ETHStaker GitCoin Grants: STAKEHOUSE, EDDC, and Studymaster - oh my!

Transcript

all right hello everyone i am envetica.ef and today i am joined by colfax and grasp on crypto and today is none under none other than the git coin grant shill fest 5000 uh i'm very excited to uh yeah there we go so to really share exactly what git coin is uh how it works and more importantly the git coin grants that uh we've got published out there to get into it uh right away the git coin platform is pretty exciting it's uh basically uh and either of you correct me if i'm wrong or step in here but my understanding is that it's it's sort of a slew of tools we're focusing today on the git coin grant aspect of it

which allows for anyone with a blockchain based program or idea to submit that idea and get potential funding for it and what makes git coin so interesting is that it relies on something called quadratic funding in fact what i will do and what i want to do here is just play a 60-second clip of the quadratic funding on their [Music] website quadratic funding is the mathematically optimal way to fund an ecosystem in a democratic way the secret behind quadratic funding is the math and it's not as complicated as it sounds

this is how it works qf is basically a crowdfunding campaign wherein you match contributions from everyday citizens with a pool raised from bigger donors the neat thing about quadratic funding is how it optimizes around the grants funded by the crowdfunding campaign here's an example if you have four grants in a one thousand dollar matching round and grant a raises ten dollars from ten different contributors and grant b raises ten dollars from one contributor grant a will get way more of the matching funds because it's supported by a broader swath of the community during the quadratic funding round a donation of ten dollars can be matched with seventy five dollars and a hundred dollar donation can be matched with two hundred and forty dollars

because of the qf formula because the matching multiples are so promising for the best projects quadratic funding has gotten a lot of traction the ethereum community has raised over four million dollars from quadratic funding campaigns contributed to by 500 people quadratic funding powers a mesh network of small donors who are supporting the very best projects in the ethereum space to learn more about how quadratic funding could power your ecosystem's growth check out wtfqf.com but that really isn't the point of this call the point of this call is to uh showcase some of these uh grants that we've got out there and what

i want to open up with um is a couple here and let's start with steakhouse and that's probably because um it's the most exciting because we're part of it and uh also it's the most most useful right so we're uh getting into tools to help uh newbies here and uh to explain that further i'm gonna hand that over to colfax a little bit and because that's his baby that's his project uh and i'll have him explain that one thanks michael what a high accolade i don't know if it's the most exciting is there's so much exciting stuff out there it's definitely exciting i'm excited about it but uh i guess on the high level i mean what steakhouse is what our goal is is

to lower the technical bar to staking on ethereum two and the way that we're going about that is we're building a gui base like a graphical user interface one click installer to help you set up all the infrastructure required to stake on ethereum two so that's your eth1 node taking care of syncing that your e2 beacon node and your e2 validator and we're leveraging a lot of existing tooling so of course the existing clients that are supported we're going to be supporting all eth2 clients so that we can promote client diversity and a lot of thought and effort has been put into the ethereum to launchpad which is an incredible tool so we're actually building

that into our workflow as well and it's yeah it's pretty exciting so um i i love yeah i want to break that that down some more because you're you're going over some some huge details there and i think i really want to break it down for those that aren't in the know here and i think why that's so important is so you're you're building this one click installer which is incredible and for those that don't really know the significance of that why it's so neat is if i want to stake on ethereum 2.0 there are multiple components that i have to set up and then sort of support on my own i gotta i have to know that i have to set up an eth1 node i have to know

how to set up an eth2 node i have to get the beacon chain working and and make sure that the hardware is compliant and monitor all these different basically a whole stack and for those new to the scene but it can be a very overwhelming experience so what you're saying is that this tool basically consolidates all of those things into a single gui where i don't have to deal with necessarily the command line it just does this is that what you're saying that's exactly what i'm saying but it's working if i guess do you think it would be useful should i pop it up on the screen yeah yeah absolutely let's go ahead and do that while you're doing that i do want to also uh sort of point out too one of the reasons why we as e-staker love this platform and the

potential for this tool so much and to kind of echo super fizz or the beacon chain health coordinator one of the things that he advocates so much for is the health of the beacon chain and this tool helps with that in the sense that it just like you said uses all of the eth2 clients we're not just locking into one so having that diversity helps maintain uh the overall health of the uh of the beacon chain which is uh wonderful on that note i'll just try and say a couple other things um that's sort of when i was thinking about this right now many people who want to contribute to a

healthy chain if they have technical abilities they can but if and if they have of course the ease to contribute and but people without the technical abilities even if they have the eath they can't really contribute super easily so that's the idea of sort of like opening up that market and i can't over emphasize how much were we steakhouse are standing on the shoulders of giants here because basically we're just building the last sort of little configuration mechanism on top on top of so many other tools so of course the eth2 clients we actually utilize the rocketpool installer under the hood um and we use so many other tools that are from the community and we sort of just glue them all together into one one user interface absolutely so without further ado i will

show you steakhouse so this is it and again i will emphasize again this is very much early stage releases are first released it's actually not even fully bundled to a desktop application yet if you are watching this and you either have some experience with react or command line tools setting up e2 clients or you have a passion or a desire to even learn any of that stuff please reach out there's a big list of to-do's that we want to do this is fully open source and meant to be a community driven project we want to sort of build a community around building out this tool as well as other tools that help with e2's taking so this is sort of the main screen it sort of gives you a little bit

information about what steakhouse is going to do and you can go ahead and click enter here it automatically runs some system checks so there are certain underlying things that either need to be installed or some underlying hardware requirements right now it just runs a few and we have a list of about maybe 10 others that would be useful to check so we're going to add more checks here but so far our system looks good to install and let's go ahead and click install oh quickly though under advanced you can select some more options eventually once we build out those features for now as you see here it says we will pick a random youth one and eth2 client for client diversity as we were talking about before

love it um but eventually we'd like to be able to configure it for the more advanced users that want to have a little bit more control so without further ado we'll click install uh you actually need to input the password here to install some of the system tools okay and what michael was saying before this next button click is going to do everything sort of for you so i guess michael do you want to talk about a little bit what what steps need to normally happen uh to install or set up an e3's taking rig while this is sort of doing it for us right so this is uh this is kind of fun and interesting so to put this into give this some real

context here so colfax mentioned the validator workshop uh that we the east acre community hosted a few months back now that workshop we took a bare metal server and we spun up on the puremont test net that took about three and a half hours or so was that workshop start to finish and everything that we did in there from setting up a getheath1 node to setting up a lighthouse eth2 beacon validator and then making sure that the user permissions and everything else is set up there's all of that we have to do manually and it's all done via the

command line colfax just did that in less than two minutes with two button clicks like that was i mean initiated really that with one button click and it the program does it all for you there's no interacting and it's uh honestly this is my favorite part to watch to know that we went from such a manual process to this is just outstanding yeah i'm super excited it still gives me chills a little bit seen at work every time uh admittedly i'm a little worried it's gonna somehow not work but it's exciting to see that it does and so as you can see here um there are definitely some ui tweaks that still need to be worked out grasp on crypto has already sort of jumped

on and offered to build out some more features for the screen uh but i'll talk through a few things that you're you're seeing um here you can see so your eth1 node your e2b connect your e2 validator uh these are the three core applications that need to be running in order for you to be staking on the eth2 network there are some statuses here sort of letting you know what's going on your eth1 node needs to basically gather all the information from all the other nodes going back quite some time so the syncing process takes a decent amount of time it can actually even take like a few days or a week so this is sort of telling you here um this is telling you how many peers you have we're still gathering some peers one's not a huge number so here's sort

of telling you the health of your system right here you can see your e2 client you're running as lighthouse um the sinking state we have some more we want to make it a little bit more granular so you have a little deep understanding of what's going on so we're working on that uh here's a few fun things to do while you're waiting for your stuff to sync you can join the estate or discord easttaker subreddit what an incredible community that can answer any questions for you not only learning but troubleshooting troubleshooting issues quick shout out to the eats uh the ethereum study master program which is also run by our good friend michael slash and vetica.ethe which we'll talk about a little bit later maybe i should actually link that here that would be incredible hey i'm not going to say no go for it we'll talk about that

afterwards that would be fun um and yeah so we're just some resources to learn troubleshoot grab some gorilla eat this is just supported for the test network right now and ether scanner beacon chain are two good useful tools it'll give you some info if you are interested in getting a little bit more technical you can click here to view the logs that will either help you understand what's going on underlying for yourself or if you have any issues you can help use these logs to get somebody to help you troubleshoot what's going on um and that's really it when the syncing is done what we'd eventually like to do we built out another screen but it's not accessible right now because it's syncing uh to send you over to the ethereum launchpad

to do your deposit create your keys and officially connect that validator and start a testing in proposing blocks but right now that's that's still under development because we want to be be very careful with that development since that's where the the if your ether actually gets involved so right well and to your point basically to kind of zoom out here and circle back into the git coin grants all of these uh would-be nice features that you've pointed out are effectively the things that you can tackle right away if and when you get that funding it allows you and frees up and provides the resources in order to facilitate those updates thanks again for the opportunity to talk

about it and uh and yeah to share with the community i mean the the last thing i'll emphasize is the whole mission of steakhouse is to serve the community yeah and to build a tool that will be helpful for the community for users that want to stake on east 2 to promote the health of the beacon chain and that's really our mission so if you have any suggestions for how we can better improve features if you want to help out uh we are all yours and that's sort of why we're here and so we're excited about the opportunity to do the git coin grant because that'll just sort of help us facilitate uh more effort towards building out this tool and and serving the community so absolutely

love it very exciting stuff thanks we have a to-do list of like at least 22 dues right now i think on our readme so there's plenty plenty of ideas that's actually a good point so um for those watching the recording everything that we reference both um from the git coin grants all the way to things like uh the git hub repo for this project we'll link to the description of this video so it's uh easy for you to access these things we went over steakhouse and why that would be um you know advantageous for anyone looking to dip their toe into the staking realm sort of in that same spectrum one of the other

grants out there is for the eddc which is the ethereum due diligence committee and for those of you who aren't familiar with this committee it was something birthed of from the east acre community it was a idea actually of super fizzes and the idea for this committee was to help guide anyone looking to solicit a staking pool service there's potential risk um and there's there's opportunity for bad actors so to help navigate the ecosystem we've created the eddc which goes out to all of the staking pools that are out currently

today every single one of them we've reached out to to establish who they are how their systems work and just ask basic questions are you insured where are you located how do you what are your tokenomics um just real basic questions to give more insights um for consumers to make better educated financial decisions now we do have a website up for those interested in learning more about the ethereum due diligence committee that's ethethddc.org the committee meets every single wednesday it's streamed live on the e-staker youtube channel and then

we post the recordings on the channel as well but this just gives um brief um information in terms of who we are what we're trying to achieve and then we can see the preliminary information on the staking pools now so if we click into these we've sent over questionnaires to these respective staking pools to ask exactly what we talked about you know who are their owners how are their how are their teams made were their tokenomics where are they located to give some more insights now this is just sort of an alpha version of the site this should launch fully in the next couple weeks here

so i want to i do want to point out that we do have a grant available for them if you want to see more progress being made within this group this is a great opportunity to help fund and and push the progress being made so things like a more immersive and uh more intuitive website uh quicker turnarounds on evaluations of staking pools more exposure to the meetings things like that will be able to facilitate with additional funding so this is one more out there so again so we went from steakhouse which is uh like basically hands-on uh staking to eddc which helps

uh with staking pools uh but if we zoom out even further and kind of transition to the next uh grant out there which is the ethereum study master and this is a great platform for those that have no idea what the hell we're talking about with the first two grants if you don't know what validators are or staking or staking pools or how ethereum works this is the platform to help guide you it essentially is a learning platform it originated from the east acre group and was a 10-week course actually hosted on reddit so each week effectively a study group would come together we would study and read a single article

we would take a test at the end of that week and after 10 weeks if you passed all those quizzes you got an exclusive study master pull-up so basically it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that one you did all of the work and then two that you know what you're talking about in relation to these courses now right now there's just a single course on the ethereum studymaster platform which is the ethereum 2.0 serenity basically to deep dive into what is ethereum 2.0 from the technical side goes in depth explaining what the consensus mechanism is how validation and blocks work how what

epochs are all of the technical stuff so if you're if you're looking to get into the nitty-gritty this tries to stay within a 10th grade reading level and um and boils those things down into its simplest form that is what this course is now that was sort of the test for it what we're what we're looking to do with it is really broaden it out and expand like what is ethereum and how do you play within this ecosystem so there'll be a couple more courses on how to set up a validator node start to finish everything that you could possibly know from the hardware to the software to spinning it up to maintaining that validator to explaining what nfts are how to mint them why they would be valuable and how to

trade we want to go through the entire range and answer any questions that anyone could possibly ask within the ecosystem so that you're not just sitting on the sidelines watching this thing happen you can you can actively participate and learn about these things so again the links to all these things will be in the description um but if you search for ethereum study master uh we've got a video explaining exactly uh what this is in depth uh and then sort of our road map again these are additional courses and additional feature sets that we're looking to have to to push forward with the additional funding so that is the ethereum studymaster and

just a quick rapid fire shill fest here all of these programs that we're talking about steakhouse eddc ethereum studymaster these are all fresh ideas that have come out of the east acre community these are all sort of the the parent company if you will so we we do as a group have a grant out there as well that i just want to push out there i do want to open up to the both of you just in general and just if we've got a couple minutes for the both of you to kind of discuss have you seen anything just in general out there that maybe excited you or were you were interested to see when you were perusing the git coin platform i found there's a couple projects i was interested in that aren't

on there um but i saw it eat denver i'm hoping they would get on there but uh one was ethereum push notification services um they did a new member presentation i was hoping they would get on bitcoin but i haven't seen them and i want to echo what mike was saying about east taker and their grants that they have the e-staker leaders one of which is michael and and the rest of the folks are definitely don't want to just like push their grampies they're very community driven and very humble and very community for first and so i wanted to take this opportunity to chill easttaker for a little bit further on top of what michael said truthfully i sort of came across the east taker community in november

since then i've gotten much more involved in staking a ton made separate friends uh now i'm working on steakhouse which is incredible uh incredibly exciting for me and the east acre community has been by my side helping supporting getting steakhouse to where it is now and i'm confident that steakhouse will be able to continue to to grow with their support even like logo design from from michael buda has done so many ux reviews and things like that um stake or ease takers supporting things like the eddc study masters so many things and so if you want to see more interesting things like this come into the community i recommend really looking at it because they

are making so much happen and so much possible and actually to that point in addition to uh sort of in promoting and facilitating ideas like steakhouse and eddc and studymaster the east acre community also does events in fact i do want to remind everyone of the upcoming events we have even this month on saturday march 13th we have the live stream of the rocket pool quiz show the quiz show this is the third one we've done this year is a monthly event where we host a community driven basically like a quiz show so we put up

or like a trivia night so we put up ethereum based questions and compete for prizes and co-ops this particular event is rocket pool themed so all the questions uh will be will be about rocket pool to help educate um people about the protocol so again that is saturday march 13th at uh i think it's 8 00 pm uh utc all of those applicable details are on the e staker website and then we have our uh community call coming up to discuss the eth1 eth2 merge that is on saturday march 20th at 1 utc again those details are on our

event calendar at eathstaker.cc and then finally the last event we've got scheduled is on the 27th that is saturday at 10 a.m and that is the next installation of the validator workshop so where we take last time we took a bare metal server spun it up on the test net this time we're going to do the same thing but we're going to do it in a different way we're going to do an mvp version to just show people this is the minimal viable product this is the the you want to spin something up quick and dirty this is what you need to do and then just answer some some questions for newcomers

i'm getting more comfortable with the deposit cli what if you lost your keys how do you regenerate them going through some of the maintenance things like that so we'll be going through all of that on the 27th details for all of that eastaker.cc unless there's anything from the two of you i do first and foremost want to thank both of you for your time this has been awesome i i've loved talking about e-staker i love talking about git coin grant i love talking about all these projects i love seeing these things mature and grow uh so just exciting stuff i'm very pumped and thank you both again for for coming and uh for sharing uh the projects you've been working on this is uh it just blows my mind the quality that

gets shipped out of these uh communities some of these projects are just absolutely amazing so thank you again for the work you've been putting in thank you michael yeah thanks for having us uh here and letting us talk about steakhouse a little bit this was a lot of fun absolutely all right you guys have a good one