KZG Ceremony update, Layer 2 chat and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #521 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray refuel where we kept the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony sassano and today's the 10th of January 2023. all right everyone let's get into it so uh Trent Van Epps here from the ethereum foundation has put together an update uh where he said just recorded the latest on ethereum's upcoming kzg ceremony with a few people here excited for the episode and maybe the ceremony to be live soon and you can learn more at the GitHub repository here now as you guys will know the kcg ceremony is a necessary prerequisite before we can launch a Proto dank sharding or Erp 4844 on the ethereum network now I've explained a bit how the kzg ceremony works in the past so I'm not going to go over that again now but you can read all

about it at the GitHub repository here but basically you will get an opportunity if you want to to participate in this they're hoping for as wide participation as possible so from my understanding all you would do is you would go to a website you would run some software uh sorry that website would run some software on your hardware and then generate a source of Randomness from that or you can submit your own source of Randomness as well and and the other software does all the good stuff from there I'm not sure exactly how it works under the hood but from my understanding as I've explained before you would only need one honest participant out of all of them so let's say there were a hundred thousand participants and you know 99 999 of them were all are being dishonest you still

only need one honest participant to have a guarantee that the kzg ceremony is secure which is really really cool um that's why I mean some people uh will uh I guess I criticize this system saying oh it's a trusted setup right like you're still trusting someone uh for the source of entropy here but basically yes but the more participants you have the greater uh sorry I guess like the lower the chance of everyone being dishonest is obviously if you only have one participant uh the chance of someone being dishonest is is pretty high if you have two goes down and then it can go down from there obviously as you get larger and larger it's not like exponential function it can turn into a linear function and we don't know the exact numbers around it it's kind of hard to calculate that but we do know

logically that the more participants there are unique participants and that that's actually been the biggest issue with I think the kcg ceremonies how to do civil resistance because you can you can say okay well we had a hundred thousand participants but how do you prove that they were a hundred thousand unique participants that's the key here unique participants that aren't just Bots you know there could be one unique participant and the rest of them are Bots right that doesn't help anyone because the Bots could be run by that one person and the whole thing was just one person so that's what they've been working on and I'm curious to see what they've come up with when they release the kzg ceremony because I think that's going to be critically important as well to make sure that the people who participating are actually Unique Individuals and not to just Bots uh

because that would be a really bad thing if we discover later on that it was all Bots and was all the same person and now we can no longer trust the uh uh the kind of stuff that was given in that in that ceremony there I think there's an extremely low chance of that happening just from the the fact of the matter is that there's already hundreds of people at least hundreds of unique humans at least that I know will participate in this ceremony people like the core developers and researchers people in the daily Way community uh people uh you know just on Twitter just following along casually can open up the website and do it themselves as well all the develop a lot of the developers in the ecosystem uh the exchanges and the infrastructure providers in general May participate as well so you can have a

pretty good guarantee that there's going to be at least hundreds of unique participants anyway even if you didn't have a civil resistant mechanism but the point of having a simple resistant mechanism is making sure that we get quality submissions rather than just Bots rather than just really low grade submissions to the ceremony itself but yeah as I said this is coming real soon uh they've been teasing it for quite a while now and you can see here that Trend says it'll be live soon TM so we don't know the exact date yet maybe in the next couple of months would be the you know the ideal timing I guess because as I said this is a prerequisite for erp48 44 and 4844 can't go live until this is done so this needs to happen within I guess like the next couple months or two to three months if

we expect back to 4844 to go live in Q3 or Q4 of this year but yeah as I said you can check out the GitHub repository for yourself I'll link it in the YouTube description below all right an update out of rocketpool today uh they started off this thread by saying staking rocketpool just got a whole lot easier our proprietary router now Aggregates R8 secondary markets to fulfill your transaction via the deposit queue and or decentralized exchange and deliver the best possible rates you can try it out at stake dot rockerpool.net so these are for that this is obviously for the people out there who aren't really interested in running a mini pool as part of the rocker pool Network they just want exposure to staked eth and exposure to rocketpool uh they can do that by purchasing re now as I've said before R8

has been at a uh kind of Premium here uh because of the fact that that deposit uh sorry that staking pool has been full and you need to spin up more mini pools in order to up that uh sorry in order to kind of uh get get that premium down to meet more eth and all those other upgrades that I've spoken about uh in the past I'm not going to rehash them here but it's great to see that rocketpool uh has come to get it come together and put this out there to make it easier for people to be able to buy our wreath and get the best possible rate they can get and as you can see in this screenshot it actually tells you what the premium is so you can see here that the premium at time of this screenshot was 1.23 so essentially uh

you could think about this like okay well what's the yield that you're going to be getting for the entire uh entire year on your staked eth it says here average return of 4.15 I don't know if that includes the premium or not but let's say for the sake of argument it doesn't then you would subtract that 1.23 premium that you paid uh and from that rate and that would give you your real rate because you already basically paid more to get access to this R8 now logic sorry ideally the um the R8 price wouldn't have a premium on it at all it would be uh tied to exactly how much rewards it has uh and uh there'd be zero percent premium and you'd get and you wouldn't have to actually in front anything for that uh but that's not how it is today

it hopefully will be like that in the future but today because there is more demand than there is Supply there is that uh premium there but great to see rocketpool add this to their official steak.rockerpool.net website which you can go check out it'll be linked in the YouTube description below all right onto a bit of chat about layer twos so you can see here the crypto fees dot info website has added stock where's starknet to L2 fees dot info which is a great website that tracks all the fees across all the different Layer Two networks as you can see uh their track fees for sending Ethan swapping tokens now of course these are basic uh kind of fees here like sending it and swapping tokens there's just two other things you can do on these Layer Two networks obviously there are all the defa apps

you can interact with nft stuff but it becomes harder to estimate the fees there because each D5 project and each kind of like nft project would have their their different fees associated with them depending on the transaction or depending on I guess like the smart contract being interacted with there so that's why sending Ethan swapping tokens tokens here being erc20s I just I guess like a an easy thing to calculate and you can see the list now includes stock Nets and the fees are pretty cheap I mean these fees are also uh dependent on the fees of ethereum layer one since the data you settled to ethereum layer one here that's why you can see that the optimistic roll-up fees are uh or be a little bit more expensive than the ZK roll-up lines not too much more here but that's because they've got to post their

cool data to uh to layer one here and they've got more expensive costs uh there but post Proto dank shiting these fees are going to be subscent basically especially at the at the current gas prices that we're at the relatively low gas prices that we're at here uh but yeah just great to see that l2fees.info has added stock net here just another way to keep track of the stock net ecosystem uh for you so you can go check that out for yourself uh and the second thing which is a bit related here to the L2 stuff for I guess very related is a tweet that David Hoffman put out where he said the L2 bull market and he took a screenshot of l2beat.com's activity measure which shows the I guess past 24 hours of TPS on each of these l2s now I've often said that TPS isn't okay way

to measure activity on a network but it doesn't really translate one-to-one across networks l2b does their best to I guess normalize this to make it comparable uh but still the the the thing that I wanted to point out here was not necessarily the TPS numbers themselves and this is real TPS this is this is not theoretical TPS where you say okay well we can do a thousand TPS but like there's no one using the chain so the real TPS is actually zero this is real TPS over the past 24 hours of when David took this screenshot but what I'm focused on is the seven day change which is massive look at the seven day change here in a bear Market guys I know the the Market's been a little bit more bullish over the last I guess three days now um which will have influenced this but

this is really cool because I mean it just further forces the fact that l2s are continuing to grow right these Roll-Ups are continuing to grow the thesis is playing out that ethereum is scaling via these layer 2 networks and websites like l2beat.com do a great way of uh sorry do a great service of measuring this for us and showing us these nice little fancy stats that we can get uh value out of and get data out of uh but when you kind of look at this and look at the TPS numbers as I said I would take it out with a little bit of a grain of salt just because I'm not entirely sure if l2b right now is normalizing this because ethereum handles gas differently to optimism and arbitrim uh even though they're evm compatible or going for even equivalence

which optimism has gone for I don't think it's like one to one it might be very close but I don't think it's like one to one and then looking at the other networks which are not neces are not evm at all uh it's definitely different like immutable X for example uh I don't know if this is normalized as I said uh but they're not eating evm network dodx is not an evm Network same with so resident EK sync stock net and Aztec connectia uh that they're different so looking at that is kind of hard because you've I've seen screenshots before of TPS on some of these networks being a lot higher than this but that TPS can't be compared to uh I guess like an evm Network for example because it's a different measure there the the way TPS is being measured is different so always good to keep that

in mind we're measuring these things and it's also a good rule of thumb for looking at this on-chain data in general or just data generally data can be very easily easily manipulated or easily misinterpreted depending on uh what narrative someone is trying to push or depending on if you don't actually understand what's happening under the hood and that's why I've traditionally not been a fan of tvl as a metric I mean I originally was but then this was back in 2020 but then it became like a Target instead of a measure and what ended up happening was that people looked at tvl as if it was some sort of signal as for an investment thesis or for some kind of activity signal but in reality it wasn't in reality most of the time the only reason why these a lot of protocols had tvl to begin with is because they were

paying for it they were doing liquidity mining programs and it was a bull market so it was working but now you see in a bear Market a lot of this tvl especially because the tvl is measured in the asset price as well and measured in USD on asset prices that fall against USD in Bear markets we see that the TBL number was highly inflated by the asset prices being inflated and also highly inflated by liquidity mining programs so I always like to denominate tvl not so much in USD but in in eth or in another kind of like strong asset uh like maybe something like BTC rather than USD because USD obviously is influenced by the prices of the assets and it leads to a lot of noise so again going back to my original Point uh it's always good to look at this data critically make sure

you understand the data make sure you understand how it's measured and the differences between it and all the Nuance lest you fall into this whole of thinking something has a lot of activity on it thinking something's really popular when in reality you're not necessarily being lied to but you're either misrepresent messenger interpreting the data or someone else is misinterpreting it and trying to push it as if it's a positive to suit their own narrative because as we know this space runs on narratives runs on people trying to pump their own bags as we as we know so yeah just always good to keep that in mind but anyway that doesn't take away from the fact that the growth uh the the seven day change here is really positive and that's something that is actually worth looking at especially if it's consistent across chains if it's you

know for example if there was an outlier here that showed uh for some reason arbitrum one had plus one thousand percent and the rest of them had like no growth at all and then I would be a bit sus about that I'd be like why did arbitrim grow so fast are they doing a new liquidity mining program was there a big event on arbitrim uh did the uh is there a bug on l2beat.com that's showing an incorrect data incorrect data or did they change the way they measure these things that's that's what I mean by looking at the Nuance you can't just look at a number and think oh my God like you know that's the truth and people used to do this uh when um D5 pulse used to have some bugs where it would say that the tvl of maker when make I had most of the tvl was basically

zero and people like oh my god did make it get hacked and it's funny people went to that instead of going to D5 pulse uh which was just a centralized website talking to a database their data having a bug in it and they'd and their data um pipeline having a bug in it which showed the wrong data and the funny thing is you could very quickly and very easily verify this for yourself by going to another third-party service like eat the scan and looking at the maker contract itself and seeing that the assets were still there obviously uh etherscan is not going to give you the whole uh sorry is is not uh something to be 100 trusted because it can also be tampered with it can also have data pipeline issues but uh if if that's not showing something different to what D5 pulse is showing I

think it's better to assume that it's a data error rather than uh you know it got hacked or something like that so that's another bit of nuance to consider there as well but anyway leave one at that you can check out the activity measure here if you want at l2b.com which David Hoffman also links in his tweet here which of course will be linked in the YouTube description below all right continuing on the I guess layer 2 front here I came across a tweet thread from 100y.eath uh which was about polygon so they started off this thread by saying polygon will lead the the era of modular blockchain in 2023 I've written a 69 minute read long piece on polygon covering all of its products hope this will serve as a valuable Resource as you embark on your journey to polygon now this is a tweet thread which you can

read which summarizes this but also a medium post which yeah is is literally a six to nine minute read so it is quite a long way with different chapters there's about seven I think chapters here going over this but if you want to to learn about polygon what they're doing you know what the I guess ball cases for polygon what they're working on across all of their different teams this is your Bible basically it's up to date just got published just today so I would highly recommend going and checking it out for yourself um but the reason why I I also wanted to talk about this was not only that it was a great report but also the fact that this terminology of modular blockchain is something that I've been talking about a lot and uh for a very long time on the refuel was we originally put on

my radar by polynaya which you which you are all familiar with uh way back in I guess like maybe even 2020 I think it was uh or even uh maybe early 2021 but basically the the concept of a modular blockchain is splitting up the parts of what a blockchain does so the ethereum layer one will be like a settlement and datability a data availability layout and ethereum layer layer 2 will be an execution layer even though ethereum layer 1 can still do execution it's not being optimized for that and then we had these other chains come uh come out or I guess like reveal themselves like Celestia which is just optimizing for data availability polygon Avail so polygon has their own solution which is also optimizing for data availability uh there are other ones like eigenlayer which is uh taking a novel approach here

by is tapping into the eighth that's staked and doing like a restaking architecture so there's an explosion of I guess the modular blockchain design in stark contrast to the last few years which has been dominated by the monolithic blockchain design which is which are the solanas of the world the Avalanche of the world the the blockchains that say we can do everything at layer one we don't need to scale via a modular approach which is fine to have that thesis and think that that can work but as you guys know I don't think that that's actually a long-term sustainable model I think that the modular roadmap or the modular blockchain design is much better but I think there's actually value in the monolithic designs as well because it shows us what not to do it basically shows us and validates our thesis around monolithic blockchains now of course it

may still be too early to definitively say that monolithic blockchains are not going to be successful and modular blockchains are the only things that are going to be successful but in my personal opinion I think that that like I I already believe that but there's obviously I mean obviously we're still too early to disability say anything and it's not like I'm saying that these other monolithic chains can't succeed in their own right I'm saying that I think they'll succeed in a niche kind of form only I don't think they're going to succeed in the same way something like ethereum will where it's a modular design that can scale to the world it becomes a settlement layer 8 becomes or is ultrasound money you know becomes a better and better story of value and cruise more monetary premium uh that is a whole different kind of discussion

there but I think it's still valuable to have both modular and monolithic even if I believe that modular is the way to go but if you want to learn more about modular blockchains uh and everything the polygon has going for it I highly recommend giving this blog post to read which will be linked in the YouTube description below and you can also read the Tweet thread which of course will be linked as well which summarizes the post just in case you didn't want to uh you know spend six or nine minutes reading this but in saying that I mean if you've got some spare time or if you've got that you know you've got time to do that you can do that and or you can maybe feed the blog post through one of those text-to-speech readers if you don't mind the rather robotic voices some of them

have and maybe you go on a run or go on a walk or something or on the treadmill or at the gym and listen to it might be valuable for you as well but anyway we'll be linked in the YouTube description below all right so something that came out of the uh fee project yesterday I think it's fee uh it might be Phi uh it's spelled Phi so maybe it is five maybe I'll say five from now on but it's called fire connect and it's now live on mainnet so what fire connect allows you to do is connect lens and create your favorite world view in Thailand you can construct the URL like the one below which is linked TR uh which is a sample connecting for land so just the refresher here Phi is a project that wants to basically allow you to build

your own digital world digital metaverse based on your on-chain footprint so for example you get a unique building based on how much eth you have in your wallet or a unique footprint based on how many unusoft transactions you have so a unique item based on how many unisoft transactions you've done and it goes far beyond this those are just the basic examples here but you can actually uh go here and see on um or see the demo of what they mean by connecting the lands here uh is that this URL refers to four different kind of land plots and there's different kind of items or buildings I should say on each of them here and I should definitely only disclose that I'm an investor in in fire here but this is I guess like one of the nft related plays that I like investing in or I like

putting my weight behind it's those infrastructure things where I think there's tons of value in nfts I don't know which individual ones are going to succeed so I'd rather take like a wide berth infrastructure approach uh when investing in these sorts of things um but yeah I mean if you haven't checked them out yet you can but great to see that they've added Phi connect here there's a little tweet thread uh I guess um describing this and explaining exactly what it is as well as the link there to what I've got right in front of me which you can check out it'll be linked in the YouTube description below all right so you may have heard of a I guess decentralized Twitter clone called farcasta that has been in the works for quite a while and has actually been live in an invite only mode for a while now

um it has for the last I guess like yeah or so that it's been in open Beta been a mobile only uh kind of experience but now there is a desktop client that got released today uh called uh or I guess spelled o-m-i-l-o-s dot XYZ which you can go check out for yourself if you have a farcast uh invite and connect here so as I said this is a decentralized version of of Twitter it's very similar to Twitter it's got the you know the tweets the replies I mean they're called casts uh right and then when you and you can still like something and reply to it and and recast it um but the reason why I bring this up is because this is one of those I guess like decentralized social media platforms that I'm really bullish on like this and lens I'm just really

bullish on on these sorts of things because they're trying to build the architecture in such a way that not everything is strictly on chain so that makes it obviously a lot cheaper makes the user experience better but the decentralizing what actually matters so the reason why different clients can be built is because the back end is open right like it's not like Twitter where it's all closed off and different clients used to be able to be built within the API was shut off which means the back end was shut off I like this because it means you can pick your own client I think there's like a few like five different mobile clients or something to interact with firecast star I'm not showing the exact number and now there's a web client and there's going to be more and more as as time goes on

here so I just wanted to highlight that for you guys that there is a web client live now if you have a far Caster invite if you don't I actually don't know what the current process is to uh um sign up to forecaster I got my invite quite a quite a while ago I haven't been very active on there because it's been mobile only I do most of my I guess tweeting on desktop so if I want if I'm going to move or at least kind of interact with a similar platform I'm going to be doing it on desktop almost exclusively so that's why I haven't really been active on there but I hope with this new web client that I can be more active when I say once I get it working um right now it won't let me connect because I created a new wallet on on the

mobile client I had not signed in with like sasol.heath for example and I have to find a way to connect them together uh which I will do I just haven't done that because obviously sasol.e doesn't have a forecasted invite so I can't sign in with it on desktop but I'll get there I'll get there but anyway uh as I said like file customers invite only you can go to their Twitter account to see what the current process is for signing up uh and I'll link this in the YouTube description below all right finally here we have a new project or I don't know if they're brand new but it's new to me at least uh that kind of put together a Twitter thread uh called lava Network which talked about uh supporting decentralized access to ethereum State data AKA their their lava Network now uh supports uh or now I

guess like um has a decentralized RPC that ethereum users can tap into now I've talked a lot about rpcs in the past how uh basically a lot of them are centralized how they can censor you because you're relaying your transactions uh via them instead of relaying it via your own full node or via a decentralized IPC well there are some out there like POC Network which you've been around for a little while there is a new RPC from uh I guess llama nerds which I've talked about before as well which I don't know if they're decentralized yet but they're committed to not censoring not Banning anyone not Geo blocking or anything like that which is a step above what infuro currently does because they do jira block certain countries uh based on sanctions I've

believe so countries like Iran and Russia um but uh in that in that respect uh you know I've always encouraged people to use these decentralized RPC networks or use their own full node as an RPC which is actually relatively easy to do and if you're running a full node you really don't have an excuse not to use it as an RPC because at the end of the day like if you're running a full node and because you're validating or validated on the network that's totally fine it's awesome that you're doing that but if you're still using a third-party RPC then it doesn't really make much sense so if you are doing that you should definitely go and set up your own RPC uh connections or it gets like change your well to connect to your own full node and open the the ports needed for RPC

access to to happen there which you can Google for anyway but yeah just great to see another entrant in the decentralized RPC space I'm sure there's going to be more of these as time goes on it is actually something that pop network has been trying to do and add incentives to with their token so essentially you could you would have a service where uh the people people would pay some kind of I guess like the RPC would take some kind of fee in and the token would be staked in order to get a claim on that and to run uh nodes in their Network and such and such not sure on the economics of it and how well that will work over time but the idea of having a decentralized RPC is obviously very uh very sound and very needed but then we also have like clients coming as well

which will help a lot with this RPC stuff that we've been suffering because you would just be able to run in a like client uh locally and then be able to relay transactions with relative certainty that everything is okay and you're interacting with the correct chain but in the meantime yeah you can use your own full node as an RPC if you want to or you can use one of these decentralized rpcs or one of the ones that have committed to not censoring or not jira blocking such as laminar which I've highlighted before you can Google it llama nodes I know I talk really fast guys I'm sorry sometimes I talk so fast you probably don't get what I'm saying but yeah llama nodes you can Google that as well but of course lava network network will be linked in the YouTube description below for you to check out

but on that note I'm going to cut today's episode a little bit short because that's all I have for you uh but anyway thanks for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give that video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone