Decentralize social media, EIP-1559 adoption & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #186 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily way refuel where recap the latest news in ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 13th of august 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so just wanted to give a quick shout out here to uh cryptowife she made me a little uh sassel themed penguin today now i guess a lot of you will have seen kind of like the pengus or the pudgy penguins on on twitter over the last i guess week or so it hasn't been very long uh but everyone changing their profile pictures to these penguins that are part of this kind of profile picture collection um and obviously this isn't like part of that collection but this is a special custom made one uh from crypto wife here so it's just it's so cute right look how cute it is it's so

wholesome so i guess yeah thank you crypto wife for making this uh making this one for me i've changed my profile picture to it as well and she even minted an nft and sent me the nft at cecil.ed so i've even got like ownership of it as well which is really really cool and she also made like an edit here of um you know the uh the penguins sitting in kind of like my study here which i think is pretty pretty cool and pretty cute uh and you know i i think i've i've um covered crypto wife before on the refill she's made a a few different memes uh uh and i've either rt a few of them before i think she's made memes out of me as well like yeah me and eric yell and eric took a twitter break and a few other

ones around here so she's definitely a a good follower for for these sorts of things and a very talented artist as well so i mean i highly recommend giving her a follow uh and kind of like following along with what she's doing in her work here it's really really awesome so yeah thanks again crypto wife for this cute little little penguin profile picture all right so more drama surrounding jack again on on twitter today and i'm not going to talk too much about the drama itself but i want to talk about kind of i guess ava's uh plans to build a decentralized social media protocol now i'll start with just like what the drama stemmed from basically it stemmed from uh jack essentially saying that or replying to a tweet where this this person st said um this is one thing that feels like

would benefit the eth ecosystem way more than it benefits twitter uh and that was quote tweeting a tweet from this brandon person saying every account on twitter should have a wallet address for storing nfts uh and then jack said agreed so he was agreeing with the fact that this would benefit the eth ecosystem more than twitter but then he goes on to say uh however every account on twitter being able to link to a lightning wallet you know would be would be better right would benefit twitter more uh you know and obviously bitcoin as well now i looked at this and i thought okay well this isn't like anything new or anything surprising obviously you know jack is a massive bitcoin fanatic and he loves lightning and all that sort of stuff but then stanley uh quote tweeted him and said uh every account on arves social

media protocol you will be able to bring your ethereum wallet and your own audience uh now for those who don't know arve announced plans to build a social media protocol about a month ago i believe there was coverage of it in decrypt and i've written about it in today's newsletter as well but essentially what i kind of focused on in the newsletter was this idea of a decentralized social media protocol this is something that has been tried in the past and in my opinion has failed and i think i've spoken about this on the refill it's failed for for a number of different reasons um in my eyes like one of them being that it felt kind of like these platforms were built as social media first and then just like they tacked on crypto as like a secondary thing and they tacked on decentralization just because kind of

like a marketing gimmick and were they really decentralized you know who knows but i don't think there's been an attempt yet to make something that is like a fully scalable uh web 3 ethereum kind of native uh social media protocol and i gave a few ideas in the newsletter today about what this would kind of look like uh you know and the biggest thing is basically for it to actually work it would need to be on a layer two it obviously can't be on layer one for those of you who may have been around for a while there actually was a decentralized twitter protocol called ppf that was on layer one ethereum back in i mean it's it's very old now back in like the one way day so even back then it was too expensive uh to do this on chain and it wasn't a good use of resources either so

that kind of like failed to take off so you would definitely need to keep user state user balances things like their wallet and everything on layer two but you could have uh the things like the front end um you know and stuff like that and kind of like storage for images on uh you know ipfs or r weave or filecoin so you can use these other kind of like networks that are purpose built for this uh to kind of like bring together the whole system but for the most secure things like uh user state and balances and stuff like that you would definitely want to have that on layer 2 and you want that to have that layer 2 secured by by ethereum um and the next thing would obviously be you it needs to be fully web3 enabled uh to sign up for you know

these social media kind of like uh platform you basically just sign in with ethereum there's no like username and password your ethereum wallet your public key is your kind of like login credentials uh to get in and you can carry that with you anywhere right like this and and and you basically can access it from any kind of like wallet that has basically uh compatibility with it whether that be a hardware wallet or or a software wallet or a mobile wallet or whatever or an extension it doesn't matter what it is they can it can access it um it also needs to allow people to customize their own experience so the actual kind of like um the protocol itself will be decentralized but uh you know people will be able to build their own front ends on it so sort of like how i spoke the other day about how with uni

swap you know the protocol the smart contracts that live on ethereum are decentralized but then there's all these kind of like centralized uh front ends that sit around there and some decentralized ones now obviously the one that unisop labs runs is centralized then they've exercised that power where they've censored a few tokens and stuff like that but that's okay the fact that you have a choice of what front end to use and the fact that the uh the smart contracts are going to be open and permissionless and anyone can build on them is the whole point you're basically creating like uh like a default but for social media in terms of like the openness and the permissionlessness uh of the smart contracts next up would be payments infrastructure it needs to be embedded directly into the user experience on uh in the protocol not on the front ends

the front ends can talk to it but it needs to be built into the protocol itself it cannot be something that's tacked on it needs to be as part of the smart contract logic and the the payments infrastructure can be um obviously on layer two it can be things like tipping or it can be uh just like full-blown payments for buying and selling things or whatever you want to do with that kind of infrastructure there next up people should be able to be able to interact with their nfts could you imagine setting your profile picture as an nft that you actually own and you prove ownership of it because it's directly embedded into the protocol that would be really really cool and also being able to just show off your nfts in general would be obviously uh very appealing to a lot of different users and things like that um and the

next next up would be there should be a native defy integration built in so obviously you have the payments infrastructure but you should also be able to do defy stuff directly from this social media account like could you imagine on twitter right now if i was to kind of like have a button here that says uh you know tipstani that would be part of the payment infrastructure or if i go to my profile i can kind of like have my own tab that no one else can can that no one else really can see it's just something that i've customized for myself um showing all my current default activity and then being able to do a bunch of different d5 things in there and monitoring stuff with dashboards you could imagine you know a lot of different things from this but directly embedded into the protocol

itself not just like an afterthought or attack on or whatever and then finally you should uh have your handle tied to your ens so uh i have the assassin.ed kind of like ens name that should be my handle on the social media protocol when i sign in with my sasser.ethereum address that is my handle that is what people see me as and people know that uh you know and people know that's my ethereum address and can interact with that directly on the protocol with the various front ends so i guess like the trdi is that to build a decentralized social media protocol that works you need scale which we do have now with layer twos on ethereum you know a lot of you will have seen that reddit is scaling their community points with an instantiation of arbitram uh so they're actually going to build their

own arbitrary layer too not use the the albertum 1 network which is fine because they're still going to be secured by ethereum and secondly you need to build all of these crypto native features uh first right directly into the smart contract into the protocol they cannot be just simple add-ons because that is not uh and it can't just be like a gimmick of decentralization it has to be built from the ground up with decentralization and crypto native features in mind so that's kind of like how i would build it i'm not sure you know exactly the exact details of what ave is doing i know that there's at least 20 people working on it right now which is which is crazy because avi is you know they're a defy company right they're not a social media protocol company but it seems like they're branching out and want to do a

lot more than just what they're doing with ave which is which is awesome i mean they have the the bank roll to do it they have all the support they want i mean a lot of people want this to happen because at the end of the day i don't want to be at the mercy of jack and and what he thinks uh should twitter should be at the end of the day because i think twitter and other kind of social media platforms should be totally open it should be customizable and should be able to people should be able to do what they want on them but right now jack is acting as a gatekeeper i mean he started doing it with the bitcoin uh kind of hashtag where the bitcoin emoji is next to next to the bitcoin hashtag whereas there's not one for ethereum um you know

and he's openly hostile towards ethereum and he's even saying stuff like you know basically saying we're not going to integrate an ethereum wallet but we're going to integrate a lightning wallet because we think that's a better use of resources and i actually said something about it here where i i put out a tweet where i said what if twitter integrated both an ethereum wallet and a lightning network wallet and let the users decide which one they wanted to use because at the end of the day you know users are going to use what they get the most utility out of and i said i think we all know which one would see the most usage and it wouldn't even be close honestly um and and i just think that would be the better path but obviously uh jack has his own invested interest and his own kind of like agenda

here which is exactly why we we need uh kind of i guess like a decentralized social media protocol so i'm cautiously optimistic i know that i've been bearish on them before but i think if anyone could pull it off it's the other team so we're gonna have to see how that plays out but i'm sure there's there's plenty of other teams working on this but from all the kind of things that i've seen in the past they've failed and i think that they've failed because of the fact that they just tacked on these features rather than building something from the ground up as crypto native you know ethereum first uh kind of features in there so i'm gonna be very interested to see how how that kind of plays out there um and then i mean again with the drama around jack like dc investor put out a

tweet uh today saying uh you know jack maximally doubling down against the theory will become one of the biggest miscalculations in web history there is a huge opportunity for social networks and other websites ready to embrace ethereum web three not lightning well it's linked to your account which no one cares about and he's obviously directly calling out jack here and then jack replied saying i'm focused on a native currency for the internet that is all and then i replied why did twitter issue nfts on ethereum then if he's only focused on this i mean it's a bunch of laughing here but essentially you know demetri buterin uh vitalik's dad quote tweeted jack saying you know internet is not static html websites it's alive and messy with javascript et cetera its currency will not be something static either the dynamic dynam dynamism of ethereum that makes it much more suitable candidate to

be the native currency of the internet and i completely agree with dimitri here i mean the fact that i don't want to bash bitcoin too much but i just don't see how bitcoin can be the native currency for the internet when it's so static i mean and the lightning network has so many inherent flaws that that it basically inherits from bitcoin i just do not see how this uh this is going to be a a how bitcoin is going to be the native currency of the internet i believe ethereum is going to be the native currency of of the internet ib sorry eth and i believe ethereum the network is going to be uh the new internet i believe that we're going to be able to build all these decentralized kind of protocols on top of ethereum or using a theorem as kind of like a

security layer essentially and then building it on layer 2 or other kind of like networks to tap into it and things like that i just think that i mean dimitri puts it well here like bitcoin is html ethereum is javascript and for those who don't know html websites were considered web one and javascript was considered web 2 or at least the start of web 2 and that's why we have all of the kind of like fancy websites that we know and love today and we're not just stuck with like static html websites we have all the interactions and everything like that so that's exactly kind of like what i view bitcoin and ethereum as bitcoin is those static html websites ethereum is javascript which allows us to do so much more with this technology than we would have with bitcoin but anyway i'm going to end the

kind of conversation there on those points there's a lot more to get through actually i've got one more tweet here from mike uh that was uh that is a co-founder of rainbow um he basically uh tweeted out um a teaser i think of something they're working on saying something like this for dot eth profiles where you can kind of see this is kind of like a twitter-like interface where you've got like your ens name in in in the uh the handle there and then you have like a bunch of like uh you know nft showcase going on links to different things i mean you know very i guess like an and a very ethereum native kind of stuff going on here so i guess that's something that i would love to see uh in a decentralized social media uh but yeah we're gonna have to

see how that shakes out but good to see there's people working on this and and you know i guess like this is just something that uh could be a front end into intellect is decentralized twitter you could use rainbow as your front end into to interact with those smart contracts so i think that could be really really really cool all right so uh arbitram uh it was an exclusive in coindesk saying that chain link have has become available on the arbitrary one network now as far as i know this was the most critical piece of infrastructure that other trim needed before they were able to go live uh and i i know this because i'm i mean i know this because i'm assuming this because at the end of the day a lot of the protocols on arbitrary rely on oracle's and without an oracle network live and

and working such as chain link which is obviously the leading oracle provider i mean there really isn't no competition i believe um you know a lot of these apps wouldn't have actually been able to go live so i think the fact that the auric or that chain link is now live and available on the arbitrary one network means that they are launching very very very soon obviously they say they're going to launch in august but i i wouldn't be surprised to see them launch even today maybe i don't know or next week rather than later in august but yeah i mean this was the i think um the last blocker for them and the fact that it's live now is incredibly awesome to see and i just i mean at this point just counting down the hours i mean i don't know what i'm counting down to but like every hour

that goes by i'm just like oh my god come on come on i'll be trim come on launch launch so yeah i'm going to be interesting to uh interested to see how how that launch goes of course so uh seb from zappa put out a uh tweet today saying that zappa has decided not to go forward with their decision to add fees now i spoke about this yesterday and i actually said that i didn't think that it was a big deal that they were adding fees but they've gone kind of like a step a step further here and basically said well you know we've listened to the community we know that you guys have an issue with it so we're actually going to not implement fees uh at this at this time and the reasoning that they kind of like gave was that they wanted to show users that they the

way they're monetizing is is not by selling user data because uh some users ask like you know are you gonna sell all our data is that how you're gonna make money because right now you're you know kind of like vc backed but once that money runs out how are you gonna sustain the platform and things like that and and the integrating fees was one one part of it but then uh you know seb quote tweeted he uh posted a tweet that he uh uh a link to a tweet that he had tweeted out about a month ago now saying that you know after doing one month of gamification and having a hundred thousand plus nfts minted on zappa uh seb said he can safely say that we are vastly underestimated the impact nfts can have in novel d5 business models um league of legends made billions of

dollars purely through skins that have zero resale value so essentially what he's saying here is that there are other ways zappa can monetize without having to institute fees on the protocol uh which i think makes a lot of sense and then he goes on to say that um you know most importantly if they do reintroduce a fee in the future they believe that the community should be the ones guiding that decision is this an alpha leak i don't know i mean is this a hinting at a token right community should be the ones guarding that decision uh how do you do that you do that with a doubt and what do dows have they have tokens now obviously i've said a lot of times before that i'm a seed investor in zappa but i have no idea if there's going to be a token or not i i do not have any

alpha there that i don't i mean i speak to them regularly about like the product and things like that but i haven't spoken to them about a token before so i don't know but i'm just following my rule that every single protocol that you know that has anything to do with crypto every single project that has anything to do with crypto is gonna have a token so yeah maybe that's a little bit of an alpha leak there we'll have to see how that shakes out but i commend them on this decision even though i didn't see a big deal with these fees i'm glad they're listening to community feedback and actually you know uh retracting this decision it shows a lot of character and it shows uh i guess like an aligned mission here that they have with the rest of their community to keep growing zappa to make sure that uh

you know they can do what's in the community's best interest and they they can monetize in various different ways i i think they're gonna ramp up their gamification stuff they're teasing season two um of their nft stuff going on so i'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with there so cl everyone's favorite cat on twitter at least my favorite cat on twitter posted this interesting tweet where he said crypto isn't just building an alternative financial system there's so many different career paths and communities with their own culture it's more like an alternative reality i mean it is right like we talk about this thing like a metaverse but at the end of the day we're creating something that's that's very very much detached from the current reality that we experience in real life right think about it the alternative financial

system defy is vastly different to the traditional one it it doesn't even need the traditional finance system to function for d fighter function it is already a closed loop system if you use the tools that exist in that loop right obviously for stable coins like usdc and usdt for onboarding via fiat we still need the traditional system but if you were to pay be paid in like the diet currency for example and or be paid in eighth then you are using a fully cl kind of closed-loop system where you don't need to access these traditional finance kind of tools so really i mean we're already there and it really is like kind of an alternative reality in that sense but also things like nfts a lot of this stuff is definitely being done outside of the

traditional kind of collectible and art space and all that sort of stuff uh the culture is i mean the culture's purely online digital culture like i haven't this kind of culture only leaks into the real world at kind of things like ethereum conferences for example but you know pretty much all of it is is online on twitter on other social media platforms um you know in discords in telegrams all that sort of stuff and and obviously the nft world is leading the charge there as well so yeah i just thought this was an interesting tweet because we we do talk about the metaverse a lot as an ecosystem i don't think anyone really knows what the word means or can like to i don't think there's a kind of an agreed-upon definition but if i had to pick one it would be you know it's an

alternative reality to what we've experienced in kind of like meat space and i think it's just going to keep getting uh you know wilder and weirder and wackier because of that and i just think that this was kind of like an interesting kind of flow into that so yeah uh i guess like great tweet cl if you're watching the refuel today so dune analytics has announced that they've raised eight million uh an eight million dollar series a led by usv aka aka union square ventures uh with participation from a bunch of other investors uh such as red point vc multi-coin capital and dragonfly capital now i'm a state investor in doing just a disclaimer there but uh i mean i love dune absolutely i mean i was using dude for long before i was a seed investor in

it and and you know i was promoting them on twitter and things like that and i use doing pretty much every day to keep up to date with all of the different metrics going on on chain uh you know there's one five five nine dashboards the decentralized exchange dashboards there's dashboards for basically everything and it's it's really really awesome to see the community that they've built there's basically hundreds of different kind of like dune wizards as i like to call them that essentially make these custom dashboards to follow along with any kind of like on-chain data that you'd like to see and what they're going to be doing with this money is expanding to more chains and layers so different kind of like block chains of course and different layers um you know optimism arbitrary all of the favorite ones we all know and love

and i think that's obviously very very smart because uh a lot of the data coming out of ethereum uh you know i mean the data coming out of ethereum is just one part of the story as we move to like layer twos and side chains and stuff like that you're gonna need a way to track that so you know doing doing this uh and expanding the support here is just like a natural step for them i think uh but yeah congrats on the raise here dune obviously i love the product and obviously like i'm happy that um uh that i was able to support in the seed round and they've gone on to a series a here so yeah congrats to them on this raise so uh some more one five five nine talk today alex from uh nansen put out this uh tweet that said eip1559 adoption is

now at twenty percent up from five percent last week now this is of course because metamask began rolling out their one five five nine integration and more people are using one five five nine style transactions now so you can see in the chart here basically the the steady growth you know it it spikes at times due to various different reasons um you know bots and and kind of like things like that um and you know different people doing different transactions i guess like during the more kind of like hated periods or maybe during nft drops and stuff like that definitely a bunch of different reasons for that but you know i expect this to to keep you know keep increasing pretty rapidly over the coming weeks as more wallets add support for it i mean even grid plus added

supplier support to their lattice one hardware wallet which is the first hardware wallet to fully support one five five nine transactions so i've talked about the lattice one before on the refuel if you don't have one definitely go check them out it's not i mean some people have we're talking about this in the discord channel saying that uh the lattice one is an awesome hardware wallet but it's not kind of like as portable as something like uh a ledger right and it's not and it's not kind of like made for that it's definitely made for the home um you know for keeping it on your desk and being able to do super secure transactions being able to see on the screen like what you're actually signing when you're doing a transaction so i mean i love i love the latest one and everything they've got going on there but yeah it's

a valid criticism that it's not very portable but at the same time it's not really designed for that um but the fact that they're very fast to shoot features is one reason why i love them so much uh and you can see you know the first hybrid wallet to support one five five nine style transactions so definitely go check that out um another one five five nine tweak coming in here from block native uh where they've basically done a little bit of analysis on kind of i guess uh what the mempool data has been showing them now for those who don't know block native build themselves as masters of the ethereum mempool and they definitely are they have a lot of tools they're focused on the mempool and they do a lot of work around here they've posted a bunch of different literature around this if you want to go check it

out it's on their blog but essentially you can see here in this chart the proportion of the transaction type so this is definitely showing a similar thing to uh what uh nansen was showing before what alex from nansen was showing before you can see here the type two transactions which are the one five five nine style has been increasing uh gradually over time type zero obviously getting less and less there as well and then you can see uh base fee averages and how they kind of like spike over time whether that be because of like nft drops and stuff like that uh count of transaction types here uh one five five nine obviously making it a dent there and count of type two transactions you know the trend is all the same here so great little thread here from block native if you want to go

check it out they dive a little bit deeper into this so definitely uh go check it out it'll be a link in the youtube description for you to do so so uh luden's uh uh is is teasing a new fully on chain jrpg auto auto chess combat in redacted so this is a game that they seem to be building here other they say the possibilities are endless selling on chain strategies you can script your squad in solidity renting creatures the hours paying mercenary contracts for protections etc we are going to eat axi with open source software and interoperability so a bit of competition here but i mean i've been monitoring a lot of these games lately and i think it's it's something that i i really want to see happen and i've talked about this

before on the review where i've said that there's a game called well there's a bunch of games that lets you basically build up your empire your city um things like uh i mean the names are escaping me right now but basically sim city simula simulators that allow you to do this but they don't have crypto features embedded into them so what if we do put crypto features on them what if they were like stakes uh like monetary stakes and uh kind of like monetary awards for these sorts of things and we've seen the popularity of something like this with axiomfinity with the play to earn model and and other sort of models of games out there um so there's just another one that's kind of like being teased here and i you know i said let me in because i really want to play this i really

when i see what this is all about so uh you know even though it may look i guess like you know very indie i think that's the special part about crypto and about kind of like ethereum it's all indie grassroots and you know these these sorts of things are definitely um appealing because you get to basically build your base out kind of like uh uh you know beat other people kind of like what dark forest is doing as well to compete with other people for for planets and stuff in in dark forest so i think we're going to see a lot more of these fully on chain kind of like games that allow you to earn money uh because it's just a no-brainer at the end of the day i believe so yeah uh i'll link this in the youtube description you can go check it out and maybe follow this

account as well if this is if this interests you all right so finally just a shout out here uh if you're interested and passionate about ethereum layer 2's and optimistic roll-ups and would like to work with a world-class team you can apply to optimism uh pbc here so actually for those who don't know what pbc means it actually stands for public uh goods corporation or public um public goods funding i can't remember exactly what the b stands for but public goods corporation is essentially what it is and they're trying to basically build public infrastructure uh that acts as like a public good um uh and essentially kind of give that value back to the ecosystem and i know there was a bunch of drama that i spoke about yesterday with optimism one thing i didn't mention

on there was that currently optimism is running the only block producer which they call sequences uh to run their lar2 network and they're generating fees on there they're actually generating a lot of fees on there but they've committed to giving all that back to the community they're not going to take any of that for themselves they're going to give that all back to public goods i think they're generating like 30 40 000 a day in just like network fees so um you know they're really living up to their name here so i just wanted to give like a little bit of a plug there because i forgot to mention it yesterday um but yeah if you're interested in working with optimism they have a bunch of different roles here ranging from devops engineers to death engineer to product designers to even an executive assistant so if you're interested in

that definitely go check it out but i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks everyone