Ethereum hyperscaling, Arbitrum Nitro is coming - The Daily Gwei Refuel #414 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where you kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host daniel cesano and today the 26th of july 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so apologies to the podcast listeners yesterday unfortunately the service that i used to upload the podcast libsyn it was having some issues and then i had to go to bed so i didn't upload the podcast until about i think 11 or 12 hours after it was supposed to go out but it was up on youtube and i did make an announcement of the discord channel saying that it wouldn't be up until later uh but yeah sorry about that to podcast listeners obviously it's uh it's up now so if you haven't listened to it yet and you missed it you can go listen to it there but anyway on to the

news from the last 24 hours so vitalik actually replied to this tweet here that um argent pulled out so arjun put out this tweet thread about kind of like uh ecc and vitalik's talk and things like that and then focused on this road map that vitalik i guess showcased that hcc and something that he's posted on twitter before and we all know what it is like the merge the surge the verge the purge and the splurge right like these kind of like me me names that we've been cut we've become accustomed to uh over the last few weeks and few months now vitalik replied to this and said you know the all these things are not stages they are all happening in parallel so if you're looking at this roadmap thinking okay well we'll do the merge then we'll do the search then we'll do the virgin et

cetera et cetera it's not like that like all of the kind of research and development is happening in parallel the thing is though is that you know obviously depending on kind of like priorities and depending on what stage kind of the research and development is at things will go into the network uh certain things will go into the network before other things so for example the surge with protodank sharding is going to go in before vertical tries or is going to go in before kind of like uh historical data and technical kind of like um upgrades and deleting the history and things like that right uh so that while they are being worked on in parallel they're not going to be deployed in parallel they're going to be deployed probably all their standalone forks over the next few years you don't we don't know exactly the kind of exact

timelines here obviously uh but i guess with the merge we know the timeline should be in less than two months now uh and then with the surge which is the kind of proto dang shotting we're hopefully expecting the first half of next year but it could push later um but for the others there's no real timeline but that doesn't mean that we're kind of like waiting until you know the surge is um is kind of like implemented to begin research on the verge and vocal trees know and statelessness and things like that no they've been in active research for a very long time uh and kind of like the the same goes for pretty much everything on this list and you can actually see i don't think these are up to date but you can see kind of like these progress bars on on each of these

things on on the roadmap here now as i said i don't think they're up to date we're further along on some of these things than we were when vitalik first posted this but essentially you can see that pretty much like everything down to the splurge has a progress bar and kind of like the progress bar has kind of like progressed some amount so that's why vitalik was saying you know these are being done in parallel it's not a stages thing because if it was being done in stages it would basically show that the verge the persian splurge there shouldn't be any progress at all right it should just be zero but that is obviously not the case so i just wanted to kind of like clear that up for people because i see some people will be confused about this and i think it's a

pretty uh bad misconception to have because of the fact that you may think oh my god it's gonna take so much longer to get these things out there because they're not being worked on at the same time as these other things when in reality you know even things like the splurge which is i guess like last on this list on quote unquote last in this list and it will probably be the kind of i guess uh last things that go in uh in terms of kind of like a deployment thing have been researched for as long as pretty much everything else on this list uh so yeah as i said they're being worked on in parallel i thank vitalik for kind of like clarifying this for people because whenever he tweets obviously gets a lot more eyeballs on it than myself or some other people in the ecosystem tweeting

it out uh and yeah it gives me a chance to highlight it on the refuel for you guys so just wanted to kind of highlight that you can check out this road map by the way again like i can kind of like don't worry about the progress bars on this it doesn't really matter but each of these items like if you want to dig deeper into each of them you can just google them and you'll spend a long time on this like if you are literally at the point where you're like okay i want to learn as much as i can about the ethereum bro map as possible and you have the time to do it well this will take you months and months and months to learn like if you really want to learn in terms of kind of getting into the weeds learning why each

things are the way they are what the current research is like what the current development is like all the kind of stuff behind it it'll probably take you a few months to kind of get a grasp of all of it and across everything here and and understand it on on a deeper level like obviously you can get the high level um i'm kind of like view on things but if you want the extra context if you want the reasoning as to why things are being done that way then it's going to take a while and this is actually funny because this is a thought that i often have and i kind of like um talk about this with friends sometimes this is the main reason i think why new people that come into this ecosystem don't understand why ethereum is the way it is because to a new person coming in

