ENS growth, new Andre project and much more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #156 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where we cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the second of july 2021 all right everyone let's jump into it so a git coin grants round 10 matching round 10 has now ended i hope you all got your donations in wanted to give a big thank you to all of you that donated to the daily way i really really appreciate it it means a lot to me and i hope that you donated to you know everyone else as well all the other projects out there the next matching round will be in three months so we can do it all again then and you know i'll be here bugging you to go donate to your favorite projects of course uh they're actually get coins actually doing a live stream

at 12 p.m eastern standard time uh today uh so today for i guess like what's the date today the second second of july um you know and you can go sign up on this link here so if you manage to watch this video before 12 pm eastern standard time which if you're watching the first couple hours that it goes live you should then uh you know go join this live stream uh it should be a good one so paul brody from uh ey announced today that nightfall 3 is now out now for those of you who don't know nightfall has been this project that's been in the works at ey for quite a while basically a privacy project um and there's been multiple releases now this is the third release uh that basically brings a zero knowledge optimistic roll up

layer two with privacy 8000 gas per transaction uh released and it's been released into the public domain now just to give some context here 8 000 gas per transaction for a private transaction is awesome because uh to send eighth on the ethereum network and not to send it privately just to send it like as normal eighth is 21 000 gas so you have nightfall here which is offering private transactions for just 8 000 transaction at layer 2 as part of their uh kind of optimistic role up here so if you want to read more details about it you can head to this link it'll be linked in the youtube description of course but again this is just speaking to i guess what i've been kind of going on about for a while now uh that we need a lot more kind of like privacy tools

to come online and they are they're coming online over time you have obviously tornado cache and aztec protocol and ey i mean there's so many out there now and you know i i think i've said it on the retail before that i think that we need to get to a point where like privacy becomes the default and i don't think we're going to be able to do that at layer one i think layer two is where privacy is gonna become kind of the default that's where you expect it but it's going to still take a little while to do that because you know unfortunately the way ethereum works is that pretty much everyone can see your you know your total financial history on chain if they know your ethereum address right and uh anyone in the world can see that so and you know you can accidentally

make a mistake sometimes and link addresses together so you know on-chain privacy is is pretty pretty terrible uh so that you know and and and from that perspective i think that uh things like uh institutions and enterprises and corporates and stuff like that are going to not want to adopt mainland ethereum because of that look at that that kind of like um privacy concern uh so yeah i i mean i i envision a future maybe in a few years time where we do have private uh private privacy uh sorry private default privacy um but you know i don't know if it's gonna happen anytime soon the the stark reality is that a lot of people just simply either don't really care because they don't see the immediate kind of like negative consequences of not having privacy or they're just not aware of it you know

and believe it or not there are still people out there who think that uh you know these blockchains aren't public they think that you can basically do money laundering or hired money in these kind of systems when you really can't because if and if your address touches a centralized exchange ever you're pretty much screwed there uh because they centralize exchanges even if they don't care why see you and you haven't done kyc you've left a trail there uh whether that be as an email that you've used to sign up or you know an ip address or whatever uh but whereas like for bigger transactions pretty much all the exchanges require you to kyc uh even the offshore ones so from that perspective uh you know money laundering or doing kind of criminal stuff on a blockchain is

just like not not feasible and it's like fully public but there are a lot of people who don't know that and that kind of like i guess narrative uh fleshes itself out and goes into the kind of the wider ecosystem and people start to believe that you know they actually have privacy on these on these blockchains when in reality they don't and you know it's not even just not having privacy it's having like zero privacy and basically exposing all of your on-chain financial activity to the world so yeah cool to see this release from nightfall here um you can go check out this blog post for the full release and they've also got it open sourced on github as it is part of the public domain now so if you're a dev and you want to go check it out and check out their system

you can do that as well so i missed this the other day i don't know when it was announced but it might have just been announced yesterday and i only saw it like later in the day but um balancer has joined uh polygons uh summer of d5 with 10 million dollars in joint token incentives so balancer is on polygon now um uh and you you can basically go and yield farm with 10 million dollars worth of token incentives i think these token incentives are both bal and matic yep that's correct so yeah if you're on the polygon network or if you're not on there yet and definitely just bridge over there and start earning these uh these kind of like rewards here and start doing some more yield farming uh i think it's funny like if i was to look at i

guess the list of like the top apps and if they're on polygon yet i think most of the top defy apps on ethereum or at least a lot of them are on polygon and i i do believe that this isn't going to stop here i've said it many many times before it's like there's polygon and then there's going to be arbitrary optimism all these other protocols they're just going to be on all of these kind of things and and they're going to have like token incentives but the thing is we'll it'll be it's going to be very hard to see which i guess scalability solutions get traction uh like actual genuine traction versus which don't because everything's going to have liquidity mining token incentives whatever you want to call it which means that there's going to be a lot of liquidity that flows in but as soon as those token incentives

run out does that liquidity leave right like how much of it leaves we've seen it happen before plenty of times on ethereum's layer one so i think it's going to still be quite a while i would say maybe some years before we actually have kind of like a clearer picture of what this ecosystem is going to look like with the layer twos whether it's going to be a handful of them whether we're going to have like this super disjointed system that just like uh i guess like um prevails because of those token incentives because at the end of the day a lot of people use these systems to make money in some sort of way and some of the easiest ways to make money is to yield farm especially if it's a lower risk farm not maybe not providing liquidity but a lot of the ones like the sable coin

farms and things like that uh and just like earning token rewards for for basically just having your stable coins parked somewhere um you know there's a lot of people doing that but then the the money just flows out as fast as it came because they want to do something else with that maybe they want to go to another yield farm and then it's just like yield farming all the way down so we're gonna have to see how it plays out uh i've spoken about it a lot so i won't rehash what i've said now but cool to see another i guess like uh star defy app from ethereum launch on polygon here speaking of layer twos i actually missed this a couple days ago looping put out their quarterly report uh for uh 2021 uh sorry q1 2021 uh sorry no q2 2021 um and and they put out like what's to

expect from q3 but i think they highlighted here the biggest piece of this um and this actually came as a surprise to me so they have deployed their loopering smart wallet wallet contracts on arbitram which will reduce the cost of creating wallet by factor of 10 times which means that loopering's smart wallet is going multi-layer too so it is not just married to loopering's layer 2 system which is obviously their own um zk roll up that they have that they have built but they're going and deploying their wallet to other layer 2s as well which is awesome i mean if they're going to arbitrary that means they're going to optimism and they're going to go to zk sync and evel and kind of like all these other ones i expect them to go everywhere and i love this i love that they're not just like staying on their

own oh look they linked one of my daily great refuel videos here that's cool um i love that they're not just going on i guess like um their own kind of like uh uh roll up solution and just sticking to that and just like siloing themselves um i do think there is a benefit to obviously honing in on your own product and like just focusing on your own kind of like app chain if you want to call it that but i think that at the end of the day this ecosystem ethereum you know everything that we do on ethereum is built on collaboration and composability so you want to be able to preserve as much of that as possible as we you know go through this great migration to layer two i think that's exactly what's happening with with loop ring and i'm sure you know these other app

chains like diy dx and and diversify and things like that i'm sure they're also going to be looking at what to do uh and how to kind of like tap into these other layer two ecosystems because as i said like it's it the ecosystem is built on this the the sum is great some of the the parts is greater than the whole uh and and you know sorry greater than individual um and then uh i think that's just gonna be a benefit to users as well because we're gonna have the bridge systems out there so you can go from like loop rings while uh loot brings layer two to arbor trims and still use your smart wallet across them at least that's that's i believe how it's going to work so that's just gonna preserve uh i guess like the composability between them and it's going to make user

experience a lot better which is really at the end of the day everything just is for the user experience and you know user experience is like a broad term but it includes like gas fees at the end of that that's like the biggest ux or user experience barrier that i can see right now is that the gas for ethereum at least is that the gas fees are high even at 13 way or whatever they are right now while i'm recording this that's still too high for most people so improving the ux obviously layer two is a big part of that but also preserving what people are used to using on layer one and what people expect is also a big big part of that and that's exactly why i've been going on about these infrastructure things that need to be set up on these layer twos like infuria alchemy

the graph chain link they all need to be there before users come or else the user experience is going to actually be degraded because what ends up happening is that yes they're saving on transaction fees or like i mean we're all users right we also we would all save on transaction fees but we're getting a different experience and a worse experience than layer one because if there's no like infuria or alchemy support then we would have to point out uh i guess like wallets to our own node or another third-party node and have to do it kind of like um you know that that kind of a third-party node has to support those networks as well um and then on top of that you know if the graph wasn't on there we would have to basically manually check everything you wouldn't have all those fancy dashboards

uh and if chain link wasn't on there you wouldn't have you know something like rv like rv is powered by chain links oracles so you wouldn't be able to use it at all so that would mean that it doesn't matter if the fees are cheap like the system just is fundamentally not going to work out very well so uh yeah i i think that um you know although i think pretty much all the layer twos of clued into this by now and are like okay well this is critical infrared we want to make sure the ux is is the same as layer one just with cheaper fees because really that's all in my mind layer twos bring two key things it great it vastly improves the user experience by giving them cheaper transactions like the one that's the first major thing and secondly it also improves the design

space for developers where developers can do more with layer two than they can do with layer one and you can actually start doing things outside of the scope of layer one like ethereum is has some limitations because it is solidity based and it's and has the evm as well which is obviously you know been criticized a lot in the past for those of you who have seen it it is not perfect uh mind you mind you but it's still good for what it does but you know at layer 2 you know i've spoken about starcraft before how they're building their own kind of virtual machines and smart contracting language and dydx is already on there so the design space just gets much larger so those are the two core things i think that layer twos uh offer and those are things that should be focused

on and and they should just basically clone layer one in terms of infrastructure support and and you know go from there instead of just kind of like trying to launch without that because then as i said the user experience is greatly uh affected there so the ef or ethereum foundation ecosystem support program put put out their update on uh their q1 allocations here now for those who don't know this is where a lot of the money goes when the ethereum foundation kind of like cashes out their eighth like i'm sure you've all seen that on chain before they kind of cash out some eath whether that's too uh basically in exchange to kind of like go to fiat or they'll pay kind of like different kind of uh i guess like um addresses on chain and things like that so those kind of things go to uh you

know all these kind of uh i guess like projects on here and all these kind of uh funding initiatives so you can see there's a i mean this is a long list here of different projects and some fan favorites in here like dark forest which is a uh decentralized and persistent rts a real-time strategy game uh load stars like if two kind of um clients i think there's prism in here somewhere uh there's there's a bunch in here i mean there's there's there's heaps and there's like a lot of core protocol stuff a lot of layer two things going on uh and the total that was awarded was five point three four million dollars in q1 which is really really cool to see eighth global is included as well of course they run all the hackathons and everything like that that i'm sure a lot

of you have seen uh and you know i'm just really glad to see the ethereum foundation ecosystem support program continuing to excuse me sorry continuing to support i guess like the ethereum ecosystem right they're doing what's in their name and doing it well i think um because you can see like all the the apps they're kind of supporting here i'm actually pretty pretty or like i think it's pretty awesome that they're kind of like supporting dark forest because like and i mean when you think about it like pretty much most of the things on this list are like layer 1 layer 2 core protocol client stuff like not really anything like the app layer but they're just you know there's a few in here that were on the app player like dark forest

there's cream as well um which i is no cream isn't the money market uh this is for uh zero knowledge proofs and things like that so i thought that was the the korean money market so just going through this list actually i think dark forest may be the only app player um thing that was funded as part of this round which is which is pretty cool to see actually because i think dark forest isn't just a game it's doing a lot in kind of like i guess realm of zk snarks and stuff like that which is obviously going to be a big part of ethereum's kind of road map and future here so it's cool to see that but yeah i think they are the only app level kind of thing here or at least uh one of the only i can't really see any

more on the list yeah but still really cool to see this uh and i'm great i'm great to see uh you know these these kind of like teams get funded so andre put out a blog post uh today announcing a new project called fixed forex which is a project uh you guessed it for forex trading so forex standing for foreign exchange of course and there's a bunch of different currencies supported like us dollars euros tsar which i think is uh african africa the money they use in africa i'm i'm not sure uh i i think so uh the yen uh the chinese one uh and et cetera uh it doesn't really go into detail about which currencies are supported i was gonna say when aud but maybe that's as part of the et cetera thing here

but anyway there's not much information on this basically this project uh is has no token the order hasn't been completed and the contract is experimental so in other words it's an andre project um and the key features are there's zero governance there's no multi-sig zero configuration zero fees zero value extraction gentle liquidations uh dynamic minting caps based on on-chain liquidity and dynamic loan-to-value ratios based on on-chain protocols so um this reminds me of liquidity a bit those who don't know liquidity is kind of like the same vein where they're trying to like be extremely governance minimized and the fees that they take are like flat fees and stuff like that and uh yeah so that kind of reminded me of liquidity immediately um but the essentially how this is kind

of how how this works is is basically uh the loan to value ratio is derived from money markets such as compound rv v1 and v2 and the iron bank and as these systems auto update their accepted collateral so does fixed forex dynamically update which means i guess that fixed forex is at the mercy of these kind of money markets for its functioning and for its like health at the end of the day so you could say that these protocols are in in turn governing uh this part of fixed forex um there's minting caps that are put in place and they're derived from available on chain liquidity so the higher the on-chain liquidity the higher the minting caps that's pretty cool right um i'm not sure exactly how they're doing this um or like how he's

doing this i'm not sure if it's able to be gamed or if it's safe or whatever as i said not much information in here and then he goes on to explain gentle liquidations which is just that liquidations are to cover the absolute minimum amount of debt uh is repaid to bring users position back to even no more worrying about the full stack being liquidated during drawdown events and here's the contract and the full release will be based on curves crypto pools to allow for decentralized forex market so if this works it's a pretty big deal like i mean there's not really much high pr it's there's not much of anything here as i've said multiple times but i think that if this actually works and it does what what andre says that's it's going to do and it's robust and and and can be resistant to any kind of

attacks then i think this is this is a game changer but you know this has just gone live i think a few hours ago there's not much support for it yet obviously because it just went live i don't think curve even has uh kind of like i guess uh this is just built on like curves kind of crypto pools it's not actually integrated as part of their system yet or things like that so i'm just gonna keep an eye on this and see what happens here you know andre likes to release a lot of projects and some of them go well some of them don't uh and i don't think there's any denying that he's smart and knows what he's doing but i think a lot of the time he'll release something like this and then he'll leave it up to the ecosystem to kind of figure out what to do with it

which is fine i'm just curious to see what we do with it right the considering there's no token you know a lot of people aren't going to be interested in this because of that like it became a thing where you would basically ape into or use a new andre project because there was a token attached to it and you could make money from it i remember when he launched the keeper project and he launched a token with it and it was launched from his deployer address and there was people that kind of basically got in and made like 100 x in like a day this was this was during like you know the the i guess like not not the the top of the bull market but during like a very heated time i guess as part of like d5 summer and stuff like that so

i don't know you know how much attention this is going to get because it has no token but i think that the smart people will kind of look at this and see if it's actually going to work and people will use it because you know i i've said before that i think usd stable coins um uh kind of like exclude a lot of people because a lot of people don't want to take on that currency risk they want they want to have to hold usd uh for multiple reasons like i fall into that bucket so having other stable coins out there and being able to do things with them is like the dream for me so i'm hoping that some something like this or something else comes along and and really kind of i guess um it kind of solves that issue there so uni swap v3 liquidity mining

contracts have been deployed to the ethereum mainnet and all test nets which means developers can start using these contracts today they say here the v3 liquidity mining is similar to v2 liquidity providers can stake the liquidity and receive rewards prorider according to their liquidity contribution uh lps and rewards as long as their liquidity remains in range uh v3 also introduces some other improvements here such as lps can now participate in multiple liquidity mining programs simultaneously on a single pair no more having to choose and switch between incentives that's really cool actually um that's very capital efficient and remember how i said that unit top v3 was all about capital efficiency because of their concentrated liquidity and a few other things they put in there as part of features uh this is just like kind of

falling into the same same vein here which i think is really really cool so yeah if you're a developer interested in kind of looking at these contracts they'll it'll be linked in the youtube description of course and you can go check them out for yourself and see if it's something that you're interested in so brantley from our ens domains put out some stats here in the tweet where he says markets may have been down in june but not ens most new dot ether registrations in a month plus 31 000 nearly three times in uh the amount in may blue past 250 milestones for integra uh for integrations now at 253 and it remains the dominant on openc for domain trading seven times as much as all the others combined uh so there's nice some nice charts here you can see the monthly registrations uh and there's the open c kind of

rankings here and then of course uh the the growth here on analytics chart now i think this happened for two reasons i'm not sure if uh brantley mentioned this but the two reasons that i see this happening is one low gas prices obviously when gas prices are higher people don't really want to mint lots of uh dot e kind of like domain names or e s names because they're nfts and that brings and it's expensive and that brings me to my second point because they're nfts i think people clued into that and were like oh well enos domains and nfts oh i love nfts and they bought it right i think that i saw that narrative play out so i think those are the two main reasons that our ens has taken off but that

doesn't take away from the growth i think it's amazing that ens is growing like this i i mean honestly i think ens is one of the best tools that we have on ethereum that isn't celebrated nearly enough obviously there's privacy concerns with it like i'm just going to put that out there of course like i mean sassel.edu is my public address uh and you know i claim my git coin airdrop with that address and i regret doing that because the bitcoin airdrop ended up being worth a lot and you know people can see it on there but whatever i mean it's whatever uh but but still i i think that having like um a public address that you don't mind being public and having your kind of identity attached to it is just like the first step in getting to a point where we can do decentralized

identity management and things like that which i think is really really cool and obviously you know you can put in your twitter name or your twitter buyer and people can like easily look at that and be like okay i can send funds there i know it's going to add this person like for donations and stuff like that there's a lot of other on-chain things you can do as well uh using that so yeah cool to see ans getting this traction um and as i said it's due to those two main reasons lower gas fees and people realizing the nfts sorry that ens names are nfts uh and you know kind of like aping him because of that but you know it's funny and i've also actually maybe this is a third reason maybe not i don't know how prevalent it is but i've seen people

registering ens names with a message so they'll basically register like a whole sentence as an ens name in order to get the attention of someone that they want to talk to uh so it's like hey uh you know such and such can you contact me uh uh at this kind of like uh wherever right and you know i i've seen like there's a non non-negligible amount of kind of like names registered like that so that's another funny thing but obviously they're just kind of like messages and they're not really meant to be uh kind of like names that people use regularly and i think it just speaks to the fact that ethereum still needs a good decentralized messaging service i know there's a few things out there i think you know status is working on on a lot of stuff there swarm i believe um i think if i'm not

getting mixed up he'll whisper whisper might have been the the the system there but i think that's evolved since then but still we do need and decentralized messaging service uh you know that that kind of like is fully unchained and tied in with the rest of the ethereum ecosystem so i'm rooting for for the people working on that sort of stuff all right so the last thing here is a bit of a conversation about mev today because there was an event that happened yesterday uh you can see vitalik posted about at the mav.wdf online summit over eight hours worth of videos i'll link this in the youtube description i'm pretty sure you can kind of like check out uh the youtube videos at mev.wtf website um but basically uh it went through kind of like all of what's happening with mev

right you had like the evolution of mev uh framing the mev problem protocol level response to mev and application level response to mev now mav may seem like a new thing to a lot of you over the last few months if you haven't been paying attention to it in the past but one person who has been working on this for a long time is philip diane now i believe he's been working on this since 2018 um and he's published multiple papers on his multiple kind of research pieces on this um and he's been kind of like uh you know in deep in this kind of like industry because as he says here as someone who's been working on mitigations to meb for years such as submarine sends adver advising muni swap hundreds of conversations with uh with every dex project and

mitigations got zero industry attention until flashbots now this is what i wanted to focus on flashbots i've talked about flashbots ad nauseum on the refill i'm not going to go and rehash it again but before flashbots came to the scene hardly anyone was talking about mev it was relegated to the niche areas of the ethereum ecosystem where only the most hardcore researchers were actually paying attention to it and everyone now saw it as kind of like this fringe thing that we shouldn't really be worried about now since flashbots came onto the scene everyone's clueing into mev now and they know exactly how harmful it can be if not uh you know worked on and kind of like minimized or democratized in in such a way as well so i think that's why you've been seeing a lot more about mev lately it's basically flashbots because before

that it was i mean miners weren't really taking advantage of mev because they didn't have an easy tool to do so they didn't have flashbots well now they do and they're really taking advantage of it and this problem doesn't go away with staking either and that's another reason why it's top of mind is that we're trying to figure out the best way to do transaction ordering where we can basically minimize mev to the point where it becomes not worth it for the people that are extracting the mev or remove it all together but i don't think that we're going to get to a point where we can remove it all together or at least like eliminate it all together for quite a while so if you want like the full breakdown of mev what's happening you know what what are all the mitigations currently going on

you can go to mav.wtf and obviously watch the recap which i mean they say it's four hours here but the youtube video is actually eight hours long so i think that there was um probably more kind of like other events besides the main agenda here that were kind of like posted on there i haven't watched it yet i plan to um i usually these days i usually listen to podcasts while i'm playing world of warcraft i just have it on my other monitor and i'll just play some some water vlogger it's like it's relaxing right so you know i i think i can get through eight hours worth uh mev to me is something that everyone should really be paying attention to not only because it's something that is like a pretty big uh a deal with an ethereum but it's just so interesting like there's so many things

happening in the dark forest as they like to call it that you just don't get exposed to and you just don't hear about or know about unless you deep dive and it's really cool to see what the the top researchers and and kind of like engineers in this space are working on and you know what what kind of techniques they're coming up with and just being on the bleeding edge so if you've got time for it i definitely recommend going and checking it out there but i think that's going to wrap up today's episode so thank you everyone again 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 watch out this weekend for the next daily grade data pump video i'll be posting that on probably sunday

uh and i'll catch you all on next week's refuel thanks everyone