Immutable x Gamestop, ENS.tools live and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #308 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily grey refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's the 4th of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so i've been talking about bridges a lot lately and i put out this tweet today saying one of the most important things we can do right now as an ecosystem is to create a resource for users to become informed about the risks trade-offs and security properties of the various bridges luckily i hear that l2beat.com is on the case and i do hear that they're on the case they are definitely working on this sort of stuff uh but they do need help with it as well from from what i from what i um know so if you're interested in kind of like helping them put together a you know a

resource for this sort of stuff definitely reach out to them on twitter or you can even just dm me and i can put you in contact with them but i think this is as you know as i've been saying over the past like few weeks about bridges i think this is like one of the most important things we need right now important resources because when you use one of these bridges a lot of the time you don't know what the security model is right is it uh susceptible to an economic attack is it completely centralized behind a multi-sig uh you know is it kind of like um completely centralized behind like one key like some of them have one keys i believe controlling them uh you know what what does the kind of controls look like what can be done can funds actually be stolen by the centralized operator

all these sorts of things right so and he's like is there a function to do that uh and your l2 beat has an amazing breakdown of each of the l2s out there with all these kind of kind of trade-offs and risks labeled there with everything that can happen on the l2s we do definitely need it for bridges so i think l2 beat uh is going to be doing this but uh you know they definitely need help with it so just wanted to kind of bring that up there and let basically get you guys to go help them if you feel like you can add value here if you feel like you can you can write something or draw something up or help them with with the effort definitely reach out to them or reach out to me and i'll put you in contact with them

all right so liam uh liam horn who's part of the optimism team on twitter today shared an interesting eth research post called optimizing cross-chain swaps now from my understanding this has got to do with like batched withdrawal as well um cross-chain being kind of like cross l2 swaps more so than i believe across kind of like l1 and side chains and all that sort of stuff uh but yeah i mean i suggest going and giving this this post a read but it's really great to see that there's a lot of work being done on things like this because i know i say all the time that with altitudes you can always withdraw back to l1 now the problem is oh i guess like one of the problems with that is that like the l1 as i've been saying is going to be super expensive right like it's

always going to be expensive it's going to probably just get more expensive from here so those kind of things uh being able to withdraw to layer one no matter what happens at the layer two and layer one being expensive are kind of like uh i guess i can't be reconciled right you can you can have one or the other uh but like you don't really wanna have both so i think where the batched withdrawals comes from or the idea for it comes from is like okay well how do we reduce the cost for all users so there only has to be kind of like one gas fee right so you can imagine a thing where now two goes offline everyone wants to get their their eighth out of the l2 well uh you know there's a lot of smaller players who can't afford the maybe potentially

at that point it's like a 500 fee to get your um your eighth out or something like that and maybe you know a lot of people wouldn't be able to afford that obviously so what's what do we do then well we batch it and then we only have to pay one transaction fee which is you know i mean roll-ups basically do that anyway right they batch things together in order to to scale compute scale execution and kind of like scale uh scale ethereum but uh yeah i mean i don't i think it kind of like starts to fall apart when the fees get so high that even if you can go back to l1 a lot of people won't be able to and what they have basically becomes dust and dust is what we refer to as assets on a blockchain that cost more in

fees to move them uh then they're actually worth so that has happened a lot on ethereum i mean if you have a wallet with like uh you know i guess like 50 even 100 in some of these kind of like money markets you can't get that back without spending almost the same amount in fees right so that money is technically lost to you and there was actually a study done recently i believe there's a few hundred million dollars just of dust just stuck in like d5 protocols because of this and uh i think you know there's been discussions around how do we save that like do we do a kind of like a one-off uh uh kind of like migration where we say use okay well we're gonna migrate all the dust that's stuck in all these kind of like different apps to an l2 and

then you can get your funds uh there's i mean it's kind of like just an idea there's no kind of like serious proposals for it yet but obviously that would be a beneficial thing but there's issues with that like uh because you can you can basically make one of the l two as a king maker then like you know you can imagine there's been an eip that says okay well we're gonna uh do this kind of like one time uh fun kind of like migration of this dust and we're gonna we're gonna put it on optimism we're gonna put an arbitrary well then that's unfair to the other l2s right so i think for that reason alone it probably won't happen but batched withdraw even like batch deposits and things like that uh has been you know that has been happening for a while now

is is really great because it just allows us to scale uh the the positive withdrawal process without having to and we can do this trustlessly as well mind you but obviously it kind of like er introduces more smart contract risk which is something that is topical lately right this this this kind of like concept of smart contract risk because i think over the last few days a lot of people for one reason or another didn't realize that uh layer two bridges suffered from the same kind of like smart contract risk as a bridge another layer one did just because they're secured by ethereum doesn't mean that they're immune to bugs or anything like that like as i said yesterday all code can have bugs in it it doesn't matter what code it is it can be literally

anything it's gonna it can have potential to have bugs in it uh you know even just like a a ten line program can have a bug in it because software developers are humans humans are you know fallible we can we make mistakes we miss things even if it's gone through rounds of audits things can get that can still get missed uh and especially coding like financial uh applications uh using maybe even newer languages is is difficult right so i think from that perspective adding more smart contract risk uh through maybe bash deposits and withdraw withdrawals can uh scare some people off but at the same time a lot of these contracts are simple and easy to reason about and when people say something is easy to reason about basically what it means is that it's not a complex smart contract in that context

when we say something's hard to reason about it means there's a lot of moving parts going on there's a lot of different things that can go wrong and you know potentially will go wrong and that's like a car right for example you have uh a you know a modern car where there's so many moving parts that uh anyone any one of those things can go wrong there's obviously redundancies in place and stuff like that maybe the better thing is like an is like an airplane right there i mean the amount of redundancies that there are in an airplane because because it's expected that things will go wrong there'll be mechanical faults there'll be electrical faults and there's redundancies in place for that whereas uh you can build in redundancies in in kind of like ethereum land as well but the better approach is we don't have to have all these super

complex smart contracts we can actually do things um with a simple contract so the approach generally is if you can do this in like the simplest way possible and make it easy to reason about you should even if it's going to take you longer to do even if it's it's harder to do even if it feels like it's just optimizing for the sake of optimizing uh it's still worth it from a security perspective so that's something to keep an eye on that's something that i don't think gets talked about enough is the fact that the layer 2 bridges while they may be able well they may potentially have bugs in them uh they are just much easier to reason about they're much simpler than some of these l1 bridges now of course as l1 bridges that are just multi-sigs they're pretty simple to reason about as

well of course they can have bugs but they're centralized like we want these bridges especially the l2 ones to be decentralized there's no point having an l2 and kind of like migrating everyone to l2 if the bridges are still centralized because that means we're all at the mercy of you know the arbitram team the optimism team the whatever team right so from that perspective we want them to be decentralized we don't want them to have any admin keys or any control but for that to happen we need to you know make sure that they're actually kind of like battle tested battle hardened and get to a point where we can be relatively certain there's not going to be a major bug that results in loss of funds because at the end of the day you can never be 100 certain but you can be relatively certain so and

you know there's there's been you know most smart contracts or most kind of like apps have had some sort of kind of bug discovered in them or some sort of exploit discovered in them um there's i think very very few out there that there has never been a bug in i believe none of unisob's contracts have ever had a critical bug and if they did it was caught before it went to mainnet i don't i don't think unisop's ever been exploited uh maker has never been exploited uh the only thing that happened to maker was a different thing they didn't get exploited from a smart contract level but they um they had like an economic exploit that people took advantage of but technically it was the protocol was actually running as it should it was just kind of like a failure on the um on the uh on the keeper side of things

but i won't go into detail about that but there's very few my point is there's very few things that haven't actually been exploited or haven't had haven't found bugs in and it's not just within crypto it's within software in general like all software has bugs i mean the amount of updates that come out for all the software that we use and the amount of bug fixes that that are in those kind of updates you see why it's very hard to build financial you know financial software applications especially on a network where transactions are irreversible like it's easy enough to build it in the traditional finance system where you can just be like okay well if there's a bug you know i can claw back the funds probably but with a smart contract bug uh you know unless the the you know the attacker sends the

funds back those are gone there's no rollbacks happening on ethereum we did that once with the dow and and we haven't done it since because that's just not the you know the way these things work if you do a rollback it's kind of like a bailout and it's it's just centralized and yeah none of that kind of like stuff works and i guess technically the deal wasn't a royal backer either but i'm not going to get into that right now so i mean i went up a little bit of a tangent there but definitely go give this little poster read on the eth research forum here i thought it was an interesting little thing and i think it just brings up a lot of interesting discussions going forward around batch withdrawals and how we can get users to withdraw to l1 uh even if the gas costs are high

so another tweet i put out uh just before was i i basically said for the longest time many people believe the air that eip1559 would never go live and then it did and we've earned 1.75 million each since i'm now seeing the same rhetoric with regards to the merge but it will ship this year and ethereum will finally be a proof of stake network you guys know that the merge is you know coming i mean i've talked about it endlessly on the on the refuel before but for those of you who may be relatively new to the ecosystem there was a lot of people saying for a very long time that erp-1559 was a pipe dream it would never go live it would never work it doesn't actually do anything beneficial blah blah blah right and some of that stuff actually held up 159 from going live because there was a

lot of uh loud voices saying we need more testing we need more kind of like study we need more research done which is fair enough but a lot of this stuff was coming from people who i don't consider to be good actors but there were you know good actors in in the mix as well but people were saying that it wouldn't ship then it shipped and now we've burned 1.75 million eighth which is a lot of eighth right it's billions and billions of dollars worth and now i'm seeing the same kind of thing with the merge i mean for the longest time now like i mean okay let's take a step back here ethereum has had the goal of being a proof of stake network since before it was a proof of work network so literally since vitalik basically proposed ethereum he said i want ethereum to be a proof-of-stake

network so that's like eight years ago now right a very long time ago so i kind of get the critics saying that ethereum is never going to be a proof of stake network but at the same time i don't get them saying it in the face of all the overwhelming evidence that ethereum will be a proof of stake network and the two biggest pieces of evidence are the beacon chain is already live ethereum already has a proof of stake network uh it's been running for over a year it's you know there's tons of eat staked in there there's been no major bugs or anything like that it's working as intended and we have five amazing clients working on it and we have a lot of amazing researchers as well the second bit is that as i've said to you guys plenty time plenty of times over

the last few weeks the merge is getting extremely close now the spec is almost frozen the engineering work is all you know it's pretty much done we're already moving on to the shanghai eips for the next upgrade after the merge so from that perspective you can't just look at the evidence and and like say what you've been saying for all those years yes okay ethereum took a long time to get the proof of stake but the point is is that it's here now just because it took a long time doesn't mean it's never going to happen i don't understand people who think like that where they're like okay something hasn't happened for a long time that means it's never going to happen like there's just like a weird train of like logic there that i don't i don't follow so you know it may happen

in june as i said to you guys the merge they're targeting june it may happen later than that but i am 100 confident it's going to happen this year i don't see unless there's like a major major bug that's something that we've overlooked with the merge i don't see it going being uh being pushed into next year at all like not even close to next year so i'm super looking forward to this because you know the goal posts are going to move like some of the haters the bitcoin maximus especially they're not going to ever give ethereum credit for anything they're always going to move the goal post which is fine but i'm talking about more of the kind of like people who aren't bitcoin maximalists are more middle ground people and they still for some reason think that the merge isn't going to happen or isn't

going to happen this year when obviously it is so let's get it done it's obviously going to get done i have full faith in all the client developers and researchers and as i've said plenty of times i will keep you guys updated and everything happening there as well oh actually i should have spoken about this before that but here's an interesting tweet from ali attila atia atia about bridges so uh they said while both rollups and non-rollout bridges can have bugs the latter has exponentially larger attack service involving social engineering attacks against guardians and or data custodians rogue validators of the weakest chain and buggy signing wallet now i've this is what i talked about yesterday about how like yes roll up ridges can have bugs in them and i mean i was just

talking about before but they're much easier to reason about rather than these uh these non-roll-up bridges or these kind of like multi-chain bridges right for the reasons that ali has outlined here so i think a lot of this stuff's going to be covered in l2 beats section about bridges they're going to cover i mean if it's as comprehensive as their l2 sections then everyone's going to have like really really great insight into all of these bridges you'll be able to see which ones are using what model what you know what security model which ones are at risk which ones are just totally centralized and i think from that perspective it's going to be really great for users to get that information because we're entering the era of cross chain multi-chain everywhere bridges having billions of dollars locked into them we can't just keep being cowboys

about it we need to understand the risks we need users to understand the risk and we need to present those risks to them without kind of like hiding it and basically saying yeah don't worry bridge across and like meaning and like yeah bridge across and earn some money well i mean there's a potential for you to lose all your money too so users should definitely be well well aware of that i believe all right on to the biggest news for the last 24 hours which came out like 10 minutes after i finished recording the refuel which was funny but uh immutable x or immutable announced that they've partnered up with gamestop to power their nft marketplace that's huge news right guys i mean gamestop is obviously a very big brand we all saw the kind of like stuff that went on last year with gma and wall street bets and all that

sort of stuff but gamestop is more than a meme it's more than their stock they're they you know they're absolutely massive you know they're actually called eb games in australia and eb games is pretty big in australia too uh but yeah they're partnering with immutable to build their nft marketplace on top of immutable x which is obviously a valydium on top of ethereum so uh as immutable says here they'll be powering it with um security speed 100 carbon neutrality and zero gas fees and their integration will allow current and future nft projects and economies to access more liquidity and gaming content with mainstream users they're also going to be launching a 100 million dollar imx pool which they intend to use for grants to creators of nst nft content and technology enabling creators to leverage all the benefits of the leading l2

ethereum brings at immutable x this is i mean this is huge right guys like absolutely massive if you want to learn more i suggest checking out this uh live stream that bank listed with robbie ferguson one of the co-founders of immutable here but uh this is just like one of the biggest i guess like brands or entertainment brands in the world getting into nfts right and we've seen this you know plenty of times right we've seen a lot of companies getting involved obviously we saw facebook change it's brand to meta which actually funny enough i actually think that's like kind of a bearish thing it seems that they i think their growth has been slowing a lot lately it's really kind of like they're kind of like losing a lot of market share a lot of mind share so i think they thought they had to pivot

towards the metaverse stuff because that's what the cool kids are doing so i think that it's gonna be interesting to see how that kind of like plays out but i think web3 first uh metaverse projects like immutable uh partnering with uh forward-looking companies like gamestop is the is the way to go like gamestop isn't viewed as like a boomer company that's losing touch with everyone and has like an evil founder whereas facebook is and no one wants to play in the facebook metaverse i mean the the thing is the facebook acquired oculus and the oculus headset's actually quite cool but there's other virtual reality headsets you can get as well so you don't have to use facebook's kind of like metaverse products or any of their services and i'm kind of like wondering how many people are going to use it because when you think about it

facebook's audience right now they have a very big uh i guess like audience with the older crowd uh uh and they they they love using it i mean my parents my my gran not not really my grandparents but like i know a lot of people around my grandparents age that use it to keep in touch with family and stuff like that and that's awesome right but are they going to do metaverse stuff no right and not anytime soon it's going to take them a very i mean it took them 20 years or something to to get to the point where they're actually using kind of like um the internet right like like a lot of us do and they're still not even at that point so i think that um are they going to put virtual reality headsets on no no so i'm actually wondering what kind of like facebook's

metaverse is going to look like if if no one really uses that because we have an alternative we have the web3 metaverse we have the the metaverse powered by immutable powered by uh forward-looking companies like gamestop things that don't have bad reputation so i think that's what gets me most excited about this sort of stuff and immutable has obviously partnered with a bunch of other leading uh kind of like companies as well and there's obviously a bunch of companies doing this there's still the blowback on nfts of course uh i'm sure gamestop has a lot of overlap with the people who hate nfts and and and um the people who kind of like play play games because gamers tend to very much hate nfts i think they misunderstand it but also i kind of like i i get the hate because as i mentioned i think on

another refuel recently they really hate in-app purchases they hate the financialization of gaming um but i think that the financialization of gaming can be done in a way that's not parasitic but it requires a fine balance and they also hate they also hate crypto because um of all the gpus that get sold out for for mining like there's actually been a gpu shortage for a very long time now and there's of course the prices to go up and people can't get new new gpus and that's mostly i mean it's some impact because of covert and supply chain issues but it's mostly got to do with the fact that people are buying gpus to mine ethereum and obviously that's all going away with the merge as well and that's actually an under talked about point with regards to the merge is that obviously we're getting off proof

of work mining but the until unspoken about kind of benefit is the fact that uh the gamers may actually like us again because we won't be taking their gpus anymore so we'll see how that plays out but i guess congrats to immutable and gamestop on this partnership i can't wait to see what they develop together and i'm very much looking forward to seeing what the 100 million dollar fund uh gets built as well so aox here on twitter who i actually spoke about i think like a couple of weeks ago has released his e s dot tools uh uh tool here our website here i did i did cover this a couple weeks on the refill when he was first teasing it so you can now search expired names and open seed listings with lots and lots of filters that help you discover uh discover uh undervalued gems uh in his

screenshot uh he says i am looking at some of the cheapest short dictionary words available on openc this is really cool this is like uh ens for power users essentially so if you want to register an ens name if you want to see what ones are available ones are expiring soon if you want to play the good domain squatting game which i mean people have mixed opinions about that but you know you can use this kind of this tool and it's much easier than doing it manually through etherscan and through open scene all that sort of stuff so this is really really cool so if you want to go check this out you can go to ens.tools there's so many features in this right now i was playing around with it before so many filters and things like that like you can really find a lot of really cool stuff here and you

can find things for sale i mean there's going to be a marketplace eventually for this sort of stuff like a much more active marketplace just like there's a um much more an active marketplace for dns names and things as well uh but yeah i i i really like this tool i really like playing around with it i suggest you guys go and and check it out it's at ens.tools and i mean i guess speaking of kind of like ens for a second here on i mean i know i talk about ens quite regularly on on the refuel but that's another less talked about thing in the ethereum ecosystem that i think is is making uh big strides within kind of like the non-crypto world celebrities changing their twitter names to dot eth is huge because people just

go and google what is dot eth right and then they come up with ns and then they may go register their own name and they're like oh wow i can tie like this address to a name and now i don't have to worry about copy pasting my address like it's actually a huge ux upgrade it's just that it's not really talked about because it's not something that's flashy or kind of like fun for people uh but like it's still like the the one of the biggest ux upgrades we have on ethereum like i love being able to say to people hey you know send stuff to cecil.ed and not have to give them my my my full address because i don't even know what it is like no one memorizes their full full ethereum address right i know i know the first few things that it

starts with but that's not enough actually because that's actually an insecure way of verifying an address by looking at the first few characters in the last few characters because they can be overlapped there but um i have cecil.ed tied to that address so i just tell people and uh you know send it here and it works flawlessly pretty much every wallet integrates with ens as well by default which is awesome too so so yeah is is a staple in the ethereum ecosystem it's not going anywhere obviously and i believe its adoption is just going to keep going up and up from here so tools like ens.tools are a very welcome thing for us to all be able to play around with so our encode club has announced a stark net hack in partnership with starkware so this is a four week hack that will

kick off on february 28th and give hackers a chance to build on stark net and win prizes so you can go check out this blog post for more details on this so if you're a developer or an aspiring developer and you want to build on start net and get paid to do it and learn and you know interact with people from the start team this is definitely what you want to be involved in i mean february 28th is not too far away either um registrations are open open uh now until feb 28th then the hackathon begins uh and then march 7th has late registration submission deadline april 23rd so this actually goes for for a little while here actually goes for about um five weeks i believe and then there's a judging period in april and uh prize giving in finale as well there so that's that's really cool i

mean i i think these hackathons are the most amazing way to get like people building on your new ecosystem because really all these l2s are their own ecosystems building on ethereum like stocknet's going to have all of its own apps built in its chiro language and you're going to have like optimism arbitrary having a lot of their own native apps that are evm compatible and all that sort of stuff you can have zk sync with zk and then zkvm you're gonna have polygons roll-ups you can have all these sort of ecosystems going on and the best way to get people to build on it is to host hackathons and help them do it like basically lead them to the promised land essentially right rather than just saying hey guys you there's here's some developer docs come and build on us like you need to give

them that nudge there's always that nudge that needs to be given to people then then real magic can happen and ethereum has been doing hackathons forever i mean there's so many kind of like hackathons in ethereum land eth global runs a ton of them uh and they actually do partnerships with other other ecosystems as well there's been a recent one with polygon that was absolutely massive um so from that perspective uh i just really like these things so definitely go check this out if you're a developer and respon or an aspiring developer because i think you'll definitely be interested in this all right finally here another merge related update so trent van epps from the faf announced on february 11th tim and himself will be running the third merge community call so if you missed the first two you can add this one to

your calendar uh here is the issue on on github and here's the discussion are taking place so there's going to be discussion a discussion about post merge test nets uh consortium its replacement getting applications to deploy and test on the new defnet uh blocks going from 13 seconds to 12 seconds how does that impact you know various contracts transaction fees go into validated addresses on the execution layer validators um running both uh an execution and consensus client and um some some some more things here so if you're interested to listen to the bleeding edge later stuff going on in the merge i guess like ecosystem here it's happening at february 11th at 1400 utc which is i believe 9 a.m eastern time i'm going to be sleeping for this

of course so i'll probably watch it after when i wake up uh but yeah really really cool to see there's another merge community call going on you can add it to your calendar here and intended if you want but as i said it's going to be recorded i believe and you'll be able to catch up on it anyway anyway there uh but yeah i think actually i've got a couple more minutes left i can i can talk about something else a couple of minutes before i end it for today what i want to talk about is how funny it is uh looking at the what's going on like the tech market right now in terms of um i guess like growth and and and and not not so much growth and kind of like the performance of the different stocks uh for those of you who didn't see and i

spoke about facebook before but facebook or meta whatever you want to call it they missed earnings by a lot and what's what's happening right now with facebook is their growth is actually slowing for the first time in a while i believe and their stock tanked 25 25 percent that's a crypto like that's a i mean we've used the volatility in crypto but if if if eth went down 25 in a day that is a extremely brutal day like 25 in one day is for stocks especially is just absolutely nuts right um and that happened because they missed the the um their earnings there but then on the flip side amazon actually beat earnings by a lot and they're up 15 so there's people who say like crypto is extremely volatile yes you're right but at the same time if you compare it like

for like it's actually quite similar amazon is a what two trillion dollar company facebook is i don't know what the market cap is it's over a trillion probably ethereum is not even close to that ethereum is like what 350 billion and it's still and it has less volatility than that i don't remember the last time eth went down 25 in a day and one day i mean i think that happened back in may when we had that massive crash after a blow off top but just generally when people say oh crypto's so volatile i think most of the time they're talking about the the lower caps but even then there's a lot of low cap stocks or lower cap stocks that have absolutely tanked i mean some of them are down 70 80 percent from their highs that is literally crypto level so i think

the there's a there's just a massive misconception conception around crypto being like the most volatile thing in the world when stocks are just as volatile these days and whether it's because of the easy money paradigm whether it's because uh the markets have just become a bit of a mockery because of that easy money paradigm i don't know i haven't done like a deep study on this but i just wanted to kind of like point out that yes crypto is volatile but i mean if you're going to look for stability in stocks you're probably not going to get it unless you're buying an index but if you buy an index in crypto you get less volatility too so maybe not as less as kind of like the spx or the nasdaq but it's still kind of like pretty similar so yeah anyway just just a little bit of a note on that i

thought that was something funny that i've been kind of like monitoring the last few days and i just wanted to share it with you but i think that's gonna be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks everyone