right they see ethereum and they say something like solana for example ethereum layer one not not you know maybe even rollups as an extension right but ethereum layer one expensive to use like it's expensive to use in terms of it cost a few dollars to do a swap even at the cheap gas prices then you go on something like a solana and to do a decentralized exchange swap uh it would cost like basically nothing right now obviously refuel watchers and listeners will know that there is a whole host of reasons why this is the case and why ethereum is the way it is but to a new person they don't realize this and how are they going to realize this like how are they going to realize any of that like it and that's the thing they're never like most of them are never going

to most of them are never going to care so what ends up happening is that it falls to us it falls to the builders to build better products and build better services and that's why we've obviously gone with the royal upcentric roadmap because we think rollups will be able to scale out scale pretty much everything even the most centralized layer one out there rollups will be able to outscale that over the longer term and that is what users will care about the end of the day like i really do think that users do care about decentralization and security but it's not something that they will think or care about on day one they'll care about it kind of like when something goes wrong especially but as they learn more and more about certain things and they kind of like um uh care more and more about security

then obviously they'll kind of like uh uh i guess like have some common sense around this so for example right in the current system people put money in a bank like most people aren't going to put money into a bank that maybe they've never heard of before or doesn't look legit or kind of like looks a little bit dodgy right they're going to go for the more trusted brands and that's why banks are pretty pretty centralized like there's only a handful of them that actually last long term so if you take that as kind of like the analogy there i think the same is going to be true for crypto because it's a value network where people aren't just going to put their money on on anything like especially as they keep hearing stories about exchanges being hacked and and default protocols being hacked and all

that sort of stuff like as that goes on as time goes on and as i guess we saturate the mass market with crypto stuff and i'm talking this is like the decade's view here then i think more and more people will care but yeah just that's something i always think about like if i was a total noob into this ecosystem if i had no prior context then how would i be able to differentiate between ethereum and and solana just as just as an example right i wouldn't i'd have to dive deeper into things but that in my mind doesn't really stop ethereum from still being the kind of like top ecosystem still being the the market leader and rollups kind of adding to that because of the fact that i believe rollups will offer just a better experience for developers to build on they'll build applications and then

those applications will offer a better experience to users and as i said i expect roll-up fees to basically trend towards zero for the end user eventually i don't expect the winning roll-ups to be charging gas fees 10 news i expect them to be extracting them away and that you know we're on that path to get there through this road map so yeah just a bit of added context there from me um but i'm sure you guys have run into this before as well all right so next up here we have a great thread from speaking of scaling from sriram here from eigen layer now i think this was called data layer before and they changed their name and i don't know if i'm saying eigen right it might be pronounced some other way you guys know i'm terrible at pronunciation but in this thread he starts it off by

saying ethereum hyperscaling primer why the best blockchains will have a no trade-off between scalability and security why is hyperscale data availability critical how does ethereum get there now i highly recommend kind of reading through this thread uh it's really really great and you'll get like a much better understanding of kind of like how ethereum is scaling and kind of like pretty much one of if not the only viable path towards global scalability uh sri ram kind of takes us on on a journey in this threat and he he kind of like gets me pumped up because he thinks now i don't know if this is true or not i don't know if this is being cooperated i don't know if we're going to get there but he thinks we can get to uh we can get we can scale data availability uh from kind of like what

it would be i guess with proto-dang sharding or with dank sharding a million times more so with proto-dank sharding the debt availability rate of ethereum will go from 70 kilobytes a second to 1.3 megabytes per second which is obviously a a relatively huge jump there but he thinks it's theoretically possible to use the same ideas that dang sharding uses to scale this data availability a million times more to one terabytes per second now if you want to know how that's possible i i suggest reading the thread but do keep in mind that this stuff is still very theoretical it has not obviously been done practically i think with eigenlayer they're going to going to try and do this and they're going to try and kind of like show that this works practically without sacrificing decentralization and security and all the good stuff that we care about but if we can achieve that

like i don't even know what to say that would be more data availability than anyone would need for an extremely long time we would be able to run anything on chain anything and everything on on a kind of on a roll-up which would be absolutely insane right when you think about it but as i said it's still theoretical it's it's kind of like still very far away even if it does work i don't imagine something like this being implemented on the ethereum for for a long time for a number of different reasons but it is using the technologies that ethereum is working on that as part of the ethereum roadmap so that's why i wanted to highlight the thread and make sure that you read it and there's also a video here as well if you want to read that so watch that uh because i think it's really really great

and obviously the you know not everyone agrees with this there are some kind of like debates happening here um you know pauline i said there are some trade-offs that may exist to this such as higher complexity uh and historical storage becoming i guess kind of like uh uh untenable but there are kind of like uh trade-offs might be fine right and he's kind of like written about this before in his blog post which you can read here uh but yeah i think there's a few other comments in here as well but i highly recommend reading the thread i'll just link it in the description below for you all right so some more big coinbase related news here which i find hilarious but essentially it was it came out yesterday that coinbase is facing an sec probe a probe over cryptocurrency listings this is not surprising to me at

all you guys know my opinion on what coinbase has been doing over the last few years and and the tokens they've been listing and just like the absolute crap they've been listing which not only are securities like but they're like some of them are actually just outright scams so this hasn't come as a surprise though i don't think the ssc really has much of a case here much of a leg to stand on because the ssc is the kind of institution that approved coinbase's ipo and as you guys know coinbase ipo'd in may of last year so it wasn't exactly a kind of like thing that they did many years prior before they were doing all this stuff like listing all these tokens right so i don't think the sec is really going to win anything here like they can't even win their case against ripple

like they feel it looks like they're losing their case against ripple and an xrp to me is a very clear security but that's another this is another topic but it's just funny how i i saw this and people were kind of like uh getting panicked about this and getting up you know uproar about this i'm like guys like what are you talking about like just because the uh ssc is probing coinbase doesn't mean they're going to win anything doesn't mean they're going to win a settlement doesn't mean they're going to win a court case or anything like that right uh and if there is a settlement that would probably be the best outcome because that would mean that coinbase just pays a fine and the sec leaves them alone this has happened before this is in crypto especially of um those of you who remember block one the

company that behind eos they raised i think like four billion dollars or something in the eos ico and that was an unregistered security sale guess how much they paid in a fine to the scc to basically get the ssc off their back 24 million dollars out of the 4 billion that they raised like and they probably made more than that from selling in the eos tokens too uh they paid 24 million they admitted no wrong doing which i thought was hilarious and no one in in block one went to jail or faced any kind of like personal liability from this at least as far as i know so the sac is really a very toothless organization like the fact that you can just pay a 24 million dollar fine using the proceeds from the unregistered security sale right and also pocketing a ton of profit from that is just

hilarious to me so even if coinbase for some reason just wants the sec off their back and basically says okay we'll pay this fine just piss off basically right that doesn't that that's hilarious like the ssc is not protecting anyone in that case all they're doing is making themselves fatter right probably some of the sec higher ups are getting a bonus for this because they they can kind of like show that they're doing their job or quote-unquote doing their job right but in reality i think the ssc is the one of the biggest jokes of an institution in in the us i i think that they're not respected by anyone not even by their peer organizations and i think that this probe is really just them trying to make like trying to look like they're doing something when in reality they're not they're not they're not

protecting anyone like i can't think of anyone that the ssc has protected to be honest like did they protect anyone from the terror collapse no not at all have they gone after terror i i mean i'm sure the korean authorities are doing a lot but i haven't heard much out of the out of the us about this they did kind of like subpoena i think dokuan back in the day but nothing really came of that right so like this is what i mean by toothless organization like terror was continued allowed to exist and look don't get me wrong i'm not advocating for uh kind of like these regulatory agencies coming down hard on things or kind of like over-regulating stuff but if their goal is to protect investors then they're doing a really really job of it like if this was a if this was

a private company genslaw the current head of the ssc would have been fired a long time ago like as if he was the ceo or something right of a company because he's not actually doing anything he's not doing what he's supposed to be doing maybe he is maybe maybe the real goal isn't actually to protect investors which if you're on the kind of more cynical side of things you don't believe that's the real goal maybe the real goal is just to be a bully and kind of make sure that the rich can stay rich and make sure that no none of the smaller players can kind of like um get out from under another none of the retail investors none of the plebs can get out from under it right i think there's merit to that i don't think that's something that it's a conspiracy theory i think a lot of the

existing financial system is geared towards punishing uh kind of like retail investors and rewarding the already rich and maybe the sec just exists to protect that like i don't know for sure but everything that i've seen out of them i haven't been impressed at all and i'm not just saying that because i'm not a fan of financial regulators like if the ssc was actually doing a good job and actually going after the scammers actually going after the the kind of like ecosystems that were extracting money and making people lose money then i would applaud them but they're not doing any of that they're really not doing anything to protect anyone which is just bizarre and and insane but it is kind of like the way it is and obviously kind of like um we've kind of like seen this on crypto twitter for a long time now i'm not the

only one with this opinion but i'll kind of leave that at that because i want to rant too much about it but i think it's an important thing to consider that like these institutions do not exist to protect you they exist to protect the establishment most of the time if not all of the time so whenever you see them going after coinbase for kind of registering maybe unregistered securities and stuff like that i don't expect much to come of this at all and don't expect uh i guess like um uh anyone to go to jail or any kind of like things to happen to make these kind of like people lose money i'm sure the people who kind of uh did these scam tokens already cashed out during the bull market and are off somewhere else and they're not even being charged in this sort of stuff because they're just

charging coinbase so yeah anyway i'm going to end that little rant there for now there's a bunch of other things to get through but i think it's just we're kind of worth keeping keeping in mind there all right so it seems we're getting very close to arbitrary nitro so the albertum developers twitter account here announced yesterday that we are getting quite close to the arbitrary one upgrade to the nitro tech stack a list of scheduled dates of our current plans for test net upgrades prior to upgrading on mainnet can be found below so they're going to be upgrading their test nets in the next couple days and they've said that mainnet will follow two weeks after so you can see here the girly nitro devnet will be updated on the july uh sorry on july 26th and the nitro test net will be uploaded on updated on july

27th so if we kind of like say that there's a couple weeks after and then ring could be on july 28th and then we say a couple weeks after that nitro will be live on mainnet we can pretty much put it in basically mid august that nitro will be live on the arbor trim mainnet deployment which is super exciting obviously they had to pause the odyssey uh kind of event because the chain got clogged because nitro wasn't implemented but from everything that i've seen from nitro it seemed that this is going to be a massive boost in scalability for the arbitrary network fees are going to be cheaper and then i'm sure they're going to restart odyssey and people will be able to get back on there and start using arbitrim in all its glory again which i'm super excited for of course so very much

looking forward to nitro hitting mainnet here and uh great to see that kind of like it's coming sooner rather than later i did say to you guys i think maybe the last week of the week before that i felt like nitro was coming you know pretty soon like i didn't think that they would kind of you know pause odyssey and basically wait six months to release nitro or anything like that and i did go back and see that they only i think it was like either april may or june when they kind of first put nitro on test net so it hasn't actually been that long and the fact that we pretty much hopefully will get a main net in i mean august uh is kind of like really really bullish for me anyway in terms of kind of like arbitrary development so very much looking forward to that you

can keep an eye on out for it and i'll definitely cover it on the refuel once it's live all right so i talk a lot about polygons business development on on the refuel and i don't want to kind of rehash everything that i've said before but there was a great tweet here from crypto texan today that basically showcased all the major partnerships or not all of them but a lot of the major partnerships that polygon has kind of landed over the last maybe six to nine months i guess you could say here and it's kind of like in descending order so you got like draftkings which was announced in october of last year you got other big organizations like adobe stripe meta reddit disney which you know brings us to july of this year um but you know i think this really does speak to

obviously their business development skills because these kind of partnerships are not things that and just anyone can land and as i've said before polygon is competing with other very well-funded ecosystems typically layer 1 ecosystems to do this and then crypto texan also makes the kind of like note here that they've done this while launching the polygon zkm right while working on uh all these kind of like zk technology and all these layer 2 stuff and all their other products right which is just crazy to me polygon is such a powerhouse and the funny thing about polygon is that they were matic network right in um there was still matic network in uh you know only a couple years ago or something like that i think if i'm remembering correctly here uh and then obviously they became uh kind of uh polygon and then from there they have

just exploded in both usage in awareness in kind of like the products that they're building and it's just great to see like they've come so far and they've been rewarded for it like i know like obviously i'm an advisor to polygon and you guys know that but when i became an advisor of polygon i actually signed it when it was signed the agreement when it was still manic network um and matic network back then for those who remember wasn't really something people talked about it wasn't viewed favorably no one really knew what they were doing um and the token was was not really worth anything back then i mean i believe when i signed on it was either worth one or two cents or something like that and it's worth uh uh much more than that today i think it's worth like 75 cents or something and i went higher than that

in the bull market um so you know i i kind of like didn't join polygon beca like because they were doing this and because i wanted to be part of kind of like this i joined them because i believed or as an advisor because i believed in their vision i believed that they had the chops to kind of like pull this off and and they did and i honestly i'm blown away by it myself like i didn't uh kind of like think that they would go this far i thought that they were going to be a powerhouse but they've just blown away my expectations here i think they've kind of like blown away everyone's expectations really people doubted them even up until recently about their zkvm tech and some people will say oh they had to acquire these teams to do zkvm guys like i don't

think these people realize how many people there are actually able to build zero knowledge technology let alone zk vms they're pretty much all accounted for already like there are no more of these people they don't exist as part of kind of like some team that no one's ever heard of it's either polygon starkware zk sync and a few other kind of like and scroll i should say and maybe some kind of like stragglers here and there but pretty much all of them are already accounted for there's very very few people who can do this so if polygon wanted instead of acquiring teams what they would have to do is they would have to go and recruited people themselves they would have to compete with these other ecosystems for personnel when in reality acquiring these teams bringing them all

in house and letting them just continue the work that they've been doing and giving the resources for them to do that was the right approach here so yeah anyway i'm gonna stop fawning over polygon here i just i don't know i just whenever i think about it guys just absolutely blow me away how well they've done with not just the partnerships not just the business development but like everything since i kind of like signed on as an advisor it's just uh it's been great to see it's been great to see their ascent and they're adding so much value to the theorem ecosystem it's insane all right on to this tweet thread from op labs today so this is a bit of a technical deep deep dive into something that optimism does so you can kind of uh read the thread but i'll kind of read

the start here where they said optimism does a lot of stuff on chain managing all of these interactions securely can be a bit of a headache that's why we be built drippy a trust minimized ethereum native conditional transaction system as i said bit technical here uh not a long thread you can also kind of i guess read uh this blog post titled drippy how optimism automates ethereum if you're into any of that stuff in if you're into uh kind of like development and learning more about development you should definitely give this thread and blog post to read but for the tldr here of what drippy is it's like a web free version of if this than that if you if you've ever used this app if this then that or ift triple t um it basically allows transactions to be executed under certain conditions so gp allows us us

being optimism to easily program in solidity sets of checks actions that we call drips really cool i think that people don't realize that this sort of stuff is needed and this sort of stuff is happening in the background for a lot of projects out there um you know something as a i guess simple example here is oracle updates whenever an oracle update is published on chain for something like chain link that is all handled off chain first and then there is an off chain kind of like mechanism a script that runs to post that data on chain so that the price can kind of like go on chain and default apps can use it and other people can use it and we can all see that there was there's a price there and we can all validate and things like that right um so drippy i guess is basically like an

extension on that and basically kind of a tool that allows automation for for anything at the end of the day like any of these kind of interactions anything that needs to be done on networks on smart contracts is what droopy does but as i said there is a thread and a blog post for you to ready to jump into this uh deeper here uh definitely maybe only do so if you're if you're kind of like a developer if you want some more context around this um but it's not too complicated to understand but it may not be useful to you if you're just uh if you're an on developer all right so a great tweet here from raoul today where he said today companies pay for their own cloud cost to provide services and great ux for to paying customers with extremely cheap fees from rollups post sharing on

ethereum companies abstracting gas fees away from users to offer them value will become a normal thing again this is what i was talking about before about how and i've talked about this a lot on the refuel right about how rollups eventually will be subsidizing all the costs for their users because the cost will be so low and as an example of this is immutable x they're not technically a roll up there or a validium and because of that the transaction fees are extremely cheap because they store the data off chain they cover the cost for their users because it's so cheap to do so and it gives their users an absolutely amazing experience of not having to pay any gas fees to do anything on on the network right they can still use eith in order to kind of like use it as money to trade nfts and stuff like that but

they don't have to worry about gas phase they never even have to think about it the same is going to be true for things like optimism and arbitrary and the polygons and the star wars and the scrolls and everything like that once they get cheap enough with dag sharding with more data availability once they do their own upgrades once they get to a point where it's literally cents on the dollar even less than that there are going to be uh a subsidization of of most if not all of of kind of like those fees and in certain different ways right it's not just going to be kind of like the optimism foundation paying the fees for example it will be i think the validators kind of like paying them because they'll be making money from other kind of like avenues such as mev for example or the applications

themselves will be making money from the fees that they take and then they'll kind of like subsidize that for their users all these sorts of stuff right like when you think about how we can take this and where we can take this and how much of a boon this would be to user experience it gets really wild so i mean i we're already there in terms of immutable x obviously being already already there in terms of kind of like layer twos we're not there with rollups yet because they're too expensive but with lydiums it's very easy to do because it's already very cheap and that gives us insight into i think what we're going to be seeing long term with things like bank sharing implemented all right finally here we have an update from alpha day and i covered these guys a few weeks ago but the alpha day beta

is now live and you're invited to try it out so if you're an er if you're an alpha day early discord nft holder you can visit app.alphaday.com and use the following credentials in this thread to get started here and now for those of you who don't know i described alpha days basically like a bloomberg terminal for crypto for ethereum and something that i am definitely very excited to use i think i just saw this before i'm gonna go play around with it soon i haven't played around with it yet but i'm very very excited to play around with this and see how it can kind of work with my current flow and potentially replace my current flow of keeping up with everything i described it last time where i said that i have so many different windows in front of me to keep up with everything

you know twitter feed uh newsletters prices uh kind of like my portfolio stuff like that right and and and i think you know having kind of like one i guess display one dashboard for that would be really really cool especially for the news stuff like obviously i covered the news on the refuel being able to aggregate grade it in in a better way being able to kind of like keep track of it in a better way at a glance would really be beneficial to me so i'm really excited to kind of like test out this product you should do so as well and i should disclose i'm an investor in this product as well i think i discussed that last time but just again people who didn't hear me say that last time but it is in beta and you kind of like can try it out here i'll link in

youtube description below i have a couple minutes left here just another thing that i wanted to talk about today uh just before i finish up here it's not related to the markets but it kind of is um i find it funny how whenever i kind of like look at people discussing price and discussing kind of like the markets in general there's always this inkling of oh this week's gonna be bad because if this isn't this news event and like for everyone who hasn't yet they should go read a book uh titled fooled by randomness which is a very popular book and it's been suggested in crypto circles a lot of times but it is so accurate and describes this phenomenon so accurately because let's just take a recent example everyone was like super bearish i think

a few weeks ago when the cpi numbers came out because they were the highest in like 40 years and then the price of eth and btc and a lot of other cryptos pumped right so like there are certain events that well i think most events that people point to and they're like oh this is going to affect the price this way this is going to affect the price this way like it doesn't work like that like you're and this is what the book full by randomness goes into it basically shows that like just because it's a coincidence sometimes that one of these events leads to this price or action or one of these eventually so that price action doesn't mean it's a trend doesn't mean it's a pattern if it was that easy to trade markets just based on these news that everyone kind of like expects

is going to be bad or everyone's expects is going to be good then everyone would be a good trader it doesn't work like that at all so i just reading that book i think there's maybe kind of like some youtube videos about it as well if you don't want to read the whole book there but i just wanted to kind of uh note on note that because i see people talking about this a lot as people concerned about the macro environment a lot like i get it like it is concerning there are obviously a lot of shitty things happening right now and people kind of like are wondering should i buy now should i wait you know especially people who who kind of like over invested as well like oh crap i'm already over invested i want to buy more but if i have to wait a few years maybe

i won't be able to pay my bills stuff like that if you're in that position not investment advice but please don't put yourself in that position i'll try to get out of it because it's not a good way to be um but yeah i just wanted to make a quick comment on that and i'm going to end it on that note so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone