Kiln milestone tracker, Polygon Academy and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #313 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where recap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today's 11th of february 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so we all saw the inflation numbers yesterday i guess or most of us would have seen them coming out of the u.s i think it was a 7.5 percent uh cpi which is obviously very very high inflation it seems that the fed has let inflation well and truly run ahead of them and now people are kind of like thinking okay well this means interest rates are going to rise and assets are going to be risk off so we're going to sell things and and you know go into cash and then just kind of like ride out the wave look i don't know what's going to happen short to medium term i've discussed before

about how i think like the macro environment is basically impossible to at least at least for most people to kind of like analyze and make predictions based on but one thing i did want to focus on was a tweet that i put out where i said usd is inflating at near double digits and you're selling each an asset that is going permanently deflationary this year for fed bucks pure not going to make it energy so the way i look at it is if you're going into cash right now right if you're selling into cash and you're planning to hold cash for a while kind of think about it where are you going to get enough return to not only meet inflation but beat it as well because there's there's there's flat usd inflation but then there's actually

inflation in kind of like uh your purchasing power and i've kind of like discussed this before i think i discussed this a couple weeks ago on the live stream i did with david hoffman on bankless where you know inflation may be 7.5 percent but your purchasing power for certain things is going down uh even more than that so for example used cars because not just because of um of inflation but also because of supply chain issues i think cost 40 more in the u.s over the last year and food is like higher than 7.5 percent there's a bunch of other things like utility bills and things like that so you know if you want to earn like 10 on your stable coins and using a kind of like relatively safe way to do so then you know you're keeping up with inflation and beating it by a little bit

but only by like two and a half percent so your real per like purchasing power increase is only about two and a half percent and then you compare it to uh to things like as i mentioned like things that you actually need to buy like utility utility bills food and all that sort of stuff and they're kind of like it just kind of kind of gets out of whack right you kind of start thinking yourself like why would i sit in cash for very long if this is kind of like the result here now the thing is though is that you can sit in other assets like eighth like i mean people like sitting bitcoin there's obviously tons of other assets out there you can sit in but your risk goes up with it like uh the the risk of sitting in eighth uh in the

short to medium term is quite high because it's extremely volatile eighth is not immune to going down fifty percent as a in within a few weeks as we've seen sixty percent i mean in may last year it went down sixty percent in like one to two weeks or something like that so it's not immune to that but it's more about the long term right like if you're planning to sit in cash for a year that's that's that's a long time to be in cash flow i'm not talking about yield firing anything i'm talking about cash in a bank account where you're basically earning zero on it anyway that's a long time to be in cash and your purchasing power is basically getting destroyed in that case like you are literally getting inflated away pretty heavily in that case so what if you keep your money in each

for a year well that you know you could buy ether three thousand dollars it could go back to two thousand dollars and sit there for the rest of the year your purchasing power goes down even more right but i'm talking kind of like you know a few years five ten years down the track if you're looking for something to hedge hedge against inflation you know increase your purchasing power over time and not only um that but also invest in like a hyper growth industry invest obviously in ethereum then i for me personally i don't see how you can go wrong with eth now of course as i said it is riskier and it depends depends on your situation as well if you can't you know if you need the money like no you can't you know not everyone can sit in an asset for like a few years

waiting on a return um but i just like you know it should be part of like an overall kind of portfolio structure that you have you know the way i kind of structure my portfolio is that i have like some cash i have obviously like a lot of money tied up in eighth because i i i like to stack validators and things like that and and stake with more validators but i think you need to kind of like balance it out for your own situation everyone's situation is different and i think anyone taking two you know either side of the extreme is wrong anyone saying who who tells you that you shouldn't have any cash at all i think they're wrong anyone who tells you you should be like 100 all in on 8 in bitcoin and anything else and hold no cash that's also wrong like there needs

to be a middle ground there needs to be a balance here and you don't have to be all in on one crypto asset or in on just crypto you can have like stocks and indexes and things like that like you could have like a you know a few concentrated bets i do believe that spreading yourself out way too thin is is just a quick way to i guess maybe not so much like make you poor but underperform uh just like investing in eth for example i've explained plenty of times how most things underperform ether over the longer term so yeah just just generally i mean when i saw this yesterday obviously the market kind of dumped a bit i think that's just opportunistic traders and and algorithms kind of like trading off of this uh obviously eth has like a ton of kind of like things coming for it this year with

the merge and other kind of like catalysts so the way i look at ether is just like a high growth kind of um uh tech startup still because i mean the growth that eve has even at its current market cap is insane right uh and then also on top of that it's a story of value i consider it an inflation hedge it is going permanently deflationary in june of this year or hopefully in june right we don't know exactly when the merge is going to be but hopefully in june so so yeah very much looking forward to all of that uh and very much think that uh i guess like anyone who plans to sit in cash for you know i'm talking like mostly cash or all in cash for the next you know 12 24 months i just personally i don't think that's kind of like the

strategy that i would go with uh obviously you know this is an investment advice but when you kind of look at all the writing on the wall it just doesn't make much sense at the end of the day so so yeah anyway just wanted to give a a few comments around that one all right so the next merge test net killin and i keep saying this wrong i think someone's got to correct me on this but uh k-i-l-n you've probably seen this kind of word being thrown around but the you know it's the next merge test net uh this one incorporates the la with what is potentially the last major spec changes and now it has a milestone tracker as well here so i'll link this in the youtube description for you to check out but you can see it's the same milestone tracker that we saw for the uh

kentucky dev slash test net there with the uh you know six milestones here or i guess technically seven because it starts from m0 so you've got like a few teams already kind of like powering through with m0 and m1 m standing for milestone obviously and uh and obviously they're going to get to m6 for it to be be considered complete here so very very excited to see this if this all goes smoothly and no kind of like spec changes are needed to be made for the merge spec um due to this the spec will get frozen and then we'll get release candidates which means we'll get like a much better idea around the main net timeline and uh it'll come into like clear view right now it's a bit fuzzy right we can kind of see down the road we don't know exactly where the

date is we don't know exactly what kind of like date we're in we kind of see oh yeah maybe around june july but we don't have an exact date or anything but as this kind of like test net uh continues as kind of um things you know if things go well especially the spec can be frozen and then we can get release candidates out there and then it comes into complete clear view and we can see okay well there's the date you know how this here's how we get there and the merge is is is well and truly on its way so i'm always very excited where i when i see these milestone trackers i i very much look forward to whenever these kind of get pulled out because of the fact that you get to like follow in in real time all the different clients and the

milestones that they're hitting and they they get really excited about this too i mean i'm sure there's going to be plenty of screenshots on twitter about this and about meeting these milestones so i'm very much looking forward to that uh but yeah definitely check this out it'll be linked in the youtube description below so speaking of ethereum core protocol development uh alex stokes here today has shared a link to a draft aip to get beacon state routes into the evm aka uh this is a requirement for beacon chain withdrawals so this is uh i guess like uh staked eighth being withdrawn from the beacon chain this is obviously going to be uh coming in shanghai well that's the hope and shanghai is the first network upgrade after the merge which is i guess like six ish months after the merge uh so you can kind of go to the

github uh um uh pull request here and you can see if you go to kind of like files changed here you can kind of like see that yeah uh the erp or the draft eip detailed here and this is very important obviously because people want to be able to withdraw their staked eighth of course uh you know a lot of people would uh started staking ethan it was about five six hundred dollars and now it's much higher than that but you know i i discussed the other day how i think that most people are just going to continue staking their eighth i really don't think we're going to have like a a mass kind of like um sell-off uh even when withdrawals are enabled i don't think we're going to have like a lot of people withdrawing uh at once i i do think that

uh and i also think that the bump in the apy due to the fact that uh that all you know post merge all uh unburnt fear revenue and kind of like all mav is going to be going to validate is instead of miners that's going to encourage a lot more people to stake so we might just kind of like have this netting out over time where we get a lot more eat steak than that six months and then when the six months uh is up and we have shanghai and people can withdraw their eath there might be a you know a few a few people that withdraw and things like that here and there i expect that to be the case i don't expect no one to withdraw and sell sell off their ether and take profits but i don't think it's going to be as big as

people are expecting it to be and you know the the funny thing is as well is that i think i mean when you kind of like look at what the apy is going to be it could be 10 plus percent on eth and it depends on what the price of kind of like ethers of course but you know i mean and that also the price of 8 is going to dictate a lot of this as well because if okay let's give it a hypothetical scenario here let's say eth when withdrawals are enabled is like 20k let's just say i mean it's possible it's entirely possible um so 20k and a lot of people started staking when it was 500 so that's a that's a that you know that's a very big gain from 500 to 20k um doing my kind of like head math here

that is a 40x gain so people who are up 40x on on eth they're going to want to take some profits right but as i was saying there's going to be an offset during that six months so people where new people are going to be staking because they want that apy and to be honest i think once you're kind of like set in your staking ways and you start getting those rewards out i think a lot of people are going to change their mind about taking the profits as well they're going to be like uh maybe i'll take a little bit of profits but the thing is as well is that if you sell uh you know if you only if you say you have like 33 eighth and you sell and you and because you've been staking and you've got some rewards and then you want to sell like three right

to round it off to 30. well you can't stake anymore you need a 32 minimum to stake so that's going to prevent people from selling as well many people would just sell that 18th reward that they have rather than rather than more than that because then they won't be able to stake anymore they'll have to buy back anyway uh so it's kind of like a that um that kind of like train of thought as well it's like okay well you either sell it all or you or or you sell kind of like your rewards but selling a portion of it is kind of like not really uh negotiable if you're a solo staker obviously if you want to stake with a pool or a centralized service or anything like that you can do that but if you're a solo staker and i think solo steak is

like the diamond hands of diamond hands to be honest guys like i really do think that the solo steak is like the never sells of ether at least a lot of them are and obviously i fall into that camp but i i do think that those kinds of people uh will only kind of like take profits off um off the rewards as well rather than giving up their validators uh you know i i tried i mean i i've stacked for so long and so hard to and and i've said to you guys i don't plan to ever sell my eighth because i want to stack as many validators as possible and i want to earn the rewards off that now i don't know if i'm going to sell the rewards or not to be honest like that's just again like the rewards are in eighth

it's not like the rewards are in stable coins or anything like that so it'd be very hard for me to sell the rewards and i actually count the rewards like the staking rewards as part of my kind of like long-term stack anyway so probably not gonna sell that either so when you take all that into account i i really don't think even when withdrawals are enabled we're going to see any kind of uh real kind of cell pressure maybe from a from a narrative point of view but from an actual fundamental point of view like tracking the eth i don't think we're going to see massive inflows to exchanges or massive kind of like cells on on dexas and things like that from people that were staking i think a lot of people are going to choose to to continue staking because of everything i

just outlined there all right so i think the biggest news the last 24 hours was that a critical bug was discovered in the optimism code base by a guy called j freeman now for those of you who aren't familiar with who jay is he's actually uh the person who developed cydia or our side yeah i don't know how to pronounce it exactly but c-y-d-i-a which is um an app store for jailbroken ios devices so this was i think the most popular one by far uh i you know the funny thing is i haven't jailbroken my ios device in so long but i remember using um sideyell however you say it back then and it was um it was a pretty cool thing to use but obviously jay is uh you know a hacker man right as the meme goes he knows his when it

comes to uh when it comes to um code uh and he also works within crypto too apparently uh he he's been working with orcid protocol for a while as well so he discovered this critical bug which basically would allow for uh unlimited printing of tokens if it was to be exploited which is of course an inflation bug which is pretty much one of the worst bugs you can encounter now he was rewarded uh two million dollars at i mean two million forty two dollars uh for this for for this bug bounty that is a nice payday two million dollars to catch this critical bug reported to optimism optimism obviously fixed it before announcing the bug and they optimism also did the really noble thing of contacting uh bobber network and medics which had forks of optimism which

had this bug as well and told them about it and they were they patched it too so this is just i mean this is feel good all round a good i mean awesome for jay he just got himself for two million dollars for for this because if this was exploited it could have uh resulted in a lot more than two million dollars worth of losses that's for sure and these are obviously direct user losses um and he's just kind of like uh helped a lot with um uh with with this and catching this and everything like that and you know kudos to optimism for actually paying out such a large bug bounty as well now there's a few other things i wanted to discuss about this one the major thing on to those guys is this is why the l2s have centralized controls in place right now guys like this is the

like the main reason because they're young networks optimistic roll-ups is young untested technology in the wild yes it's been you know live for a few months now and it's been kind of like being battle tested and more eyeballs on it but it's still too early to kind of like remove those centralized controls or remove those training wheels because if this had happened and there weren't centralized controls in place and optimism was a decentralized network they would have to coordinate with a global kind of like worldwide validator and sequences and and whoever else uh set and infrastructure providers and whatever else to patch this bug and and the thing is that could have leaked and then it could have been exploited and we've seen kind of like this stuff happen before where it happened actually with um with geth recently where they fixed the

critical bug then they announced there was a bug uh so people could update and then it was exploited before the patch could go out so sorry before the patched version i mean the patch version was out sorry but it was exploded before enough people kind of like upgraded and it led to a chain split there wasn't i mean we got lucky there wasn't any kind of like adverse effects there uh for the majority of the network but i mean it still shows how and publicly announcing this sort of stuff is is is not great because it will be exploited straight away if especially if you've got details about how the bug works and things like that so that's what these kind of like controls are in place for but i also think the centralized controls uh work very well to allow these teams to move fast uh not

break things like move fast and break things is from the web 2 world i don't believe in moving fast and breaking things but i think that the l2 teams because of these centralized controls they can move fast and ship fast right not necessarily break things because you don't want to be breaking things in with financial infrastructure but moving fast and be able to ship fast is is a key element here because not only are these layer twos competing with each other they're competing with the monolithic l1 because they're competing on the execution layer side so they're competing with um avalanche they're competing with solana they're competing with phantom whatever other kind of like r1 you can think of and a lot of those are totally centralized they have massive kind of like marketing war chest and business development war chest

and they can and they move really quickly because of that so the layer two is having their centralization and and kind of like training wheels in place i'm happy for that to be in place for quite a while i know a lot of them plan to decentralize sooner rather than later but the thing is is that it's going to be a progressive thing where the decentralization will be done in phases it won't be done all at once and it'll only be done when they're confident that you know it's been battle tested enough and and kind of like we've done enough that we can do at this point and then we can kind of decentralize it out so so yeah anyway great to see that no kind of like funds were lost in this and that was it was patched and everything um and yeah i

guess congrats again to jay on get these two million dollars i'm sure it's life-changing money for him uh maybe not maybe he already made a lot of money in the past doing other things i'm not sure but i think two million dollars is not jump change right it's uh it's a it's a nice bit of money for everyone so um yeah congrats again to jay there all right so swag them as prime has shared uh details of uh the first stock net core dev call uh so stock net core devs meant to discuss protocol changes and updates i think about 24 hours ago um it's similar to the ethereum uh core dev calls there's a recording available here and there was an agenda with um kind of like i guess like links here as well so if you want to check out this you can there'll be links in the youtube

description but really cool to see more public core dev calls happening not just from ethereum but also from the layer twos because really the layer two ecosystem is an extension of ethereum core development they should be doing these sorts of things and they should be kind of like following i guess like what ethereum has done in the past and i think that they should be following the eip process as well when they start to decentralize so there could be like a a stock net improvement proposal right s-i-a-s-i-s-i-p and then there could be like an optimism improvement proposal oem and you know arbitrary and all that sort of stuff right so from that perspective uh the closer they are to kind of like how ethereum does things the better i think and i guess like star wars started to do this with their uh their core dev calls public uh i think public

core dev calls or at least like the call is recorded and and and the recording is public i'm not sure if it was publicly done kind of like live whereas a theorem called dev calls r but still i mean it's still good that they kind of like put a recording out and you can kind of go view that and everything there so kudos to them for that all right so david schwartz from uh polygon hermes shared a eth research post today with ideas that uh jordi bullet bail uh baillina who also works with uh polygon hermes uh and and david had to improve the decentralization model for her for for the hermes zk evm project so they had feedback from the polygon zk teams now looking forward to receiving comments from the community so you can go give this a read it is quite

technical i wouldn't say that it's something that like i totally kind of like understand from the first couple of reads that i've read it but i anything got to do with zk evm i'm extremely excited about quick refresher zkavm is the kind of like holy grail of zero knowledge um stuff right now because it means generalized evm using zk proofs and obviously polygon is investing a lot of money in this they're working on this a lot and hermes is one of the front runners there there's obviously other teams too like zk sync and and and and things like that i'm sure starkware is looking at it too but they're kind of like going a little bit of a different different road there but uh yeah definitely check this out if you're more technically minded and you want to leave feedback for them i think this was only posted like yesterday i

haven't got any feedback yet but i'm sure someone will jump in soon i mean heath research is such a gold mine honestly like there's a lot of stuff on here obviously that's on like the bleeding edge of ethereum research and most of you won't understand that because like i don't understand it to be honest uh but it you know if you're kind of like technically minded if you want to get more involved with research you have to be on each research i mean you can you can't not be on eat research let's be honest so definitely go check this out holding kid in the youtube description so that's another update out of polygon so uh polygon academy was uh was launched so this is a newly launched free online school dedicated to onboarding web 2 devs into the web 3 ecosystem so you can visit this blog

post to find out how to join the polygon academy here and the rankings um and kind of like all these other i mean there's all these other kind of uh kind of documentation here for you to check out they've got like levels and things like that like apprentice badge developer badge warrior badge wizard wizard badge and and you know there's some there's a discord channel you can join all that good stuff there i'm super excited about initiatives like this because i want to pull in as many web 2 people as we can into web 3 like let's just drain all of the talent from web 2. let's let leave web 2 with basically nothing um you know not not to sound like an but really at this point like web 2 especially the monoliths in web 2 they're not innovating i mean when's the last time google did anything innovative

and every single product almost every single product that google develops outside of search has either failed or they've just pulled the plug on i don't know if you guys have noticed this following google over the years but they really haven't done much um you know in terms of like the monolithic companies that are still kind of like innovating at the at kind of like the bleeding edge and it's arguable but apple is i mean this is the reason why apples worth so much is because they are doing a lot of innovation there um and then you kind of look at some other web 2 companies uh like fake like especially social media like facebook where's the innovation like metaverse facebook sorry facebook the metaverse isn't gonna happen on facebook like no one wants facebook metaverse no one wants zak metaverse it's gonna be soulless it's gonna be lifeless um so

yeah i mean you guys know my view on kind of like web 2 and it's ironic because i upload my videos to to youtube which is web 2 but um i think just in general like if we can get the you know the smartest web 2 people over to web 3 and really drain that knowledge over it'll just be a big plus for our ecosystem so very very excited to see that polygon is jumping into the fray here with polygon academy all right so alchemix is teasing uh something that's for sure they're teasing a bunch of different things he has a lot going on in this teaser video but not much kind of like i guess like uh a lot you know not much kind of like detailed information so we're gonna have to see what's coming soon here but this is this is really really cool i mean

alcomix is one of those projects that have kept building through i guess like the d5 bear market even though they were considered d5 2.0 i mean that was just a meme guys like you saw it play out it was like a meme and marketing thing where everyone was saying you know d5 2.0 blah blah and it just ended the same way as everything else but it doesn't just because the token prices went down doesn't mean the products aren't still being developed and alchemix is one of those products that i've loved for a very long time where exactly you get you where basically you get to kind of like put in your funds and draw against it and you you don't have a risk of liquidation and it kind of like uh pays itself off like self-replaying loans is still mind-blowing i mean it may be it may be

kind of like old news for us that have been in d5 and crypto for a while but for most people it's mind-blowing stuff and just extending this out and giving and getting access to this for more people is very very bullish so i'm very excited to see what this is from alchemics and when they'll be uh kind of like releasing this it's they say it's coming soon you know soon could be a week it could be six months who knows but we'll have to see uh kind of like what happens here so yeah just wanted to kind of quickly spotlight that so rac today announced the first version of what he's calling rac os and you can access this at rac.fm which is a web3 enabled portal for all rac holders which is his um social token here so um it's free for all to use but has some

unlocked features if you hold the the tokens it's not a full operating system per se but it is the base layer to build on and continue to develop for years to come uh he had a lot of fun making it he says here and you can see there's a music player uh app with several unreleased tracks including a 60-minute ambient mix for the long-term holders so that's really cool so i'm guessing only token holders can view um rac token holders can can actually play this and then for the long-term token holders uh they can actually listen to this mix and the thing is is that you can't actually buy that you ha you know unless you i guess unless you get someone to record it for you or to pirate it for you to actually listen to it you have to be a long-term token holder which is which is

cool i mean this is something that's uniquely enabled by crypto because that's a decentralized way of doing it um there's a bunch of different apps with kind of like uh tour dates discography contact info token addresses uh if you're a patreon subscriber you can claim tokens as well uh and they're also premiering their club and event space in the metaverse this is cool i mean rac has been a pioneer of um you know nft metaverse uh social token stuff and he's really going the extra mile with it he's not just trying to kind of like create something to you know enrich himself with a token or anything like that he's trying to push the boundary he's trying to do something different he's obviously a very um uh he's obviously very passionate about uh creating music and and and and making sure that artists are awarded for that

he always talks about how the streaming platforms aren't paying artists enough and how he wants to disrupt the music industry and all that sort of stuff and he's been doing this for a while so uh you know he's just taking it the extra mile with this rac os today so very very excited he's uh he's obviously innovating here more than most people are in this scene and that's what i always like to see from uh from creators like this all right finally here just a shout out to uh to arbitrarily who have a jobs kind of like bought here jobs.lever.co slash off chain labs where you can see all of their open positions i can't remember if i've i brought this up before to you guys but i saw it again today and i figured you know why not i'll just kind of say say to say the refuel kind of like

watches and listeners there are plenty of jobs out there for you to go and kind of like um get involved with whether that be at off chain labs or some other layer two team or an nft project or a metaverse project i mean if you can't find a job in crypto right now um you're doing something wrong and i don't mean that in a bad way i just mean that in a there's so many so many opportunities right now i never say this all the time but guys like so many opportunities right now and honestly when when you start working in crypto you'll realize that it's not just you know a quote-unquote crypto job it's a it's a lifestyle it's like it's a culture it's so so different to what you're used to in the traditional world in the non-crypto world like i was blown away

when i first started working for set like just how different it was and especially because a lot of these teams are startups it just kind of like completely changes it as well because you know startup culture is obviously very different to corporate culture and all that sorts of stuff so if you're working at a big corporate or a big enterprise and especially if it's web 2 and you're able to jump into crypto do it do it now don't wait guys like do it right now go to cryptocurrency jobs as websites search their for roles apply to things you know get involved as much as you can because it's the golden age right now for getting a career in crypto don't wait too long like you you know you might be saying to yourself oh you know i'll do it i'll do it later do it

later and then like two three years passes and you miss kind of like the really early adopter pioneer stage and you kind of like regret that that's what i that's that's kind of what my thinking was originally when i you know got a job at set in mid-2019 i was dying to get a job like i was looking for a job um for six months actually from early 2019 to mid-2019 um because there wasn't many jobs back then i was obviously in australia it was made it even harder with the time zone difference and everything like that but uh set you know reached out to me and took a chance on me and it and honestly changed my life right um so i think that don't wait guys like just jump right into it get into it uh go on as i said the cryptocurrency jobs

website or go on off chain labs this thing here i'll link this in the youtube description check if there's a role that suits you because there's roles for everything and apply don't wait don't hesitate i think on that note i'm going to end up 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