Ethereum core updates, Slingshot mobile app and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #472 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Deadly gray refuel where he kept the latest news in ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Dan this is Hunter inside 20th of October 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so cat is out of the bag uh there is a lot of drama that's happened in the last 24 hours but uh to give some context as to what that is basically all the stuff I spoke about yesterday with regards to SPF of FTX and the anti-d5 bill that he was lobbying for and trying to get pushed through in the US it turns out that that stuff was true I mentioned yesterday how I believed that was true based on a lot of different people that I had heard it from but it could still be a rumor well it seems like it's true now and SPF has his own thread on this

which I cannot show you because he has me blocked on Twitter unfortunately but yeah so the bill itself may be confusing you may be wondering you know what is this bill why people are kind of up in arms about it well Alliance Dow on Twitter here did a really great thread on this bill so it's called or I guess the acronym is the dccpa bill and that's and they say the DC CPA greatly threatens D Frame of Innovation the proposed Bill gives the cftc which is the commodity Futures Traders trading commission new powers to regulate spot markets which they actually just traditionally regulate derivatives not spot markets forces human intermediation and forces projects to sacrifice decentralization it favors centralized incumbents and kills startups and the alliance Dao opposes the dccpa and

there's a threat here explaining in a bit more detail about all these points here which you should go give a read but basically the key is it favors centralized incumbents and kill startups this is why someone like SPF is lobbying for this he runs a big centralized exchange right and it would be very beneficial for everyone to have to be forced to use his centralized exchange instead of being able to use D5 and on-chain products and all that sort of stuff and I spoke about all this yesterday so I'm not going to rehash it but essentially I am very happy to see the pushback on this from the community within not just I guess like the community members on Twitter or on Reddit or wherever else but also people that can effect change and are in the US and do whole positions of power and can

go and try and get uh this bill I guess uh changed or or amended because it's not law yet bills get amended over time but uh you know if this bill ends up going through we want it to go through with what we want to see in it we don't want it to go through anti-d5 measures you know and think and and as it currently stands at least the bill that I saw there's some stuff in there or a lot of stuff in there that doesn't even make sense so for example I think part of the bill requires that all uni swap liquidity providers uh need to kind of do kyc and AML and people that trade through uni swap uh in the pool they're providing liquidity to um I don't know if that's in the current version of the bill it might have been

part of another bill but there's similar things to that in it it's just unworkable it's a weird really weird uh kind of Bill here so I'm hoping that the things can get amended because there is going to be some form of this bill that gets pushed through as I've said to you guys regulations have been coming for a while for for crypto for D5 they're not just going to give up and and leave it on the on the table they're going to go through iterations of this bill or maybe a maybe a different Bill and put in things that they want to be in there uh but it's on us it's on us as a community to Lobby against that and Lobby against the I guess bad things that are in there the the unworkable things and make sure that if anything goes through which as I

said there's something is going to go through is that it's not going to kill defy it's not going to kill crypto and it's all going to be well and good there but as I said you can read the thread here from Alliance Dao I'll link it in the YouTube description below but I'm sure a lot of you saw the drama on Twitter today around this and all the different comments and stuff I'm not going to go through all of those I'd covered it enough yesterday but I do want to say one thing people like SBF and a lot of other people in this ecosystem especially on the centralized player side of things it's good to always default to recognizing that these people are profit maximalists now profit Maximus doesn't gel well with decentralization Maximus a lot of decentralization efforts actually fall to altruists right let's take a obvious

example running a full ethereum no you don't get paid to do that you only get paid to be a validator so running a full ethereum node is a purely altruistic Endeavor uh maybe you do it because you want to relay your own transactions and maybe you're helping some friends maybe you're letting some friends connect to it and they can relay those transactions but that's still Ultra altruism right you're not charging for that if you do begin charging for that well then you're no longer just a full node you're a full-blown service provider and there's different kind of complications that come along with that but just running a normal full node for yourself uh is done altruistically because you're not getting paid to do that as I said you may get a value out of it you may be able to use it as your own RPC and you

may feel like you're contributing to the decentralization of the ethereum network which you definitely are but you're not getting paid for that so a lot of what we like I mean and also things like client diversity on the beacon chain well it's definitely uh ideal to have a diverse uh Beaker chain and well sorry a client diverse Beacon chain it is not strictly something that is profit driven right it's definitely got a Sprinkle of altruism in there as well so there's lots of examples of this in the ecosystem but uh when you think about it like that the profit maximalist and the decentralization Maximus so to speak are at odds with one another the if you want to be a profit maximalist you don't really care about decentralization and I think that there are a lot of people in this industry that run big centralized

uh companies that couldn't care less about decentralization they see crypto for for what they think it is which is just a casino and to be fair a lot of it is a casino and they take advantage of that they extract the value out of that and then they go and do things that protect themselves like that cozy up to Regulators as I discussed yesterday and push through regulations that are bad for their competition because at the end of the day Defy is stiff competition for C5 it's actually eaten a lot of their market share uh but but also I think that C5 should recognize that D5 grows the pie for everyone see if I can still act as a very nice on and off ramp especially for Fiat and also they can build front ends on these things on the D5 protocols and offer these to their

customers so they don't have to go by the way so they don't have to be obsoleted they just have to change their business model but you know a lot of these bigger centralized companies don't want to do that they'd rather kill their competition with uh with regulation and with um government uh government power uh over these sorts of things rather than compete which is just I think really really shitty but the good to keep in mind that there are a lot of people like that in the secret system a lot of profit maximalists they aren't exactly shy about it and it's pretty obvious to me which ones are uh profit maximalists in this ecosystem uh but maybe it isn't too far cyclist and I think that's what the profit maximum is count on is that these first cyclists come in they've got all this money that

they just throw into whatever and then obviously these um profit Maxes uh know how to play the game a lot better than the noobs and they fleece the noobs for all they've got so to speak so so yeah and uh speaking of uh this uh D5 bill as well or I guess like General uh protections or general safety of D5 versus traditional Finance Jake shavinsky had a really great thread out today very very short thread but basically starts it off by saying contrary to widespread belief traditional Finance is not safe for consumers or investors sure it's dressed up to look that way but it's neat and Tighter image is a thin veil for institutionalized discrimination exclusion and exploitation crypto offers a different approach and then he continues by saying traditional Finance is dominated by large institutions

trusted third-party intermediaries who make a business of extracting value from the system at the expense of their customers and in service of their shareholders they keep all the profits and socialize all the losses traditional Finance keeps its risk hidden in a black box or buried in hundreds of pages of quote unquote disclosures that nobody ever reads but that somehow give cover when things blow up crypto by contrast wears its risk on its sleeve it looks messy because you can actually see it does that mean all of crypto should be unregulated forever no of course not it's already regulated in many ways and many and by many agencies but let's dispense with the falsehood that crypto is more dangerous than tradfy just because it doesn't wear the same lipstick I think this is just an amazing little short thread here that really articulates exactly why uh people fight

back against people people saying try to advice safer it's more regulator blah blah as I've said before the centralized exchanges uh especially the ones in the US are probably regulated more heavily than banks at this point they have to do so much compliance stuff so much kyc so much AML uh and they have like more access to more data than than Banks do because everything even on chain is easily linked to people's addresses in their database right so they're regulated as heavily if not more heavily than these Banks and other traditional Finance institutions and on top of that they're not as protected or not really protected in any way at all like these banks are as Jake says here they'll

those losses are socialized the banks get bailed out because they're quote unquote too big to fail right uh whereas crypto exchanges and crypto D5 protocols and all that sorts of stuff they don't get bailed out at all they are allowed to fail right the only teams that they are sorry the only people they get bailed out by are other companies for example um companies buying uh or offering to buy things like Celsius and block fi uh that's private companies bailing out that's not the government whereas the government in the US what they did after the 2008 financial crisis is that they bailed out the banks and the banks got to buy other failed Banks got to get all their assets all their customers everything like that and then get bailed out on that bad uh debt so to speak by the government and where does the

government get the money to do that well they either print it or they take they take it from the tax revenue or they do both both of those things are what's called socializing the losses tax obviously comes from citizens right it comes from everyone but a lot of ordinary citizens who had nothing to do with the financial crisis at all right and and printing it just basically socializes it to every single uh person that's holding US Dollars and every single saver because it inflates the value of a dollar right it makes the dollar worth less so the banks always come out on top especially in in the US because of the fact that is that they get bailed out whereas in crypto as Jake says um we wear it on our On Our Sleeve right we wear the ugliness and the openness on

our sleeve and everyone can see it and everyone can see what's going on whereas in traditional Finance you can't see right uh not even governments have a good view of this stuff because there's just so much that they have to look at uh that they just I mean they have agencies on it and everything like that but I doubt it's very efficient I doubt it catches many criminals there's been tons of uh instances of criminals being able to use these systems with relative ease in order to launder money break sanctions do all sorts of things right uh so so yeah anyway I thought this was a great third from Jake if you want to reread it again you can I'll link it in the YouTube description below but now onto some core Dev updates so Tim baiko put out a small uh note here talking about I guess the next all-core

Dev call uh which uh and can set this layer call which is starting next week so the agenda is at this GitHub link which you can check out yourself um and he says yeah even though there haven't been public calls over the past month uh I've had a ton of conversations with client teams researchers Erp Champions regarding how we should approach Shanghai capella which is obviously the network upgrade that comes after the merge um hopefully sooner rather than later but essentially what this boils down to is selecting which IPS uh should be included in this Fork there are a lot of candidate erps I believe last time I talked about that this there were over 25 of them obviously we can't get 25 in the network at once that's just not going to happen it's just too much to happen at once so

we need to cut that down and I think the focus of the first callback is starting the conversation on this uh and going through which ones people want to discuss which ones people think are more important than others uh which ones are being championed more than others and seeing how that all shakes out there so I'm excited for the all core devs course to come back and the consensus layer calls to come back I hope the core devs have had a good break obviously we had Devcon after the so we had the merge and then caught ever went on a break we had Devcon which was uh which from what I saw was really amazing so I hope they're uh really really recharged and ready to go and as I've been showcasing on the refill as well a lot of them didn't really take a break they just kept

working on things which is fine too whatever floats their boat uh but yeah this next uh all-core Dev score will and continuous layer calls will be held next week all right so something that I've spoken about before on the refuel is the concept of single slot finality now just a refresher here on ethereum under proof of stake we have a finality threshold around 13 minutes uh well I mean I don't there's like an exact number in there uh I'm not going to get exact with that but basically every six and a half minutes there is an epic and after two epics there is a uh there is finalization of the chain which as I said happens around 13 minutes now this is because this has been something that people have been

critical of saying you know that's too long we should aim to do uh finality as as quickly as possible and then the idea of single slot finality came along which is basically single block finality so finality within 12 seconds every ethereum slot uh in proof of stake is 12 seconds so how can we do finality in a single slot well uh vitalik put out an updated document on paths towards single slot finality it is quite lengthy it is quite technical I learned so much reading this I highly recommend giving it a read Because what vitalik does in this post is he breaks down each of the paths that we could possibly take their trade-offs and why things aren't going to be uh sorry as easy as people think

they are depending on the path that we take and some hard questions as well uh I think the hardest question or hardest thing to think about from this proposal or sorry from this document that I saw was around the monetary policy change so you'll read the document to get the full context here but just trying to tell Dr this uh uh and or trying to like simplify this basically one of the proposals suggests that we allow it sorry we cap the amount of validators on the network and then we Shuffle the validator set right and then we do an uncapped uh each stake so for example instead of only being able to stake 32 each per validator you could stake any amount of if you wanted per per

validator right at least that's my understanding from the document but as I said you have to read the document to get the full context here but this would lead to a monetary uh policy change if we did economic capping and this would also um Pro reduce the security of the ethereum chain uh other improve of stake chain as well now to be clear this is not the part that has been decided on this is just one of the possible parts and I just really highly recommend reading this whole post to get a gist of what I'm talking about because I can't simplify it I can't TR it um I only read the post once so obviously don't understand it well enough but also it's not something that you can just simplify into a 30 second sound bite you definitely have to read it to understand all this because

there's not just the economic considerations but there's also the consideration considerations around how the proof of stake consensus engine actually works how the finality engine works how to achieve single slot finality the trade-offs that take place in that the positives the negatives all of that it's all in this document you should go check it out I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right uh so an update on eip4844 here from Jessie who's one of the people working on Erp 40 4844 from coinbase so tldr is that the effort came in with a bunch of momentum ran multiple high impact working sessions during the conference uh during Devcon identified a few small spec changes and he's moving Full Speed Ahead on implementation and

you can check out this thread for all the details on that but it really does seem like 4844 is moving ahead really really quickly at the moment there has been some concerns with complexity here and how complex it is for each of the teams on both the execution layer such as layer side to get this done and if they're able to get it done in time for the Shanghai update or we should or if we should split up the erp4844 into a later update and just have withdrawals as part of Shanghai and a bunch of those other eips that I mentioned before but we'll see you know once a spec is finalized once all the parameters and variables are finalized and the spec is quote unquote Frozen then client teams can start building this stuff out on on uh for for test Nets and then for

mainnet because right now it's just devnets from what I've seen um and you know the devnets are obviously aren't set in stone they're very very loose very kind of messy but that's the first step towards this sorts of stuff so just great to see there's tons of progress being made on 4844 which is proto-dank sharding to get cheaper roll ups uh at 10 to 100 times cheaper Roll-Ups on on ethereum here now Paulino had some thoughts around AP 4844 as well they start off this thread by saying erp4844 is targeting a minimum gas price of 0.00018 per blob so blobs are those um transaction types that store call data or the new transaction types that will store core data in 4844 so this means

that data component for the average drop transaction would be in the 0.000x dollar range this means Roll-Ups can grow uh you know hundreds of times from today's activity while data costs remain in the uh that range that I mentioned before and they shared a screenshot here of a slide deck from a presentation talking about this and then added a bit more of a of a thread here with explanation on this so basically I guess what planar is saying here that with 4844 ethereum's data availability capacity skyrockets and the cost just collapses completely uh and you you know you've probably heard about data availability a lot lately especially with other chains and networks talking about this a lot that I mentioned

previously like Celestial polygon of veil eigenlayer it's definitely a big topic of discussion but I often wonder if you know these things are needed if ethereum gets put 48 44 out in a timely manner and then keep scaling up from there and keeps costs so low that it's basically negligible because a cost lower than a cent like one tenth of a cent one 100th of a cent one one thousandth of a cent per transaction is stupidly cheap right uh and it depends on I guess like what transaction you're doing as well on the economic weight behind those and obviously trying to prevent spam you have to have some minimum amount here I mean there's going to be a lot of spam if your transactions are like one one thousandth of a cent as opposed to transactions costing one cent

and as I've mentioned before I think there is a Goldilocks zone when it comes to transaction fees so for example if you have like a transaction fee uh floor like a minimum transaction fee of of one cent um then I think that that would actually be fine for a lot of users but you could do fee markets in different ways you can have it so that um the network minimum is one cent but what the users see is is much lower than that right and then you kind of like aggregate it together do some fancy uh fancy stuff in the background and you know be able to kind of like aggregate that and show users our cheaper transaction fees than that just to prevent things like spam and there's also quality of service things you can do as well I mean it just depends on

what trade-offs you want to take as I've been critical of quality of service stuff before because it can lead to censorship um and but I guess like generally censorship is such a big discussion now that we may even solve that it just accidentally through all the stuff that we've got uh that that's being worked on right now uh but yeah we're gonna have to see how this shakes out but 48 44 is coming and it's coming really quickly I'm super excited for it but I will have to see uh how these shakes out over the next few months all right another thing I'm really excited about that Argent put a tweet thread out today about is called account abstraction and I've talked about account obstruction before it's basically the concept of getting rid of what's called an externally owned account and making all Eos smart

contract accounts so as I've said before there's two types of accounts in ethereum EOS externally owned accounts which are normal ethereum addresses and smart contract accounts which are pretty self-explanatory account obstruction would make uh EOS into smart contracts account types as well which means that we will just have one account type you would have to deal with and it leads to a lot of great features that come with that and in this thread Arjun explains these features in plain English if I've ever recommended a thread to read about something in ethereum land this is probably really high at not maybe not at the top of the list but really high on the list it is one of the best threads I have ever read on anything it just so simply explains exactly what account abstraction is from first principles and

with examples as well that actually shows you you why you personally would get value out of this so I'm not going to read it for you I want you to go read it even pause this video and go do it now because I thought it was just a really really awesome thread that explained the concepts in an easy to understand wait and anyway I'll link that in the YouTube description you can go check it out all right so the block today is reporting that Fidelity digital assets will begin offering eth to institutions later this month I thought that they were already doing this I remember covering this on the refuel covering something got to do with Fidelity on the refuel and eat uh a little while ago but it seems that they haven't been doing this yet so yeah they'll be offering their eighth to institutions later this

month on October 28th it says here so uh institutional customers will be able to buy sell and transfer eth starting October 28th on the Fidelity digital assets platform pretty cool uh I think that as I said before the more I guess of these uh markets that get opened up to these institutions especially in the bear Market the better it's going to be in a bull market because there'll be more people that are able to access this sorts of stuff it's going to bring more liquidity in it's going to be better for the overall Market Health um and these are the types of things that we saw go live uh last bear Market that ended up being really good for the bull market so yeah we'll see how it plays out when the bull market inevitably comes back uh but great to

see more institutional players being able to get involved with eth as an asset all right so optimism has got a thread out today uh where they start off by saying the optimism Collective retroactive public goods funding op chain super chain op tax op stack what are these crazy Concepts these are rationally optimistic people are going on about these back-to-back Talks by Carl and Calvin at Devcon 6 hold the answers you seek so this is a threat uh mini thread on basically uh two talks and a blog post about these things that I mentioned here that you may be confused about so definitely go check this thread out I'll link in the YouTube description below and check those talks out from Devcon because optimism is doing a lot of amazing work on on their own network but also for ethereum that I

think that watching these videos seeing and listening to uh the people building this stuff talk about it and and kind of get that information firsthand is very very important so you can check this out in the YouTube description below all right so a slingshot has uh put out a teaser video today and followed this up with a tweet saying slingshot wallet is now available on test flight for the first 1000 on the waitlist Android coming soon so the slingshot while it's been in works for a little while and I should disclose I'm an angel investor in slingshot so I know about this I was able to get early access to the test flight version of this wallet it is really Snappy the UI ux on this wallet is actually really awesome it's one of the best I've seen to be honest and I'm

not just saying that because I'm an investor it genuinely is and if you are one of those who got access to it because you were the first 1000 on the wait list and you have an iOS device well you will know what I'm talking about here so this is super cool uh slingshot isn't live on ethereum mainnet just yet it's live on uh went live on polygon POS chain and it's allowing a bunch of a bunch of the l2s as well um like I believe arbitrum and optimism uh but a little birdie has told me that ethereum uh support should be coming relatively soon ethereum main net support which is really awesome so you'll be able to use this wallet to use this mobile wallet with slingshot to use slingshots to centralize exchange aggregator on all these different networks I'm I think they're going to be

adding support for as many networks as they can especially evm compatible ones to trade assets uh as you as you wish basically so yeah if you're lucky enough to get an invite because you were on the wait list congrats to you you'll know what I'm talking about but for those of you who haven't uh I don't think this will be in uh beta for very long so hopefully you'll be able to download it on its public release relatively soon all right so speaking of good threads uh this I guess has been a a theme of this refill episode threads uh uh uh uh the founder of uh Sizemore here put out a thread about his long-term vision for self-sovereign identities and ZK badges so this was basically summarizing his talk from Devcon which you can check out the YouTube link here which I'll link in

the YouTube description uh and there's also slides as well uh but the reason why I wanted to highlight this thread in particular was because you guys know I'm a big fan of sizmo obviously as an investor but also because I love what they're doing with self-sovereign identity and ZK badges I think it's going to unlock the next big use cases of this technology and I've explained why in previous refuels and I thought this thread was just a really great explanation of how the founder of the project sees this stuff happening the Practical applications of this and how that's going to affect you as a user on you know in crypto and even outside of it as well so you should definitely go check out this thread I'll link it in the YouTube description and Below all right I've got a few minutes left FTR wanted to end uh this today's episode

with just a bit more chatter about the regulatory stuff um I think I may have said this before on the refill but it Bears uh repeating when it comes to regulatory stuff don't panic and re Panic off of like mainstream Media news headlines or just news headlines generally a lot of the time it takes a while for things to actually be pushed into law or to become actual regulations right A lot of the times uh the things that you see that look really really bad ends up getting amended and go through in a much I guess a healthier way or go through and aren't really that bad right this happens time and time again not just with crypto stuff but with everything but on the flip side of that you need to be really

really aware of the fact that things can get snuck through with uh I guess like names attached to them that make them sound uh innocent or make them sound like they're actually doing something good so for example a popular thing that's done in politics is naming your bill something like the protect the children act right or stop terrorism act and then in that bill shoving stuff in that's got nothing to do with protecting children or stopping terrorism but if the politician votes against a stopping truth that's you know did I say stopping children act I meant like uh uh uh keeping children safe act or something like that if Apollo I don't know why I said stopping children act um if if a politician votes against like the keeping children safe act or a bill related to that well then that looks

really bad right because a lot of people don't dig down and see what's actually in the bill they just see the headline and think wow this politician's evil there they don't care about children at all like I'm gonna uh vote against them I'm gonna tell them uh you know an even peace of my mind and that's how they can get a lot of these things in because they just hide it underneath this uh you know it isn't looking uh Bill an instant looking act so you have to basically be very aware of this and you have to basically not just read the headline of the uh the bill but dig into it and thankfully we have a lot of people in crypto that do this and do threads of it and everything like that lot of really great lawyers on Twitter that do this so

I think we're covered for the most part but it's always good to keep in mind that don't just read the headline of a news article don't just read the headline of a bill and think oh my God the world's ending everything's over we're all gonna you know everything's going to zero this industry is over that's never the case it's never going to be the case there's always Nuance to all of these discussions and you should definitely be aware of that when looking at these things but on that note I'm going to leave it at that so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone