EF ESP update, Fuel raises $80mil and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #442 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we cup the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony sassano and 37th of September 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so I spoke yesterday about the participation rate around ballot tricks and it seems that basically it's returned to pre-baletrix levels I mean you can see here on the beacon chain website that we've had participation rates of over 99 again here and I think the data on um the Big Chain website is a little bit delayed here it's not totally accurate so we can cross cross-reference it with the beacon scan website which also has the participation rate above 99 here which is basically what it was pre-beltric so everything seems to be back on track with the participation rate here and I

explained just today as to why this is you know obviously important and why uh people kind of focusing on this and being like well this shows that ballot there was a problem with Bellatrix I'd like I hate when people say that because it didn't actually show that at all this doesn't show that there was a problem with the Bellatrix upgrade itself all it showed was that people didn't and upgrade their nodes in time upgrade their software in time so they fell off the network or they didn't configure it correctly Bellatrix itself worked just fine I mean the people who did upgrade uh and saw everything and it worked completely well and completely fine there was no issues with it uh and then the change continued on and finalized as normal so when you kind of like look at that and take all that into consideration you definitely uh get to

the point where you're like okay well battle tricks went went forward or went you know very very successfully so I covered that yesterday I'm not going to rehash it now but there is a couple other things I wanted to get through here such as these two websites so this is nodewatch dot IO which tracks the beacon node account so you can see here the node count is 11917 this is the total node count uh 69.1 percent of that is synced to the network with 30.9 of them not synced right now and you can see that the no account has been going up a lot over the past few days and that's obviously because of people getting ready for the merge running more nodes here so it's very very awesome to see that so that's the uh the nodes that the beacon nodes I should say sorry and you can see here

the node count by country so a breakdown obviously the US dominates but there's a lot in Germany actually uh 17 so Germany's coming in second there and then a full breakdown of everything you have client type distributions network type distributions and and other kind of information like that so this is the website that you can go to to track the beacon nodes on the network and then there's ethernodes.org which tracks the execution layer node so bigger nodes is technically consensus layer nodes um and then ethanos.org tracks the ethereum execution layer nodes and as you can see here we have a 7414 of these now this is broken down obviously by clients as well you've got Geth Aragon Basu nevermind and a bunch of other clients listed here the client diversity

on the execution layer is not great like it really is uh leaves a lot to be desired right now and get which is the majority client has actually been going up because people who are getting their local execution link clients ready are choosing Geth over the other ones which obviously I've said before I think I've said in the past that we don't want to push a client diversity or an execution layer to post merge but still it's not great I mean 81 of people are using guests so this means if there was a critical bug in Geth 81 of the network would be forked onto its own chain and it would mean that that chain would finalize and that would be the kind of I guess like each chain it would require social coordination to fix that so you definitely want to be running a non-gath

execution layer client such as Aragon base or never mind I would recommend base to another mine simply because Aragon is a fork of Geth so you definitely want to be running something that is on a totally different code base so base to another mind uh the choices there I personally run never mind it's always been good to me but there's nothing wrong with Basu there but this is the website that I use and everyone uses basically to track the amount of eth1 or execution layer nodes I should say that are on the network and up here you've got the merge which is a tab that says you know what clients are ready for the merge which aren't about almost 80 are ready for the merge which is great to see obviously the others just need to upgrade and if they don't upgrade in time they'll be kicked off the network

as Solo validators or sorry I should say validators uh and uh they'll quickly get back online because of that but yeah you can check out this website yourself it's also got a breakdown of like country sync status uh OS Network types history and all that sort of stuff yeah so uh definitely go uh give these two websites uh a check and I will link both of them in the YouTube description below all right so Dorothy shared this document that has been floating around for a while which is called the serenity design rationale now for those of you who don't know Serenity was the name that I guess like a lot of people referred to eth2 as for a while uh and it basically stemmed from I think three to four years ago as you can see the

first document was put here that for the design rationale of I guess like the quote-unquote e-2fit or the you know the beacon chain or the Serenity and it's just gone by a bunch of different names now why I'm highlighting this design rationale document is because if you want to know why things were done certain ways within especially proof of stake ethereum and and Beyond then this is the document to read like I always get questions from people you know why 32 eighth right why is it done this way why uh why is there no delegation of stake in protocol you know there's a ton of questions you know what was the what was the point of going to prove a stake like what were we aiming for well I mean there were the the five principles here which is Simplicity long term stability

sufficiency defensing depth and full light client verifiability and then it discusses all of that in the document as well as trade-offs and and it discusses the fork Choice rules the lmd ghost Fork Choice Rule and Gaspar and all that sorts of stuff so if you want to dive deeper into the design rationale around uh F2 or Serenity or proof of stake ethereum then this is the document for you and now of course Ben Edgington is also putting together his book which is an annotated uh book of the the serenity or 8th to proof of stake uh effort as well which isn't finished yet but once that's done they'll have even more information for you but this is a document that I remember reading quite a while ago it was last change eight months ago so it hasn't been updated recently but I don't think it needs to

because I don't think the spec has changed uh in the last eight months but essentially this is a document that I really enjoyed reading because it allows me to answer those questions if you like why 32 eighth and well basically because with the eighth number is based on the amount of validators the network can handle right it's not based on some other just some arbitrary thing there's a lot of other other information like that in this document so I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out all right so Tim baiko put out just a little innocent tweet today that I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about so he said I've said uh quote unquote we might have merged by then uh quote twice on meetings today and it feels pretty surreal to be honest it's happening it does feel surreal right I

know I've mentioned this plenty of times but it really does feel surreal how close we are and I can't even imagine how it feels for the core developers and researchers that have been working tirelessly on this for many years at this point I mean uh Tim baiko especially and then of course Danny Ryan the two lead coordinators of the whole effort generally they've been working tirelessly on on this sorts of stuff uh for for many for a long time now and not only that they've also worked on other things in in between right so their efforts uh definitely I hope are gonna get rewarded and their efforts have been what has gotten us to this point but it's not just them it's hundreds of researchers and developers that have gotten us to this point that is only about eight days away from today so I I

think it's just amazing that we can basically say that we might have merged by then right if we say if we're quoting a date after September 15th we could say oh yeah yeah the merge will be done by then and we can focus on this so we can do this so we can do that and I've spoken about all these other upgrades that are going to be coming to ethereum post merge and the reason why they haven't come yet is because we had to basically table them in in favor of the merge and now that the merge is done we can start working on all these other exciting stuff so I'm super excited to just like it's going to be fun actually I should step back a bit it's going to be funny for me personally that once the merge is done it's not going to be

something that I'm going to talk about anymore like obviously it being done it's like erp1559 I used to talk about that all the time but I mean I move on to the next thing like I am someone obviously who reports on the news and educates I refer back to things sometimes but generally there'll be no reason for me to refer back to the merge anymore ethereum will be foolproof of stake we'll be looking ahead to the future with upgrades like vertical trees Proto dank sharding PBS all the good stuff coming and you know all the stuff that vitalik has shared in his ethereum roadmap flowchart before and there'll be no need for me to talk too much about the merge so it's a bit Bittersweet for me I've Loved following the entire development I mean I've Loved following the whole thing I loved reporting on it

I loved sharing all the information with you guys but I am as ready as anyone for this thing to just happen and for us to move on to the next things are in ethereum and also I'm just excited to see how the full ethereum Network fares as a proof of stake Network because we've seen the beacon chain on its own we've seen ethereum under proof of work on its own you're separate to the beacon chain and now we'll get to see how it all plays out and you know who was right and who was wrong about uh certain things like there are a lot of people who are bearish on proof of stake right proof mistake ethereum saying this attack Factor exists or this one exists then you know you're handing over your chain to the bankers and just you know random five random talking points but

we're gonna see what's actually true and what's not you know there was a one of my one of my friends said this the other day it really struck a chord with me he goes saying things you know whether it's online or otherwise that don't match with reality is free like there is no there is no Force kind of at play that for that forces these things to to match with reality but at the end of the day reality is reality like you can say whatever you want but then reality comes crashing down whether you like it or not so people can say whatever they want about a through improved stake they can say it's going to be captured by this and this it's going to centralize blah blah but if that doesn't play out right as they've said well then they are objectively wrong and reality has

trumped what they've said because anyone can say anything and and reality is reality now I know that may seem obvious to to state but I think in an industry like crypto and especially within ethereum where we see people just say the dumbest of things uh Dundas Dundas I I think that's that that's how you say that word I'm I don't have a a big country American accent is it called country in American I was going to say Outback that's what we call the country in Australia I should maybe say a thicker rule out Outback American accent where I go darndest time right that was so bad anyway I'm getting so off track um where was I actually I was talking about how the merge uh and sorry how people will find things and not actually stick with reality when reality will

come crashing down on them regardless of what they say so at the end of the day I personally don't care too much about what people say I do try to debunk fud here and there but if it's actual fight if it's something that doesn't match with reality then reality itself will take care of it uh but yeah just a cool little tweet from Tim baiko here today all right so uh the uh new home of the heart merge nft exhibition that I've been talking about lately is going live on Monday and all proceeds of course are going to the protocol Guild and artists so there are 119 ethereum core devs that are going to be getting a share of these proceeds There are 16 artists eight auctions six editions and one merge exhibition so if you want to follow staple works and jpeg here for updates

and also Trent uh this will be going live on Monday September 12th and you can participate in it if you like and I'll link this in the YouTube description so you can go follow all of these accounts so we have out the latest allocation update from the EF ecosystem Support Program covering projects that received funding in q1 and Q2 of 2022. so in the first half of 2022 uh the uh the EF ESP organized an academic grants around alongside their usual grants program awarding over 17.6 million dollars in to grantees including all of these great teams that are listed here as part of different categories so there's a category for community and education there's a category for consensus layout cryptography and zero knowledge proofs execution layer uh general research

indirect funding layer twos and user experience in the q1 where a total of 9.3 million was awarded and then Q2 a total of an 8.2 million dollars was awarded now you can go check out this blog post for yourself to check out everyone that receives money but you know this is this is kind of where the ef's money is going now for those of you who don't know the ethereum foundation was initially funded from the ethic Ico they started out with about 12 million ether I think exactly 12 million 8th but that has been whittled down to I think 300 350 000 each now because they've helped us had to sell it to develop ethereum obviously and obviously the price of eth until you know mid-2017 it was it wasn't worth that much right and they had to sell a lot in the early days

to fund early ethereum so they they are very well capitalized right now I believe they have a massive cash position and uh you know a billion dollars worth of eth or something like that by one point it's probably less now obviously because the price has gone down but that's where this money goes like I mean this is one of the places it goes It goes to the support programs it goes through the ethereum foundation payroll obviously for people that work for the film foundation and a bunch of other causes like Bitcoin grants and and things like that so if you want to dive deeper into the programs that the EF ESP supports or the teams I should say that the EF ESP supports you should definitely go check this out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right so finally here on the

ethereum core protocol side of things Frankie has highlighted this very underrated paper on ethereum data structures which you can check out here now this is one for the technical people for the researchers this is apparently a lot more accessible than the yellow paper which is the technical specification of the ethereum protocol itself and with a lot less details left as an exercise to the radar so just wanted to highlight this for you guys out there who want to dive even deeper into the technical weeds of ethereum if you've read the yellow paper then this is definitely something that would interest you I'll link it in the YouTube description below for you to check out I'm not even going to bother trying to summarize this because it is way beyond my uh kind of like technical understanding but it's still very interesting and nonetheless

all right so another massive raise today uh from I guess uh the layer 2 world so fuel Labs who are the creators of the fuel uh VM announced a 80 million dollar round LED by blockchain capital and Stratos here so their fuel is calling themselves the fastest modular execution layer delivering the highest flexible throughput with maximum security guarantees for the ethereum ecosystem now of course everyone says that right about their layer twos but um you know that's that's kind of like the marketing at the end of the day but anyway it's cool to see them raise this amount of money because this is this is a huge raise I believe one of if not the biggest layer 2 razors out there and I don't think fuel is limiting themselves to just ethereum they're also going to

be building on Celestia because some of the the founders or at least core team members share a shared between Celestia and fuel but regardless of that I think that this huge fund ratio is going to give them so much runway so many resources to just go full blast on their layer 2 video or on their kind of like module modular execution layer effort here I don't think they've actually have they said anything like L2 here at all it seems like they've said L1 L1 uh yeah they're kind of like not I guess like not really using l2a they're kind of like using L2 but this they're they're more in line with using this terminology which is the modular execution layer which I think is I think it's okay from a branding

perspective because you can see here they can send us some data layer Falls the the the bottom and then there's a module execution layer and smart contracts that sit on top of that so yeah anyway uh you can go check out the blog post for a little bit of a deeper dive here but congrats to fuel Labs on this massive raise I am pretty excited to see that more and more layer two teams are raising massive amounts of money because there are still new layer ones out there that are raising huge amounts of money which I think is like I think it's very short-sighted by the people that are funding these things but at the same time look there's there's probably going to be some new narrative next bull market Shield by these like alternative layer ones that for some reason pumps the token and then

the investors can cash out whatever but I've said before that I think most of the time uh most people in this industry are behind the bleeding edge by about six to 12 months and fundraising is is no um no stranger to that and is no exception to that I should say so I expect more and more layer two teams to be getting more funding I expect more and more kind of I guess like modular uh I guess teams getting more funding teams that are focused on the modularity of blockchains and that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone given that we I guess uh over six months into the modular thing becoming very popular I think so very very cool to see this congrats to fuel Labs on the raise all right so metamask has announced today that they've launched support uh

for uh multiple languages on the metamask knowledge base so this is uh the the knowledge about base has been translated into the top 35 most used and most uh at most used oh sorry so I should say they've translated the top 35 most Jews and most important articles into the following 15 languages Spanish Filipino Portuguese Vietnamese Malay Turkish Thai French simplified Chinese Japanese German Korean Italian Dutch and Russian so a wide breadth of languages covered there but I talked I spoke about this the other day and I said that we need more and more are things in crypto to be translated from English into other languages and what better than metamask support articles in the top 35 most used and most important ones because

obviously metamask has an absolutely massive user base and it's not just English speakers it is speakers of multiple different languages so it's great to see them prioritizing internet internationalization here I don't know what's wrong with my pronunciation today it's even worse than usual but go check this out if you speak any of those languages obviously you speak English or you wouldn't be listening to me but maybe it's not your first language maybe you prefer to read things in Spanish or Portuguese or Japanese or German or whatever other language is supported here so I'll link this in the YouTube description for you to go check out so arbitrim has announced the first their first ever arbitrim hackathon which is happening on October 15th and 16th in Bogota Colombia where obviously

Devcon is happening so you can go check out and apply to hack below at this this link here but I don't think arbitrum is going to be the only one doing this they're definitely going to be a lot of teams taking advantage of the fact that Devcon in Bogota is the first Devcon in like three years it is going to be absolutely massive unfortunately I will not be there I'll be just kind of like sitting in my study watching all the videos watching all the of all the things going on on social media but I think this one's going to be big I regret that I'm not going to be there because as I said it's the first step Con in three years uh there's going to be pretty much anyone who's anyone in the ethereum community is going to be there and it's going to be a great

celebration because it's going to be about a month or less than a month after the merge happens as well so if you're going to be there and if you're a developer that wants to be part of the arbitrim uh Devcon hackathon then I'll link this in the description below for you to apply to now as I said albertron isn't going to the only one doing this so keep an eye out for any of your other favorite teams or platforms doing hackathons I'll highlight them as I see them on the refuel as well uh but yeah I mean at the end of the day Devcon is a developer conference it is definitely I mean it is a developer conference but at the same time most people go to conferences to socialize and you can still do that but if you are a developer or you're aspiring to be one you should

definitely take advantage of all of these opportunities that will be available to you at Devcon if you've been able to get a ticket even if you haven't like the thing with these conferences is that there's always like side conferences and there's always people there's always events happening outside the conferences that you can go to so you can go do that even if you weren't able to secure a ticket to Devcon itself plenty of people do that especially if you live in the region I mean if you live in South America then getting to Bogota will be relatively easy for you even if you live in North America it's easy I mean I guess like the hardest places to get or at least the longest flights are from from Europe and uh where I am in Australia of course I'm from Asia but if you are in uh the

the Americas and you haven't got a Devcon ticket then you can still go right you can still go and still go to those little side events and stuff like that so definitely uh go do that but as I said I'll link this in the YouTube description if you want to apply to arbitrim's hackathon all right so an interesting proposal here in the make a Dao world so hexanult shared here that coinbase has put out a proposal to invest 1.6 billion out of the 1.6 billion dollars out of the PSM which is the peg stability module into a yield bearing account this will boost maker Revenue by 24 million a year Mega has 5.5 billion in USD like collateral this is one of the many proposals to generate reeled from The Real World and he also has a follow-up tweet here about how exactly this will work and he says

you know here is a thread to clarify some misunderstandings about this yield offering first the difference between protocol controlled value and users assets The Proposal will invest in the PCV in the usdc PSM not your user funds so uh that that's a good clarification there and then there's a bunch of others in this thread I'm not going to read them all out you can go check that out now I wanted to just have a broader discussion about makerdale here on the on the heels of this proposal so I'm not going to talk about this proposal generally I'm going to talk about more of maker Dow's Direction and strategy obviously there's been a lot of drama in the main make a dow world lately they've gone from ideas around you know yellowing in the PSM into ease to get off uh Reliance on centralized stable coins like usdc as well as discussions

being floated that that that die should depeg from USD because it's a risk and a bunch of other drama of course uh and and the usual maker drama around low governance turnout and all that sort of stuff my honest opinion here is that I personally don't like the direction that maker is going in uh because of the fact that like it really seems very confused as a project right now like before especially on the single collateral die it had a a very clear mandate that everyone could understand there was dye which is its centralized stablecoin there was eth that could be used to generate it uh and you know then you could go use that within D5 and whatever else now in multi-clateral diet which I have supported in the past don't get me

wrong but now on the multi-clateral diet there is this kind of very weird amalgamation of things happening and it seems that the mega Community wants to prioritize real world assets or rwas as a way to scale maker and a way to scale die and that's totally fine because as I've mentioned before the there is a there is kind of like a bottleneck when creating a decentralized stable coin and the the Holy Trinity of a stablecoin design is having something that is scalable stable and decentralized nothing has got those three properties at this point in time because if you're stable right and you're um and you're scalable you're not decentralized uh or I mean it doesn't there's not like a one-to-one mapping there but you know from what I've seen from every stable

coin they usually have a trade-off like the decentralized stable coins uh they may be stable and scalable but they're not decentralized right Die For example under single collateral uh single collateral die it was decentralized because it was only backed by eth but it was not scalable and it wasn't very stable right so there are all these trade-offs and obviously we've had many many attempts at building a decentralized stablecoin before but I don't really think that makers attempt here is the one that is going to I guess win because like dye is already backed by a lot of usdc if they keep backing it with real world assets and it's just going to be even more centralized if they keep kind of having this uh like I guess like Breakaway of the cohesion

within the community around what direction maker should go and around you know things like oh if dye should actually be pegged to USD and all the other drama around that it kind of feels like they're going to lose and they're already lost to centralized stable coins but I guess that's not an Apples to Apples comparison so maybe it's not right to say they're lost to it but at the same time if Dai is back to you know mostly by centralized assets then why would you use dye instead of just usdc or usdt right or a bus there or any other centralized stable coin but in in saying that there are other attempts at building kind of stable coins that aren't pegged to the USD such as Rye but that also suffers from the fact that it's truly decentralized it's uh it it's state it's stable to itself so kind of

like Flip's disability point on its head um but it's not very scalable because of the fact that it is trying to be truly decentralized with just being eight-backed so there are so many trade-offs here and I actually as more time goes on I actually don't think we're going to be able to get a fully decentralized stable coin and what I mean by that is I don't think we're going to be able to get a fully decentralized stable coin like single collateral die that is both scalable and stable we're gonna have to just accept the fact that there requires centralization vectors in these stable coins if we want to grow them to the world Maybe I'm Wrong about this but I don't think I am because I've just I've discussed this before on the refuel unless eath was able to obtain an astronomical market cap we wouldn't be

able to scale a stable sorry scale a stable coin to where we needed it to be to service the world and I've discussed the numbers before I even went up to like an ether 100 trillion dollar market cap and I've even said how even if 10 of 8th was backing diet that market cap it still wouldn't be enough for the planet it would require eighth to be worth a stupid amount and at that point you would just use eth as your currency right you wouldn't even bother using a stable coin that was pegged to the US dollar so it's kind of a thing of if each market cap goes to a stupid high level then eth would probably just be the unit of account and the MLA that we use within the world anyway I know that sounds very far-fetched but that is more likely a scenario than something

utilizing either's collateral to create a stable coin pegged to the USD which if all intents and purposes at that point if achieved 100 trillion dollar market cap then I don't think the USD would be worth very much because obviously that is measured in USD there and then you can go dive even deeper into things like measuring purchasing power and measuring stability of assets against itself like it it's always funny when you think about the stability of assets if you measure USD stability against Energy prices for example I mean USD hasn't been very stable against Energy prices at all it's lost value against Energy prices and just general purchasing power uh it's lost a lot of value because of inflation both monetary and supply side and I don't think that's something that people think about too often and maybe I'm going off a little bit of a tangent

here but people tend to think of stability as USD but in reality if you had held us there over the last five years right you have lost so much purchasing power and the thing is is that depending on your time frame and depending on your your way of viewing things it's very hard to see what you've lost and what you haven't because one USD equals one USD yes but 180 equals one eighth as well so if you're just comparing USD to itself and saying oh USD stable because oh it won USD goes one USD or you could say the same thing for eth but because you're measuring each value against the US dollar that's where the volatility comes from imagine if we had measured USD against the purchasing power or against energy bills

if you have that chart we have those charts we see the energy prices going up right that that is the true measure of USD stability if you want to think about it like that so in my mind either way I look at stability is purchasing power so I yeah I don't really think we're going to get a truly decentralized USD stablecoin that is scalable and stable because at that point or stable to its stable relative to other things because at that point ether would just be big enough to act as that currency and Moe and and eth will be that very good story value as well so yeah anyway that's a I can I could talk about that for a long time because this is something that I think about very very deeply as someone who is in a position that tries to preserve Capital now I'm less about

growing Capital like in an exponential way and more about preserving what I already have I'm always thinking about purchasing power for me it's always like okay I don't want to hold too much for it because uh of such and such you know because of inflation because of this because of that but I also don't want to leave myself in a position where I'm just exposed to risk assets so I try to diversify and try to do things here it is very difficult right but it's something that I think about often as a thought exercise too and something that you maybe maybe you'll get value of thinking about as well is measuring things as part of like purchasing power rather than measuring everything against the a uh you know a Fiat such as your I stay but I'm gonna leave that at that for today I think that's all I wanted to

talk about So yeah thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone