Goerli TTD proposed, Rocket Pool scaling and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #408 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where you cap the latest news in your theory ecosystem i'm your host the anthony designer on tuesday 18th of july 2022 alright everyone let's get into it so what an amazing and eventful weekend we had well maybe mine was more eventful because i celebrated my 30th birthday and thank you to everyone who wished me uh happy birthday i really really appreciate it it was a fun time with friends and family but it's all over now i'm entering my 20s uh you know i don't feel 30. sorry i'm exiting my 20s entering my 30s i don't really feel uh 30 years old i feel much older than that because of crypto which is which is funny right like i feel like crypto moves so quickly it just ages you faster and i know a fair few people who have

kind of like said this to me as well so i'm sure a lot of you feel the same way um but not only was it my 30th birthday over the weekend but eth decided to pump i mean all of crypto decided to pump but 8th kind of went up i guess what to about 1500 i'm just looking at the chart now uh it's come a little bit down from that but it went up pretty quickly now i don't know if you know we've bottomed or if we're going to kind of like reverse the trend here or anything like that i doubt it i feel like this is just the first kind of like i guess good recovery we've had since uh the dumping began and i think that you know people are kind of like asking that question of you know is this the bottom

is it not look i'm not into the near short-term kind of like stuff yes i pay attention to the price in the short term but i don't base any of my decisions on kind of on my buying decisions or signing decisions based on that i'm all about kind of like the big picture trends and obviously you guys know i'm i'm ultra bullish on eighth long term i bought a lot of eighth at these lows actually i've been stacking as much as i can because you know i feel it's just much safer to kind of like buy in bulkier than it was obviously much higher but you know i buy eight when i can basically and and you've got to make up your own decisions of when you buy and when you sell and everything like that like you guys know i'm not selling i'm just kind of trying to stack more

validators but you know that's not a strategy for most people like definitely if you want to take profits you should take profits uh but you know nothing i say on on here is investment advice but yeah you guys know i've been buying kind of like down here and i'm happy to wait like i'm not a short-term medium-term investor i'm a long-term investor happy to wait see how things play out and i just have too many reasons to be bullish on each like i know the macro environment is still i know that we had the biggest inflation numbers in 40 years last week like i get all that but at some point right like the bleeding and the pain stops and then you kind of like reverse a little bit and maybe you just kind of trend sideways for a while like i as i said i

don't think this is this is a reversal of a trend i don't think that we're kind of going going back into like a full-blown bull market and he can keep going up like before that you know it comes back down to to to maybe re-test these levels or something like that like eighth could go to 2.5 k or something like that but still come back down like but for a trend reversal to be like fully confirmed and i think i've discussed this on on the refill before it has to kind of go pretty high from from the lows and it has to kind of break some pretty key levels and it's also just kind of like a feeling like whenever i've spotted a trend reversal it's been a feeling for me more than anything kind of like based on fact uh and it's kind of really hard to pinpoint

when that feeling will come uh it has definitely hasn't come yet i don't definitely am i'm not saying that we're going into a new bull market or anything like that but it's good that we're getting some positive price action because i think it just makes the space a lot more positive it gives hope to people hope is what we've got really at the end of the day and it isn't just with the crypto markets i think i'm thinking about this a lot more uh lately especially over the last few months not just got to do with crypto but just generally it's like hope is such a powerful emotion it's what drives us to keep going uh you know sometimes obviously it's misplaced and you may keep going with something that is already dead but i think a lot of the time like most of the time like hope is

that thing that just drives us to keep going drives us to keep living our lives keep doing what we're doing even through the dark days and i think the people who have the most success in life are those who have who can kind of like hold on to that hope but also be really realistic about it like obviously hoping for something to recover that or like in investing right holding on to a coin or hoping that it's going to recover even though it's very obvious that it's dead uh that's misplaced hope but hoping that just generally crypto is going to recover and crypto is going to take over the world and you know obviously we're going to have like things like decentralized finance and and um all the other use cases like that is i think you know well placed hope from there but individual investing decisions is

obviously a harder thing from there but if you take the big picture look into crypto generally but it just into anything in life i think hope is just very very powerful and that's something that i've always had like hope for the future i'm very very hopeful very very positive and optimistic about the future especially when it comes to ethereum uh and i and i hope that i can i i hope i hope that i kind of like um you know that comes across with the refuel but anyway i'm going to leave it at that don't want to get too off track here um but yeah there's a bunch of updates to get through from over the weekend so we're going to start with some merge updates so this just got announced but basically superfiz shared something here from github where tim biker has proposed a girly ttd with a merge estimate of

august 9th to august 11th so it's a basically official i would say like with the fact that there's kind of like a ttd being proposed or suggested here doesn't seem to be any pushback of be monitoring core dev conversations it seems that everyone is on the same page at this point in time so yeah girly will probably merge august between august 9th and august 11th which is the kind of like early to mid um i guess august prediction that a lot of people gave there which means that if everything goes right with girly and goes kind of like well with girly we will see hopefully the september sorry the main net merge in mid to late september so again guys like i went to it last week we are so close it's just incredible how close we are and there are still lots of people who think the

merge is never happening there are a lot of miners who still think it's not happening there are a lot of people who are still memeing that kind of like um it's going to be delayed again or it's just going to be perpetual delay kind of like land when that's obviously not the truth like you can see it right yeah we and the funny thing is like we've been going through these merged test nets like sapolya and rops than we've done already like that is done and dusted that's not kind of like a coming soon thing we did that so there's no reason to believe that girly won't happen as scheduled and there's no reason to believe that the mainnet merge won't happen and i've already noticed the narrative shifting around okay well the merge will happen but like proof of stake is insecure and previously the

previous thing is that okay whatever like you can shift the goal post as much as you want but the the fact of the matter is the merger is happening we're having that massive kind of impact from the merge and all those narratives surrounding it is going to come with that which is just going to be absolutely awesome uh and also i just wanted to give a quick shout out to this website that's been around for a while i may have shouted it out on the refill before but when merged.com uh basically tracks all this stuff with a bunch of links and resources so you can go definitely check it out it's got like a countdown timer here for the difficulty bomb for girly and for mainnet now these are obviously based on the soft targets uh i guess girly has more of a hard target now but this 19th of september

for the main net merge is still a soft target definitely not um you know set in stone just yet but i'm not expecting any you know i don't know i struggle to call it a delay but i'm not expecting much changes to that date if goalie goes well it doesn't really seem to be any other reason to change it um there has been a bit of discussion in cordev's channels about people thinking that there hasn't been enough notice given to you know solo stakers and other kind of people running validators about the fact that they have to run an ethereum or execution layer full node there has been and like i don't think any more notice is going to need be needed at this point like you've had months and months and months to be across this there are guides everywhere for this there is a merge

readiness checklist so yeah i mean just another reminder from me if you're a solo staker you definitely need to make sure that you're running a client-side execution node or execution full nodes you know geth nevermind any of those sorts of things there uh or else you know you can't outsource that to something like an inferior alchemy post merge so just a reminder there but you can go to the merge readiness checklist that i've talked about a bunch of times that walks you through it all there and then finally on the merge this is a an interesting tweet i saw from hell press you guys all know who hal press is from north rock digital here who said i think people i misunderstand what the merge represents sometimes this is not a trade where you must try to time your entries and exits perfectly this is a structural shift it's an

investment more than a trade these flows are never reversing the merge will create the first structural demand asset in the history of crypto you just need to buy before and then huddle the structural flows will take care of the rest sure there will be volatility and some short-term traders will try to sell the news at times however when you look back and later zoom out i think that all will be noise so this goes back to i guess like what i've talked about a lot and obviously what hal has talked about a lot about that massive issuance reduction right that 80 to 90 issuance reduction in eth kind of like um issued per day obviously miners have to sell that eighth and there has been structural kind of like cell pressure because of that and that's exactly what hal is saying here that we're literally removing that with the

merge like that is never coming back like it's not like ethereum is going to go back and go to back to proof of work from proof of stake it's never happening and like i it's funny that i say never i mean there's a you know there's like a an invis in in infinitely small chance that maybe one day that happens but it's just not even worth thinking about so it's never reversing so you have this 80 to 90 eastern introduction that is never reversing all this cell pressure that's just gone and as hal explained in his bankless episode it turns ethan to a structural demand asset it's going to be net deflationary even at these low gas prices it is going to be in that deflationary and even if it isn't there is not enough heat being issued and there's not enough i mean we don't

have withdrawals enabled so uh we you know that the atheist should can't be withdrawn until withdrawals enabled but there still isn't enough to make it to to kind of like make it like it was under proof of work so it like guys it's just it's just impossible not to be bullish and i agree with with hal here where he says it's not a trade it's an investment like it's a long-term investment it's not something that you buy say you buy either like twelve hundred dollars and then it goes up to fifteen hundred dollars you're like yeah yeah yeah and then it goes back to twelve hundred dollars you're like oh no my investment failed no that's a trade like you shouldn't be looking at things like that it's it's all about the long-term horizon it's all about the long-term trade especially when it comes to

something like the merge and i think that it's just it cannot be priced in it just cannot be because of the fact that most people don't understand this uh it's something that definitely can't be priced in hal has described this as well where the fact is you can compare it to something like bitcoin harvenings where bitcoin harvenings are known in advance forever like you know the bitcoin issuance will have every four years all right but they're never priced in because the bitcoin price keeps going up over time the bitcoin price goes up post-harvenings right and that's because you can't you can't uh uh price in the structural stuff because in the at the end of the day that 15 million whatever a million dollars it is uh now i don't know if the math top my head that's being sold from bitcoin miners until the harvey happens

is not not going to be sold they have to sell it so it's the same with the trip uh triple hardening i guess that's that's being called in um in ethereum the miners still have to sell these to pay for their operations so it can't be priced in unless there was the i guess um demand to offset that when a lot of the times there really isn't for a long period of time because it's just a lot of money that needs to come in to support that uh kind of like pr to support a specific price so once that kind of like cell pressure just evaporates i'm just so curious to see what this is going to do with the price of eighth even among all these kind of like headwinds from the macro environment and things like that it just feels like it's just something that

people just aren't considering aren't paying attention enough attention to i know you guys are and i think that post merge it's going to de-risk a lot of the eth trade as well a lot of the people who are like oh what if something goes wrong with the merge you know once the merge goes well and everything's solid and everything's working fine and ethereum is a full proof of stake network it's going to be risk it for bigger players for institutions and i think they're going to pile in i think there's going to be a flood of eth going into staking as well uh especially because post merge we have uh the unburnt fear of revenue going to stake is we have mev going to stakers people are going to see that apy jump up and then like oh oh api i guess they're going to be like oh i want a

slice of that and they're going to stake their wreath so like it's it's just it's like even though as i said even though we have all these headwinds guys like i struggled to be to be bearish on eighth like maybe short term it's bearish i mean obviously like 4900 to 800 and something dollars like that was a massive fall from all time in six or so months i get that but at the same time it's all about the long term it's not about the six months like when i say long term when i was talking about five plus years um the sort of thing like i have been holding ethan stacking youth since early 2017 since i first got into it i have not sold any of it i mean like it's always been part of my thesis that ethe would become a full proof of stake

network it would it would kind of like grow from there and all the other stuff surrounding i'm not going to rehash the ball case for eth again you guys already know it but yeah just thought that was an interesting tweet from hell here uh i'll link in the description you can go check it out if you want all right so another interesting tweet from ethereumpools.info today or a tweet thread where they said last week we explained how ethereum rewards and penalties work in theory but how do they look in practice and this is kind of like a breakdown uh thread of kind of like the earn reward rewards per day based on kind of like popular staking services here as you can see and addresses annualized kind of rewards and there's a thread kind of like explaining all of that and explaining where it has come from so

you can go check this out i just wanted to give a quick shout out to it you can check it out in the youtube description below because i think a lot of people don't realize that not everyone is getting the same reward and there is kind of like slight deviations in reward depending on a number of different factors like if you're online 100 of the time but someone else is only online 90 of the time well they're obviously not going to get the same amount of rewards as you are for the year like if you counted as a year basis from january 1st to december 30th 31st if you count the whole year if you're online 100 of time you're definitely going to be net more net more netting more rewards than someone who's only online 90 of the time um and the same is true for uh kind of like uh

proposing blocks and things like that like over a year it should be more or less equal among validators but it's not always an exact sign so if you take just those 365 days uh and maybe someone one address proposed more blocks than another well then technically they're going to have more ethernet but on average if as long as you're kind of like online most of the time and you're proposing blocks and all that good stuff there you should net out to about the same kind of like rewards here but you can see the deviations i mean there are there are small deviations like point five five percent four point four six percent then there are larger deviations some people are only uh having three point seven eight percent whereas some are having up to four point seven four percent so the deviations as i said

depend on a number of different factors and that's what ethereum pools dot info is kind of like quantifying here for you and i think it's good to keep in mind and it's probably going to deviate more depending on like post-merge with regards to fear of a new and mev too like especially especially mev me is definitely going to make this deviate a lot more because there'll be people who don't run mev boost as old and solo stakers they'll be staking pools that may not run it they'll be kind of like different um things going on with mev maybe solo stakers do their own sort of thing it remains to be seen but there's going to be more deviation here with with rewards and the same is true for miners like if a miner is offline for ten percent of the of the year and only online for

ninety percent of it well obviously they're going to earn ten percent less rewards than a matter of time for 100 of the time so it's all about rewarding the people you're proportionate to the work that they do and i think ethereum proof of stake does a really good job of that all right so mahalo put out a tweet uh here saying our dream when we started polygon was to become the go-to web three platform one that will constantly push the frontiers of innovation and adoption until we bring the world to ethereum in four days a new chapter will start polygon is reaching where we always wanted to be so polygon has been teasing this massive zk evm announcement that they're going to be uh doing on i believe wednesday at 1pm uh eur paris time because they're at htc at the moment the big ethereum conference there

so i believe it's going to be announced wednesday at 1pm paris time whatever time that is i i don't know what local time it is for me but that's i think when it's going to be announced and i mean always these announcements are hyped up and everything like that and and i guess like it depends on what you're expecting from it i don't know what's coming you guys know i'm an adviser to polygon but they haven't told me what's coming or anything like that so i don't know what the announcement is going to be um obviously the magic price has been going up a fair bit recently i think it's one of the best performers of the last week or something like that because of i think this hype but if anything polygon doesn't just talk they also kind of like deliver like if they

do anything it's like delivering and they deliver on a number of different fronts obviously you guys know that their business development is i've talked about this before he's probably the best in the industry but they do deliver on the tech side of things as well so i'm really curious to see what this is hopefully it lives up to the high pr but i mean like they've been hyped so much like i i don't know like how it can live up to them to the hype at some point like there are some things that just get hyped so much and some people are disappointed some people aren't i just think it's going to be a big deal i think if it's got to do with zkvm it definitely sounds like it's going to be a big deal i'm definitely super pumped for it so we're going to

see how what happens here uh but yeah i guess like we'll have to see on wednesday 1 p.m paris time hopefully that is before i record the refuel for wednesday i don't know if it will be but we'll see i'm sure you guys will see it on twitter anyway you won't need me to tell you about it but i just wanted to kind of like highlight it there all right so when nitro that's what everyone's been asking about lately when it comes to arbitrary well we're not we don't have nitro just yet or a date for nitrate just yet but we have the new nitro goalie test net for the albatroom roll-up is now live so this will replace the current nitro goalie test a devnet and they'll be migrating their wrinklebee test net to nitro this month so this blog post goes into more detail

about this but i guess the fact that this test net is kind of like being migrated here means that we're probably relatively close to nitro on on arbitrary mainnet i hope so like i i i discussed this when the odyssey event was paused but basically like i really hope nitro is coming soon because they had because arbitrary had so much amazing momentum with their odyssey event like there were so many people kind of like using it so much activity on the network i really hope they can capture that again once nitro is live and i understand the reasons why they paused it until nycha was live uh but yeah it seems like it's it's close here the fact that they're kind of like migrating their test nets it seems like to me that they're gearing up for a main net release hopefully soon maybe next

month maybe maybe sooner than that i'm not sure but it has to be close at this this at this point right guys like i mean i hope so i hope it's close but anyway you can read this blog post for more information about uh about the kind of like test net cr but obviously it won't apply to most of you since you won't be using the test nets but i think reading between the lines it must mean that nitro is is coming relatively soon so get my fingers crossed for that we'll see how it goes all right so speaking of teasers zk sync is also teasing something so you can see here a little uh exchange between one of the co-founders of zk sync and i think maybe their marketing person here where uh gluck 64 says we're good to go are we ready to announce next week and perks

just says yup so i guess like it's major um i guess we'll see like as i said about the polygon announcement we'll see how major these kind of like announcements are uh i think next week so this was posted on july 16th next week means this week so there seems to be a big zika sync announcement coming this week along with the polygon announcement we'll see how they both are hopefully they're kind of like living up to the hype i don't know like as i said guys like there's always too much hype around things and i don't think anything's ever lived up to the hype um i i know you know what i think eip1559 lives up to the height because everyone was hyping like how much ether would burn and no one really believed it and then everyone was like wow we're actually burning a lot of eighth so i

think it did live up to the hype but generally these things are kind of like hit or miss with people but we'll have to see we have to see what zika think has up their sleeves some people are saying oh it's the token are people saying it's zk 2.0 going live other people saying it's zk porter we'll have to see like they've got a lot of stuff in the works i'm not sure exactly what's going to be going live here but i'm curious to see uh kind of what shakes out there so definitely looking forward to that obviously i'll cover it on the refill once we get the news out all right so uh i came across this amazing thread here from martial oh my god i can't pronounce that i am very very sorry for pronouncing that wrong but anyway this thread is about

rock-a-pull and how they're going to be scaling the rocker pool service to service more customers basically so the tldr here is that rockapool is quietly building at least three massive scaling solutions that will enable it to have a 1 000 times growth and easily compete at scale with lido this gets me going guys like this is what gets me excited i've said before how i believe that rocketpool has only been limited by the fact that they have some hard limitations that they really had to work around really had to work on in order to get more people to want to stay with the rocketpool service so this threat does an excellent job of covering all of that so i highly recommend giving it a read uh but basically gives a bit of background about kind of what the liquid staking kind of liquid staking environment looks like

right now and then uh basically going into the three major upgrades that are covered coming so one of them is less eath bonded mini pool so basically getting the bond requirement down from 16th to 40th so that is a huge improvement obviously uh then the second is a staking as a service so staking out service will enable big fish to participate in staking in the most trust minimized and yield generative way currently available there's a nice little chart here explaining how that works obviously you can check it out in the thread for yourself and then third is integrated solar staker migration so basically as part of a credential update that's expected in the capella hard fork rocker pool is able to offer a direct migration into their ecosystem which would be higher yielding so basically allowing large staking providers and

individuals chasing yield and converting their existing validators to rock-a-pull validators that's very cool that is actually probably the coolest thing for me because the fact that allowing people to easily migrate is definitely what's needed post kind of like withdrawals um because of the fact that i've talked about this great reshuffling before obviously that i can't happen till withdrawals are enabled and once withdrawals are enabled rockapool has a perfect opportunity to seize the kind of like moment here and get those people to migrate over because there will be migrations happening and it needs to be as easy as possible so if we can get more as much as many of those people into rocketpool as possible then that's going to be awesome so i think that's probably the biggest thing here obviously the other two are quite big as well i definitely like the state the um

collateral requirement dropping because that'll uh that'll enable obviously more kind of like ra to be minted and more rock pool notes to be spun up and all that good stuff there but definitely that ease of migration is a big factor here and as i said before making it as easy as possible for people to both solo stake and stake with decentralized services like rocketpool should be our number one goal as a ethereum staking community and i think it is for the rocker pool community for the eighth staging community and all the ones surrounding them i think that they've definitely been working on this for quite a while and it's something that they obviously know is needed because of something like you know lighter having so much dominance but as i've said before lido's dominance goes down with more competition you know better competition right like a rocker pool is

good competition but it needs to be better to compete and and they know that and then taking that on board and that's why they're coming up with these improvements and these improvements are coming out over the next six to 12 months um and then also obviously we need beacon chain withdrawals to be enabled for that great reshuffling to take place there um and also the social signaling too like getting more people aware of rocket pool they've been doing their bankless blitz campaign and all that good stuff there which i think has worked wonders and it's nice to see bankless spinning up rockapool kind of validators and nodes as well with the money that they're getting uh or with the rpr tokens that they're getting from the sponsorship so all of that is you know awesome social signaling it gets more people involved and you know i've

never personally never been more bullish on rocketpool like i hold a bunch of rpl that was generally generously gifted to me it's all my public address um and i you know i'm comfy with it like honestly very very comfy with it i think that it's not investment advice but i think that you know if anything in kind of like the ethereum ecosystem is worth betting on its rocketpool like honestly if they're the most ethereum aligned project i think i if i i mean i'm not trying to pick favorites here or anything but like they've been building for so long the community is just so ethereum aligned they're working so so hard to build a truly decentralized staking service i honestly can't think of you know many other projects that would be as ethereum aligned as rocketpool is especially ethereum online while also building a product that is

directly related to ethereum you know security sustainability uh and all its values and and obviously proof of stake and everything surrounding that as well so i'm gonna stop gushing over rocketpool there but definitely read this thread i'll link it in the youtube description below and you should also read this simplified rocketpool node setup here from fast contract because this is a guide it was published in may it wasn't a recent thing so maybe you've already seen it but this is a guide of kind of like how to set up your own rocketpool note in a very simplified way step-by-step hardware software all that good stuff there you can check out this uh kind of like guide i'll also link that in the youtube description below all right so i came across this new project which is empiric called empiric network which they're saying is a zk

native oracle for the zk future of blockchain now this is going to be deployed i believe on stock net or stock waste technology first uh and you can see here that they've been backed by a bunch of i guess um kind of like different data partners such as alameda jane street uh ftx gemini flow traders and cmt digital here and you can read the blog post for i guess like a deeper dive into this but i just want to put this on your radar as another starkware project that i came across and having a zk native oracle could be very cool for enabling private d5 obviously we have aztec connect that went live i think the week before last week for private d5 but more and more of this stuff is coming online um and it's coming online at layer two it's not going to be at layer one guys like

forget about layer one layer two is where to look for ethereum innovation and theorem application innovation i just i should say it's all going to be happening on there from now on i believe all right so cismo has released their first ethereum uh kind of like power users zk badge in alpha so you can meet yours here so this is the first experiment around novel governance mechanisms based on reputa reputation and privacy preserving voting and this is a mini threat about the kind of like threat about the experiment here so i've discussed cismo before but basically the i guess like uh magic going on here is that you can essentially prove that you own something uh without revealing your the address that owns it so for example you could prove that you have like you

know a thousand eight on for just for a crazy example here you can prove that you have a thousand eighth on uh you know that you own a thousand eight without revealing the address that that 1000 eighth belongs to now obviously that is just kind of a very simple example but you can extend this out to stuff like governance say you don't want people to know how much of a governance token uh kind of like you hold uh but you want to participate in governance right so well you can basically have that governance token on an address you can issue yourself a kind of like zk badge that is cryptographically sound and basically says yes you can participate in governance because you you actually have these tokens on another address and you have kind of like the ability to participate in another address without revealing what address that is i think

that's really really cool it has a bunch of obviously kind of like use cases and you can kind of like keep extending this out to things like reputation and and and privacy reserving voting and all that sort of stuff there uh but yeah you can check out the i guess like alpha mint here at this address i'll link in the description but you can also also check out the mini thread here for a kind of um explanation as to what's going on below all right finally here we have an article from stu which is discussing bls signature aggregation under the hood so if you're into uh basically cryptography if you're into diving deeper into the things that make the beacon chain work well you should definitely check out this blog post it is uh i don't think it's too technical it is it is kind of

like a little bit technical it does dive into a bunch of stuff that you may not uh be able to kind of like digest through a first or second read but it's definitely something that aspiring cryptographers aspiring people who are maybe looking to become core developers should definitely give a read of that so i'll link this in the description for you to to read uh and i guess like great little pc from stu i read through it obviously i didn't understand everything but i read through it and thought it was just a great overview of bls signature aggregation which is what enables us to have so many validators on the beacon chain i mean we would not be able to have 410 000 validators and counting on the big chain without bls signature aggregation so that's a little fun fact there for those who didn't know that

it's basically what enables us to to kind of like be as decentralized as we are and it's it's kind of magic how they work as well so definitely check that out i'll link it in the youtube description but that's gonna be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone