Ethereum's big 2022, Distinguishing zkEVMs and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #514 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the dailyway refuel where you cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony 30th of December 2022. alright everyone let's get into it so final refuel of the Year sorry about the last few days I think I missed three refuels this week uh unfortunately there was a lot of busyness happening around my households for the first two days there I wasn't able to do a refuel and then on the third day which was yesterday uh my computer just wouldn't Boot and the funny thing is is that like I figured out the problem probably at like 1am or something like that or later in the night and it was too late to record a refuel but I'm back today uh and I'm really excited to do this final episode for the year and what a year it has been

for crypto I mean obviously we can call 2022 a bear Market yeah similar to 2018 and I put out a tweet though on a positive note where I said all things considered ethereum had an amazing year in 2022 yes ethi's down 75 from its all-time high but this year we saw the merge finally ship L2 group continue and even accelerate and d5's product Market fit validated in the best ways possible here's to an even bigger 2023 for ethereum and that's kind of funny because I've said this before on the refill but basically ethereum didn't feel like it was in a bear Market this year if you look at the eighth price and that was all you did then of course you know it was in a bear market right and Heath uh went down a lot this year you know and went down even further than

where it is today went to 880 uh we had some uh you know really bad weeks this year I think there was like 10 or 11 weeks in a row of just eat going straight down right so it has not been pretty on the East price side but even that like 75 from all-time high and the bottom was what I think 80 down or something uh when last bear Market we went 94 down relatively to that we're doing pretty good but when we look at ethereum as a network as an ecosystem well there's no bear Market there at all right I mean I I kind of highlighted the main things here with the merge finally shipping which obviously was the biggest event of the Year Bar None there was nothing that happened that was bigger than that in terms of positive events I mean if you want to go with negative

Events maybe FTX collapsing was bigger than that and Terra collapsing was bigger than that just I mean going through these events we have had a yeah that's for sure both on the positive and negative side but not just the merge right L2 growth there was a recent bankless newsletter that you should guys should go read showing the growth of L2 showing the metrics around it and I mean it's just continued oh yeah particularly the second half of this year where L2 growth is really skyrocketed and I think it's a mixture of things definitely more and more people onboarding onto l2s from ethereum L1 people coming over from the alt l1's which pretty much have no activity left on any of them because their prices are down so much and a lot of the activity was just driven by the bull market so they're coming back to

ethereum they're experimenting with l2s they're enjoying them they're enjoying those cheap fees uh and the l2s continue to develop their ecosystems and as I said you can check out bankless's newsletter which does a really great job of highlighting that with actual metrics and then finally we had d5's product Market fit validated in yeah the best ways possible simply because we saw so much of C5 blow up this year and a lot of it due to the custodial nature of C5 we saw obviously FTX with FTX uh SPF and Curry were yating customer deposits into things to make money on uh and lose money on obviously as well uh we saw Celsius blow up we saw Terra blow up right that had a lot of centralization vectors to it it was never really true D5 we saw that blow up block fi uh hoddle naught there's so many of these

things right we're three hours Capital ride all the contagion there and D5 continued chugging defy on ethereum went you know continued chugging the old D5 protocols that everyone makes fun of and everyone thinks of Boomer defy kept chugging kept working really well uh were available for you to use I mean uni swap is just a prime example here was available the entire time unisop didn't go down it didn't get hacked didn't get exploited didn't lose anyone's money uh and you were able to trade whatever assets you wanted on there and you're still able to do that today I think that's amazing right makeup I mean it's funny because maker had a bit of um a bit of drama back in the day especially uh during the covert dump where it had a bit of bad debt that it had to make up for but make hasn't skipped a beat

compound's been fine ave's been fine curve has been fine you know all these Boomer D5 protocols that people go on about uh as as being not very interesting well they're doing their job they're being not very interesting but that's good when it comes to finance you don't want to be interesting because when you are interesting uh that means that you are either a Ponzi uh like just straight up you're either a Ponzi or you are not actually D5 right because there's a lot of marketing a lot of uh funneling people's money into it in order to grow I mean that it looks very Ponzi right when you when you look at it like that but yeah I think decentralized Finance uh is the product Market fit for blockchains generally money and D5 I mean they go hand in hand other things that have the most product Market fit by

far and ethereum leads that by far I mean no other D5 ecosystem even comes close to ethereum and I'm talking ethereum as a whole layer one and Layer Two but even just layer one is still miles ahead of everything else and the other ecosystems don't really have much of a real D5 ecosystem now I know there's been a lot of talk about other layer ones and and ones in particular that the price is down a lot and the ecosystem's down a lot I'm not going to spend any time talking about this on the refuel I actually filled in for Ryan on the bankless roll-up this week where David and I spoke a lot about this so you can check out the the roll up once it's live uh maybe it's already live um you can go check that out for for my thoughts there uh but yeah generally

ethereum has just had an absolutely incredible year and it's poised to have an even better 2023 or maybe not even better because it's hard to top the merge but a really exciting 2023 we obviously with withdrawals in the first half of the year and then hopefully ending out the year with Proto dank sharding and a bunch of other upgrades come a bunch of other eips coming in with those two hard Forks or two Network upgrades that we will get next year I you guys know I'm personally most excited for staking withdrawals being enabled because it's really going to lead to I believe a lot of people to stake their wreath and contrary to popular belief people unlocking their staked eth and it's going to complete that Loop that I've spoken about before uh which I think maybe is a perfect segue into one another thing I want to

talk about when it comes to ethereum staking that I've mentioned on the refill before but I really want to kind of articulate this in simple terms for people so you guys know I've been spinning up a bunch of rocker pull mini pools lately I currently have five it's really addictive so I might actually spin up more and you need 16 eth to spin one up and about 100 RPL tokens but the reason why it's really good to spin one up now is because there is an Arbitrage opportunity now the way this works is that the re pool is full right now there is over there is 5 000 uh eighth in that in that kind of R8 pool there and if you deposit into it there is by spinning up a mini pool uh there is an Arbitrage opportunity there and what this means is

that you can use something called Rocket R which is a piece of a sidecar software that you can use with the rockapool smart node Suite when setting up your mini pool to a profit from that Arbitrage now it can vary The Profit can vary obviously depending on how full the pool is but I've spun up four mini pools using this the first one that I spun up I I kind of I I screwed up and didn't use Rock it up but the four that I've that I've used I've gotten at least 0.33 eth from the ARB so that's a free 0.33 e just for spinning up a mini pool so if you want to stake your eat you should definitely look at spinning up a mini pool it is so easy as I've talked about before I actually was talking to some friends and said that I like I would go

as far as saying that uh are staking with rocker Paws um setting up a mini pool not just buying R8 but setting up a mini pool doing the whole thing is arguably easier than solo staking just because they have such a nice interface and such a good documentation around it um so if you're on the fence about it well I mean there's a free eth profit opportunity for you per mini pool and it varies depending on obviously the uh uh the the fullness of that pool there and the Arbitrage opportunity that exists at that point in time but if you use rocket R but when spinning off a mini pool you can profit from that and I have I've earned 1.3 each I think from from it in total and I'm hoping to earn more from it uh uh because I was going to use that

if to stay take anyway like if you're going to stake anyway whether it be solo sticking or somewhere else definitely consider spitting up a mini pool there but I mean I have had so much fun lately with the ethereum staking ecosystem now you guys know I've been spinning up validators for quite a while as a solo Staker but it's refreshing to do something different with rocker pool and feel like I'm actually contributing to the Network's health and decentralization rather than just contributing to centralized uh entities because rockapole is a decentralized staking pool and obviously I'm part of the oh down now so maybe my opinion is a bit more biased on rocketpool these days but you guys know that I'm sending the rewards to the protocol Guild anyway so I'm not being paid to show or anything like that but I'm just so impressed with

that whole ecosystem there and I just thought it was a a pretty big opportunity uh to get this ARB if you're interested in it if you have the E to spin up a mini pool and the RPL tokens of course uh but yeah definitely check that out uh This Thread from Jasper explains it a bit and you can learn more about it in this uh GitHub repo which I'll link in the description below but just going back quickly to the uh reflecting on 2022 which I could do for for a long time but I want to reflect on one more thing which I think is a pretty major thing in the last bear Market ethereum was dead to pretty much everyone in crypto except the most hardcore ethereans now you'll see people have this opinion of some other l1s right now and it's a pet peeve of mine

where people think that just because ethereum came back from that bear market and continued to thrive it means their favorite project is going to do the same thing and I've talked about this before and I'm not going to spend too much time on this but the reason why ethereum came back and I think a big reason why ethereum came back and there's a lot of reasons but I think one of the biggest reasons was that ethereum didn't have any real competition back then for a smart contract platform funny enough its biggest competition for Capital was Bitcoin and it suffered against Bitcoin greatly I mean the BTC ratio went down a lot and uh it was it was really bad especially at the end of 2019 even early 2020 it was looking very dire out there for eighth against BTC but because it

didn't have much competition because ethereum was the birthplace of defy it was the first one to actually do defy at scale and and make it easy for people to use I mean relatively easy for people to use uh and then eth was uh being focused and ethers an asset was being focused on to improve its tokonomics we had 1559 and obviously the merge things like that being worked on even back then um it really came together for ethereum but I think that that biggest part was the fact that it didn't have much real competition EOS was not real competition um the 2017 era at layer ones they were all dead anyway so when you're looking at these other ecosystems today and you're seeing people say that oh because ethereum came back from such a massive drawdown in 2018 it means that such and such can come back in 2022 I I just

don't think that's a great thesis to have uh the things coming the things in 2022 are coming out of the trying to come out of the 2022 bear Market have many more headwinds than ethereum had have many more competition have much more competition than ethereum had because not only are they competing with other layer ones they're also competing with the ethereum L2 ecosystem which also didn't exist back in 2018 2019 mind you but exists today so taking that all into account if your thesis is really just ethereum came back so my favorite project will I really would encourage you to revisit that thesis and this isn't me being an eighth Maxi saying this is me being a rationalist it is not rational to make an investment thesis out of past behavior of other assets right that doesn't make any sense

because there are thousands of assets that have never gone back to their USD all-time high let alone their all-time high against Ethan BTC and there will be thousands of assets going forward if not tens of thousands that will never do it either even the ones that were considered really really bullish and really really popular last year so a lot of them are never going to come back from that a lot of them are never going to develop an ecosystem they're going to uh go by the wayside they're not going to die so to speak they won't go to zero nothing really goes to zero in crypto even Tara didn't went to zero and then came back from it right because they did the folks and everything but when thinking about it from an investment thesis perspective from a thesis on an ecosystem perspective you can't just

look at other ones that have succeeded and say that oh well this is going to succeed because uh you know this is similar to what happened back then look at all the layer ones from the ethereum 2018 bear Market era all that that kind of cycle look at all of them back then none of them survived and thrived not not one of them and you know there were ones about around back then such as even cardano and cardeno didn't even Thrive during the bull market and is still not thriving today uh there were ones that got uh they weren't out back then but got built like polka dot I mean there's not really much happening there so when looking at these ecosystems you really need to take that into account but anyway I'm gonna I'm gonna digress on that point there I've got a bunch of

other things to get through and then I'm going to end today's episode actually at the end with uh with uh some some positive stuff but anyway moving on so ultrasound money the relay that they're running uh has 2.69 of validators connected to it which is really cool to see so you guys remember that ultrasound money and gnosis set up uh two on non-censoring relayers well they have well ultrasound money has 2.7 of validated of total validators connected to it and you can actually go to the website and see this might be updated since then yeah now it's at 3.5 of all validators registered to it so if you are running a validator and you haven't registered to the ultrasound a relay just yet you can do so the link is here it's very easy to do you can do it even

if you're running a kind of a solo staking or um uh with a mini rocketball mini pool now because they added support on the smart node stack for the ultrasound relay which is very cool uh but yeah just wanted to highlight that uh this is a non-censoring relay as well so that's why I'm highlighting this here all right so uh the ethereum on arm account which is one of my favorite accounts to follow on Twitter put out a tweet uh I think it was a couple of days ago where they said they're running optimism on a rock 5B board which is really cool they're running it alongside Geth and teku and it's time to look into ethereum layer 2 nodes so obviously you guys know that layer 2s have their own nodes validators sequences all that software running to power them and eventually they're going to want to hand

this over to the community and not just run it as a centralized team now to do so we'll obviously require Hardware not like mining Hardware or anything like that but Hardware similar to what you would be required to use for ethereum staking well if you already have a staking rig you can run these other things on there especially if it's uh if it's a bit more powerful but you can do it on a rock 5B board imagine running an ethereum validator an optimism sequencer an arbitrim sequencer and some ck sequences imagine doing that on these boards be very very cool uh obviously as you know things get bigger and bigger and maybe things get more more and more complicated especially on the ZK side you'll need more beefy Hardware but so for someone like me who's got a I really overspec the staking PC for my solo

staking I would love to use that with this sort of stuff right running optimism or arbitrim nodes or whatever other nodes and have that not disturb my my solo staking validators and have it all chugging along very nicely without having to spin up another computer or a separate computer for it and improving the decentralization of obviously not only ethereum but also the layer 2 is built on top of it so I just thought that was a cool thing that uh the ethereum on arm accounts highlighted here uh moving on Joseph from the ethereum foundation put out a year-end blog post here of the EF supported teams research and development Roundup so these are all the teams that the ethereum foundation has been supporting I think believer this is for Q4 and this is obviously the last update for the year uh oh actually no no this

isn't Q4 this is for I believe the um the entire ya and highlighting the teams that they've been supporting here and all the efforts there so if you want to check out this blog post it'll be linked in the YouTube description below for you to do so but it's a great way to go down a bunch of rabbit holes especially over the continued holiday period maybe you have a few weeks off work leading into January and you're looking for some reading material well this is a great place to start so I'll link this in the YouTube description the description below for you to check out uh we have a new blog post from pseudo FiOS where he says the term zkvm has become broader over time there are two major approaches language can compatibility and byteco compatibility and that's the total of uh pseudo theosis blog Pro Str

distinguishing ZK evm so if you're interested in diving a little bit deeper in the technical aspects of ZK VMS definitely check out this blog post from sudo and also if you're looking for reading material definitely check out sudo's entire mirror page here uh it is very good there are a lot of great blog posts in here specifically about ZK VMS layer twos um and some other related things I mean there's a there's a bunch of posts now that you can read uh but I'll link this particular one in the YouTube description below and there's also one that I think you should read from avitalik if you haven't yet around the different types of ZK EVMS uh because there's I believe three or four different types of ZK VMS with different projects focusing on different ones like for example Taiko is focusing on a type 1 zkvm I believe Scrolls focusing on

type 2 and I think polygon is Type 2 or type 3 uh but they've got multiple ZK evm efforts happening there but it's good to read up on this sort of stuff especially as we we progressed through the holiday period where you possibly have more time if you're on holidays and you can send it to a Kindle or something and read the posts there all right so synthetics or nssnx perps V2 are now live featuring five to ten basis points trading fees and deep liquidity for Traders now this is live obviously on the optimism Network and you can trade via Quinta and the decentrex front ends here so they continue by saying before anything else purse V2 is tradable on those front ends and these two protocols tap into synthetic liquidity to power perps

trading and purpose V2 is a novel exchange engine that efficiently matches buyers and sellers with snx stakers serving as temporary counterparty as needed snakes will only take on Asset Risk temporarily while incentives reward Traders for bringing markets a true neutral and you can read the rest of the thread here and the blog Pro is I believe there's a blog post which I'll link in the YouTube description below but great to see synthetics continuing to chug along here they're an older project in on crypto as I've explained before they kind of found a little bit of product Market fit on layer one but then got priced out because the gas gas fees went up a lot then they started they were one of the first if not the first projects to actually build on on a generalized layer too like optimism and now they're just continuing to build out

a great ecosystem on there so definitely go give snx perps V to a look I'll link this in the YouTube description below um something that was pointed out to me that I missed from the other day actually a few days ago now uh was a blog post from ingonyama where they introduced the inorigable inaugural inaugural Z games which accelerates Elio incentivized test net so the goal of this competition is to drive alio approva throughput to the max using GPU acceleration uh now for those of you who don't know Elio is a a layer 1 blockchain uh trying to I guess uh uh do just zero knowledge at layer one rather than Layer Two which I think you know I'm very critical of layer 1 blockchains but I think as an experiment as like a research project it's fine especially

for something like ingonyama that is building these kind of hardware and building different software implementations to take advantage of uh of ZK stuff and ZK proving uh they're gonna want their technology everywhere not just for layer twos but layer ones as well so yeah if you're interested in learning more about the Z games you can check out these blog posts here I don't believe there's a thread it's just a blog post TR how to get involved uh and kind of uh the rules behind it and everything there though those details will be linked in the YouTube description below alright so a thread here I came across over the weekend I believe are from Dino eggs which is one that talks about light clients so what are like clients how are they different from Full nodes and what are their benefits you'll know that I've talked about like clients a lot on the

refill before and about how they're considered a bit of a holy grail for blockchains or Dino X's tweet thread here does a really great job of explaining exactly what they are uh in simple terms I really enjoyed the thread I'll link the thread in the YouTube description below but what I mean by the Holy Grail here is that I mean I've said this before but I think it's it's worth repeating imagine being able to have a like client node on your phone that gives you the same or almost the same guarantees of the validity of um of the network that you're interacting with as a full node does so that you can basically use your phone as a full node or near a full node in terms of security guarantees and being able to relay your transactions off that and using minimal data uh both data in terms of bandwidth

and data in terms of data storage on your phone and obviously uh your phone isn't as powerful as your computer at all maybe it is I mean the phone's pretty powerful these days but imagine being able to do that and even not just phones but low powered Hardware like Raspberry Pi's and rock 5B board which you can already run ethereum full nodes but may eventually not be able to well like clients I mean that's the solution there and this goes hand in hand with vertical trees which I've said before that you guys should definitely be doing more research into as part of The Verge ethereum roadmap item which you can just Google the Verge ethereum and it should come up with related things that's another bit of reading material that you should give give a pay attention to because I think that's going to be a

bigger and bigger theme for 2023 and 2024 along with like clients so definitely go check out this thread I'll link it in the YouTube description below uh I guess last up here before I get into the uh kind of uh thing I want to talk about to end off this episode just a shout out I did another bull Case episode for ethereum on bankless with uh DC investor Justin Drake and of course the bankless guys David and Ryan here you may have already seen it but I mean if you're looking to feel bullish heading into 2023 you can go check out this uh podcast YouTube video I'll link it in the YouTube description and below for you there all right so I've left a bit of time to basically focus on this tweet that I

pulled out uh yesterday so I said going to aim to be a more positive Tweeter in 2023 I found my find myself still getting involved with too much drama slash unnecessary spats about things that don't even matter and Twitter as a platform is very good at amplifying toxicity slash negativity less more positivity now this is actually quite hard to do on social media generally and it's really hard to do it in crypto because social media really wants you to get involved in the drama it wants you to contribute to it it rewards you for it because drama brings attention it brings likes it brings very traits it brings followers so if you uh trying to grow a following then then getting you know engaged with drama and and causing drama and and doing that sorts of stuff is

actually a really great way to grow a following and it becomes addictive for people it becomes addictive for people who make who monetize their following on Twitter and other social media platforms so it is it is quite hard to do this and for me I got used to being not toxic but being very or getting involved with a lot of drama from the 2018 2019 2020 days where I was on Twitter all the time just defending ethereum from Bitcoin maximalist and I kind of trained myself in to get into that where I became very very defensive for a long time and then through 2021 the noise was so much and I had like all these people calling me eighth Maxi and all these altar one shillers coming at me and everything and then I just kind of felt myself getting more and more toxic over time this year

I I tend to have tweeted a lot less than I previously had and I got involved with a lot less of kind of uh these spats or this drama but I still got involved with it I still found myself dunking on on other ecosystems when I really didn't need to do that um and I I wasn't necessarily doing it for engagement farming or anything like that I was just doing it because I was so used to doing it in the past so that's why I kind of put this out there as my New Year's resolution of of sorts to me be a more positive Tweeter in 2023 to stop spreading so much negativity and stop getting involved with this because people really do resonate with the positivity people really resonate with um saying you know positive and good things and even if people are going to

call me an eat Maxi if I'm just talking about ethereum all the time they're so bad I'll just block them right I'm not gonna put up with it I really I mean I block list I have 3 600 people on my block list I mean probably not all of them are people probably some of them are Bots but I I just block people that are going to be a smartass or a reply guy I just going to bring negativity to my replies because when I see replies to my tweets I want to see good replies I want to be able to interact with people I want to see more positivity there so I wanted to so to speak be the change I want to see in the world and I feel like you know what better way to do that and to start a fresh year like this I do

think generally 2023 is going to be a more positive year than 2022 has been for the ecosystem as a whole there's really just going to be the True Believers left the markets May recover uh which will obviously add positivity in the air there'll be continued development on the ethereum front and I'll continue covering on the refuel of course uh but generally I just don't want to get involved with um this negativity anymore I'm going to try my hardest too I'm probably gonna uh kind of a cave here and there but this is specific to Twitter I think in disc in the daily way Discord I do find myself venting at times and I do find myself venting on the refuel I think it's always good to have a vent it's always good to talk to people that uh you know are friends of yours and um and can kind

of like take it and don't just come at you with which is what happens in the daily wear Discord Channel which I really enjoy uh but yeah I'm aiming to be more positive in 2023 now on that note as well I would encourage all of you to aim to do that I think it's just a better thing to to do overall and positive positivity begets positivity but in saying that that doesn't mean to be weak or to let yourself get walked over if you see on social media if you see misinformation and you want to call it out call it out like don't just let it slide if you actually want to call it I'm not saying they have to be on there full time and call that out I'm not saying it's your duty or your job or anything but if you're feeling compelled to do it then do it be nice

about it don't be toxic about it of course but do it because the worst thing about uh this industry in my eyes is that so much misinformation so much lie so much just bad information in general gets spread so easily and there's not enough people speaking up against it there's not enough people educating about it there's a lot more than we used to have but not as many as I would love to see uh you know especially going into 2023. now in I do think ethereum is in a really great place right now I think the ethereum flood generally is pretty much non-existent at this point and um there are there is a lot of fun from Bitcoin Maximus but I mean I don't take that seriously it's not even good fud it's like really really bad and shitty fun that I don't even think is worth uh

talking about anymore I mean I do talk about on the refill sometimes but honestly it's just so bad it's so repetitive and you guys know they pivot all the time there was the merge it was first it was the merge never gonna happen now it's staking withdrawal is never gonna happen and I wonder what it's going to be after that it's not even worth engaging with that right um I'm talking about the people who just don't know the specifics about ethereum maybe they've been misled maybe they're just spreading misinformation on on Twitter without even knowing it I those kinds of people are worth correcting and the audience that view this and read this is also worth correcting because I spent a lot of my time doing this in the previous Market cycle up until 2020 and I think it paid a lot of dividends I

think it really helped ethereum come out of its I guess like bear market and really helped ethereum Thrive and I want to see that continue uh but I don't have the energy to be on Twitter and doing this all the time I am on Twitter a lot but I'm definitely not going to get involved with this this stuff anymore I'm going to educate via the refuel and talk to you guys in the description good Channel I mean I'm definitely not going to get involved with Twitter spats every day I've done that long enough I think I need a break from that um but yeah I think that's going to round out today's episode the last episode of the Year I hope you all have an amazing New Year's and you've got plans and everything uh I think it's going to be a great 2023 as I said

before I mean it really is only up from here we've had such a shitty 2022 it just kind of boggles the mind that 2023 could be worse and maybe I'm going to regret saying that but honestly if you're going to 2023 with a positive mindset I think that's a good start and that's what I'm doing and I'm going to be a more positive Tweeter and I hope you will join me in that but on that note thank you all for listening and watching this year uh that I'll catch you all and next year don't forget to like the uh video don't forget to subscribe to the channel don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord channel uh and yeah as I said I will catch you all next year thanks everyone