I am big on on investing in uh things that are building infrastructure to enable cool people to do cool things with nfts and that's exactly what fee is doing here so if you want to go explore it uh you can as I said it's live on the polygon POS chain it is not live on ethereum mainnet uh simply because it would be too expensive to be on the mainnet I'm hoping that they eventually deploy this to layer 2 as well or at least I guess like migrate it to to layer twos when when it's ready here but for now you can play with it on polygon I'll link this in the YouTube description below for you to go play around with I've already played around with it a bit it's quite fun um I I think it's really cool just to

see my Unchained stuff visualized under sasso.eth and I did play on some other addresses that I own as well that have I guess more actions that I've done uh and yeah it looks cool right and I'm sure you saw some people tweeting about their their kind of what they built as well I saw David Hoffman tweeting about this too uh but yeah definitely go check it out I'll link it in the YouTube description below alright finally here we have something from Euler and just a disclosure again I'm an investor in Euler Labs here who are building Euler Finance but basically what they have uh uh released today is an early Christmas present for everyone looking for a comprehensive guide on getting information about Euler and this is the research guide here so basically you can go check this out for yourself but this will give you a full breakdown

of everything oil art Finance how it works uh you know how um how different interest rates work on the protocol how you can use the graph with the protocol I mean all sorts of things I'm just scrolling through it right now but this is a really great resource for you to be able to I guess I get information about Euler uh and basically do research on on the protocol yourself now last time just an aside here last time I uh said the word Euler instead of Euler someone corrected me and said no it's Eula it's like no no it is actually Euler I actually pronounced this one right out of every word that I've pronounced wrong on this podcast I have actually pronounced this right so it is oil light named after a famous mathematician it's not Eula which is funny because like it

doesn't read like Euler at all but that's what it is right I'm just uh I just want to design that because you guys know I'm really bad at pronouncing things um but yeah you can check out Euler's uh research post I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh but yeah I think that that's going to be it for today so I think 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 newsletter join the Disco Channel and I'll catch you all in next week thanks everyone