Kiln merge testnet live, Rocket Pool on fire & more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #332 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where i cut the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony designer and that is the 10th of march 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so a git coin grants round 13 is now live as i mentioned the other day it was going live today so i know a lot of you have already donated uh to both the delegate and other grants out there so thank you so much for doing that um but yeah as i said i guess like a few days ago it is now time to donate to your favorite projects out there there are a bunch of new projects on there right now um and get your donations matched obviously the daily gray is on there and so is ethub i thank you so much for your support there

don't feel obligated to donate it's just there for people who want to donate i always appreciate it but it is definitely not needed um i much rather prefer you donate to uh the multitude of other projects that are out there on bitcoin and as i mentioned last week there's over a million dollars worth of matching funds up for grabs i think couple million dollars at this stage which is really awesome to see so just a reminder there for you guys to go check it out but there are plenty of other stuff to get through today so i'm going to move on from that there is a bunch of merge updates so it's time to get started testing the merge uh going again as mario's from the go ethereum team says here he says we spun up the kill and test net to test ethereum's upcoming move to proof of

stake this should be the final test that before we start merging roxton rinkeby and gurley which is obviously the test nets that are the main test nets that part of the ethereum network and this thread that marius has put together explains how you can get involved so i'm not going to go through the threat i'll link in the youtube description but the reason why you would want to get involved is what tim biko is saying here the amount of data that they gather on killen can directly influence how soon that we are ready for the actual merge right um you know the main net merge uh this this is the time for application tooling infrastructure providers and developers to test things if there are bugs and now is where we want to find them and tim was quote tweeting superfiz who said let me say

this as plainly as possible killing is the big milestone for the ethereum emerge i urge you once again to participate in this test net and i look forward to delivering a pull-up to every participant it's showtime friends and as i said marius's thread here goes through how you can participate and there's also uh i guess a link to everything uh from parathos here so you can find the configs at kiln.themerge.dev and this will allow you to get started uh kind of running the the software to test the merge so if you're so inclined definitely do this because we need all the testing we can get as tim baico mentioned we if there are bugs we want to find them now because i mean as i've mentioned plenty of times if there are no bugs found if everything seems to be going well and nothing breaks and every and everything

kind of like merges correctly and continues on correctly then what's up after that as as kind of like marius said here is merging roxton rinkeby and gurley and all that sort of stuff and then after that is a main net so we are so close guys oh my god i feel like not enough people are talking about this like it's just crazy how a few months ago everyone was talking about it and now it's kind of quiet but i think that's because a lot of people have left the ecosystem at this stage obviously the price of eighth and just general crypto is is not too hot right now it's you know the funny thing is the market is doing exactly what it did in 2019 it's such a weird feeling to see it again where it pumps and then everyone's like oh is this it is it are we going

back into a bull market and then it dumps down again and i remember explaining to a friend when we were in the bull market i said to him and it's because it was his first cycle he didn't realize what it would be like i said look it's not going to be like this forever the bull markets come and go and the worst is when we kind of like go into what's called a crab market or a sideways market where every pump gets sold down and you know it kind of like really mentally drains on you especially if you're watching the charts all the time so uh obviously that is scaring away a lot of a lot of people people aren't interested anymore but that's fine you know for those of us who are interested there's just so much going on with the merge it's just crazy like it's

crazy that we're so close i mean we're in march guys this could be happening in june like april may june it's three months away three four months away even if it happens in july it's so close and it's gonna happen before before we know it at this stage so very very much looking forward to that of course but as i said if you want to get involved now is the time to do so do not dawdle do not wait this is your time to get involved this is your time to help out on on kind of like testing side of things and as superfiz said you will get a pop out of it as well so if you're into collecting pops which all of you should be of course then this is the best way to kind of like get one of the rarest ones

because obviously apart for testing the merge test net is only going to come around once right so definitely uh get involved there i'll leave all these links in the youtube description and you can go check it out oh actually one more thing about the merge sorry before i move on is that the beacon chain genesis will be friday at 1400 utc the power chain has already started or the proof of work chain has already started and the core devs expect the privilege phase to last at least a week um so you can deploy your smart contracts now to know how they behave pre and post merge if your developer deploy it to the kill and test net and then once uh it merges you'll be able to see them on both sides of the merge which is very very cool to see and finally around the merge sigma prime

the developers of lighthouse have put together a uh update number 40 which goes through the remaining work for light of a lighthouse to do before the merge so if you're interested in more merge related stuff definitely give this a read this is coming from a client developer's perspective which is always a really really awesome read alright so i have a bunch of rocker pool things to get through today's four different tweets from rockapool so this first one comes from jcrtp who says who tweeted out a question came up during the twitter spaces about rocketpool's client diversity here's a snapshot of the current distribution per mini pool uh validator thanks to xerox invis for the discord bot that generates these charts on demand now it's nice to see eth nimbus getting more love now as i've

mentioned before uh rocketpool is really really great on the client diversity side they care about client diversity more than any other staking service or staking pool out there by by far really i mean look at this diversity look at this kind of like um distribution here lighthouse is at 45 percent takers at 25 percent nimbus at 17 prism at seven uh 0.7 unknown and uh four percent haven't had a proposal yet so it's obviously can't can't attract those yet but this is crazy i mean prism is in the minority here guys like whereas prism is the super majority right now on on on the kind of like beacon chain main net so this is really awesome to see this means that rocker pool kind of like validators have made the conscious decision to not use the

super majority client or at least most of them have and to use the other clients and it's really great as as jcrtp here said it's great to see nimbus and even teku getting love because they are you know the minority client at the end of the day like lighthouse and prism are the leaders right now i believe uh nimbus and tekku are behind but you know this is just kind of like all flipped on its head we have lighthouse at number one teku number two nimbus number three and prism number four so very very cool to see this um this kind of like client distribution going on here on the rocker pool side of things and uh i think you know we'll see we can revisit this you know in six months twelve months see how this distribution kind of i'm i'm really glad that uh they're that

they're kind of like the super majority client prism is actually the lowest here on rockapool now could another client become a super majority over time of course it can of course it can and that's why client diversity is not just like a one and done sort of thing it is an ongoing thing it requires a community to keep calling it out to keep the beacon chain healthy and to make sure that we're not just kind of like uh you know replacing the majority client being prism right now with a different client and still having a super majority and for those of you who don't know a super majority client is defined as a client that has more than 66 of the total validator share now the reason why this is bad is because that's over two-thirds of the valid data share and if there was something that was to

go wrong um if there was a bug or anything like that then people could stand to lose a lot of money and it would require social coordination to reverse and or to kind of like change and it's just very very messy so we want to see uh you know each client having no more than 50 ideally uh you know definitely less than 66 but 50 or less is probably the sweet spot there so i haven't seen any updates on the mainnet distribution yet i'm sure there's going to be updates out there soon but rocketpool is absolutely killing the game here with um the amount of kind of i guess uh people that they have going with the other clients and not prism not to say that prism is a bad client as usual but of course we want to see more client diversity there all right the second update out of

rocketpool is this pool that i've been talking about for quite a while uh on the refuel the r8 wste curve pull that allows you to basically stack your earth staking yield with other yields such as token rewards so you can see here that jasper the friendly ghost who's been a big proponent for this pool has basically put out a screenshot today showing the yield that you can currently get in this pool so the min apy is 26 percent the max apy is 65 and currently jasper's apy at time of screenshot was 26 that is a huge amount this is an eighth yield guys absolutely crazy obviously that's probably not going to sustain because this is early days for this pool it's it's definitely got a bit of added risk to it uh and

there's not that much uh kind of like uh liquidity in it just yet uh kind of uh compared to you know the fact that there will be more liquidity in in the future but still if you're interested in taking this risk and you know you want to stake your wreath and you want to get more uh i guess like rewards on your wreath 26 percent each denominator returns can't go wrong with that i mean that's just crazy right like i mean as vanilla eats taking gives you like four or five percent right now and post merge will probably be around 10 or something like that so this is just kind of like quadruple you know five times the current normal vanilla staking staking yields and then over double the uh the post-merge staking yields here so it really really um i guess cool to see this and this is uh

sorry this was the topic of today's newsletter where i spoke about a concept called yield burger that i um i don't know i don't think i came up with that i heard someone else kind of like say it a while ago but it's basically this concept of layering on top uh kind of like token rewards or liquidity mining rewards on top of each other to create like a really high yield now this was done obviously in d5 summer this became quite lucrative it was obviously very risky but so the apys went up really high when you did this and you know people kind of uh made a lot of money if they were in earlier these things if they put a lot of money into it and they're still alive and well it's still happening in the ecosystem today but it's being done in a i guess less

risky way in a more kind of like sustainable way um because back then in d5 summer basically what you would do is you'd basically just throw an amount of money into an unaudited random fork of some other project that that was probably unaudited and it was just kind of like really risky yes you could get make a lot of money but the risk was super super high so obviously throwing your rath or wst or both into a curve pool is much is much safer because curve is you know been around for a while it's been audited it's safe it's it's all well and good relatively safe like nothing's foolproof but you know relatively safe there um and you're getting like a very very nice yield on this at the moment so if you're interested in that you can definitely go check that out i think that's really really cool and

i'm obviously earning a um you know a field you can never go wrong with that right all right uh another uh there's two more rocket pool updates to get through so this one is about their new staking ui so you can go to stake.rockapool.net there's a new interface which with a bunch of improvements such as a wallet panel transaction estimates more intuitive r8 exchange rate and help and much more so you can check it out at the url that i just mentioned state.rockapool.net maybe i can load it up here um for you guys hopefully it'll it'll load uh yeah there we go it's loaded for me there so yeah this is nice uh very orange right it's kind of like turned my whole face i face orange here but uh yeah this basically just allows you to stake eight and receive our eighth and

it tells you your kind of like average return which is four point three three percent which is obviously the vanilla staking yield right now it's got some transaction details here as well this is very similar to obviously just a normal swap interface like uni swap and things like that which i've said to you guys this is what we want to see we don't want to see all the fancy complicated stuff we just want to see people see stuff that people are used to especially if we're trying to get people more involved with each staking obviously one of rocketpool's goals here is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to stake their earth and any amount of eth so very very cool to see this new interface from them so definitely go check that one out and finally uh rocapool shared a chart today with the caption this is

what a decentralized staking pool looks like now you can see here that validators per node is quite decentralized and quite distributed so uh my uh i guess my um camera is cutting off the left-hand side of this chart here but basically there is one validator uh per per kind of like node and there's about 475 of them and then it tapers off greatly now the explanation here is that uh as i've mentioned before there are two parts to staking on on ethereum there are two pieces of software that everyone runs or three if you count on each one node but like two on the e2 side or the consensus layer side is a beacon node and a validator now one beacon node can be home to many validator clients so if you have ten validators you can make them all talk to

your one beacon node and that's fine but the thing is the beacon node is the full node that is what holds kind of like the chain that is what kind of val you know keeps up up to the head with the chain and validates the chain uh it's kind of like what needs one full node so we want as much of them online as possible there's currently i think four or five thousand of them online obviously a lot of people won't spin up extra beacon notes if they don't have to because they you know they they're kind of like heavy on the storage space and things like that um so they'll just point their validators to to the beacon nodes here but uh rocketpool seems to be different here just like on the client diversity front they seem to be doing very very nicely here with the validators per node and

the amount of nodes they have in their network so very much love to see this um and and and also i think this is i actually i'm not totally sure if this is showing the bigger notes or the rocker pool notes i'm going to assume it's showing the rocker pool note someone's going to correct me on this um maybe i'll scroll through the comments but uh but yeah i think um you know regardless of that i think uh having more nodes in the network having more of the and per validator is very healthy in general both on the rocketpool and the ethereum side of things so very very cool to see this uh from rocketpool all right so darren uh leo here from uh uh through not three layout capital has shared a i guess article from uh calcas calcalistec.com

that is covering stockwear's uh new fundraising round so apparently they're raising more money this would be their series d round um and they're set to value them at a 6 billion valuation and they're set to raise another 100 million dollars this is massive and not unsurprising considering the fact that immutable just raised at a 2.5 billion evaluation i believe and immutable uses stock where's tech and obviously star queries is a big name within the ethereum space within the scaling space and the layer 2 space they've been doing a lot of great work for many years now um and you know i feel like investors just want to throw money at them now there's no details about which investors are going to be kind of like in this round it's still very early days from from what the article seems to state this information

came from someone who works at starkware but i mean this isn't surprising to me at all as i said guys like there are so many big investors out there that are throwing money at this stuff i spoke about this yesterday at the end of um yesterday's episode where i basically said that there are billion dollar funds out there they need to allocate they want to allocate to the best things that they can allocate to and there is probably nothing better than layer two teams right now or scalability teams in general to allocate to uh because they are all obviously extremely um extremely uh needed for the ecosystem and they already have product market fit in my mind like everyone knows that block space in general has product market fit and what these layer twos is just do is just give us more block space obviously it's a very simplified version

of it but that is you know the thesis at the end of the day so very very cool to see this um you know i have brought up in the past before about how i took a bit of an issue with how starkware was conducting their fundraisers because they allowed certain parties into the rounds such as alameda research and three arrows capital who have been critical of ethereum in the past especially three hours capital out there um and been critical of ethereum's kind of like scaling journey so i'm not sure why they allowed those investors into their rounds i'm curious to see who is in this round who leads this round it may not be crypto native investors because at this level of kind of i guess um sorry at this later stage of fundraising a series series kind of like d round uh it's usually these kind of like more

traditional firms that come in at this stage just like we saw with the immutable x rays so i'm curious to see who is both leading this and participating in it um but yeah i guess like i'm gonna have to keep an eye out for more information on this and we'll see how this evolves over the coming months all right an update from zk sync today so the zk sync 2.0 portal has been upgraded you can now pay network fees in any token not just eth uh block explorer added and multiple ux improvements you can request tokens from the faucet to try it out here at dot io slash bridge faucet so i spoke about this i don't know if it was this week or last week about this concept of paying network fees in any token um and i said

you know i mentioned how like i thought it was a good thing i thought that we had to abstract away as much complexity as possible but the ultimate settlement currency is always going to be eth because zk sync needs to pay ethereum to settle on ethereum and ethereum only accepts eth for fees because of aip1559 including that base fee there so some people like to spin this as a bearish thing they're like oh if you don't need to use either fees then what's the point of eth and i explained last time how there's so many more use cases for ethan it's just totally bizarre uh to me that people would say that but uh yeah i'm not gonna rehash all of that but just wanted to kind of i guess highlight that in the context of this they've also added a block explorer which is very needed of course you know

we can't have a layer to a network without a block explorer and multiple ux improvements now uh you have to connect your wallet here to seal this i'm not going to connect my wallet uh for now but you can go test this and this is on test net by the way this is not mainnet this is on the gurley test net um so you're going to need test net ethan and and tokens not main net ethan tokens and you can get them from the various uh four sets you know one here and then there's another one that you can go to which is linked in the uh in the twitter thread as well but very very cool to see this um i think you know all these layer twos are really ramping up the development process really ramping up their releases they're all in cutthroat competition

with each other especially the zk teams it seems like everyone's building a zk vm right now uh and they're all kind of like fighting each other over and being like you know my zkvm is better i know mine's better i'm going to bring my test net out now and then i'm going to bring my main head out before you we're going to have all the apps on here blah look guys at this stage of the rollout i have no idea who's going to win this race and and by win i mean become the dominant player i have absolutely no idea what users are going to to prefer to use i feel like the tech underneath is going to feel very similar it's going to be instant transactions cheap transactions and really at the end of the day the winners and losers and dominant players are going to be decided

by marketing and business development just like anything it's going to be decided on how much outreach these um ecosystems do how much money they throw at people to build on them how much of a community they formulate you know the same stuff we always want to see of these kind of like networks obviously the stuff that we see in ethereum and and is a big reason why ethereum has succeeded uh but at this time at this point in time it's anyone's game there's no dominant player yet uh i i don't think you know the yes there are teams that are further along in their roadmap but than others but none of the zkvms are on main nets are the optimistic roll-ups that are on mainnet are just kind of like getting to the point where they're they're basically reaching ethereum main net parity with parity in

terms of like the main apps and obviously haven't reached user parity yet and it being a bear market there's not that many users around right now so it really is anyone's game at this stage and that's why the competition is so fierce because winning this game is a trillion dollar opportunity it's not a billion dollars not 10 billion not 100 billion it is a trillion dollar opportunity as i've explained before a layer 2 network and a layer 1 network that has the most usage on it when you know takes over the world essentially everyone's using it that's a trillion dollar opportunity so of course it's the competition's going to be cutthroat of course every single one of these teams wants to win wants to be the dominant player wants to be part of that 80 percent uh in in the kind of like predator distribution there and uh as i said it's

anyone's game i don't think uh anyone can kind of predict who's gonna win now but we're gonna have to see how that plays out it's gonna be a game that plays out over many years it's not gonna be decided this year or next year the year after i think it is still a five to ten year game and uh we may say you know start seeing kind of like winners and losers shake out in a couple of years but even then i don't know i feel like that would be still too early to tell and we'll have to see how it plays out uh not to write off the optimistic roll-up teams either they're doing a lot of great work and as i've said before they're going to get the sub 10 transaction fees eventually too so they're going to live side by side it's

all going to come down to marketing business development integrations as well is a big part of it too and what users prefer to use at the end of the day and what developers prefer to develop on those are the you know the main factors at the end of the day when it comes to these layer two networks all right speaking of layer two's uh last update here out of optimism so they introduced their canon technologies today which is their next-gen fault proof architecture and it is coming soon it enables optimal data costs it if it effortlessly preserves evm equivalence and its very first bug bounty goes live today so you can check out the blog post for more information on this and how it all works it's very technical of course but if you want to read it you can very cool to see this optimism seems to be making all the

right moves lately after there false kind of like start last year you know i was talking to someone today and i was saying you know it's funny how like um the last year in the l2 space has been you know a year ago in march optimism was supposed to launch and they ended up delaying uh and then you know they launched kind of like soft launch in like july and then they kind of like did their remove their white list a few months after that and obviously arbitration beat them to the punch with it with the main net launch without the white list but it's all coming together now i think for both of both the optimistic roll up main optimistic roll-up networks optimism and arbitrary they both have bustling ecosystems their tech is getting better all the time they're lowering the fees can't go wrong

here but yeah if you want to learn more about optimism's canon technology definitely give this blog post a read all right uh actually there's one more layer two thing and this is more of a broad discussion i put out a tweet today where i said every single ethereum user should be taking advantage of these low gas prices to bridge some assets into layer two don't wait until gas is at 100 plus guy again to do it so if gway is under 20 i'm pretty sure bridging into these things costs less than 10 right now obviously this is not super cheap it is still ten dollars you know in fees but bridging in really at the end of the day you only have to do it once to optimism to enter arbor trim the other ones maybe more than once but i'll explain why only once to optimism an

arbitrary bridging eighth you have eight for fees if you want other tokens you can just sell or buy other tokens uh sorry you can just sell each other tokens on these networks now obviously they're not gonna have every token out there they're they're going to have the major tokens um and then you can use your ether all the different apps out there you can buy nfts with it on there you can participate in the money markets whatever so you that 10 ish fee at 20 gray i mean i know grace 40 right now but um at 20 grey is uh is it okay it's okay to eat i think if people have a few thousand dollars to play with then ten dollars is just cost of doing business if you're if you've only got a hundred dollars to play with then totally ten dollars is going to eat

into getting to your money there um and you know even bridging in from uh from uh i guess um centralized exchange is still around 10 15 anyway so that's not going to help you i think the cheapest way to get into a layer 2 and that in kind of like that place would be to essentially what you would do is you'd go through something like crypto.com i think or um or one of these kind of like direct fiat on-ramps onto the layer two they're gonna charge you a probably two to three percent rate or something like that but that's less than the ten dollar charge so if you it depends on like the the amount right if you're only playing at 100 bucks then it's worth it because you're only paying two to three bucks then but if you're paying playing with like a thousand

dollars well that's 20 30 that's more than the fee it would cost you to go from layer one it doesn't make sense for you to go and use one of these services so there's the and the reason why ethereum gas fees aren't based on percentages of the value is because the ethereum network doesn't care about the value of the token or the value of the nft that you're moving all it cares about is the gas cost and the gas costs obviously dictated by the different op codes and the different kind of like code that's being run in the background and how much computation it takes up so it doesn't matter if you're moving a million dollars of eighth or ten dollars of eighth it's going to cost the same amount or well around the same amount as a sort of thing very very close to to

each other there um so so yeah anyway um and and what i wanted to kind of like talk about as well as i've got a few minutes left here about about kind of like getting onto layer twos now is because you're gonna you think kind of like 100 way you know hasn't been around for a for a couple months now you think to yourself ah you know i've got time i've got time you don't guys like grey can go up really really quickly depending on market conditions it can change rapidly like i was actually just looking at this a couple of hours ago great was 20 now it's 45 i don't know why it's 45 i mean you can go to ultrasound.money and see if there's some nf teammate happening but i doubt it now it's going up to 49. you know this can change so rapidly and we can we could be

back to 100 plus grey gas prices before you know it so don't wait when you see grey at like 20 or below golden golden level the guess it can probably go lower than that maybe you can go to sub 10 if the market really dies but really at the end of the day 20 gray around that is the best you can it's probably one of some of the best great prices you're going to get or gas prices you're going to get take advantage of it don't wait don't dawdle do it now because if gas hit you know if grey's at 100 bucks bridging into these 100 ways sorry um bridging into these l2 is going to cost you like 50 at least or something like that right and that's obviously getting into kind of like the um the ridiculous territory there but as i said as we get

more of these centralized exchange bridges online more of these kind of like um direct fiat on ramps that that kind of like allow you to do things with cheaper fees it's gonna be much better for for the end user there and as i said i think you know alba trim optimism um you know obviously the polygon post chain is in a layer two but you can bridge into that they're probably the three main ones that i would bridge into right now just because they have the most things to do on there uh obviously other things are live such as kind of like zigzag exchange on zk sync but that's really all you can do on zk sync and donate on get coins there's not that much right now stock net obviously is in very early alpha stages not much to do on on there there's some

other like optimism forks and stuff there are some things to do there but if you want the big the best bang for your buck right now i would bridge into arbor trim or optimism um and the polygon pos chain in terms of like uh how much activity or how much stuff each chain has to do from my reading it would go the polygon pos chain which obviously isn't a layer two but still there um arbitrary then optimism but i think arbitrary and optimism are getting you know pretty close to each other um at this point in time but the polygon pls chain is definitely like very far ahead because they've been they've had long let's kind of i guess develop their ecosystem out um but that's the kind of like order i would go with so get onto these l2s today guys don't wait don't dawdle um and you get

to experience fast transactions with cheap fees you know who doesn't love that right uh but on that note i think that's going to 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 tomorrow thanks everyone