Ethereum gas fees chat, ENS growth and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #356 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where he cut the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host dana nicosano and today's the third of may 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so i hope you all enjoyed yesterday's marathon two hour episode or almost two hour episode um it was great to be back great to be back in the kind of like refuel seat so to speak recording that all for you and there's a lot to get through so hope you enjoyed that now today we're back to our regularly scheduled programming there wasn't too many updates over the last 24 hours but there's a few things that i did want to talk about um you know i feel my tweets that i put out and feel some and some other interesting tweets that i saw today so we'll start with one tweet that

i put out where i basically said you know before making an uneducated comment or going on a rant about ethereum's gas fees i encourage people to actually read up on how ethereum is scaling via the roll-up centric roadmap slash modular design and then in the following tweet i linked to a few different resources there now obviously uh loyal kind of like refuel watchers and listeners will already know about this i don't need to preach to you guys i don't think you guys would even need to read these kind of resources unless you want to you can go for it and watch it one of them is a great youtube video about almost two hour video from uh from bank list that goes through the whole modular design um and everything like that so definitely check out those uh resources if you want to they'll be linked in the youtube

description but at this point you're all you know pretty much aware of it i've talked about it for for many many months now um but i think one thing i wanted to kind of like focus on here was what prompted this tweet and basically i put this out because obviously the gas fee spiked really high when there was that kind of like nft mint uh the other side or nft mean or something like that uh and it's like crazy i think it went up to like 5 000 way or something like that and so for that brief period of time what ended up happening was that uh the the the kind of lay one phase was so high people were like oh my god it's costing me thousands of dollars to do anything and it's like i kind of like look at that and i'm just

like why like i get why people are complaining about this but like how are people paying so much attention to you know the gas phase that within like a couple hour window they're able to kind of like uh spot the um the spike in gas phase but they're not able to get onto a layer two right like they just don't know about the layer two's kind of like a road map they don't know that theorem has layer two's live today there are some people who believe that layer 2's aren't live guys i come across these people all the time they say oh layer 2 is always six months away so what do you mean it's always six months away it's been live for like i mean what since arbitrary went live in terms of like generalized l2s and even before that we had like the single purpose applause l2s

as well they're live and you can use them today i've used all of them and i'm sure many of you have used them as well and they work very very well yes they aren't the cheapest thing in the world yet so they will get cheaper but they work just fine and then some people say oh well there's not everything on there that's on layer one yet i'm like okay well yeah it's gonna take a little while to build out ecosystems but at the same time if something's valuable to you on layer one and you wanna use it well then you're gonna have to pay the fee to do that right and what's always kind of like um i guess i don't know confused me about people complaining about like kind of like the high fees and i think this stems from a few different things but it's kind of

like i don't really see any real world analogies here besides maybe something like utility bills right obviously people are going to be upset when the utility bill uh kind of like increases in value uh because they need to pay for water electricity all that sort of stuff there but and and i think people view block space as like a utility or a public utility that shouldn't increase in price too much yes there are some some prices increases over time but they're angry when that happens i don't think ethereum layer one block space is that if i'm being honest i think lay one block space is a veblen good i think that it is more akin to a luxury item than it is for like a public kind of like um a public utility or something like that uh because layout one of them is not

being designed to be a public utility the rollup centric roadmap says that layer 1 will be settlement and data and that's what layer 2 will take advantage of in order to offer that cheaper block space to people uh so the way i think about layer one block space is it's like a a luxury item like a luxury watch or something like if layer one is kind of like a like a rolex for example well then layer two is like a g-shock or something right right one of the cheaper brands out there um just as kind of like a crude analogy so but like a lot of people don't don't don't do that because they as i said they think of it as kind of like a public um a public resource but on top of that i think that the alternative layer ones has taken

advantage of this kind of like information asymmetry and try to equate uh their block space with ethereum's block space when obviously not all block space is created equal and ethereum block space is very very special it is the most decentralized and secure uh block space by far right um uh you know and i'm not accounting bitcoin in this because bitcoin block space is really only good for for sending and receiving bitcoin right at the end of the day right it can't do what ethereum can do um so that costs something like if you if you want to keep a network decentralized and secure uh like ethereum then you need to limit its scalability and then obviously there's a lot of demand for that and there's been heaps of persistent demand for that for for years now and i really do think people need to change their thinking

around this into thinking that ethereum layer one block space is for everyone it's not like i'm just gonna be straight up guys it's not it's never going to be for everyone um it already isn't for most of the world and uh layer twos is where it's going to be for everyone and then even things like layer 3s that starkwear's been kind of like are talking about lately uh and and stuff like that so i just kind of like hope that the narrative and kind of like the um the thinking from people can change around that i'm not really betting on it changing because this industry is just full of so many people who who just kind of like don't really care to learn as well which is sad but it is what it is uh there uh as well but yeah that concept of kind of like block space

and and not all of it being equal that's like a crypto level 100 thing like i don't expect noobs to know this at all um but i do expect people to be more curious and to want to actually learn instead of making these just like really bad and uneducated comments and just like literally spreading misinformation about these sorts of things and i get the frustration around high gas fees but at the end of the day like let's take that that nft mint for example like you didn't want it enough right like the thing is is that you shouldn't be blaming ethereum you should be blaming yuga labs for designing an nft means so poorly where they did it on layer one there was no kind of like um dutch auction mechanism or anything like that they just let everyone kind of like ape in part on the pun

um and everyone was front run and then people kind of like spent heaps of money on failed transactions trying to get in and that's simply because they wanted it more than you know another person did for example right like they they wanted to kind of like flip it they wanted to speculate on it and and that's what kind of like happened there if you if an nft project wants a more equitable distribution then they should go into layer two they should do a better auction mechanism and uh you know i mean that they should do kind of like um there's not just the dutch auction mechanism there's a bunch of other ones paradigm has put out a bunch of research around this but i just don't think you should blame ethereum for this ethereum functioned as expected like ethereum did exactly what it has been designed to do

the fee market did exactly what it has been designed to do it functioned flawlessly it didn't tip over it didn't you know yes the fees went up but that was by design so i whenever i see people blaming ethereum for this i'm like no blame the projects the projects have other options at this stage i mean hugo labs could have gone directly to any of these l2 teams and they would have put a team on them right like literally a dedicated team on them because they know how big they are you know for example like i spoke about polygon being really great at business development before because they've just they've got a whole team dedicated to it if hugo labs went to polygon and said hey we want to mint our nft um on on kind of like a polygon pos chain or some other kind of solution uh

can you do this for us i'm sure they would have turned that around really quickly for them but they didn't do that and then everyone blames ethereum so just a bit of a rant there on that sort of stuff obviously that the kind of like discussion around gas prices is something that's always that top of mind for people but i think the only way that that kind of like changes is if we just stop getting if people just stop using ethereum l1 altogether and always using ethereum l2s because that's the future we need to go to and if you want to use ethereum l1 well then you have to pay to use it it's like i just really get i don't get that it's just so bizarre to me because like for example if i if i go to like an expensive restaurant and i can't get in

because i can't afford to get in i can't afford to eat there i don't chuck like a hissy fit and start complaining about it and starts calling that restaurant a scam right like you know what i mean uh maybe you guys disagree with me on this but like that's how i think about it um i go and eat where i can afford to eat for example right or i don't crack the shits if i can't afford you know a certain kind of like good or a certain like maybe i want to buy like a fan you know something fancy but i can't afford it well i don't say oh crap like you know that's a scam because i can't i can't afford it no i just go buy the thing i can afford or i save up to buy the thing that i want right so it's always been just really

bizarre to me that people call something like a scam or call that later rug or say that kind of like it's it's fleecing uh users just because they that you know they can't afford to use it um i i don't think that's the right way to think about it now am i defending ethereum's kind of like gas fees uh again like and am i saying that users uh you know should just make more money to be able to use ethereum no not at all but i will obviously defend ethereum's design it's roll-up-centric roadmap because i think that is the only way to design a blockchain the modular design um to keep it decentralized and secure and that requires ethereum layer one or layer ones in general to be limited to be expensive to use but that doesn't mean that users should have to suffer from that and that's why we have the

layer two ecosystem and why i spent so much time talking about that and promoting it and educating on it and you know you guys have heard me talk about this many many times before but i think that's just like my general view on gas fees like in a nutshell the last time like 10 minutes that i've been talking for here i'm gonna stop it there um but yeah i just want to kind of get that out there if you disagree with me you know just let me know in the comments or in the discord channel like i'm i'm always open to being disagreed with and discussing these sorts of things if you want an actual discussion better to say it in the discord channel because on the youtube comments i mean i read them but it's really hard to like kind of like talk and there's like all this spam and

stuff so discord channel is better because that lets other people join in and kind of like have a healthy discussion so i'm going to leave it at that um on that tweet there but there was a related tweet here from tog rail from scroll who talked about how different transactions on uh on kind of like a network like ethereum can have varying impacts on fee market volatility and this is a great threat if you want more insight into how fee markets work and how you know the different transactions different things people are doing on the network can uh basically alter the way kind of like the the female alter the volatility of the fee market so to speak so i just wanted to highlight this i'm not going to read it out because it's a it's a bit of a lengthy thread here but definitely go

give it a read it was very very educational all right so here uh gal ron on twitter shared an article from fastcompany.com uh with a quote from epic games as ceo who said the field of zero knowledge proofs the the idea that you can verify that something happened without receiving any private details about it i think that's going to be the backbone of a large part of the next century in technology i mean i totally agree i think that zk or zero knowledge proofs in general go far beyond scalability you know they go beyond privacy they do so many cool things that we and a lot of these things we haven't even thought of yet i mean i've talked i've talked about sismo before about how you can have basically have like zero knowledge proofs of nft so essentially

you can prove to someone that you own an nft without revealing the address that you own that on that's that's awesome right that's obviously a lot to do with with privacy but that's that's just really really cool obviously the scalability stuff that that a lot of um teams are working on now with zk technology is is a very big deal but it has applications for basically everything and as i said before zero knowledge proofs and zk kind of like um zk stuff is not necessarily new it's it's existed in kind of like theory research land for a long time but it didn't have any practical any real practical applications that people would we're going to put money behind until crypto and because of that we've had an explosion in this sort of stuff i mean it's not just stock where working on this is um which which gal ron is uh it

works as product uh in product that's stock we're here but it's basically every major uh kind of like l2 team now looking at it right and you have the dedicated teams of course but i mean think about it polygons working on zk starkware zk sync um scroll you have loop ring you have um a bunch of others out there using the technologies from from places like starkware uh i'm you know and also optimus and arbitrom are definitely looking into these sorts of stuff they're not just saying oh you know optimistic rollups the bl end all um they're definitely looking into that and put investing kind of like time and money into that as well so very cool to see someone as kind of i guess respected and as successful as um epic games ceo tim sweeney here saying this it's funny because like i think he's had varied

opinions on crypto i think he was bearish maybe on nfts and metaverse stuff originally but then he was bullish on it and now he's obviously he's really bullish on zk technology which probably means he's talked to some of the zk teams within ethereum i would i would guess um which would be really cool to see kind of like what happens there but you just wanted to highlight this article you can go give it a read or link it in the usual description but very cool to see some outside validation of zk proofs from uh from tim sweeney here all right so speaking of polygon uh jane t one of the co-founders of polygon had just put out a simple tweet today saying expect the avail test net this month so avail is polygons data availability blockchain it's basically their version of i guess like what celestia is trying

to do what data layer is trying to do and i think uh i think there might be a couple of others out there that i'm forgetting right now but essentially they're launching their uh avail test net this month with this month which is very cool i mean test net usually comes a few months before mainnet so we should see like a polygon available maintenance maybe maybe even this year right that users can start or developers can start building on and then users can start kind of like taking advantage of uh but i think this is this is awesome i think you know data availability is going to be that thing that's going to be like a narrative a big narrative going forward especially as platforms like celestia launch and stuff like that but also as kind of like the l2 wars heat up right uh i think i

spoke uh in the discord channel i don't know if i mentioned it on um on the refuel yet but metis uh one of the l2 scaling solutions they actually aren't technically a roll-up anymore because in their latest upgrade they actually put the data off-chain and as i've discussed with you guys before the data not being unchained means that something isn't technically a roll-up anymore it's closer to uh volidium right uh validium is starkware's kind of like term for something that has proof on chain but data off chain um and you know if you could do this with i mean i don't know what what infrastructure metis is using but like if metas wanted to they could put their data on a veil if any of these solutions wanted to they could put their data on a veil instead of using a um i guess like closed group or small group

of kind of like validators to do this they would probably get access as far as i understand it to a subset of the polygon pos chain validators because they'll be stacking matic in order to become a validator on the avail network um and they'll be kind of responsible for keeping that data available so very cool things happening in that space uh definitely something to keep an eye on and i'll keep you guys up to date on everything uh got to do with avail as we know more so ens have has been having a crazy few weeks lately and i think uh it's in large part due to people speculating on uh i guess like the three and four digit ens names because a lot of people don't realize that eons's are actually nfts as well right because obviously they represent a unique name on ethereum but

you can see here nick johnson from the ens team uh kind of like highlighted how many records have been broken lately so may 2nd yesterday uh was another crazy day for ens with the highest revenue ever of 1.95 million dollars most registration 63 000 and most registration years was just a hundred thousand and also there's been a million ens names registered now as well so absolutely crazy growth i mean if you contextualize this to april look at that right and it's funny because like as i was saying people are just kind of like speculating on three or four letter kind of like ens names but i think that's totally fine because it means that you know the ens kind of like uh down treasury gets like a lot more revenue it gets a lot more awareness and um and kind of like marketing for ens

itself which leads to more integrations later on which leads to just kind of like more adoption of ens so i don't care if like it's speculation driving this um i think speculation pretty much drives everything in crypto and drives like most of the adoption so it's not actually a bad thing uh but yeah this is really really cool i love it i love seeing enos grow i mean i've been a fan of ens since basically day one i mean they're they're the absolute best i read my e s name all the time there uh but yeah i just wanted to kind of like highlight these stats and hide this growth from ens very very cool to see this hoping it continues but as i said i think this large spike is due to just a speculation which is totally fine but we're going to see if it's kind of like

uh resulting in a maybe a material uptick in how many ens names are registered and i think more important like how many people are actually um using them as kind of like and pointing them to an address because you can buy an ens name and not kind of like assign an address to it um and you just keep it maybe you want to speculate on trade on it say say you've got like 10 e s names that you're speculating on you don't have to tie them to your your ethereum addresses you can just kind of like trade them on opencl stuff like that so i'll be curious to see how that trend continues as well all right so vesta finance this is a protocol that i first mentioned a few months ago and i haven't spoken about them in a little while here but they've

been quietly building and i should disclose that i'm an angel investor in investor finance here but i do want to highlight them today because they had a had a good thread here explaining kind of like what they've done and what's coming uh so what they've done recently and what's coming next for vesta here so you know i've been telling you guys a lot recently that a lot of these defrag protocols they may be quiet no you know a lot of people may not be talking about them but they're still building they're still innovating they're still shipping products and i think the problem is is that during bearish periods like no one's really paying attention to that stuff i get like if you look at your twitter feed right now what are most people talking about they're talking about like nfts right they're talking about kind of like the yoga lab stuff

the nft maintenance talking about uh i mean they're always talking about ethereum but like just generally the things that attract most of the attention and most of people's kind of like eyeballs is the stuff that kind of um is is is hot in in a speculative way right the innovation stuff is kind of secondary to that and i think what ends up happening is that people start caring a lot more about the innovation side of crypto and the fundamental side of crypto when the token that they're holding is going up so for example if you're holding like the vesta token right you're obviously much more interested in the updates than someone who isn't um and and i think that like in general that that holds true for pretty much every project unless the project is going through kind of like some huge speculative mania like for example a lot

of the alternative l1 late last year were pumping like crazy um you know i i myself and a lot of other ethereum people don't own any of these things but we were still paying attention to it because we were like you know why are these things pumping for starters like doesn't make any sense which it didn't because a lot of them are down a lot now but also it's just something that captures the attention right just the media headlines just kind of like the flavor of the week or the month so to speak so i think that happens with a lot of things so but if you're interested in kind of like i guess reading this thread from vesta to see what they've been doing what they're up to i i highly recommend doing so i'll link it in the youtube description below um but yeah i

just kind of like wanted to highlight that and this isn't just for vessel you should be looking at every project every kind of like worthwhile d5 project because there's a lot of innovation going on and if you're kind of like not paying attention to it you might be missing something really cool all right so i wanted to highlight this thread from domothy today who kind of like had a bit of a satirical thread where they started it by saying every day it becomes more obvious that tcpip is simply not going to make it this dinosaur is holding back progress we should look for innovative ways to make a single all-in-one protocol that can do everything and just works building on top of tc pip with a layered stack dumb idea now obviously this is a satirical take on people say about ethereum because if i read this tweet with kind

of replacing the the um the terms with crypto related terms this is how it would sound every day it becomes more obvious that ethereum is simply not going to make it this dinosaur is holding back progress we should look for innovative ways to make a single all-in-one protocol that can do everything and just works all in one protocol being something like maybe solana building on top of ethereum with a layered stack dumb idea and you can see how this translates directly and there's kind of like this um newsletter sorry magazine cover here from popular mechanics saying death of the internet clogged up bogged down and gridlocked can the net be saved before it screeches to a halt which is hilarious because you could say the same thing of you could replace this title with death of ethereum right clogged up yeah bogged down yeah and gridlocked

yeah can you know can ethereum be say before it screeches to a halt right you could literally just replace it with that and it would still make sense um which is always funny to see and then dominic continued the thread by kind of like uh you know giving a bit more satire here but uh but yeah that was that was kind of like funny there but then you know probably not kind of replied with i guess like a devil's advocate um uh tweet here by saying tcpip is a technology protocol blockchains are socioeconomic movements it's possible with 100 credible neutrality you only need one settlement protocol but we're far from that and until that happens i welcome alternatives although no one's trying and i kind of like get this point as well um obviously blockchains as paulina says here are socioeconomic movements uh because of the fact that there's just so

much kind of like uh i guess uh so much of a social layer involved in it because of i mean large part because of the tokens uh but at the same time like no one is really trying to seriously compete with the theorem from what i've seen and i'm gonna be honest if i was to give the two networks that are actually close to ethereum like in terms of like design funny enough i would actually put cardano in one of those buckets even though i think cardano's design is broken i think they're closer to ethereum than um then something like a salon or an avalanche is and and tazos as well now that's not me saying that i'm bullish on either of those networks i'm not i think that they've already lost i think that they're not going to win anything but you know at least they're closer to

ethereum than something like a solana or an avalanche but as polina says here no one is really trying to to kind of like compete with that you know 100 credible neutral settlement layer which is what ethereum is trying to be so just a few different takes here but i wanted to highlight this because it was just funny seeing kind of like how you can replace the internet with ethereum and get the same kind of results from this uh from both this tweet and from this magazine cover all right so i had a rather i guess um maybe i would say 50 50 not unpopular but not popular tweet where i said ethereum projects should airdrop their tokens to solo eat stakers possibly waited by time at stake solar east stakers are much more likely to be aligned with ethereum's values

missions and ethos they are plus they are more likely to be active in the ecosystem and in governance now a lot of people took this to mean that i that that we should only airdrop tokens to solar eight takers and no one else which i guess is my bad on the wording here so i followed up the tweet by saying airdrops wouldn't just go to solo eat stakers it'd just be one group among many like how optimism is air dropping opia to a bunch of different groups the airdrop could also be extended to values alliance taking providers like rocketpool just some ideas this is literally just an idea and it actually was born out of the discord channel we were just discussing these things and i'm like okay well i'll just put a tweet out get a feel for it a lot of people hit back and said you know this is kind

of like um just making the rich richer obviously to be a solo staker the barrier to entry is quite high at 32 eighth but that's why i said possibly weighted by time at stake so you you would basically reward the original stake as more than the latest takers because if you staked in the first few months of the big n chain going live you're pretty much definitely an e like almost an eighth maxi i would say because the bigger chain went live when it was like 600 bucks or something um so it was obviously a lot less to get that 328 back then and if you staked like from the get-go like one of the first stakers you were putting a lot of kind of like risk and and i would say you were basically an eth maxi but as i said this is just one

idea like that i had and i had this because you always want to i guess like airdrop tokens to the best possible group of people i think uh get coin donors is pretty good but that's been muddied lately because uh people are just trying to game the system now um i think the way optimism did it is is is okay there were interesting ideas it's not perfect as i've said before like no airdrop is going to be perfect but i thought that was really really cool um but i think yeah the point of this tweet was that we should look for more and innovative ways to do air drops we should look for more ways to reward the long kind of like long-lasting community members in in ethereum and the people who've been around for years and years rather than kind of like just air air-dropping

willy-nilly to everyone because there are not everyone is created equal like if you've been around for five years adding value to ethereum in any such capacity versus someone who's been around for like three months well the person who's been around for five years you know nine out of 10 times is going to be worth a lot more as kind of like someone you want on your ecosystem than the person who's only been around for a few months so that's kind of like perspective i look at this but i do get people people kind of like saying you know this is really gatekeeping for people who who can who can't even solo steak and stuff like that and that's why i followed it up by saying you know you could also airdrop it to value-align providers like rocketpool i think the rocketpool community like especially the

the main communities is an excellent one to get involved in your in your own community as a project and in your own governance process because they're super active super friendly actually give a about like ethereum's values and the more people that you can target in that group the better i i i truly believe so we'll have to see you know if future air drops do this i have i don't know of any air drops that have done this yet there might be some out there that i'm missing um i think maybe gnosis chain did something i can't i can't remember because they have their own like beacon chain now or something like that i i don't know exactly if they did something or not but yeah i just wanted to kind of like uh highlight this tweet here because as i said it wasn't like

popular wasn't unpopular it was kind of like people were on the fence about it but i'd love to hear your thoughts too as i said jump in the discord channel just let me know what you think about it um love to hear your thoughts on this idea all right so we have another duna analytics dashboard from hill dobby today this one is basically called ethereum the overview with and this includes historical stats on wallets blocks transactions smart contracts price and more this is really cool i mean this is like a little i mean there's been a lot of dashboards in the past that have tried to kind of like show uh really cool metrics about ethereum and stuff like that and i think i i i i think i like them generally but i like them more when they're kind of like focused on maybe just like a few k

metrics i like this stuff like ethereum price near ethereum gas it's actually pretty funny how kind of like these things track pretty pretty cleanly um you know maybe not on the absolute scale but kind of like on just just kind of like eyeballing it here and then you can kind of like see things like transaction count the users on ethereum i guess the addresses on ethereum uh smart contract creation all that sorts of stuff going on there a gas used in gas limit and and things like that so caught another cool dashboard from hill dobby who's absolutely killing it by the way i'm doing analytics i mean you can see how many dashboards they've got here uh how many people are kind of like following their dashboards absolutely love this um i love the amount of work he's putting into these sorts of things and i'm always happy to highlight this

whenever i see a really cool one so definitely go check this out i'll link it in the youtube description all right finally here i just wanted to highlight a podcast that trent van epps did with all kevin o'keefe from uh git coin uh on bankless as part of the green pill podcast yeah and this podcast is basically about uh the protocol guild which i've mentioned before uh and about ethereum public goods more generally so definitely go give this a watch or listen uh uh or both uh beca and maybe do it after after the refuel here when you're done with this i mean this is the last thing i'm talking about so yeah maybe do it immediately after this or on your walk or something like that uh because it's as you guys know public goods are good i'm basically a public goods maximalist i i think

that's a that's an app description at this point uh and trent is doing some of the best work in this in this area especially with the protocol guild so if you want to learn all about the protocol guild and how trent thinks about public goods then i couldn't think of a better podcast than this especially with kevin owaki being the host who is the godfather of public goods on ethereum right so definitely go check this out i'll link it in the youtube description but i think that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone