Ethereum's Endgame, OwenSwap detailed and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #268 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray review where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 7th of december 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so i hope you all had a chance to mint your nfts yesterday your daily great anniversary nfts it was such an awesome kind of like experience uh you know got up about an hour before the mint went live we jumped into the discord channel and everyone was going kind of like crazy about it um unfortunately ran into a little bit of technical difficulties so the link ended up getting shared i think about 20 minutes before um 2200 utc instead of half an hour before but i think ever most people who are you know awake and waiting that wanted to mint one were able to mint one unfortunately

there were a couple of people who sniped some i think one person minted 28 of them and then obviously went to resell them on open c uh but the good thing is that all secondary sale royalties are also going to be going to core devs which is which is really cool so we donated 19.93 eth which is what's 80 of the proceeds two core devs it's what 87 thousand dollars at today's prices so a really awesome kind of like um outcome there of course and uh really awesome just like mint process the the mirror team the platform that we did the nft mint on we're really awesome to work with uh they kind of like fixed those last minute bugs that were causing the technical technical difficulties there they were on deck with us so just absolutely awesome awesome kind of like to work with there

so so yeah big thank you to everyone who has supported uh the nf teammate who got one there's now a discord channel set up for those who own uh one of the nfts it's exclusive to to people who own it only people who own it can read it and write in it obviously myself is in there kid is in there and a bunch of other people are in there and it's been cool just to kind of like chat to those people there so uh yeah once again thank you everyone for uh for kind of like the support here this won't be the final mint i know that there are a few people who said that i should have done kind of like this on layer two um you know the main reason why i did it on layer one is i mean a big reason is that uh keita had

worked with miro before uh and he'd worked with the mirror people before and that you know they had been kind of helping us with this mint for like weeks and kind of like getting new contracts spun up so that everything could could run smoothly and we didn't want to kind of like setting them at the last minute hey guys we're actually going to mint it on layer two right we didn't want to kind of like rug pull them um so we just kind of like did it on layer one uh but in saying that i'm going to try to make it so that any of that kind of like future nfts that i do are going to be at layer two except one of ones if i do one of one nfts i'm probably still gonna do it at layer one to be honest um but any

of the kind of like you know if i do like hundreds of of nfts like another anniversary nft in the future like at the two year mark or any other ones i'm gonna um you know try my best to make sure it's done at layer two i know the gas fees hurt i know the gas fees were like eighty dollars to mint at 100 way and i think the the gas kind of like spiked up during the mint because of some other nft mint so i get that of course i'm not saying i don't get that but i know think of it this way we burnt some eat right we burnt some meat from these fees too so you know you know you guys know i always love the burn there but yeah just kind of like note there as well but uh again thank you everyone hope you're enjoying

your nfts i mean you'll see it cycle through on my nft display behind me i've got it up there uh and you know i as a lot of you have said it is genuinely like not just because it's kind of like the nft that represents me in my room but is genuinely i think one of the best nfts i've ever seen the art is amazing kidder is insanely talented you know you would have seen some of these other nfts before i mean some of them are up on the on the ft display actually two two of these other ones are up there the one five five nine one and the block explorer one just an insanely talented 3d artist and you know it was just amazing to see how it came out so uh so yeah anyway moving on to the next stuff uh so i saw this from git coin you know

how i've been saying that git coin uh the matching funds were at two million it's actually had over three million dollars now holy i didn't even realize it grown like that so um it was like originally i think 1.5 million went up to 2 million and then went to 2.5 and now it's over three million dollars worth of matching funds as part of this later latest kind of matching round and we're only at kind of like day six or seven i think right now um so there's been over 91 000 contributions of over 1.2 million dollars from 7 000 people so far which is obviously blowing away all the records in bitcoin right now um and if you want to create a grant there's four days left to do so as well if you haven't got a grant yet uh you know i've been reminding you pretty much

like you're pretty regularly on the refuel to go donate but i mean this is insane and you know i really want to see the breakdown between l1 donations and l2 donations because obviously uh uh git coin is integrated with zk sync l2 and they're also integrated with the polygon pos chain for for this round which is really awesome to see as well and it makes a lot of sense because you know due to the way the quadratic matching works if you're donating kind of like 1 or 10 die it can go a lot further than like a 100 donation and even 100 is not economically feasible with the gas fees the way they are and definitely you know not one dial 2 die so you definitely need kind of like that those scalability solutions and it works perfectly for something like git coin so really

awesome to see and again thank you everyone that has donated to me so far i really really appreciate it but uh don't forget to donate to everyone else as well there so i was thinking today randomly just this just came to me randomly today and i actually wrote today's newsletter about it but i i sent this tweet out where i said ethereum is a digitally native global empire ruled by no one owned by everyone i was thinking about this uh because i started watching the um the foundation series and uh there's this kind of like you know massive human empire in it like absolutely huge and the premise i mean i don't know if this is a spoiler alert or anything but it's basically kind of like the premise of the of the whole whole kind of story is that this massive empire is kind of

predicted to fall and to fail right like it got so big that um there's no chance it's gonna survive and like you know over the long term it's gonna kind of like fail but it's not unique to kind of uh that you know that show or that book it's a book series but like lesbian empires that have kind of like risen fell over over the over the kind of like centuries and and you know thousands of years i mean one of the most famous examples is the roman empire and i think it tends to happen for a bunch of different reasons like obviously these empires are very centralized they get like really really big they fail to scale and i think we're seeing it play out right now with a few nation states where they just get so big and they that you know it becomes so

polarized and it just starts kind of like bursting at the seams and then i thought about ethereum and what makes ethereum different there's two main things that make ethereum different it's digitally native right it doesn't have an actual centralized physical presence the only physical presence that ethereum has is on people's machines as full nodes and validators and miners but they're distributed across the entire planet it's not in kind of like a central location of course and the second thing is that ethereum is decentralized like truly decentralized which means it's not ruled by anyone like not any one person no one person has unilateral control over the ethereum network not even a small group has any control over the ethereum network um it's owned by everyone like whether you're just an eath holder

whether you're kind of like a builder whether you're a core developer whether you're kind of like on the outset building infrastructure that feeds into ethereum uh whether you're you know you're just a kind of like a creator an educator like everyone falls into this uh in terms of kind of like uh ethereum being owned by everyone um you know it's not a kind of like ownership model where everyone's got like an equal share like some some voices carry more weight than others but the point is is that uh there's no you know there's no kind of like single point of failures here there's no small group that kind of makes the decisions and anyone can actually put forward a change to the ethereum kind of like i guess you could call it it's laws right the protocol laws the the code that is embedded into

the protocol that uh the kind of like whole network has to abide by anyone can put through a change um sorry i can submit submit an iep to change one of those rules or to add a new one now that eip process is well defined it's a long process especially for major changes you need to get buy-in from like the rest of the community but it's not like you know things can't change of course their things can and do change quite regularly but uh at least as it has been in the past and as it is right now for the right reasons or for like the majority kind of rule reasons because ethereum is not a democracy ethereum to get something into the network requires a super majority so it's definitely not a democracy um and there's no kind of like on-chain voting or anything like that

so you know that's what kind of like why i thought about it in that in that kind of like frame of reference there uh but i think sometimes people kind of look at the word empire and kind of like have negative connotations behind that because as i mentioned before empires traditionally the nation-state empires they're completely centralized and nation-states always want to centralize power within them they don't want to kind of like give up power they always try to console that as much power as they can and you've seen this with pretty much every single nation state like i can't think of any nation states that willingly give up their power if they give up their power or their independence it's usually because they're being strong i'm doing it by another more powerful nation state right um whereas uh they don't that kind of like willingly give up their power so

from that perspective um you know i get why the the the term kind of like empire carries that negative connotation but ethereum is literally the opposite of that ethereum wants to kind of like decentralize and distribute out it you know power over the network to everyone it doesn't want to consolidate it within itself it actually wants to get more decentralized over time by design and it has been right it's ethereum started off as extremely centralized from the get from from kind of the early days because it was just a small group of people building it there was no real community or anything like that it was a very small group and then over time more and more people kind of like get into ethereum and and come to you know become community and community members and builders or whatever else and that actually um increases ethereum's

decentralization whereas if the you know you go into a nation state and the kind of like more people that they're in a nation-state what ends up happening is that it just actually forces the next nation state to centralize more consolidate more power they have more kind of population which means they have more gdp i mean a good you know first world nation state i mean sometimes there are kind of like more populations at a lower gdp but i'm talking about the nation states like the us and uk and and you know all the really big ones right um and canada like those sorts of things right they kind of like consolidate power consolidate economic kind of like throughput and their gdp grows with the more population that comes into it ethereum is similar in that like it's quote unquote gdp or its economic activity will grow with the

more people that come into the network but it will not consolidate any more power it would actually decentralize that power out because more people will run full nodes more people will run validators to other networks more people will be involved in the governance process in educating and building so from that perspective you could you can truly say that ethereum flips the kind of like empire traditional meaning on its head uh and cr and basically makes it so that's a positive thing rather than a negative thing so yeah anyway just a few of my thoughts on that one there i wrote a little bit more about this in the newsletter today but uh that just kind of like came to me when i was when i was watching this show the other day and then it came back to me today i was like wow okay you know ethereum really is

this empire that just keeps growing but it's the the kind of like the most important thing about ethereum is that yes it keeps growing and growing but it doesn't become central more centralized the more it grows uh which i think is quite amazing right like i don't think we've seen that before in any kind of like uh empire throughout all of history and we haven't we definitely haven't seen kind of like a digitally native empire in all of history because i mean you can't really call facebook or twitter i mean you can call them empires but they're very different in the sense that like it's not really something where you can feel like you're a citizen of facebook or a citizen of twitter whereas for ethereum i feel like i'm a citizen of it because i have my own wallet uh you know there's laws that i

buy by the network laws that i literally can't break because they're they're kind of like embedded into the network i have my own digital uh kind of like native currency being eighth which i use to pay my quote unquote taxes which is the gas phase right uh and you know and then do everything else on there like defy and everything else that you can do on there but anyway i'm gonna leave it at that for now bunch of other stuff to get through uh so another blog post a new blog post from vitalik called endgame so in this post vitalik talks a lot about how he believes that block production so kind of like uh when you know miners or stakers in the future produce blocks he or even and layer twos as well so block production at layer two he believes that this is going to become very centralized

due to mav so then because of that how do we kind of like keep the trustlessness and decentralization properties of ethereum if block production becomes centralized and in this kind of blog post he describes the notion of kind of like separating the concerns and making it so that even if block production is completely centralized with one entity they can't actually do anything to censor users do anything to break the rules of the network um because block validation is still trustless and highly decentralized um and censorship is still prevented because of that so i highly recommend giving this blog post to read because it does get quite technical um and then explains a lot better than i can and kind of like on the refuel and then after you're done reading this post from vitalik i suggest going and reading

polynei's post which is actually a follow-up called fanciful endgame where uh he basically says that all polynomial basically says that his blog post is supposed to be less research and more dreams and the tldr is that specialized execution layers specialized settlement layers and specialized data availability layers cooperating in tandem is one million times better than mega megalomaniac blockchains aka l1 so sticking on theme for polynomial right we all hate monolithic megalomaniac blockchains we love modular blockchains um you definitely should give this blog post to read after breeding vitaliks of course because the talks as i said um is very kind of like research and technical um uh pioneers is more about like i guess like the higher

level kind of like dreamy stuff like you know more dreams as i describe it here so it's good to kind of like get both ends of the kind of like spectrum here and it's quite amazing that paulina was able to put this out so fast after vitalik published his his kind of blog post uh it's just incredible the amount of kind of like stuff polly now puts out so yeah definitely go check out both of these blog posts they'll be linked in the youtube description below so xerox mons has teased a kind of like i guess alternative to open c called onc today in a in a kind of i guess twitter thread here now the context around this is that openc basically today confirms that they're not going to do a token with a new hire that they did i think they hired lyft's lyft's former cfo as their

new cfo and people are speculating that uh open c's basically going to ipo they're not going to be doing a token um so like where are the alternatives like can we build an alternative to open c for that reason but also for a bunch of other reasons like open seas contracts smart contracts are still not verified uh which means you can't actually see what what the code is under the hood um because they're not gonna do a token it means there's no hope of community ownership uh which is kind of like obviously really bad uh it's completely centralized and they have a monopoly right now we wanna decentralize that out so xerox mons is creating o and c which is basically their uh kind of like take on on kind of like a decentralized open c it's going to have a token called i think called sudo that's uh that's tied

to sudo swap which is a digital marketplace for nfts which is actually on layer 2 right now i believe it's on zk sync i believe last time i saw this um but yeah it's going to be basically doing everything that open c isn't trying to decentralize out an nft marketplace making it truly community owned making it kind of like cross-chain and flexible and all these sorts of stuff so definitely go kind of like read the kind of twitter thread here from xerox mons which explains this a lot better um but i'm all on board with this like i love openc for what it is but it's missing so much of kind of like the ethereum spirit at the end of the day it is not kind of like uh open source it is not decentralized it has no plans of being decentralized and plans of doing a

token it um doesn't really seem like they're playing you know too well with the community on on that front i mean there's a lot of things that could be better about it they don't innovate that quickly um i feel like they could be innovating much faster and if they had community ownership it'd probably be even faster there so i think that for all the good that open c has done there is kind of like a lot of stuff that is missing and i really want to see competition kind of enter this arena with there's been some attempts at the competition for openstack on other from other people but i don't think anything's been kind of like a real serious attempt yet so i'm curious to see if anyone can actually kind of like come in and start chipping away at open seas kind of marketplace market share i

should say because i'm pretty sure it's like at least 90 plus at this point if not more of the general kind of like nft marketplace volume and that's not healthy he's never healthy for something to have a lot of market share um so anything that we can do to kind of like decentralize that out and create alternatives the better and i'll definitely keep kind of like promoting those to you guys and making sure that you're well aware of them so definitely go give this a thread a read so parallel has announced today a new kind of like service called imp inbox which is end-to-end encrypted communication between wallets secured by your ethereum address it is a service for anyone to send and receive messages to any wallet using their ens or xerox address so you can kind of see it here um kind of like you can kind of click

launch inbox and it'll take you to kind of like the interface i'm not going to do it because it'll kind of like launch into my my wallet and everything like that and kind of like probably set up some prompts um but this is really cool uh wall-to-wall communication is definitely something that needs more products built around it because we have this amazing kind of like thing in an ethereum wallet that can send messages and can be like your login like we've got to sign in with ethereum effort happening and things like that but we're not really harnessing it like we could so it's really cool to see that parallax has come along with this thing called inbox which they're promising it to be kind of like wallet to wallet communication and end-to-end encrypted so i could as success name and it can be a secure

end-to-end encrypted chat just like a signal or i think you know telegram does this as well and there's a few other apps out there that will do end-to-end encrypted chats and for those of you who don't know what this means it means that no one can intercept what we're saying to each other over the internet because uh the only way to read the message is to decrypt it using the private key that is stored on your device so for example if you're using kind of like a a meta mask and you sign the kind of like sign to start the chat with uh with someone um then that kind of private key of your ethereum wallet is the is the decryption key for for that end to end chat there so that's the way it works and now obviously if your private key became compromised they

would be able to kind of like see your messages but um the whole point of it is it's just kind of like a client to client thing where while the message is traveling over the internet no one can kind of like see what's in it they can intercept it they can kind of like download it but they can't decrypt it right it's all encrypted um so you know that's been a kind of like privacy kind of like uh breakthrough for a while now um and it's been used by these privacy apps for a while but it's really cool to see it come to kind of like the ethereum ecosystem and uh you you'd be allowed to kind of like use these services without having to sign up with your mobile number or having to sign up with kind of like your email address or anything else

because some of those things are definitely like personal personal identifi identifiable information um and kind of like you don't want to be giving your phone number everywhere either uh a and your email address too so doing it with just kind of like your public ns or even a private you don't have to do it with your public in as you can do with like a private wallet is really really cool because you can just set up an ethereum wallet anonymously right just right now you can go into metamask or you can get your ledger out get your lattice one out create a new wallet fund it with some eth you know you could go through tornado cash from one of your other wallets to find your new wallet with eth and um you know you'll be well on your way to kind of like having a fully private messaging

service where it'd be very very hard to track who you were which i think is really really cool so definitely go check this out if you haven't already i think there's a thread here with a bit of you know a few more explanations about this um it's in beta and only supports metamask hot wallets right now so so yeah if you want to try it out you do need to have a metamask wallet there so brian armstrong uh ceo of coinbase uh tweeted out today that uh well i guess like unveiled today uh something called crypto cryptology which is coinbase's open source cryptograph cryptography library here so this is kind of a collection of um i guess like cryptography tools or cryptography kind of like research and and dev stuff that uh people at coinbase have been working on for a little while

now including stuff around zk snarks um stuff like threshold signing bls i mean halo 2 ring signatures a lot of this stuff that kind of like you guys have heard of before um but yeah this is now kind of like available on a github repository so if you click through here you're able to see it on on github everything yeah now obviously this is not for end users this is for developers or people interested in cryptography cryptography researchers but it's really cool to see that coinbase is open sourcing this because they've obviously funded it out of their own pocket as a private kind of company but now they're kind of um i guess like open sourcing this for everyone to to use to study to contribute to which is the crypto spirit i mean i've talked about before how i i believe that coinbase is so very

strongly aligned with kind of like the crypto spirit especially the ethereum kind of like um spirit and theorem values and ethos and this is just another kind of like sign from them that they're continuing to to give back to a community that is obviously or to an ecosystem that has obviously given so much to coinbase over the years of course and it's kind of like a symbiotic relationship you know people often argue that or some people often say that uh you know it's kind of like a chicken and egg if coinbase didn't exist would a lot would would um you know a lot of americans have gotten their first crypto earlier than they would have probably not right but at the same time like without crypto coinbase doesn't doesn't work because coinbase is made to kind of like do crypto trading so yeah it's cool

to see that bit of symbiotic relationship with there with where coinbase still offers an amazing on and off ramp for uh the people who have access to it i don't think i have access to selling crypto on coinbase yet which is still weird but anyway i know in the u.s people do you know buy and sell um and they're giving back you know in in other ways as well so really really cool to see this so uh mirror has uh kind of like updated their website today so they've uh improved the mirror dashboard so if you're on there as a creator there's a new way to create to create across your projects and communities uh and you can connect your wallet and see the freshest tools by uh by kind of like um going to the website here and doing all that um now obviously mirror was the

platform that we use for the nf team in here they're a great little platform i the the thing is i i've been meaning to kind of like migrate my newsletter to mirror because what mirror allows you to do is kind of like do web 3 native things where you'll have seen today in the blog post that i wrote alongside the nft mint is that i embedded the nft in the blog post where you could just click the collect nft button sign it with your uh your wallet um so sorry sign the transaction with your wallet and then you were kind of like able to purchase that uh that nft that way but there's also other things you can do where you can you can create like an nft out of the blog post itself and people can actually own the blog post on the on the platform um and or you can

just like attach an nft to a post and say hey if you want to support me mint this nft is part of the post directly inside it there's no need to go to a third party website or anything like that you've got it directly inside it so mirrors trying to build kind of like web3 native tools they have really cool features like splits which is what we use for the nft mint as well where we did a trustless split where eighty percent of the proceeds went to me twenty percent went to kid air and that eighty percent that went to me i was able to then withdraw it from the split send it to the open grants uh core devs kind of like page there and everything was kind of like visible on chain which was really cool as well so yeah mira is just awesome i love kind of

like what they're doing i love their web 3 you know first and native approach definitely what we want to see more of and as i said like i've been trying to kind of like find uh the right way to kind of like migrate the daily grade newsletter to mirror but at the same time i don't think they support kind of like um email kind of like subscriptions just yet i know they have like ways around that you can use third-party tools but i would love to have like an all one all-in-one experience so when they do that i may migrate across because it would really awesome to kind of like create nfts out of some of the the blog posts that i've done or at least some of the ones like the eip1559 blog posts that i did or the newsletter i did i did for the 300th edition of the

newsletter create an nft out of that sell it and then donate the proceeds to core devs again right i just want to do more of that sort of stuff there so keep an eye out for that um but yeah cool to see a new improved kind of like dashboard uh from from mirror here all right so final thing to talk about with some unisop v3 starts so over the last two weeks unit top v3 saw a new 24-hour volume record of 4.8 billion dollars set a weekly volume all-time high of 21 billion dollars and generated more ethe usd volume than coinbase crazy right absolutely crazy this is just v3 v2 is still very popular um because v2 has more of a kind of like passive liquidity approach and there's still a lot of liquidity in there so a lot of trades get routed uh kind of like

through that but this is absolutely insane i mean as you guys know i've talked about how uh unisop still has like a large chunk 75-80 percent of the dex market uh and that has only been growing over time now the reason why i wanted to kind of like uh talk about this is because of what i was talking about earlier about kind of like how openc has a near monopoly on the nft marketplace uh kind of like stuff going on and uni swap has a new monopoly on dex trading volumes maybe not as bad as kind of like openc has on nfts but you know they still have like a lot of trading volume that routes through it now there's been arguments before about like is this a good thing is this a bad thing when the sushi swap stuff happens and the fork happened everyone was like

this is good unisop finally has some competition on the amm front and fair enough like i i actually agree with that i i do believe that if it was just uni swap and no other amms existed then it wouldn't be it wouldn't be ideal but it's very hard to break a network effect for a decentralized exchange like uni swap especially when they're innovating more than any any other kind of like amm ecosystem i think right now except maybe sushi swap if they deliver on their trident promises and stuff like that but i'm sure unisop is working on you know the v4 already and you know uni swap is fully decentralized it has a governance process in in in kind of like play it's fully open source it's an ethereum community darling it has an insane brand like

everyone knows unisrop right like um it has an insane amount of kind of a a kind of network effect because of that it still does uh the amount of volume that it does is because i think a lot of people just go straight to the union swap interface or they uh they don't go through decentralized exchange aggregators because a lot of retail users are happy just to go directly to uni swap especially if they're speculating on um you know random kind of like uh dog tokens for example they go straight to to uni swap there and also because of these network effects there's a lot of arbitrage bots that are set up on uni swap between the pools there's a lot of um uh kind of like mav stuff happening as well so breaking unisop's network effect is going to be incredibly hard but i really do hope that it kind of

like unisoft doesn't get to like all of the index volume like 90 to 100 of the dex volume not because unisop is a bad product but because we do need competition here we do need more innovation here we don't want kind of like innovation and competition to slow down in this space because the amm space is still kind of like very wide it still can be improved upon in a lot of ways i know unisop's doing a lot there uh but i would love to see other teams kind of like enter the fray and do a lot there as well so and this goes for like anything within crypto or anything within any industry just like monopolies do not breed kind of like good outcomes in my mind it just it means less innovation it means like uh kind of like there's less competition which means people which means kind of

like uh products can actually or at least teams and products can do bad things and there's kind of like no repercussions because it's kind of like where are you going to go like this is actually what happened in the us i don't know how much it happens these days but for a long time there a lot of um states in the u.s or at least towns in the u.s only had one internet service provider and you couldn't switch literally so what ended up happening was that this internet service provider was just bad they didn't care right because where else are they going to go like where are the customers going to go if you haven't got access to an alternative you're stuck with this one provider they can do whatever they want they suffer no recourse because they know you want the internet like if you can't go anywhere

else then um you basically either have no internet or you move you move states or something like that or move cities and most people aren't going to do that so that's what ends up happening it's like okay you know this product or service does something bad provides bad service and you just don't have an alternative never a good outcome so yeah but in saying that unisop's growth is just incredible like i i remember tweet uh tweeting my predictions for 2020 at the beginning of last year where i said that i thought that unisop would do 100 i think it was 100 million maybe or a billion dollars a 24 hour volume or something like that by the end of the year that ended up coming true because of defy summer but at the time i believe unisop was only doing something like 10 million dollars a 24 hour volume now it

does many many billions at layer one hundreds of millions at layer two and that's only going to keep growing over time so uh yeah no not a knock on uni swap here their growth has been phenomenal but i would really hope that it doesn't just turn into like unisop and that's it i really do want to see other amms kind of like competing there as well and on that note i'm going to end it there for today so thank you 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