ENS adds DNS support, Parsec NFT firehose and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #196 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel recap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 27th of august 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so the ethereum name service or ens announced today that they have now added full dns namespace integration to ens uh and it's now live on mainnet and this has been a very very long time coming so i guess to put this into plain english what this means is that you can now use uh the dns system whether that be like example.com or like example.io as part of the ens system so you can see here this little screenshot on the um in the blog post here uh brantley milligan who's one of the the developers

at ens he basically has brantleymilligan.com and his ethereum address is attached to it so you know there's there could be like brantleymilligan.eth which is a different address to brantleymilligan.com but what's really cool about this is that everyone who already um owns one of these kind of like dot com or dot io kind of dns names or or your or kind of i guess like urls can now set their ethereum address their bitcoin address doze address whatever to uh to kind of like you know brandymilligan.com or whatever.com that they have uh which which i think is really whatever dns they have really which is absolutely awesome um now as i said this has been a long time coming and it's funny because i saw a little bit of drama about this people basically said well this just rugged everyone that

was like um domain squatting you know how people kind of sat on domain names like i was talking about beer.eat the other day where someone was obviously sitting on that and then budweiser bought that well whoever owns beer.com now they don't have to buy beer.eth right they can just use beer.com and tie their e3 ethereum address to that um but on top of that like it's just basically all the other kind of like popular domain names out there like google.com google can have their uh their official ethereum address tied to google.com not doesn't have to be google.ed like reddit.com you know you can go down the list basically and i think this is i mean i think the people that were complaining i mean this as i said this has been in in kind of like the plan for a very long time was actually on the front page of the ens

website as well so anyone who was kind of like domain squadding was doing so um either not aware of this because they just didn't kind of like do their resource or research or check up on this or you know people just love to complain right the end of the day so yeah that's that's just a little bit of drama that i saw about it but generally i think this is an absolutely amazing feature obviously because if you already have a domain name and you can't get the dot ethe for it or someone's squatting on it or it's like super super expensive well what ends up happening is that you just have to go with something else and it gets kind of annoying right you have to go with like if you were google you'd have to go with a completely different thing to google.eth something else and it

wouldn't really work like that but now you can just go with google.com and set your ethereum address or bitcoin address or doge or anything else really as that so yeah just really really excited to see this there's a bit more details about this in the um the blog post here i'll link that in the youtube description there's also a step-by-step guide of how to import your dns domain to ans to be able to kind of do this uh mine's going to remain sasser.edu i actually don't know if i own cecil.com i think i might have registered it at one point um but i have to check up on that because i haven't used kind of like the the old dns system in a while um but yeah definitely i prefer dot eth right because um it just it feels more natural feels more native but i think this is just

like a really great way to stop kind of that squatting that's going on and to allow people who already own the dns uh you know not not to have to kind of like spend lots and lots of money to buy the the domain from these squatters so yeah i thought that was that was pretty cool and just in general kind of like extends the the use case of ens to basically the entire web as well so yeah really really great to see that all right the second biggest piece of news comes from transmissions uh he works at i think it's a he works at rari capital um basically revealing what uh he calls a nova now what nova is is basically a way for l1 and l2 to communicate now he describes it in this thread basically uh for he says for the

last couple of months he's been tinkering with a design for trustlessly relaying arbitrary contract calls between l2 and l1 uh and that's called anova so essentially with nova you can make trades on l1 uniswap you know eight into l1 and fts and use l1 rv all from l2 so essentially the way this would work is that you this is kind of like similar to what's what starkware has done with their damm um they're they're kind of uh damn that i that i talked about a few weeks ago where basically you can send these kind of like messages i guess you could call them to layer one from layer two and then there's relays that sit in the middle um trustlessly that kind of like relay those messages for you and they they process it all in l1 and then it comes back to you at l2 and you kind of

you can kind of like pay the gas fees from there so and the really cool thing about this is that this works on on optimistic roll-ups as well as zk roll ups so this is just another way we're kind of getting around that seven-day kind of withdrawal period for optimistic roll-ups right and i've been talking about bridges a lot recently um and obviously we start where i talked about the d-a-m-a-m-m but i think the next biggest thing uh outside of the bridges is this sort of stuff right this trustless kind of communication between l1 and l2 done through these relayers who when constructed correctly can't actually steal any funds and can't actually um do anything do any funny business they're literally just relayers and if they don't relay the the messages then they don't go through and the whole transaction kind of like fails and

reverts or whatever it's kind of like a flash loan where if you don't actually pay back the money after you've taken the loan and done all your business within kind of like that one ethereum block then the whole kind of thing reverts so that's my understanding of how this would work is that if the relay isn't done well anything that you try any messages that you sent from l2 to l1 weren't processed to begin with and nothing really happens on that end the whole kind of thing reverts from there now the thread here from transmissions goes into much more detail about what this is uh kind of like a link to github and stuff like that um so you can go read that it'll be linked in the youtube description but yeah i mean as we've been talking about bridges a lot lately and kind of like layer twos

in general this is the critical infrastructure that needs to be put in place to enable this seamless liquidity movement between all of these different layers because you know right now there's kind of like two schools of thought about how how to scale blockchains that i see in the wild there's the ethereum school of thought which is like a rollup centric roadmap but we basically have uh zk roll-ups optimistic roll-ups all that kind of stuff um as a way to scale the theorem at l2 with l1 just providing the security for that right and that and that is still the same kind of thing with sharding where sharding just gives us more kind of i guess fuel for l2 it gives us more space gives us more room to kind of do you know more activities then there's kind of i guess like you'd call it the solana school of thought

which is basically scaling everything on layer one without sharding so essentially just one chain for everything to to kind of like be on there and which i i mean i've talked about this before and i think the ama but i don't think that's like a long-term sustainable solution because in order to do that you need to keep increasing hardware requirements over time right you need to kind of keep beefing things up and essentially you're trying to run like i guess you're trying to run the every every single thing i think about like absolutely everything in a scalable way while keeping fees cheap on just like one kind of like blockchain which i don't think i mean obviously these people are quite smart that are working on it but i don't think that um what for one i don't think it's a decentralized way to do it because you

need beefy hardware to run it and every day people can't exactly run a full node to verify these things it becomes very very hard to because there's so much data on layer one um and and and and i don't think that the validator set can be decentralized because of that as well and it's also like a a depos system which turns into a cartel over time um but also that kind of bashed out too much but i just wanted to kind of describe the two schools of thought here which is the layered approach to scaling which is what ethereum is going with its rollup centric roadmap and then there's the kind of like i mean and sharding i mean it's a layer kind of like sharing approach where i guess you could think of layers as like scaling up so like a building right you

have a building it has one floor if you scale up with layers like layer two you're adding more floors essentially that's a crude analogy but i think it works then you have horizontal scaling which is sharding where essentially you can have like another building across the street right and then on that building you can have more more storage stores than just one which are more l2s you see kind of where i'm going with this and then you have like a road between them which is like the bridge infrastructure on on ethereum so there's that kind of thinking and that allows us to keep layer one as decentralized uh and as kind of like um as secure as possible and allows people to everyday people to verify the integrity of integrity of layer one and then layer two can inherit that security whereas the other school of thought is

yeah let's just scale everything at layer one without sharding on just one holistic thing and the logic flows is that they're doing this because of breaking uh um because they think that the the layered approach breaks composability uh and that composite building being things like as i describe flash loans right where you can talk to a bunch of different protocols to do something synchronously in one kind of ethereum block but i don't think that's true uh or is going to be true over the longer term because we're going to have solutions like nova we're going to have these bridges we're going to have the damm from starkware and other such things like that and i just think it's going to be a very seamless experience i think a lot of the layer 2 stuff is going to fall into the background for users they're not even

going to have to worry about any of this stuff they're just going to use front ends to kind of i guess interact with it they're going to use bridges hop or connect or whatever they're going to use optimism arbitrary whatever l2 it is they're not even going to know at the end of the day they're just going to know what apps they're using they could be using uniswop on some kind of like rollup that you know that they've never heard of before uh without even knowing it and they could be bridging assets across all this sort of stuff it's i mean it's it's all about branding at the front end right and and there's going to be different brands that kind of i guess win and different kind of front ends that just tap into these things like even the wallets and stuff like that but this is why i think that

ethereum's kind of like laid approach is just the best way to scale a blockchain um and to keep it as decentralized and secure as possible but also i i just don't think there's any like there's any other way to do it because of the fact that you run into centralization issues because you need beefy hardware at the end of the day you can either solve it with kind of like software which i mean there's you also kind of require some kind of like beefy hardware or not i mean beefier than layer one to kind of like process layer two transactions but it's a different thing because you're not relying on um that hardware for layer for security for the layer two layer two is relying on the layer one for security um so yeah i think it just keeps it much more decentralized over time and i think that

the uh the um composability issues are gonna be figured out and we're gonna i think generally it's just gonna be asynchronous anyway and it's gonna be quick it's not gonna be i'm gonna show you in a sec what i mean by quick transfers between chains but it's going to be asynchronous where essentially you you you kind of do what nova is doing here where you kind of like relay messages across it doesn't all happen within one ethereum block or whatever within 15 seconds but it still happens because you send the message the message gets received on one end then that message is replied to and and then that message reply uh gets kind of like acknowledged by the the original sender and kind of like then it goes from there and then you kind of complete that transaction so to speak this is exactly how the worldwide web works today this

is exactly how the web scaled and i i do believe this is exactly how ethereum and and kind of with its layered approach is going to scale long term and is going to be the preferred solution so yeah just i mean i didn't mean to go into kind of like a deep breakdown into like how the scaling approach is going to is going to go but i think it's good always to give a refresher there especially when talking about these sorts of things um like nova and speaking of l2 so l2beat.com got a major upgrade or major update today uh they've added a new risk view new research uh and more you can see here their risk view and this is a condensed version of it shows a bunch of different properties of these l2 such as state validation so how is the state of the l2 being

validated is it fraud proofs or is it zero knowledge proofs uh so zk proofs whether it's an optimistic system or a forward-based system if it's plasma what are the exits like and then it's then it goes into the data availability so is it on chain data availability or is it external um as part of a data availability committee which i've talked about before in the context of um i think validity or volidium one of the two they're from starkware is the other contracts upgradable a lot of them are yes because they're very early stage so if they are upgradeable what ends up happening is that if there's no time lock on it it's a security risk because if the contract can be upgraded it can be upgraded to do anything right it can be changed to do anything underneath you it's not immutable and there's no time lock on it

so you don't have any kind of like i guess uh path to to to recovery there but then there's also the operator censoring uh a part of it so is the layer to operate essentially your transactions or censoring you from being able to do anything on l2 if so you can force exit or exit to l1 and this is the magic of l2 where your you when constructed correctly your funds cannot be held hostage on the l2 that you know they can't be stolen or anything like that what can end up happening er what can end up happening is the operator can censor you because because they control like the sequencer or the block producer and then you can just force exit to layer one and your funds from the bridge will be unlocked after a certain period of time and optimistic roll-ups it's a week on zk

roll-ups it depends on what the construction is depends how often the proofs have been uh related to the chain and stuff like that um and then you can see operator down like do they have like an escape patch which basically means can you exit your funds from that bridge as well so i think this is really really good i mean l2b is doing an amazing amount of work here uh basically pulling all these data together and making it like free for everyone to view because i think this is very very important going forward i think a lot of this is going to change over time obviously there's going to be time locks added where they need to be for upgrade for contract upgradeability there's going to be different kind of like state validation uh things put in place and all that sort of stuff um and you know

and to kind of complement this they've also got descriptions in each uh sorry risk summary in each kind of like projects page here and they've also got a bunch of links to research and things like that as well so check out this thread it'll be linked in the usual description uh and l2b is is quickly becoming welterbeat.com it's quickly becoming my one of my favorite websites in the ecosystem to check daily just to kind of see the growth of l2 but also get a lot of context around what's happening uh with all the different l2s that are live today so again speaking of l2 optimism has uh uh has announced that custom token bridge bridging is now supported on an optimistic ethereum gateway near you so i just opening up the blog post here because they've got a tldr in here so

trdr basically uh they released a new gateway interface which enables arbitrary token deposits and withdrawals to optimistic ethereum in the previous major release of the gateway uh they allowed tokens listed in the optimism token list to be transferred to l2 and back but with this new release the gates have been opened and allow any erc 20 token to transition the boundary between the layers so essentially you can send any token any asa 20 token you want to optimism and you can withdraw it back to l1 you know as you see fit there uh which is i mean awesome right like the more kind of like openness we get from uh optimism and arbitrary and stuff like that the better uh because they do have obviously white list and guard rails in place but

i did say that these guard rails would come down over time uh as the kind of i guess system is live for longer gets more battle tested as i mentioned the other day optimism increased their uh their kind of like um capacity on layer on layer two as well i think they doubled it to a hundred thousand transactions per day and optimism has now done a million total transactions which is really cool and you know i checked out their revenue they're actually doing a hundred thousand dollars of daily um trading fee of volume as well so in aggregate they're doing a lot of um a lot of fee volume even though the fees are like sub one dollar and we'll get cheaper over time as kind of like more and more transactions per second are enabled there and then the proofs kind of get cheaper

to i guess like sorry the revenue goes up uh collectively in aggregate but it falls down for individual users but yeah great to see uh they're just kind of like taking i guess the uh the guard rails off of this and allowed for arbitrary token bridging to optimism which should allow for much more pairs on uni swap on optimism to be created and much more trading volume to happen there which i am really looking forward to seeing all right speaking of bridges uh little little cohen here whoops i'll get rid of that sound there little coin here uh basically showed a video of uh going from polygon to optimism in two minutes with only a 10 cent trans transaction cost um and new users won't even need to ever touch ethereum mainnet anymore now i saw some comments in in

kind of like the the the reply to his tweet here which basically said oh well if we we um the ethereum l1 is so limited that the users don't even have to don't can't even touch it anymore it's like that's the point guys like i mean polygon commits its state to ethereum every few hours right like as part of its its construction and optimism uh commits itself um sorry optimism relies on ethereum for security and commits kind of like those those batches to uh to l1 as well so the the kind of long-term goal here with these sorts of things with l2s and stuff like that is to just have them paying for ethereum uh kind of like transaction sorry for block space uh and all the users to sit on l2 and as i've described

l2 before i was like uh as like a user wrapper we can have like millions if not billions of users in these l2s and then those l2s act as like a one entity that posts proof proofs to the main main chain which pay those fees that that um you know go to i guess like a burning under one five five nine and some of them go to the miners and stakes and stuff like that so the ethereum maintenance is still very much being used to secure this whole ecosystem and it's still very much being paid for and ethic is still very much being burned but the beautiful thing is that the end user doesn't have to touch it the end user can go using using hot pr they can go from polygon to optimism in two minutes with a ten cent transaction cost and it's

absolutely seamless right like this is just amazing i mean people were going we're talking about you know seven day withdrawal periods all this sort of stuff and and delays here and there and you know lots of composability all that blah blah blah i don't know i was talking about that just before but really these solutions are here they're getting better every single day i mean there's a new update from one of these bridges like all the time i mean hop isn't the only one i've got connects up here too where they've got um something that they call x pollinate v2 which is arbor trim to polygon test nets in 70 seconds like this is crazy right this is this kind of transfer time is going to come down over time as well um i think i mean i think there is a theoretical limit on how uh how quickly you can do

it because of i guess block times and things like that and and definitely depending on the risk curve as well uh you you've got to consider that too but yeah i'll be trim two to polygon test nets in 70 seconds this is going to be live on mainnet soon i mean the bridges are here guys like if they work you can go try them out today i mean you can try this hot protocol out one right now you just go to their website click you know click on this sort of stuff bridge some funds across go try it it's it says very seamless and an awesome experience and you know this is really the future and i'm really really excited that we have all this stuff live and it's not just kind of like it's coming soon it's coming soon it's coming soon anymore right and i mean arbitrary is going live

this month still i'm i'm gonna assume they're gonna go live on tuesday which is the 31st of august just because it's just i mean we're well at the 27th of august right now um but you know they're going live like very very soon and you're going to be able to do this on mainnet go from arbitrary to polygon in 70 seconds on mainnet just like on hop you can go from polygon to optimism in two minutes here um you know obvious obviously optimism is a is an optimistic rollup as well so yeah this stuff's here it's coming it's being improved every day super super exciting all right so block native put together a really really great uh kind of eip1559 piece today titled how to calculate ethereum eip1559 max fees uh and it's basically a

guide on how to do this now this i mean the funny thing is is this this is not something that most users will have to kind of like worry about or deal with or whatever but if you're really interested in getting into how things like the base fee the priority fee the max feed max priority fee all that sort of stuff works then this blog post will give you a very comprehensive view on it and kind of like illustrate this in in easy to explain easy to understand ways as well i mean honestly i read through this and i was like wow okay this is awesome like if you really want to know how it all works under the hood and how you can kind of like guarantee yourself to get into like the next block then this is definitely something that you should uh they should check but also

if you don't want to read this blog post every time to kind of calculate these sorts of things i mean block native has already done this for you by creating this tool called the gas estimator tool where you can basically see you have 99 probability in getting into the next block if your max fee is set to 142 with a priority for four and you can see what the base fee is here and stuff like that um and then you can you know go down the list here and see what your probability is depending on kind of what uh what max fee and priority fee you set and stuff like that so and and then you can do a trigger here and say just normal transactions versus one five five nine style transactions or should i say legacy transactions um but still go read this

blog post if you're interested in kind of like i guess understanding how it all works under the hood um but at the same time the funny thing is about this is that i think as i said long term all the users are gonna be on layer two and the only kind of like um people that will have to worry about this sort of stuff is gonna be l2 operators and it's gonna become such a finely tuned machine that if most if not all of the transaction space on l1 is taken up by these l2s then it's basically going to be a a very very efficient kind of block space market where uh all the l2s will know in advance when they're going to post their proofs they know which other proofs are going to be posted they can probably coordinate with each other to say okay you know i'm going to post my

proof here uh you can post yours after me sort of thing or like kind of like batch this stuff together i mean there's there's so much that can be done there and i think long term it's going to be wild to see just how efficient the um l1 block space becomes when we do have the majority if not all of the block space being taken up by these l2s and then in sharding it even it goes it you know it goes even further than that it's pretty crazy when you think about it but for now and probably for the foreseeable future at least for the next maybe two three years um it's good to kind of like have access to tools like this for us end users so that we can kind of like have better predictability about this sort of stuff but again if the wallet that you're using is

designed correctly it should already do this for you and you should already have like a very very high chance of getting into the next block anyway uh with kind of like the default that the wallet gives you but this is just a good way to make sure if you want to like ape into a new nft approach or something like that this is definitely an edge uh and this will definitely help you help you with with doing that so speaking of 1559 banteg kind of posted a tweet today where he compared the adoption rate of two major transaction type upgrades uh one of them being segwit which went live on the 25th of august 2017 uh and is currently used by uh by about uh uh sorry for about eighty percent of bitcoin transactions whereas one five five nine went live on

the fifth of august 2021 which is only about 22 days ago now and has already seen 55 adoption segwit took two years to get to those levels so it just shows like how far how kind of like much faster the adoption has been of one five five nine style transactions over segwit i think this comparison actually holds a lot of water because segwit was meant to be an end user upgrade where it would offer kind of like cheaper fees for end users because it it increased like the kind of block weight uh not the blocks like the hard block size but like the block weight um kind of like how one five five nine i guess isn't meant to kind of like lead to cheaper fees or whatever but in it it kind of like increases the bl the glass limit to 30 million but it targets 15

million so i'm not sure if like they're totally comparable but there is some similar similarities there but this just shows like how fast the ethereum ecosystem is to adopt these sorts of things i mean i mentioned in my newsletter yesterday i expected to get to like 70 80 percent of adoption and maybe taper out there for a little bit but you know it might just be slower to get to 90 i'm not sure if we'll ever reach 100 maybe we will um it kind of it relies on like pretty much every single actor on the network um kind of like updating themselves to use one five five nine style transactions instead of legacy ones so we'll see how that goes there but yeah still really little really great little chart here from from band teg so parsec have updated their tool here i think this is live now i haven't checked

it myself but they're basically out of this thing called the nft fire hose which basically allows you to do something called tape reading which is essentially see like a live view of kind of like nft bids going through over a certain threshold or nft trades going through over a certain threshold so as you can see here this is showing that every nft traded on the ethereum network that's worth more than 0.18 and you can see like different projects here like stoner cats and and uh kind of like bastard gang punks and stuff like that and i mean it subducts a few other ones that i that i kind of like recognize here um but this is really cool because i think this is a good way to probably get uh insight into what nft project is kind of hot like if you suddenly see a lot of things coming

through then you can kind of spot that early on maybe go maybe that's some alpha for you to go and buy this nft and kind of like see that there but they also added an all-in-one collection level data with nft preset layouts here so basically you can see here i mean for those who don't know parsec's like a bloomberg terminal for for like ethereum essentially um but you can see on the screenshot here that the different nft prices between uh like a like um a bastard gangpunks here and you can see on the right side the nft trades and then down the bottom i think my camera is kind of like blocking this but you can see like holders and stuff like that so this really gives you like a bird's eye view of what's happening in certain parts of like the ethereum on-chain ecosystem

which i think is really really cool uh but yeah i think this is live in the parsec tool today you can go check them out that's app.parsec.finance i think it's a paid service i believe um but yeah i'm not sure what the prices are right now i had access a little while ago i haven't checked that in a little while but yeah this is really really cool to see so we had a burn record over the last 24 hours um i think this was actually a while ago now this was almost 24 hours ago where we burned 9 000 eath in the 20 in 24 hours uh yesterday um which is ultramark 7.7 here uh if you if you guys are familiar with justin drake's kind of like uh uh terminology here but this is i mean this is crazy i think we actually broke this record over the last 24 hours

because if i look at my little kind of like ipad mini here it seems that we've we've almost broken that record or come close to breaking it which is crazy i mean this is basically all the nft mania going on right now it's just pushing us to burn a lot of eight i mean we're already at almost 110 000 eat burned and we're at 100 000 yesterday it's just i mean it's just crazy right and i went through yesterday about kind of like the price impacts and what i expect going for with this sort of stuff i'm not going to rehash myself today but yeah just uh crazy to see this burn record and i think that we're gonna see a day with over ten thousand eat burned in 24 hours that's that's not um too far away i don't think and we're going to see maybe maybe even

more than that because we you know if we went back into like we were with i guess like may in terms of price action on each and other kind of like coins out there coupled with an nft mania you would have both d5 and nft mania going on at once which would lead to probably sustained like maybe a couple hundred plus guy prices uh or gas prices i should say which would be quite crazy and that would literally burn like 20 000 eat a day or something like that something insane um which is gonna be interesting to see how that plays out but yeah we're gonna i'm gonna keep an eye on that and keep you guys updated on that for sure and the last thing i wanted to shout out here was that foundation now has a newsletter so kit um the director of collector relations

at foundation is going to be curating this and you can go to foundation.app newsletters to kind of subscribe here it's really great i mean i've been spending a lot more time in the kind of like 101 art space at the moment especially on foundation i've bought a bit i bought three pieces so far um and it's just really really cool to kind of like see what they're doing over there and not just them i mean there's obviously other platforms like super rare and stuff like that but i i'm really partial to foundation because i'm good friends with with kid here um she watches the refuel shout out if you're watching the episode uh kit and i bought one of her pieces actually a little while ago as well so yeah um but generally i i really like foundation's outlay as well how they kind of like outlay the on the website

and have all the artists there and all the pieces and everything like that so i i become a bit of a collector on there these days and slowly but surely building up my collection but yeah if you want to keep up to date with what they're doing uh definitely go subscribe to their newsletter here but i think that's 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