EPNS, eth2 news, DAO chat, Gitcoin grants and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #9 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 7th of december 2020. all right everyone let's get into it so before we get into the news from the weekend and on on friday i wanted to give a quick kind of reminder to everyone that get coin grants round eight is still going it actually goes till the 17th of december so if you haven't donated yet uh you know be sure to go on there and donate to all the projects that that you want to support uh you know it still does run for a while but i always like to you know get it out of the way don't don't leave it to the last minute sort of thing uh there's up there's i think there's up

to one million dollars of matching funds are up for grabs you know a bunch of projects have already been funded there's a bunch of different categories here you know you can see all the projects that are being funded both from uh individual donors and also the matching uh there's there's tons of different projects here right i'm sure you'll be able to find ones that you've used and you want to support uh not just like uh the the projects themselves in terms of like the um the tech that you use but also uh the media that you want to support so there's there's a whole kind of uh category for that called community you know the daily gray falls into that uh ether bankless the defiant d5 dad there are so many now right alex saunders monthly ethereum recap that i do with him

so there's a ton in here um and as i mentioned uh last week there's also grant collections that you can that you can peruse through if you want to just have people that kind of like curate uh the grants for you so you know on this collections page here i have the cecil's card of love which has 49 grants in it you don't have to donate to all of them at once you can just go in here and basically select which ones you want to donate to and there's a bunch of other ones here uh there's a there's an eth2 one so if you want to support basically all of the e3 efforts you literally just click here click view and then go into and and donate and add this to your cart and donate so definitely go go do that if you haven't yet a quick

shout out to coincenter who is absolutely dominating this bitcoin grants round they've received 160 000 worth of die in direct donations from people and 56 000 uh die in matching so far so i think this is the the highest matching slash donation amount in get coins history for a single project uh if i remember the aip1559 got up there i think it was around a hundred thousand dollars maybe total or a bit more than that i think coincident has kind of you know blown them out of the water here this is over two hundred thousand dollars worth and i saw uh niraj who works at coin center on twitter say that this basically makes up for the loss of their annual dinners so they host an annual dinner obviously once a year whether it's

basically a fundraising event for queen center they couldn't do it this year since uh obviously because of coronavirus and they're expecting that they won't be able to do it next year either so this makes up for two years worth which is pretty amazing because that's their biggest fundraising event uh so really really awesome to see i'm i'm sure that you know the ethereum community showed the you know coin center a lot of love here i'm sure they're gonna show it back right they're gonna you know lobby for us on uh lobby on our behalf uh in the the us especially in regards to like ethereum regulations and d5 regulations and all that you know we've seen a ton of this happening lately like i talked about last week with the stable act there's just so many you know bad kind of bills and proposals going through or trying to get

through that we need to educate these policy makers to make sure they don't push these things through and they understand the technology itself so definitely happy to see coin center get all of this all right last bitcoin grants thing before i move on uh there is a team uh that basically translates a lot of the content from bankless and from the daily gray into french so for the daily grade they will translate every tuesday and thursday edition of the newsletter into french for their community and they're doing this completely free they're not being funded by anyone you know they they're doing it on a volunteer basis so i just wanted to give a quick shout out here that if you appreciate the work that they're doing go donate to their bitcoin grant of course

uh you know you don't even have to be friends or understand or know how to read french to donate it's just good to support these efforts because it basically lets us tap into different communities right like crypto's very english you know dominated but we forget sometimes that there's whole communities out there that don't speak english but they still want to tap into our ecosystem so this is what uh the the kind of um community is doing here all the volunteers are doing here and translating this content so definitely go donate to them i'd like to see their matching go up and their total donations go up as well all right on to some news from over the weekend so a lot of you may not have heard of this project uh it's relatively new it's called the ethereum push notification service or

epns for short i'm gonna put a disclosure here and say that i'm a small investor in this uh this company uh basically i got connected to them a few months ago i was on a few calls with them i've given them advice on on on how to approach things and how to basically you know go about doing their project and everything so i just wanted to to give a disclosure there that uh yeah uh just just to make sure that you're aware of that but they're really really awesome uh the the two co-founders uh are really great to work with they're based out of india they are really passionate about what they're building and they want to build something useful so what they're building with epns is basically a decentralized notification service for defy and web 3 and ethereum

so you know i mean everyone's familiar with the usual notifications we get on our phones and our desktop you know pcs and all that sort of stuff our laptops uh but have you ever really have you ever kind of like thought to yourself well i wish i could have notifications for the things i do on ethereum i mean i certainly have the only notifications i usually get is like metamask telling me that my transaction was successful right i don't get notifications like hey your position's underwater uh go you know make sure that you go top top it up so you don't get liquidated there are other services that do this like defy saver for example and i'm a big fan of defy saver as well uh but that's not a you know a decentralized kind of protocol for notifications and you know it's kind of like limited

in scope it's not open whereas epns wants this to be kind of open and they want people to be able to basically create their own notifications on this network uh so that different people can interact with them uh they also have an app now basically an ios app if i click through here if it wants to load there we go uh yes i have an ios app that you can that you can kind of download here uh oh sorry not ios mac mac app store so for for macbook uh that you can kind of download there um it's still very early very early stage project uh it has a you know a few pretty good notifications like i don't know they got here the ens expiry alert that's that's another big one right when you have an e s address uh they expire right you have

to renew them and if you don't it goes up for grabs and someone else can expire someone else can basically take your name from you like eighth gas price tracker as well tracking the price of of gas and you know when it falls below 20 you know 20 grain or something getting a notified of that so you can go do some cheap transactions and things like that so really really bullish on this project obviously since i decided to you know invest in them and have been helping them i really love projects that are doing something different and not just following the crowd you know there's a lot of projects now kind of like trying to compete with existing projects and that's all well and good we need competition but the most interesting things to me are these unique projects so you know kudos to the epns team for for

getting this kind of app out there and i'm and i'm really excited to see how they go from here all right this was an interesting tweet from philippe here so there was i mean last week as well with the stable act uh discussions uh and we saw a couple of the people key people that were involved in that act basically have a fundamental misunderstanding of uh ethereum bitcoin crypto networks in general right they thought that people running full nodes could filter transactions they could you know screen every transaction that comes through and basically you know filter them out if they're quote unquote malicious or if they're doing you know banking things or whatever which i mean it was totally insane right

i won't rehash the whole conversation but basically you know that got people thinking like okay if this bill was actually to go in would it become illegal to run your own ethereum full node right would you would it be punishable would there be fines for it would there be jail time you know all these sorts of things i don't know if we if it would go towards you know jail time uh that would be quite extreme but you know if if an ethereum full node becomes regulated as like a like a bank basically i mean you know they're pretty pretty bad regulations right so philippi's tweet here has basically said that even if every single ethno in the u.s was forced to shut down there would still be around 8 000 nodes in the world that would um you know still be online for the ethereum network which is really

really awesome right i mean it means that we don't lose the majority of the nodes you know there's over 11 000 nodes you know three i think it was three thousand about three thousand would go down if all the ones in the u.s went down but we'd still have eight thousand so really great to see the distribution here and the resiliency of the network i mean you can see on the map here if you're watching on the video the nodes are basically uh concentrated in you know obviously north america europe is a big part of it uh and and southeast asia as well but you've also got uh australia where i am as well seems to be doing quite well so it is it is pretty pretty evenly distributed um i mean it's it's funny because you can see here on the map that south

america and africa are showing kind of like you know not many nodes i guess i can see in in south america actually if i look closely there are some nodes there but it doesn't seem like there's many nodes in africa and things like that so i would like to see you know more and more nodes get spun up there and it becomes distributed there um but that might be for a number of reasons of course why that's not the case but still it's quite distributed already and i actually uh went in on today's delegate newsletter i actually expanded on this and i had a bunch of other thoughts in there on on basically these statistics so definitely go read that if you want to get more context around this all right next up we have a really cool uh chart from alex alexander fisher who has been a long time ethereum uh

community member and he's pretty big on eth2 uh so he basically tweeted out this uh chart that that shows each two validators since genesis and we can see the participation rate increasing so for those watching you can see it increasing from you know i think about 80 85 86 percent to basically almost 99 yeah 99 now so we're basically almost at 100 validator uh participation within eth2 which is which is incredible as i mentioned uh on last week the test nets that we spun up for eth2 suffered from low participation and that's simply because there wasn't any real value at stake right whereas if you're not participating in the network and you have

you know ether in the deposit contract and eth that's that's supposed to be staking that earth will start kind of bleeding out right um and you'll start losing eighth and if you get down to 16 8 for being offline your validator will be kicked out and that 16 8 will actually be stuck until the merger or until like withdrawals are enabled on the beacon chain so you've you've got like a pretty big motivation to be online you want to be earning those rewards i think the reward weight rate is about 17 18 at the moment so you're missing out on some pretty chunky rewards if you're offline so there's only one one to two percent of validators offline right now i expect you know those will probably come online with time as well there's been a few different reports as to why these are

offline still but you know 99 i mean that's that's that's amazing that's that's pretty incredible i think uh and he's also mentioned here that pending validators deposited and waiting for activation continues to ramp up and he's now 8 600 plus uh with no exits so far so no validators have been exited out of out of the the pool i think since then since this tweet was put out maybe a day or so ago there have been some exits due to slashing events um but yeah this is this is cool uh this is exactly what we want to see i can't believe how well it i mean i still after like a week i can't believe how well e2 is still just chugging along after all the issues we saw with the test nets it just really speaks to the fact that those test nets were critical

and worked very well to get us to a point where the main net is just running smooth as butter so i'm gonna keep you know paying attention to this of course and keep tweeting about it and talking about it and probably writing about it in the newsletter um because this this i think is very important to keep keep an eye on because you know if the network runs really really really well for six months for example the researchers and developers are going to feel extremely comfortable with introducing the next slot of features into eth2 this was a big thing for them they basically wanted to see a very stable a very workable main net for for a period of time say six months before they introduced any critical upgrades so i think we're gonna get that i mean it's only been a week you know i i

probably cursed it by saying that but you know the fact that it's gone so well so far is a very good sign so i'm looking forward to seeing if that keep you know continues to play out which i i think it will all right an interesting tweet from everyone's favorite dejen spartan here so he was basically you know putting some tweets out about liquidity mining and what it's going to be like going forward so he says 2020 was when liquidity mining and liquidity providing took off and you got paid to provide liquidity right 2021 i mean this this is his prediction he thinks 2021 will be when liquidity migration um will take off so get paid to migrate your liquidity to layer twos or other chains or other protocols

we've already kind of seen that with the uni swap and sushi swap stuff right when uni swaps rewards ended like their um their liquidity mining rewards sushi swap said hey guys you can come here with your same liquidity and provide on here and we'll give you sushi rewards excuse me so we already saw that happening right now will this happen for other chains i mean i'm surprised other chains aren't really doing this yet in a big way this is a really easy way to get liquidity on these other chains right um and like other protocols as well and then layer twos as well right we've actually seen layer twos do liquidity mining recently diversify announced uh some liquidity mining loot brings been doing it

for their layer two exchanges i i actually if i was just to kind of like maybe make a prediction here that i don't i don't believe in too strongly but just something i thought of then will uni swap have a liquidity mining program for unisop v3 right if they have a layer 2 solution or if they have um you know another thing that they want people to migrate uh for really quickly will they introduce that who knows you know but this was yeah i just got my brain spinning when i saw this tweet from from the gen spartan here i think he put out a few more tweets here so yeah he basically says imagine using the liquidity migration tool provided by the the vampiric protocol that would help to migrate over your liquidity

in exchange you get x amount of rewards but your liquidity and or rewards are also locked for y period so this is basically like vesting these rewards as well and you i can see here kurtz had the same idea as me with loop ring is already doing this um with liquidity mining migration and trying to basically encourage people to go to layer twos and things like that so i think we're going to see more of this i think it's actually going to happen in 2021 especially if the market keeps heating up there's going to be more and more you know a demand for this liquidity mining really works in a big way once there's a lot of demand for like the tokens right so the token price goes up so the apys go up and you kind of have this flywheel um and this kind of like snowball effect

so i'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out in 2021 really funny tweet from andre you put this out a couple of hours ago so he basically said that there's four new releases under kind of like the y own ecosystem that are currently under audit uh from pickle from cream from cover and then the fourth one he didn't give away obviously that's a surprise and he goes on to say waiting for the feedback loop is painful it feels like wasted time you can't start on new work and you can't release yet very annoying limbo state this is funny because andre is famous for i testing prod right he has it in his bio still basically deploying new products and contracts to production on ethereum main net without audits without anything like that

without doing it on test nets and letting people play with it uh so i thought this was funny that he was complaining about that because now he's basically forced into this developer life cycle where he has to wait and he's obviously someone who doesn't like to wait he he he puts out a lot of um a lot of different protocols and a lot of different um smart contracts and the fact that he's forced to wait slows him down and he hates that so i just thought that was a little bit funny but i think it's for the best you know this is better than testing in production and and and you know there being bugs or people you know losing money and things like that i said that deep blue crypto said the same thing yeah but it better than testing production or losing user funds

and things like that but i i think yeah i mean even though he's frustrated with it i think this is a better path forward for not only wyoming but also showing the wider ecosystem that this you know eye testing prod stuff is just not long term sustainable it is not something that we should be aiming for we should be aiming to do better than that we should definitely be auditing and testing and everything on test nets before we have deployed a main net or else we're just going to end up with users losing funds uh to you know all the time and d5 is going to keep getting like a bad name because of that so i'm very glad that andre kind of like is is sticking to this now and i'm looking forward to these updates that are coming out as part of the wiring ecosystem right

and you know you'll feel safe because they've been kind of audited and then they've been looked at and it's not just like let's put it out there and see what happens sort of thing so looking forward to seeing what happens there all right vitalik tweeted out that one percent of all eighth is now in the deposit contract which is quite insane right i think it's a 1.1 1.15 million if uh which is which is insane um i remember we were struggling to i mean people think thought we were going to struggle to get uh 524 288 the minimum and now we're like pretty much double that so yeah vitalik tweeted out about this with a bunch of charts that he's been tweeting out uh basically around you know uh when the

when the deposits came in on what week day did they came in you know how uh how many entities need how many deposited depositors sorry needed to collude to reach you know 34 percent uh to kind of like have the majority share on the network basically uh at the moment i think it's 10 uh to reach 51 percent he's 30 to 67 percent which an attack he's not here an attack can do great damage is 106. so ideally we want you know all of these as high as possible right but at the same time if the 10 depositors say okay we're going to do something you know we're going to get 34 of the network and then try to like censor transactions and things like that

i mean it's not too much of a bit of a big deal on the beacon chain in its current state but in the future if they tried to do this they would be slashed for this behavior right um and that's a lot of eight thirty four percent of the one point one million eighth oh well yeah thirty four percent yeah over the one point one million eighth it's like what 300 over three hundred thousand eighth would be would be burned right and that's all their money gone so that's that's the beauty of proof of stake is it's kind of like you know we when you try to attack the network we're just gonna like burn all your wreath um so that's good it's a good deterrent and i don't think we're gonna see people colluding like this but we definitely want that number up from

10 like 10 is you know i mean you can create a group chat with 10 people and just like collude and do whatever you want basically um but i don't think that would happen uh these people aren't really known from what i from what i know um but yeah i think uh i mean as vitalik notes here you know he says that the decentralization numbers are a bit worse than last time because only uh only because they now properly treat bitcoin suites with their multiple addresses as a single unit okay so bitcoin suites is another one there uh you know that's a service provider right a staking provider but i think i'm pretty sure they're staking like uh custom funds as well so another deterrent not to attack the network or do anything do anything funky and get yourself slashed as well

as much of other charts here from vitalik as well just updates on on basically the participation count over time if deposited over time and things like that it's actually i mean if we look at the youth deposited over time chart it's funny because you can see that big spike that first big spike when uh it was basically a day or two before the minimum needed to be reached and then we saw a lot go in but since then we've actually kept seeing like a ton go in right we've we've basically doubled the amount of ether in there so not as fast of course like it took another i think two weeks from the look of just buying this chart but still really good to see who knows where we finish up right are we gonna get to two million eighth by next year by january

maybe i think it's gonna slow down from here to be honest i unless there's like some more exchanges that go online and a lot of people just flood into each staking because of that but it's it's pretty incredible that one percent of all eighth is now locked actually locked right for for quite a while uh a year at least so uh pretty cool to see that and i'm glad vitalik has been tweeting about this sort of stuff and sending this signal out to to the ecosystem now an interesting tweet thread from peter pan here who's involved with meta cartel venture dow and 1kx network he is pretty big in the down community building space uh he's been around the block so to speak and this tweet thread basically goes through a tutorial island for dows

so how you take the community builder path and you know it basically how to get involved and contribute to dows when you are fairly new to crypto and just want to learn this is really important because there's a lot of people that come into crypto you know say you're brand new coming to ethereum you want to join a community you join and there's always lingo you have to learn right you don't know how to contribute because it's very hard to know how to contribute you don't know um you know if you should join a call you don't know if you should join the forum you don't know if your opinions are going to be you know you don't know if you're going to be called stupid for lack of a better word right for your opinions because you're you're a newer person so he basically

says this is how you can get involved and learn really quickly step one take notes of the dow's regular community calls publish and summarize those meeting notes alongside other project and community issues items into a weekly newsletter you know help core contributors run surveys to gauge community sentiment and feedback on the new on new draft proposals there's a bunch of others here work on community documentation help other new community members on board help coordinate the dao's meetings all this sort of stuff so there's a lot of basic stuff that people can do when they first join a community that is very kind of like i wouldn't call it maybe low effort but like you know lower effort than say you know building something as a developer for

example right and it has high reward and it doesn't take a lot of specialized knowledge to do right taking notes of a of a community call doesn't require specialized knowledge you know and and that just gets your foot in the door and then from there you start building up a reputation within these communities and these dows and you can start doing more you know you you you might get um access to to uh you know damning people in in dm and community members in the in that community uh and being able to talk to them one-on-one for long periods of time because they know that you're a community member that's that's gonna stay and you're not just in there for like you know pumping the token or whatever which i've seen in other communities there's been people that come you know they say all this stuff and and

then in reality what they're trying to do is they're just trying to make you know pump their tokens or whatever and serious communities don't appreciate that so if you show your worth and you show that you're going to stick around then you get like this reputation you get this credibility and you get access to basically uh being able to talk to all different people and and people respect you a lot more uh that's you know this happens in every single community if you look at the ethereum community for example and all the people within that community they've been around for years they've had to earn their reputations they have to earn their credibility through just hard work through grinding uh and they had to earn the trust of the wider community and once that that is earned it becomes a lot easier to do different things

but it you know it's an uphill battle to get there and the bigger community that you join the harder it is right because there's like an established you know it's not a formal hierarchy but it's like an established hierarchy where you know you're starting from the the bottom and then you have to work your way up to the top and it just becomes exponentially harder the more community members there are so if you want to get involved on you know as a as a community member in in somewhere where it's like much easier to get to the maybe the top and become like a core contributor it's probably better to join a newer community uh one that doesn't have many community members yet one that you can kind of like make noise in without having to be drowned out by everyone else uh so i i think i mean there's plenty of

these communities spinning up all the time because there's plenty of new projects spinning up all the time so that's what i would do if i was completely new uh at this point in time i would try my hardest to find a community that i kind of resonate with and make sure that i insert myself in there and that my work is valued and i build trust in that community i mean that's exactly what i did with ethereum but i did this back in like uh i guess when i started kind of being really heavily involved was early 2018 and that's after a year of basically learning about ethereum in 2017 uh but that was during a bear market right that was when the theme community was much much smaller uh and it was kind of like a lot of like from my personal experience a lot of

grinding to get where i kind of am today uh and a lot of like basically luck too so that's kind of what it is i mean this isn't kind of new i guess like this is basically everything like if you're working for a company for example you know you just joined the company and you just started your career you're gonna start as like you know i mean for lack of a better term you're going to start at the bottom and then you've got to work your way up through the company or through your career uh it goes for everything right same with like video games if you start a video game for the first time say you're starting an online game you start at level one you have to work your way up right you i mean you can try and cheat and get people to like power level you or

whatever and that might work in video games but it doesn't work in real life you know maybe you know if someone's friends with you and they say hey this is my friend you know show them the ropes show them the ropes and and basically you know help on board them there'll be a bit more trust and credibility there but you're still going to earn most of it yourself so yeah i mean i'll link this this thread in the show notes you can go read read it yourself as well um and and and maybe even like dm peter if you're interested in this sort of stuff he's helped a lot of people in communities over the kind of years uh and i and i personally greatly respect him for all that he's done within the down community space he's definitely a pioneer there so yeah get definitely reach out to him

all right last thing i wanted to talk about was this i guess article from coindesk where it's titled why ethereum bitcoin are very different investments and one of the lead quotes here are four institutional investors they are buying btc for the digital gold narrative uh meanwhile eth just isn't in that conversation yet and this is from ryan watkins from masari who i spoke about last week they did a really awesome eth2 report at missouri uh and yeah that was a quote from him and you know what i agree with him right if we look at the macro narrative of what kind of investors are buying and what they're interested in of course it's bitcoin because they don't understand anything past that like the digital goal narrative i mean if you believe it is so easy to understand

uh right you know regardless of whether you believe it or not it's still easy to understand it's something that's familiar to people outside the ecosystem um but ethereum is much harder to understand right uh ethereum doesn't have a solid narrative like digital gold that's that's very simple and maps to something you know if you call ethereum digital oil right yes it maps to something but it doesn't really you know it doesn't really resonate or it doesn't show the value of it um and things like that as well as digital gold does what i do think ethereum is get a good narrative for ethereum is is ethereum uh an internet native bond right with with eth2 staking uh bankless first wrote about this um you can go check that out if you just google eth the internet bond and

bankless and it'll come up with it but basically i think that resonates with people right because a lot of traditional investors know what bonds are how they work right and if you tell them well eath is an internet native bond you can buy eth you can stake it and earn eth on that right earn each from the ethereum digital nation um that is really going to resonate i think but also at the same time it's going to take time to build out that narrative right a lot of people aren't going to be interested in staking while it's like like locked for example like even your rewards are locked during this kind of phase zero of um eth2 so it's going to take time to get there but i also think from a kind of narrative perspective and from a an information asymmetry perspective this

is really great right you don't want to i mean you know if you are buying like bitcoin or ethernet and this is an investment investment advice like i believe eve has further upside here it has a much smaller market cap right it doesn't have uh it's not as financialized as an asset as bitcoin is um so i think that has further upside and you know when when investors finally do get what ethereum and eth are and how it works and why where the value is right the a lot of the alpha is going to be kind of like you know sucked out of the room because you've had all these buyers coming in you've had all this stuff happening you know from early on um so that's why i think that it's important to pay attention to these things i'm personally looking forward to the

day that ethereum is spoken about in the mainstream like bitcoin is and people actually understand it they aren't just talking about the price they're talking about what you can do they're talking about d5 right talking about dows talking about everything really everything on ethereum that's super exciting i think we'll get there but it's going to take a lot more time you know bitcoin's also been around for five five more years six more years six more years than ethereum has it has also uh you know it's the number one asset by market cap so that's what everyone focuses on it has a much better brand awareness but that's fine i think ethereum over the next few years is going to bridge parity with bitcoin in that regard because once you i mean i've said this before but once

basically you you're in crypto it's no longer about bitcoin it's about ethereum right ethereum is where all the crypto native stuff is happening like anything you want to do that's interesting or anything you want to follow that's interesting in crypto i mean 99 is happening on on ethereum and that's where these investors are going to flock to or these people are going to flock to after they're bored with bitcoin right they're like okay i bought bitcoin that's cool i've heard of this ethereum thing what's that all about oh they have you know there's a token called ether what's that all about what does that do and that's where all of this kind of narrative building and all of this content that we're putting out around eth and ethereum comes into play right and then convinces these people that ethereum is just as important if not

more important than bitcoin and not just the asset but the network itself so i'm looking forward to that happening but i'll link this article you can go read it for yourself i think it's interesting to to get perspectives that aren't just like ultra bullish ethereum's going to take over the world kind of perspectives uh you definitely want to keep an open mind here and you want to be aware of the fact that ethereum is a much younger system than something like bitcoin and it's going to take more time for ethereum to get that mind share basically all right that's it for this episode everyone thank you again for tuning in don't forget to subscribe to the youtube channel give the video a like if you liked it subscribe to the delegate newsletter and join the discord channel

and i'll see you all tomorrow