Danksharding, DeFi & NFTs and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #305 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily great refuel where we cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony susana and today's the first of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so i just wanted to talk a little bit about i guess like education and information asymmetry and all that sort of stuff uh for the for the kind of like first five minutes of this episode so basically i came across this tweet today that's from this uh thomas guy that said uh was complaining about the gas phase and said yes but the gas complaint is still valid right now 99 of daps are not on roll-ups optimistic and arbitrary still have high fees 20 is still nowhere near acceptable you need a different l2 wallet for each roll-up i'm bullish on the future but not for another year at

least now obviously a lot of what's in this tweet is just wrong information and i quote tweeted this and said i was impressed by how much wrong information was in this tweet because uh most of the popular apps are already live on arbitrary optimism and polygon and we'll be live on the other l2s as they become more generalized as well uh optimism and arbitrary fees are not twenty dollars um you know a swap is less than five dollars on these networks and getting cheaper over time and you don't need a different l2 wallet for each roll up right we can always just use metamask you can just literally use one wallet and add all the networks you want and it's all well and good so what i i guess the point of me bringing this up today is that no matter how much you know we

educate them how much how many kind of like educational videos i do newsletters i do how much you know we all kind of like educate our friends family whoever whoever else there's always going to be this poor information out there i actually don't know where thomas has gotten this information from because all it takes to basically you know debunk this sort of stuff is you can go to the l2s and you can see the apps on there you can see there's uniform on all of them you can see that there's uh there's rv on the test nets and that's really one of the only major ones missing you can see curves on there a bunch of other projects on there as well right uh and then you can see at l2 fees.info that the the fees for a swap are not anywhere near 20 you should also know that if you've used

an l2 you don't need a separate wallet for each l2 right you can just use metamask so i don't know where this information came from i mean i can take a guess probably from some of the uh i guess like less uh reputable youtubers out there who like to spread this kind of stuff especially the stuff around the merge reducing gas fees which you guys know is a pretty massive pet peeve of mine uh and i'm not looking forward to that that kind of like happening around there but yeah i mean the whole point of me bringing this up really just to bring it back here is that i don't think you can ever educate too much i think education is always going to be kind of like an ongoing thing you you can't repeat yourself too much i think you know there's plenty of times where i'll

repeat myself on the refuel like i mean i repeat myself a lot on here but i think it's worth doing so because it's probably not not always the same viewers maybe you forgot something that you may need a refresher on and i don't think it's a waste of time repeating stuff so yeah just wanted to kind of like start off today's episode with that but on that note there's plenty of other things to get through so let's uh let's get educating so danny ryan's blog post finally came out this is the one that i've been talking about for the last few days it's basically the finalized series that he does this is number 33 uh about the ethereum consensus layer formerly known as eth2 uh it's a very short update of course but uh there's updates around the merge and client diversity here so there's

another um another kind of like test net coming called killing i think that's how you say k-i-l-n um so this was this will kind of like be spun up soon there's a spec here engineers are busy knocking out the changes as as danny says here so uh so that's really good to see and then obviously client diversity is a big topic right now and i've gone through that a lot on the refill with you guys before so i'm not going to rehash it there so great to see the merge progress you know from what i can see the merge spec is almost frozen as i mentioned to you guys frozen means that there's no more changes being made to the specs so the developers can just build without having to worry about any major changes being made um but on on top of that as well uh

the engineering you know work seems to be coming along really nicely they say finding the bugs they're doing these test nets so things are looking really well i haven't heard anything about uh not being able to meet that june deadline but a lot can happen between now and june so we'll have to see what shakes out there but if you want to give this whole post a read could be linked in the youtube description and there's obviously links in here to learn more about each of these things i'm looking forward to seeing killen rebooted i'm looking forward to seeing client diversity improve i have it on good authority that we're making some progress here in the background with major providers out there i'm talking to a few people about this we're really trying to push these major providers such as exchanges and staking service providers to get off the majority client

being prison right now and get onto the the more minority clients so we're going to see some positive stuff around this i think over the next few months so i'm very much looking forward to that as well so polly now is back with a fresh blog post called dank sharding which is basically a uh tldr of what that new sharding kind of designed that came from dan cradfeist is all about now i'm not going to read the whole thing obviously you can go give this a read for yourself but uh if polly now is excited about something i'm excited about something and as i've said to you guys i think dank sharding or this new sharding design from um from dan crad and that's where the name came from obviously is a massive leap forward in blockchain scalability and the modular stack and everything that we're that you know

we're super excited about and obviously sharding has been around as long as proof of stake has been around it's been a long time coming we've settled on data sharding which is basically what dang shining still is but there are a bunch of reasons to be excited about that i think for me what what kind of like uh caught my eye and these are kind of polynomials points here was that you can have synchronous calls between zk roll-ups and ethereum l1 as they confirm in the same block you can see how this can be interesting for stuff like the amm so basically being able to kind of like go cross-chain with um synchronous calls meaning that you can kind of like have oh how do i explain this in kind of like layman's turns i mean if you know what synchronous and asynchronous means then uh

then you'll get it but i guess like i can explain the difference between the two asynchronous is when like you send a message and then you get like a reply back like maybe a few seconds later or something whereas synchronous is kind of like it you know it happens at the same time right it's in sync so i mean hope that's like a really simplified explanation of it but that's exactly what happens in an ethereum block right when you do things like um when you when you do things like atomic transactions on ethereum where you can string all these protocols together and do and do it all in an ethereum block or or do kind of like um flash loans arbitrage and stuff like that so yeah um that was pretty cool and also it also uh opens up the possibility for upgrading the current ethereum execution layer

which is the layer that we all use right now the layer one uh to an enshrined roll-up but first there's an optimistic roll-up with statelessness and fraud proofs eventually there's an enshrine zk roll up with zk avm which the astute observer will say that if the current ethereum execution environment that we know is layer 1 ethereum became an enshrined zk roll up it could benefit from uh the fact that it can have synchronous calls between zkrs and ethereum l1 because ethereum l1 would be a zkr right so that's really really cool so anyway i highly recommend giving this post to read and pollinate links to a bunch of other kind of like reading materials for you guys to get your head around as well i think this is the next big thing that's going to be talked about at least for the next you know until it gets

implemented probably for the next you know a couple of years or something like that um and i think it's going to change the game again like ethereum just keeps doing this right we keep changing the game we keep coming up with all these really new really cool new things and i mean i haven't been as excited about something since the modular stacks that are coming to prominence and since we started getting these l2s online it really is like a leap forward here and if it works as advertised it can be very very good for a number of reasons so definitely give this blog post a read um but uh that's it on that one on to the next one so chris beniski shared a really great chart on twitter today uh where he captured it with percent share of fees over time 8th green btc red and

you can see here that eve has eaten into the fee revenue um and basically dwarfs bitcoin now um which would be obvious to anyone that's been paying attention now there were some people who said that this was kind of like a negative thing obviously high fees on layer one are bad for end users blah blah all that sort of stuff i'm not gonna rehash again why i think uh high fees are fine for layer one ethereum because that's kind of like what we're optimizing for right layer one being a settlement layer but i also saw people kind of like hitting back and saying that well you know the bitcoin network actually settles more dollar value um for the amount of fees that are being paid than the ethereum network does but the thing is is that this is actually an apples to oranges comparison you can't compare the

two networks ethereum is a smart contract blockchain bitcoin is not all that the bitcoin network can do is send and receive btc and a few other limited like very very limited things but it has no concept of of a gas model right it has no concept of of a gas limit or of kind of like different things costing different instructions like on ethereum for example on ethereum sending eth is cheaper than interacting with a smart contract or sending a assetting a token because that's interacting with a smart contract on on btc you're really just sending bitcoin around so that's dictated by their own mempool and their own fee market but the thing is is that it doesn't matter that the dollar value of the the kind of like value being sent across uh as compared to the fees on ethereum is lower than bitcoin

because that's not the right comparison like imagine when ethereum layer one just becomes a settlement layer for for roll-ups right and then that's kind of like the majority of um of the activity well the roll-up call data and proofs don't actually have any economic value attached to them what the once you unpack them you see all the transactions you see all the economic value but the proofs themselves and the coordinator itself doesn't actually have that so technically if all ethereum block space was taken up by l2 proofs and transactions then um ethereum's kind of like value transferred on layer one would probably be near zero so that's why i think it's just kind of like a moot comparison but i mean in saying that it's also maybe a bit disingenuous to compare the the um

percent share of fees as well uh just because kind of like bitcoin can't do what ethereum can do but at the same time bitcoin wants to be a settlement layer you can't be a settlement layer if you can't even verify star uh you know starks or snarks which is actually pretty simple to do um you know for bitcoin if they just kind of like adopted a few new op codes um and i say simple i mean obviously nothing simple when it comes to uh changing bitcoin but in saying that i mean uh ethereum is just miles ahead because you can do so much more on it right and like you can't with bitcoin so i think that obviously the better comparison is smart contract blockchain to smart contract blockchain but bitcoin can't call itself a settlement layer anymore it's not settling anything except btc no one's

settling anything there layer twos aren't settling there obviously because they can't uh there just nothing really happening there whereas on ethereum obviously there are millions of things being settled on the everyday tokens nfts uh layer two proofs and cool data and and just eighth itself right all that sort of activity happening and that's why the fees are where they are and why it's still tens of millions of dollars of free revenue every day which we're burning by the way we shouldn't ever forget that but uh yeah i still thought this was a was a cool chart here just showing kind of like the absolute dominance and you know if you overlaid the kind of like um the price chart here i think it would be an interesting kind of like uh chart to look at as well because you can see it started collapsing once um you know

ethereum started getting prominent in 2017 then it went back up as the ethereum network you know didn't really have much going for it in 2018 2019 then in 2020 you know defy summer around may june just kind of from from christian but as i said there's a bit of nuance here you shouldn't just take it on face value um there's there's a lot more that can be discussed here but got a bunch of other stuff to get through so i put out this tweet today where i said bullish on the intersection of d5 and nfts now i mentioned yesterday i think it was maybe on one of the refills from last week that defy is never going to be

fun right like true defy what what what's fun about quote-unquote defy is the money games or the ponzi's or the things that you know you can speculate on really really heavily make a lot of money lose a lot of money it's basically like gambling that's where the entertainment aspect comes from whereas with nfts it's very different because with nfts yes you can speculate but you get you as soon as you buy like a profile picture nft you become part of a community and especially because you can actually obviously link it to your twitter account now and have like the hexagon profile picture uh portrait there you can just instantly become part of this community you can join the discord channel you can get to know people you can kind of like and if the project's being you know more than just a perfect picture nft project they actually want

to build something you can get involved with that so there's a lot happening across that sort of stuff obviously there's stuff happening with d5 but to most people it's boring there's no pretty pictures to look at there's no cool things to kind of like ape into there's no kind of like games to be played but there can be we can have an intersection between d5 and of t's we can cr there's so much overlap that can be had here and there's actually a few projects doing this right now starting simple but kind of like can get more complex over time for example slingshot the other day did an nft drop people can get involved in that and they can trade it on slingshot i thought that was really cool right gets more people using slingshot gets people excited about the nft which were pretty cool um and now there's

element finance doing uh the alfie verse they're calling it here where it seems to be kind of like an intersection between nfts and d5 so i'm really liking this trend i'm hoping to see more of it as time goes on i think we will and this is kind of like how we get people excited about d5 again let's blend the things let's blend the entertainment into the quote-unquote like boring stuff with finance and get people more excited about it and i'm sure there's plenty of ideas out there that teams are having right now and they're going to come up with and it's going to be really cool to see how that all shakes out i personally am not very creative and you know there are other kind of like projects as well like you can see in the replies to my tweet here there's

like crypto notes by block zero labs which blends nfts and d5 through clarization generate yield for holding you know basically bringing all the d5 concepts to nfts and stuff like that there's a bunch of other kind of like projects here as well if you want to check that out in my my um in my twitter and twitter in my tweet here but yeah i mean i'm pretty excited for that i'm very excited to see what teams come up with here as well so influence i think i've mentioned this uh project to you guys before on the refuel but they're a great they call themselves a grand strategy space mmo backed by nfts set in a distant asteroid belt and built on ethereum specifically they're building on stark net so they put out a teaser screenshot today just saying exciting things are happening with what looks like a kind of i guess

like a picture of space with a bunch of um oh god i don't even know the terminology i'm so bad at this but uh i mean i don't want to focus on the screenshot too much what i want to focus on is kind of like the concept of i guess like crypto gaming in general and how on these l2s we're going to be able to unlock a lot of these games that obviously weren't possible on l1 and there are actually some really cool things that are being done on starknet right now on the physics side of things so some some really uh some person i can't remember their name right now was doing a bunch of stuff around physics and and kind of manipulating objects and stuff like that that's only possible using uh using stocks obviously you have the dark forest game using um

snarks and and uh to to basically have like a have like a game that runs and there's rounds of it and everything is really cool as well uh but i'm like as a former i guess former gamer i mean i play games from from time to time but i used to play a lot more games and i do do these days i'm super looking forward to this sort of stuff i want to get my kind of like hands on a game where i where it's kind of like nft is integrated in it it's actually a good game it's not just a game that you have to grind out and it feels like you're just working another job which a lot of these kind of like games are these days i want a good game with nft crypto elements included in it i don't want a a

bad game with nft implement and and uh other elements attached to it just for the sake of kind of like adding nfts and stuff to it right there's a lot of that going on right now and it's actually extremely hard to make a good game like i think people underestimate just how difficult it is to make a good game because of the fact that not only do you have to make something that obviously people enjoy but if you're adding nfts and and financialization to it you have to be very careful because it can very quickly become pay to win and what that is for those who don't know it's this trending gaming that has kind of like come to prominence especially in the mobile gaming era where essentially you can just speed through your progress by paying money to do so like paying real money to do so

and as i said this is especially prominent with mobile gaming where there's tons of these kind of like games where you build up your empire or something like that and there's different themes and stuff but they get they kind of like gate you behind the content so you you know you'll you'll progress really quickly at the start and they'll get you addicted to it and then they'll charge you a lot of money to keep progressing and you'll never catch it it gets more expensive the more progress you make and unless you kind of like wait so it's either you wait a long time or you pay to kind of like fast forward and you pay to to essentially time travel and and kind of like get things today i don't want to see that trend in crypto gaming because that just is not a fun game that is literally just

kind of like paying money to kind of like cheat i mean essentially to me it's like cheating right just paying money to to cheat your way or to kind of like bring stuff forward but also those games on mobile they're not exactly good games they're just addictive games it's just kind of like really the other day it's it's borderline casino games and gambling and we have plenty of those already in crypto so i'm just looking forward to seeing good games come to come to life here and influence is one that i'm definitely paying attention to as i'm a massive space nerd so i'm curious to see how they shake out here um i think it's going to be cool so uh ben from optimism put together a tweet thread today on that thing that i talked about last week the canon canon canon which is which they're building as

the world's first evm equivalent fault proof implementation but it's also as ben says here a way to run any golang in a roll-up a mind-blowing new fp fraud proof design enabling optimal data costs and a new stateless ethereum implementation so a lot of the smart ethereum people that i know are getting super excited about this look i'm not going to lie to you guys and say that i know exactly what it means because i'm not like on the protocol side of things i don't work at the protocol level i uh don't kind of like work at the lower levels but this thread from ben and gives a pretty great overview of it and has links to kind of like learning more information about it as well i highly recommend giving it a read that's kind of like what i wanted to highlight here um but uh but yeah i

think you know the funny thing is i think the these kind of like l2 team some of them especially like optimism and arbitrary they're very quiet on the kind of i guess like marketing front but they're building some really cool stuff and it's not just stuff that's going to benefit the l2 it's also going to benefit the l1 as well like stuff that we're doing with with ethereum core protocol as um in addition to kind of like the the the l2 core protocol stuff and the funny thing is that this stuff is open source it's being given away for basically free there's no licensing costs here at least for optimism's case there isn't um there's no kind of like uh uh pay to play sort of thing as i was talking about before it's like we're building cool here's the cool that you can use make ethereum better

using the cool that we built i love that sort of stuff that's what we're here for that's what ethereum is so i'm super excited about more of this stuff coming out but definitely go give this thread a read it'll be linked in the youtube description below so galleon dao has announced their seed round today which disclaimer how i participated in so they've raised the 1 million dollar 1 million dollars from a bunch of different investors uh you can see here 1kx is involved with uh myself sandeep from polygon uh a bunch of other people ivan here from gearbox protocol uh nick chong here uh who is investing with parify um and yeah i mean so what is galleon dao well it's an asset management methodologist guild and set swap as you can see here now what does

that mean well you guys have known that i've been talking about index co-op for a while now and i was involved in that through set basically uh with index co-op there was a bunch of um uh uh indexed products created and they had kind of like asset managers behind them and stuff like that so what galion dao wants to be is basically a dow or a guild for an asset management methodologist to create the kind of like best asset management strategies not just index products but like other structured products as well there's a lot of these kind of things you can create these days using the um i guess like the tools that are available today um and if you kind of like uh if you kind of like um do that you can unlock i mean you can unlock really great products for end users because at the

end of the day there's a lot of complexity here that i discussed yesterday how we have to make these things simple and you know when you go on either scan and look at the actual names of the tokens like when you deposit a token into like yearn for example you may get like another token back that has just like a really weird name and it's like an acronym for like so many different things and you may look at that and be like what the hell is going on this is just weird like well you know this is this is this is super weird i got no idea what this means like someone explain it to him you have to kind of like unpack the whole thing now what if there was just a way to have that kind of like just that's like one token with one name on it and then in

the background everything's kind of like abstracted away from the end user and you just kind of like very easily buy into this sort of stuff and that's kind of like one of the goals of of galleon dao here so um you know you can read the thread here for a bit more background on that they're also looking for people to to join the team as well so definitely go um go check this out and also i forgot to mention they're launching on arbitram natively as well so obviously as you guys know i'm super bullish on native l2 projects so very very um very bullish on on on them launching there uh but yeah very very excited for this um i'm proud to be a backer of of them here they're gonna be using set protocols infrastructure as well very excited about that as you guys know i worked at

set and still an advisor to them so i'm very excited about that but definitely go check out the thread the blog post and also the kind of like um opportunities here to see if you want to work with galleon dao all right so final thing here so the hop intern uh twitter account here spotted this on zapify today so zappa seems to have a native bridge uh i guess some integration with hop now so you can transfer in this example from arbitrom to polygon you select what assets you want to transfer select all the other fees down here such as lippage tolerance and allowance and stuff and then you can see the bridge route labeled down the bottom so it takes about five minutes to go from arbitrary to polygon using the hop bridge right now so that's really cool i mean that's

so quick right guys like arbitrary i mean remember when everyone was fighting the optimistic rollups saying it would take seven days to withdraw it would it's dead on arrival no one's going to use it well now you can go from arbitrary layer 2 network layer 2 optimistic roll up on ethereum to polygon which is the polygon post chain which is obviously not a layer two um but you can do so within five minutes so obviously a very good bridging experience there super exciting uh great to see zappa supporting this year and i mean you guys know my opinions on bridges as well like be safe when using these kind of bridges hops hop is relatively fine because it's a very reputable project um and and everything like that but i mean i don't know for sure but i'm sure there's kind of like centralized control

still in place for them too i'm sure there's kind of like risks involved with with that sort of stuff and there's actually been a bit of discussion lately about getting l2b to to also include information about bridges and i think that would be good because there's so many of these bridges and no one's really had one like a one-stop shop for documenting everything going on in these bridges so i really uh think that that's necessary and i really hope that l2b takes it um takes it up and kind of like has the bridges listed there's as well because as i said plenty of times the bridges are just important as these kind of like layer two networks from both a you know i guess usability standpoint from both kind of like a addressable market standpoint but more most importantly from a security standpoint because there's so many of them are just like

multi-sigs or have centralized controls in place and users need to know this as long as they know it as long as they have the the information easily accessible to them it's much better than just them just kind of like blindly bridging across and then if the bridge get gets compromised or something happens they they're thinking to themselves wow i just lost all my money right so yeah i'm hoping not to see that on l2 beat there but i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone