General market talk, AllCoreDevs update and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #342 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where you cap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony desano and today the 28th of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so already almost the end of march guys it's crazy how fast time goes right we're almost in april almost time for the uh ethereum conferences around amsterdam i was actually just looking at all the ones that i was going to attend today and i am super super excited uh you know just a bit of an alpha leak i guess um the ones that i'm i'm probably going to attend our eighth day the staking gathering layer to amsterdam shelling point the eighth amsterdam hackathon and mev day there's oh man there's so many events happening around devconnect in in amsterdam it's gonna be basically impossible to get to

all of them but those are the ones that i think i'm going to be at and i'll i'll post that in the discord channel when i'm more kind of like finalized around that but i was just looking at it all today and thinking you know i want to go to these one sort of thing and i messaged some of the organizers that uh if amsterdam was like how can i get involved here so i think i'm going to be a judge uh for the 8th amsterdam hackathon uh and maybe be on some panels there i'm doing a talk at the staken gathering run by each staker already confirmed there and there might be other things that i do as well so i'm super pumped for that but i'll talk more about that as kind of like we get closer to the to the dates there one thing i wanted to

talk about before we jump into the news is how good is this recent price action for eth right you guys know that i don't like focusing on price too much but i think like unless we come down from here i think it like uh it's just a very positive place to be you know just kind of like looking at where we've come from over the past few months like how long we've kind of ranged i've been range bound for it's really really exciting to see that uh is starting to move up in a really positive way again obviously the narrative around the merge has really started coming into its own i'm seeing so many people talk about it now i'm seeing mainstream media cover it all those sorts of things even though the mainstream media gets a lot of things wrong they're still covering it which i

guess you know could you could argue that's better than than them not covering it uh and you know just things feel a lot more positive than they did even a couple months ago which is which is really really cool and i think it's it's funny because you have all this positivity going on within the ethereum ecosystem within things happening around ethereum especially at the core protocol level but then there's a there's still a kind of like a bunch of drama going on i think when it comes to things like you know core developer funding which i discussed last week on on the refuel and that was a big point yeah that was just like a huge point of discussion over the last kind of like week or so uh then you have uh obviously all the infighting still within the crypto tribes that still goes

on i mean all this sort of stuff i don't know i feel like it's it's cycle kind of like um uh it's it's not sensitive to the cycles i feel like it always kind of like happens uh over over the years and i think when you kind of like zoom out a bit you can see periods of time where things kind of like swing one way or seeing the other you know during the during the 2018-2019 bear market a lot of people swung towards bitcoin maximalism because that was kind of like the safe haven for them to be a lot of people gave up on ethereum but then when ethereum came back in 2020 especially with d5 summer and all that those same people kind of like swung back to to ethereum now i didn't see anyone kind of like swinging to bitcoin maximalism lately or anything like that over the

past i guess like six months twelve months since we've been in this kind of like range bound thing here uh and that's really positive i think i think the wins definitely changed i think ethereum really did prove itself to the wider market and i think that going forward there's not going to be those kind of like cycles that we're used to i mean this this current quantum quote cycle since if you want to say it started in march 2020 it's definitely been completely different to previous crypto cycles uh you know i i think people are coming coming to terms with that and tuning into that and being and realizing that you know it doesn't just go oh okay bitcoin will pump then eat will pump and then quote-unquote alts will pump i don't think it's like that anymore i think things are being more and more

separated into their own categories people are kind of like buying and and speculating on these things as if that that their own thing now don't get me wrong in times of kind of like volatility especially extreme volatility to the downside everything seems to dump together but i think i'm talking more on like the month-long time scale kind of like months few months sort of thing rather than like the day-to-day stuff uh i think the correlations are definitely dropping especially for things that can actually stand on on their own actually have fundamentals backing it up i think that's a really positive development i've noticed at least over the last uh 12 to 18 months especially over the last 12 months and and you know especially over the last i guess six but we'll have to see you know there's still a lot of crap out there that that

that that gets a bid i mean i i was just looking at kind of like a coin gecko just before shiba inu is still number 15 right i i don't understand why but it is xrp is still number six like what you know there are still things cardano is still in the top ten there are still things that have like you know you kind of look at that you're like this is super weird um but i think a lot of that is just like kind of like legacy momentum and legacy inertia and over time these things kind of get washed out so we're gonna have to see obviously how that plays out over the coming years especially as this space continues to institutionalize but that was just a little bit of i guess commentary on the markets that i wanted to make but anyway enough for the

markets time to jump into the update so we have the latest all-core devs update uh number 10 here from tim biko covering basically everything happening in the core devs world so there's a tldr at the top here you guys know all about the kiln merge test net i'm not going to repeat myself there shanghai the upgrade that's coming after the merge to to the protocol i've talked about that a lot recently uh work on an executable spec for ethereum's execution layer is progressing nicely uh next step is uh harmonizing the execution layer and consensus layer upgrade processes this is kind of like the governance process there and the protocol guild which i've talked about a lot lately uh is kind of like covered in there so i definitely recommend giving this kind of poster read the protocol guild is something that i really want more

people to kind of like to pay attention to and the tldr is that it's an initiative being spun up by a few different people trent vanepts is leading this in order to basically uh get more kind of like money into the hands of public goods not just ethereum core developers but public goods kind of like in general right can be layer one core developers can be layer two can be people building tools can be anything basically um and the way that that could be done is getting all the kind of like projects with that build on ethereum to give just one percent of their treasury to uh the protocol guild and the protocol guild kind of disperses this out to the relevant people i think it's funny because like we've had stuff like this in the past i mean git coin is obviously an example of something like

this especially with the matching rounds uh the dow was like a was pretty much a um an attempt at this um but as a for-profit version where a token was issued and then as that they are invested in projects the token would logically go up in value because it had a claim on those tokens all that sort of stuff but the protocol guild as far as i understand it is trying to be a non-profit kind of like venture it's just trying to align incentives here and get more people kind of like donating to core developers um and get you know get these projects to kind of give back to the developers that are actually keeping the network alive so i definitely recommend that more people pay attention to the protocol guilds here i think it's very important uh as i said you can read this blog post it's got all the details

in it but uh it's also got links to learn more about all of that stuff as well so this will be linked in the youtube description for you to go check out so there's been a bit of talk recently about uh this girly shadow fork that happened recently uh with regards to the merge so what this is and ben edgington has a great explanation of what the shadow fork is here uh so basically shadow forks are basically uh uh where they take the state of an existing network so the state of gurley for example and mirror it onto a merge proof-of-stake network this means that the transactions from the real network can be replayed onto the shadow network as they occur the gurley network or shadow fork today today being i think the 25th of march is when ben put out this update and there are

plans to repeat this every couple of weeks uh due to transaction ordering issues the two networks gradually get out of sync so the shadow needs to be reinitialized every now and again for maximum effectiveness now why would you want to do this well you want to be able to see what's um what kind of like a uh a merged network kind of like looks like merch proof of stake network looks like using i guess real test net transactions now this is not the test nets uh being kind of like merged you know that's coming up next at the girlie robsten covant all those kind of like test nets there they're being um forked eventually uh and they're going through the merge transition process this is just like shadow forks that individuals or teams are kind of like spinning up in order to kind of like i guess do more

testing do more similar simulating here as i said to you guys before i think the main thing right now for the merge is just test test test make sure we catch all those education cases make sure we don't have a repeat repeat of what happened with kiln because what happened with with the kiln test net especially with prism producing invalid blocks that wasn't a big deal for the kiln test net because of the fact that uh prism didn't have a super majority but as i stated before if this happened on mainnet it would have been like the worst case scenario and this is what i've been talking about with regards to client diversity where essentially uh prism being the super majority on on the network at least i think the last time i checked they were i i think the latest stats from what i'm

hearing is is kind of like showing that prism is no longer the super majority but let's just assume they still are um if that happened on main net uh there would have been it would have been uh pretty bad right it would have been basically a failed merge essentially uh because of the fact that prism has or had that super majority there now as i've said before i think we can get to a point where no client has the super majority leading up leading into the merge there's a lot of work being done on client diversity guys uh both in in public and in the background uh it's actually amazing to see kind of like the community come together and push this i think super fears as i mentioned before has been an absolute champion at this get rallying all the right people contacting all the right people he's

been really great about it but you know it's really taken a whole community effort here from from from you guys kind of like talking about it even if you just kind of uh i guess put attention on it on on twitter on the discord channel or anything like that and potentially you're running your own kind of like staking software and you're not running the majority client you're actually running a minority client you know everything counts sort of things so i think there's a lot of positive kind of like work being done there i think we're going to get below i think prism will will be below 66 at least by the merge which is the super majority threshold if we can get it under 60 that would be amazing we're gonna have to see what the staking service providers do obviously coinbase and kraken account for a large

set of the stake is and they're basically using all prism i think from uh from what i've seen they seem to be more open now than they were to changing their clients so i actually think this is gonna be a really cool thing once that plays out and seeing them kind of like get off the majority client get onto the minority ones and then as they spin up new kind of i guess uh validated clients they stop spinning up the the the um the kind of like uh the majority one and they go for the minority ones there so yeah these shadow forks are cool thing to keep keep paying attention to see how they kind of like play along uh but yeah there's plenty of these and there's also a lot of merged devnets happening as well uh and just on on the note of ben's

newsletter here he published his latest what's new in eth2 nice healthy and chunky one i suggest giving it a read as i mentioned plenty of times before guys if you want to keep up with e3 this is the newsletter that you need to subscribe to there is really nothing else that is as comprehensive as ben's newsletter here for keeping you up to date with e2 with all the kind of like stuff happening in the wider ethereum roadmap honestly without this i'd be completely lost to be honest like it's just amazing all the kind of like updates he can fit into this and he covers so much stuff like i think i'm across the ethereum ecosystem uh especially kind of like the the um the protocol ecosystem but no i mean ben uh has has me beat there that's for sure but it's good because i he kind of like

produces this for free gives it gives all the information out there for us to kind of enjoy so i'll link this in the youtube description for you to check out as well all right so pseudotheos is two tweets that i wanted to highlight from them today so one of them was uh this simple one where they said zk rollups are the most significant blockchain of innovation since smart contracts i totally agree with this i i still think i've said this plenty of times but i still think the majority of people in crypto are underestimating just how important zk technology is i guess not just in the roll-up context but just as a kind of like broader thing not just for scalability but also privacy uh but like even beyond that right there are use cases that we haven't even come up with yet they can kind of um

they can kind of play a part here and as i said before there are so many teams working on zk stuff now billions of dollars worth of kind of research and development going into this sort of stuff that it really is quite amazing to see i mean you know just the layer twos alone just in the scalability front not even the privacy front are making just massive strides we saw zk sync the other week go live with their zk vm test nets um you know i have a tweet here from polygon teasing that there's two massive product releases coming up shortly and they said polygons multi-chain ethereum ecosystem is about to explode look i don't like you guys know i'm going to advise it a polygon but i don't have any special insight here i'm going to assume that this has got something to do with their zk stuff maybe they have a

zk evm test net going live as well so yeah there's just so much stuff happening here guys it's actually insane and that's just the scalability front then there's the privacy front with where aztec protocol is doing a lot of great work here um there's a bunch of other projects out there as well kind of like incorporating zk stuff into into their kind of like privacy tools and and really you guys know that that two of the things that i really focus on or main things that i focus on within the theme ecosystem is privacy and scalability because i think without those things we're never going to achieve mass adoption and they're both being worked on in parallel using similar technologies as well so we're going to continue to see this cambrian explosion it is just as innovative and just as important since smart contracts came to be like i

always talk about zero to one innovations within crypto you don't get them very often but when you do it's actually magical i mean smart contracts were a zero to one in innovation for blockchains there's no denying that uh and i think zkp zero knowledge proofs in general are a zero to one innovation for the blockchain ecosystem but just for computing in general i think um and and you know it's just going to take us to the next level of where we want to be and and kind of i guess some uh get us uh uh get us there with scalability and privacy so very much looking forward uh forward to that so i just wanted to highlight that from sudo theos another tweet from them at that which is uh going to be a little bit of a rant here but this is a good tweet

sudo theo says uh how to make 20 how to make a 22.7 billion dollar protocol in 2022 step one fork geth step two crank up throughput step three attach blockchains to the main blockchain while exclaiming that l2s are too complex step four advertising subway station step five say you solved the scalability trilemma now obviously pseudotheos was talking about the avalanche ecosystem blockchain whatever you want to call it here you guys know i'm not a big fan of of avalanche i do give credit to some of the other layer ones out there that are doing stuff differently so you know solana for example is not just a straight kind of like ethereum fork they're actually doing stuff differently even though i believe that solana's architecture is not long-term sustainable and that that it's basically

centralized at least at least like if i had to give them something at least they're doing something different here but avalanche i mean you could argue that i mean i would argue that the only thing that's novel about them is the consensus mechanism and honestly i don't think that's enough i don't think that's enough to consider something to be like a zero to one innovation as i as i mentioned before um and really what they have is literally just ethereum with a higher gas limit um and and faster blocks which has sacrificed pretty much all decentralization in my eyes and not only that but their founders are constantly on twitter gaslighting um and kind of like spreading misinformation about layer twos and you know if they weren't doing that if they were actually living up to their kind of like i guess mantra of

we're all in this together or good vibes only as i've said before i wouldn't really have an issue with it but my issue with a lot of these other l1s is really the social layer at the end of the day like the tech is is bad don't get me wrong the tech is actually really bad and there's not really much happening there in terms of innovation but it's the social kind of layer that i always always look at if you just run through kind of like all the alternative l ones or at least most of them their social layers are really bad i mean look at cardano for example like the the cardinal fanboys defend that thing like it's the best thing ever when you know the smart contracts went live and you you saw that they could do barely any tps it was actually worse than ethereum

and it's still going nowhere and on top of that you have charles hodgkinson making fun of ethereum saying it's outdated technology you know d5 is easy all this sort of stuff so again social layer stuff avalanche as i mentioned both founders uh or well i guess like i'm not exactly sure how many founders there are but like kevin and emin um which you've probably seen on twitter a lot they're always kind of like gaslighting trash talking ethereum all this sort of stuff and in the rnes they're just using ethereum so that's which is funny um solana same deal anatoly has done this before he's gaslighted about l2s he talks he basically speaks in tongues like a lot of the time he speaks like a web to engineer um which isn't necessarily bad but he also kind of like floods ethereum a bit as well i mean i'm not going to go

through them all here but it's just it's it it's kind of like it feels weird it seems like a requirement for these alternative l1 that they have to kind of like give to ethereum or kind of like point out ethereum's flaws and it's just hilarious that a lot of them are just only able to be because they're sitting on the backs of ethereum at the end of the day especially something like avalanche which i mean they have this subnet thing coming out which is literally just side chains but the only thing they have today is the c chain um the only thing that has any real use is the c chain which as i said is is a direct death fork it is basically the same thing as using ethereum just without the decentralization because they've they've cranked up the hardware requirements essentially by cranking up the gas limit and things

like that um so so yeah i mean as i said that was going to be a little bit of a rant there guys but it really isn't saying how much money can be made doing this sort of stuff um and i wrote about this in the newsletter today where i basically said i don't believe the avalanche ecosystem has given a cent back to ethereum public goods or especially ethereum core developers even though they've made billions of dollars off of their work like it's just i mean it comes back to the tragedy of the commons thing this isn't just exclusive to crypto in the web 2 world you have a lot of open source software that is used by these massive billion dollar trillion dollar companies like you know companies like microsoft and apple and as far as i know a lot of the time they give barely anything if anything to

the people that maintain this open source software and it's just bizarre right like you'd think that they'd give grants like what's what's a few million dollars in a grant or even like 10 million dollars in a grant to uh to these open source developers that are building the software that they trillion dollar companies are using to improve their own products like what's that and they still don't do it i just i don't understand it really is bizarre and the same is true for crypto because i mean apple they're sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cash same with with other kind of like big tech companies out there and what they can't spare a few million 10 million 20 i mean even like you know tens of million just to pay these open source people or give a grant to these open source developers

that are maintaining this sort of stuff and same goes for crypto what the avalanche ecosystem can't give money back to ethereum core developers as thank you like uh it's it's just it's insane right like as you guys know i'm a really really big proponent for public goods funding i try to do as much of it myself as i can but sadly i don't have you know a token that i'm that i can shill and then i can dump and donate all the proceeds to core developers you know sometimes i think to myself why don't i just kind of like issue a token and donate literally all the money i make from it to core developers you know i i could do that but i get but that opens up legal troubles right that opens up to everyone calling me a scammer all these sorts of things but i would truly do

that i mean i did it with the nft drop i donated all the proceeds after i paid uh the artist two core developers i have no issue doing that um but the problem is is that i don't wanna be called a scammer i don't wanna run into legal troubles around this i don't wanna issue a pointless token just to uh you know donate the the money maybe if you were totally transparent about it and basically said to people hey if you buy this token you are literally throwing money away it is worth nothing it's literally worthless it's not like the meme of a valueless governance token is literally worthless it does nothing and maybe it doesn't have to be an ese20 token maybe it has it can be another nft drop maybe i do it you know maybe in the future i do something else that's hyped

up right that and then i can donate all the proceeds but i don't think the point is that i think the point is is that people make billions of dollars off of other people's work and they don't even give even a small amount of that back and that's why initiatives like the protocol guild have gotten started and trying to kind of like change the change change kind of like the narrative here and change how projects approach this but yeah it just it's always insane to me that this kind of like stuff plays out and there's so many people making so much money and we can't even spare uh you know the money to pay these kind of like people that are that are building this software that is allowing for that to happen and you know it goes back to what what we were discussing

last week when uh you know peter brought up the the core developer funding all that sorts of stuff i think it goes way beyond salaries it just goes to to the point where if you see your work copied and forked and endlessly and people are making a ton of money off of it and you see nothing from it it's disheartening right it really feels crappy and i think that we can change that with things like protocol guild as i mentioned before but it it i think for the majority especially these other l1s they're not going to give anything back i mean why would they they don't even have they don't have a inclination to do that because the thing is is that they can keep copying ethereum they can keep copying ethereum upgrades like ip1559 without paying for them because ethereum is still going to

do upgrades and that's the sad reality of it at the end of the day but you know we'll see i'm really optimistic about protocol guild i'm trying to get involved and trying to help with that you know i'm trying to put a spotlight on it uh but it's not just that obviously all the work that git coin is doing there's a lot of work that other people are doing um i i hope that the nft space does more of this you know i saw a i saw a drop recently from i think his name is xcopy he made like 20 plus million dollars from an open edition that he did like really really quickly and as far as i know he's not donating any of that to ethereum public goods or anything and i i look at that and i'm like come on right like at least some of

it like even if you don't donate a ten percent of that two million dollars you're still left with 18 million dollars i know obviously you got to think about it after taxes and all that sorts of stuff but still i mean when i when i kind of like see these large numbers i'm like this is just crazy like we need to do a better job here and i hope we can and i'll keep advocating for this and i'll keep doing what i can in order to kind of like give as much money back to the core developers as i can but at the end of the day i'm just one guy you know i don't have billions of dollars to give to people i don't you know i don't i don't have even even tens of millions of dollars to to give to people um but i i

think that it shouldn't just be reliant on one person or one ecosystem it should be a whole kind of like crypto wide thing and it shouldn't just be a theorem it should be like everyone building great open source you know novel innovative tools they should get the money that they deserve and the recognition that they deserve that comes with that as well but anyway and rant there last couple of things to get through before i end today's episode so polynomial has a new blog post out called the endgame bottleneck historical storage now polynom uh kind of put out this uh this tweet where he says in a previous pros i speculated the final bottleneck is historical storage but i didn't put a number on it in the proto dank shouting faq vitalik mentions 500 terabytes a year is the point where it might get risky now i highlighted this

dank shot proto dank charting faq last week for you guys to check out from vitalik it's also linked here if you want in polynomial tweet here if you want to go check that out again but i was just reading this blog post because i did mention one of paulina's blog posts uh uh so this is this was the one that i mentioned from from feb 27 and this is the one kind of like polly now link tr but they've gone on to kind of like do a thought experiment in this twitter thread uh uh kind of like using those process context so before reading their twitter thread i suggest reading vitalik's kind of like faq here and also reading polynomials blog posts but essentially putting numbers on on this sort of stuff is what playing has done in this thread and i wanted to highlight

for it it's just it's a small thread i want you to guys to check it out because this is what comes kind of like after we not after but like this is this this is the endgame bottleneck at the end of the day this historical storage and essentially what this means is like how do we deal with all the data that's being stored on the ethereum blockchain right like obviously l2s are very data-hungry they want to store data how do we deal with that in such a way that full nodes can still be synced and still be run on consumer hardware and you know there's been a few different kind of like proposals out there i've talked about before like stateless ethereum and and history expiry and all these sorts of stuff and and and kind of like other such such things there which uh polynomial does

cover a little bit here and um and vitalik covers in his faq i believe but this is still kind of like i mean i wouldn't say that it's an open research problem in that we don't have like solutions but it is still very much ongoing research we don't know the the the kind of like implementation that's going to go live in the ethereum network but we do know kind of like or have a rough idea of where we want to get to where we want to be when it comes to this sort of stuff so definitely check out both of these posts and polynomials thread uh it's it's very well worth it i finally hear roman from tornado cash uh announced on twitter that he is building a gas price extension for chrome and firefox that focuses on getting cheaper gas prices by waiting for base fee fluctuations kind of

similar to how legacy gas estimated work but developers specifically for eip1559 so uh basically uh someone replied saying i you know if you wanted a further explanation here someone replied saying i don't understand the use case i can just submit a transaction at whatever gas i want then roman replied by saying uh if you submit with uh with lower base fed in the current one you can still get your transaction mind within five minutes but around 30 cheaper the base fee oscillates around an average value and you only need to catch a single dip to get your cheap transaction mind corey said we're saying the same thing and then remind continued and said oh i incorrectly understood your tweet at first this extension will help you to estimate how long it will take at the price you set when the price you set is too low the transaction might

take forever to get mine so this is pretty helpful i guess like the funny thing is with one five five nine uh since that's been live i've barely had to speed up transactions uh unless like i put my transaction in and then all of a sudden the base face spikes because of the fact that some nft mint is going on or something like that i just smoothed it a lot out but uh this is really cool the fact that you can kind of like set a base fee and then it'll give you kind of like an estimation of of kind of like how long it's going to take for your transaction uh uh to get mine here and this is built directly into an extension i know etherscan does this already but i always like more tools that happen with with gas things and the funny thing is this sort of

stuff really at the end of the day only applies to layer one ethereum when it comes to layer twos in the ideal scenario you don't ever need this you can just kind of like kind of like have your transactions kind of gone through instantly because there's going to be enough scale to kind of support that but i think i mean as the layer twos are still maturing there's still a lot of activity happening on layer one there's a lot of you guys playing around with layer one i'm still playing around with layer one so this sort of stuff is is needed and you know as i said uh it's it's time to get on layer twos today guys just speaking of layer twos you know the gas prices are always uh already up to 30 40 grey again it was below 20 way while we

were kind of like um calm there but as the market continues to heat up if we go over 4k eath and we stay above that we're pretty much going back to all-time high i think and then when that happens you know guys what happened to the wider crypto markets it's going to go bananas and i expect to see 100 plus guay again so the best time to get on layer 2 was yesterday the second best time is today so definitely go and do that while the gas is still cheap but also there are more and more fiat on-ramps coming online there are more and more centralized exchange bridges coming online that are cheaper than directly bridging from layer 1 ethereum but still if you want like the most trustless way to bridge your assets in you definitely want to do it from from layer 1 ethereum uh uh there so go and

do that before gas spikes again as the market continues to heat up but i think that's going to be it for today's episode so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone