The Merge in FT, LlamaNodes revealed and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #446 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the daily grade refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host the anthony sosano and says the 13th september 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so less than two days until the merge i think it's around 35 hours or something right now and uh google's merge countdown uh has been updated and the pandas are now touching so this is pretty cool that they've actually gone the extra mile here and not only do they have the pandas they're also kind of um moving the pandas closer together and i'm assuming it's going to just be one panda one actual panda once the merch happens so very cool to see that uh but yeah as i said less than 20 less than two days right now bordeaux and 797.io are both pretty much in

not in sync totally with each other at the moment but they're pretty close so you can see here on bordeaux the estimated time is september 15th at 4 43 am utc on 797.io it is september 15th at 304 am utc so they're much closer than they were prior previously and that's because obviously as we get closer it becomes easier to estimate these things and hashrate seems pretty steady it has been going down a little bit but not too much so it is pretty steady there so it does seem like the merge is going to happen you know maybe between like two and five a.m uh i i guess like uh utc on september 15th here which sucks for people in europe i believe good for the us definitely good for australia that's

like afternoon for australia so i'm happy about that uh but i guess like the euro bros as i like to call them we'll have to uh we'll have to kind of like stay up late or something or maybe get up uh very early morning there but yeah as we get closer obviously we'll get more of an exact time uh but um yeah i mean we're never gonna get an exact exact time until like basically until it it happens but yeah less than two days away now it's exactly at time of recording 38 hours remaining so oh so close guys it's crazy 38 hours anyway i also saw this from santiago today shared this on twitter that on the front page of the financial times there's something about the merge you can see here in the top in orange it says the merge historic moment or just another

crypto hype and uh there's a i guess like a thing on page 13 which you can see here this is what santiago shared basically a picture of vitalik with the you know with ethereum logo and everything talking about uh the merge itself so this is speaking to like i think a wider thing and the wider attention that ethereum has attracted with the merge normally network upgrades go through and the only ones who care about them are people within ethereum and maybe wider crypto i guess like the last network upgrade that got this much fanfare was eip1559 and didn't even really come close i think erp 1559 had some mainstream media coverage but it was mostly an insider ethereum thing right and some i guess like a bit wider in

crypto as well whereas the merge seems to have gotten much more attention from the mainstream media this time around and i think that the major reason is definitely that energy reduction that we're going to see right that 99.95 energy use reduction uh which the mainstream media loves to talk about because obviously one of the things that people hate crypto for the most is the energy use uh for better or worse that doesn't matter around the reasoning behind it it's just definitely the narrative and now the other big thing is obviously that is issuance reduction which i don't think the mainstream media reports on too much because it's a bit more involved a bit more esoteric for them to talk about uh but they definitely do talk about ethereum moving from private work to proof of stake and how that's energy

efficient and all the stuff that comes along with that so we really are on the world stage right now and it's funny that i'm going to be doing that merge mainnet merge live stream call with uh a staker and bank listen uh in a couple of days at time of the merge and i think that it's going to be it's definitely going to be a much more i guess serious stream than we've had in the past with the test nets because i think on this one there's going to be a lot of people watching like a lot and not just within crypto outside of crypto as well so it's definitely going to be us on the world stage so to speak and obviously if the merge goes goes through successfully which we expect it will you know i don't think anyone's expecting it to fail or anything like that there's

going to be a lot of good press around that as well and and i really do think that conversation is going to shift like a lot in i guess like not just the energy usage stuff but the around ethereum itself and like this is by far the biggest upgrade ethereum has ever delivered and if we deliver this and it literally goes through just fine and nothing nothing goes wrong with it and it's it's all well and good the network keeps operating then i think that's a massive de-risking event for ethereum not just within crypto but outside of crypto as well because all the other upgrades coming to the network there some of them are pretty big right but they're not nothing as i mean nowhere near as big as has the merge or as ethereum's moved to proof of stake because that has been excuse me that has been the most complex

upgrade uh by far and everything else we have coming while they may be just as impactful such as proto-dank sharing or dank sharing in general they're definitely not on the same level so yeah i i honestly think that there's nothing negative that i can think about when it comes to the merge and if you're moving to it as long as we get a successful merge obviously if something catastrophically bad happens where for some reason the chain just doesn't kind of like shift to proof of stake and it just freezes or something that'll be like the worst case scenario obviously it's not going to be a good time but we didn't even see any of that on the test nets we haven't really seen that on the shadow forks i believe there was a shadow fork recently actually shadow fork 13 where it went through not 100

perfect but i believe the only issue was on their end they didn't i think configure something properly so like it really there really is no issues with the transition itself it's more around the configuration stuff and as i've mentioned before you can definitely expect validators to some validators to drop off at time of the merge because they didn't update in time they like their nodes in time or they didn't do the configuration right but they're going to quickly fix that because money's online so yeah i mean i'm expecting a very successful merge i'm expecting the mainstream media to continue their positive coverage of ethereum once the merge goes through as well and they're definitely going to focus on that energy reduction narrative which is a huge boon for us especially at a time like this where energy prices are skyrocketing for people they're not going to you know

want us to to stomach the fact that there's this massive thing using you know sorry there's this these massive networks using all this energy for better or worse it doesn't really matter what the arguments are the narrative is still pretty bad around proof of work and i don't expect that to change anytime soon so i'm very happy with him might have to deal with that but obviously i'm also happy about a lot of other things you know i think ethereum's going to be more secure under proof of stake the issue introduction is super exciting uh the fact that it's just as i said a huge de-risking event for ethereum there's so much got that going that goes into it that uh there's just something for everyone i think at the end of the day so very very cool to see uh the merge featured in the financial

times all right last up on the merge actually no there's two or maybe three more merge things yeah i just looked at the tabs here there are three more things here but there was a feature done of me in the block so the block is doing a feature on a bunch of people that were heavily involved within ethereum and and with the merge of course so this feature uh was written by lucy here i recommend giving it a read not just because it's about me but because i thought it was really well written and and basically lucy interviewed me for this and she didn't try to make anything clickbaity about it she didn't actually represent anything inaccurately she didn't put words in my mouth she reported on what i said and and was really good so definitely go give it a read i'll link it in the youtube description below for

you to do so all right so those home new home of the heart nfts that i spoke about yesterday or i've been speaking about on the refill lately are now live and you can go check them out at the jpeg website here at jpg dot space and then there's obviously a further link here which i'll link in the youtube description below for you to do so uh and you can also i think keep minting the panda nft which is part of this collection as well the one that i didn't get number one for i got number six i was actually on the site and i clicked like mint nft which is the first new mistake because i should have just done it through the contract directly but i clicked mint nft uh basically when it when the countdown ended uh and it said it can't estimate gauss and it threw me

an error i didn't even let him it didn't even go through the metamask and i'm like oh damn it so i went to eat the scan then and i looked up the mint function and i manually did it and then i got number six actually someone in the daily grade discord channel got number one so congrats to them uh that's awesome but uh but yeah number six i'm still in the top ten i'll settle for that but i hope you guys had a chance to mint it uh as i mentioned yesterday the proceeds are going to 50 core devs another 50 to good causes but same is true for all the other nfts that statefulworks is doing as well as part of this new home of the heart collection you can go check that out i'll link it in the youtube description all right so i came across this

yesterday and i kind of debated amplifying this or not because i don't know if this is legit or anything i don't think it's a scam but i don't really know how legit it is or how i guess like safe it is to use but essentially there's this twitter account called pow dump and they announced themselves by saying we're proud to announce that we've developed pow dump a proof of work eth dump button the prime venue for the ethereum community to safely dump their eth power sunset the power chain faster and save the environment without having to go via centralized exchange so this is obviously a service that is trying to make it easy for you to uh dump your eighth power tokens if there is a ethereum proof of workforce that happens uh without having to go through a centralized exchange and they detail

you know about how this will work a bit more here i think that uh this is i mean i don't know if this is part of the cow swap community or cow swap ecosystem but they did post on the cowswap forum so i'm not entirely sure who's behind this um if you do know be sure to message me in the discord about it but i figured it was worth highlighting for you guys just to go check for yourself honestly my like whole i guess play for the proof of work for because i'm not just not going to touch it like i don't i don't really care enough to touch it i honestly don't think it's going to be worth that much there are there are competing forks as well but you should definitely uh research it yourself if you want to obviously claim the airdrop and sell it

or whatever do your own research don't rely on what i'm saying or what anyone else is saying you just need to make an educated kind of um a play at these sorts of stuff but personally i'm not going to be touching it but i just figured i'd highlight this for you guys because i i i've known that some of you guys have been discussing this in the discord channel and it's important to you all right so i came across this today it was shared in the discord channel actually something called llama nodes which will launch in the coming weeks and will provide fast and secure access to the blockchain the crypto way crypto payments web 3 signing open source and privacy conscious so i believe this is going to be a new rpc built by the d5 llama uh community here so obviously there are a bunch of rpcs out there

today that you can use the most famous ones are infuriate and alchemy but there are a bunch of others but you know notoriously uh if you're in alchemy have been the most reliable the other one's not not so much so lama nodes here wants to be wants to spin up a public rpc that i think is going to be like not censoring anything it's going to be privacy conscious as you can see here and try to be as reliable as possible so if you want to keep up to date with them you can go follow their twitter account and you can join their discord channel and everything like that but it's good to see more i guess options coming online for for our pcs because until we get like clients we're going to rely on these things and once we get like clients we still might even rely on them

it just depends how that upgrade is rolled out uh but we're gonna have to see how how it kind of like all plays out here and how it all shakes out uh but yeah you can go give this a follow if you want to keep up to date with llama nodes all right so something i came across from the xerox park uh project tl i guess like um a twitter account here something called ethedos or ethdos it's a fun social experiment uniquely enabled by recursive zk snarks uh all of these people share ethos which is proving degrees of separation in social graphs like erdos numbers while hiding friendship edges so from my understanding this is using zk magic to essentially allow a string of i guess like people to come together as part of this social graph without anyone

knowing who kind of like invited anyone else and and how people are connected to anyone else in that social graph that's my understanding of it and the way it works is that you get invited and then you invite someone else using their ans name or their ethereum address it generates you a proof and then you share that with that person and then they can invite someone else and so on and so forth right and you get to like these degrees of separation from vitalik who was i guess number zero or one in this i got number six or five i believe i believe i was number five and i invited a sixth to it uh so yeah there's not that many people in it just yet but i think it's a pretty cool experiment with using zk technology here and i'm always excited whenever i get to see things new things

that are using zk technology because uh you know i mentioned before that it's not just useful for scaling guys it's useful for privacy as well and that's a big thing i think obviously in the wake of the tornado cache sanctions privacy is on the forefront of everyone's mind zk stuff enabled tornado cache it works like we know it works because the us government decided to sanction code instead of just i guess like going after i mean they did this as well they went after the developers as well but they actually sanctioned the code because the code works right like uh and it doesn't just work for privacy it works for scaling as well and we're really just scratching the surface of zk stuff too i mean there are so many eyeballs on it now so many people joining the ecosystem to work on

zk stuff that i think it's going to permeate all of crypto and it's going to like in 10 years i reckon it's gonna take a while because it's still bleeding edge stuff but i reckon in 10 years a lot of crypto will be zkfied so to speak and we're going to be playing around with all sorts of tools that are all powered by zk technology that make for a more scalable and private uh and just more functional ecosystem at the end of the day because i think with the scaling benefits you can actually from what i've seen with i guess like mature zk proofs you can do full blown games with all the interactions that come with that on chain using zk technology and it's still relatively cheap to do it and it's gonna get cheaper over time uh with things like uh you you guys know that company that i

backed ingonyama who are building zk uh asics that's that all that stuff's coming and all that stuff's gonna make it cheaper to do this stuff cheaper and faster to generate these proofs and then we're just going to have such a vibrant zk ecosystem so yeah i mean i would say go check this out just go learn about it i i don't i think i can invite more people to it so if you want to be invited to it i can uh you just have to message me in the discord channel about it uh but cool to see more applications of of zk technology here all right so speaking of zk uh technology and just scaling in general uh one of this twitter account that i've come across recently haim here has been doing a lot of great threads around ethereum lately particularly around scaling and they did one today about

ethereum scaling technology and how it has evolved over time so as you can see here we went from state channels to plasma to optimistic roll-ups to zk roll-ups and this is a guide this is a thread with 15 tweets in it which they say is a guide to the technologies that will scale ethereum from 12 to 100 100 000 transactions per second at a lower cost than you pay today so as you can see in this graphic we had state channels which are basically payment channels uh in lieu of uh of something better uh this is all we really had it was in the spirit of the lightning network because the land network has obviously been around for a long time and then ethereum people were like oh well let's try and do this on ethereum with state channels state channels work but they're very limited in what they

can do right they're just payment channels they can't do expressive smart contracts and things like that then came plasma to try and fix that issue but there were so many different flavors of plasma and it ended up being unworkable in a practical sense so from plasma came optimistic roll-ups and actually the one of the lead i believe the lead team working on plasma plasma group actually became optimism uh which has been at the forefront of developing optimistic roll-ups and obviously there's off chain labs building arbitrary as well and then came zero knowledge proofs or validity proofs which are promising to be even better than optimistic roll-ups right and and being more scalable than optimistic roll-ups this is the journey that has happened over the last i would i'm going to say since ethereum went live basically since 2015. it's been a long journey to get to

zero knowledge roll ups but i think that more and more people are agreeing that they are the holy grail of scaling at the end of the day i think optimistic rollups are great they're awesome and as i've showed before they can actually be upgraded relatively easily to a zero knowledge roll up by just using validity proofs instead of fraud proofs and that's going to happen and then you have all these other hybrid solutions that are coming out as well such as volidium's right and something like an arbitrary nova like these are all a lot i mean they're not just coming out they're live right you can use them you can go get value out of them so we've come a long way from our state channels days and this is why like you may see me make fun of the lighting network a lot this is why i

make fun of it because the lighting network i mean not only is it like state channel or payment channel infrastructure so it's already limited by that it's being built on bitcoin as a base layer which is extremely limiting so i make fun of it because ethereum moves past these technologies that just don't fit our needs right we saw state channels like okay they're cool they do payments whatever but we need more than payments like ethereum layer 1 is an expressive smart contract layer let's we want to do that at layer 2 because we don't want to sacrifice decentralization and security on the base layer so how do we scale obviously sharding is it came into a 2 but that's more of a layer 1 thing and then we worked on plasma and then we worked optimistic roll-ups and zero

knowledge roll-ups and we got to the point where we're like wow we can actually do everything we can do on ethereum layer one on a layer two for much cheaper much faster and still inherit that security which obviously is a massive benefit to the ethereum scaling grow map but you haven't seen that with bitcoin because they can't do anything else all they can do is the lighting network and as i said it's extremely limited now there have been some talk about uh bitcoin being able to do zk proofs and things like that like they can technically but they're not really gonna get much benefit out of that unless they add new op codes to the bitcoin base layer which would require a hard fork and even then they would have to have a data layer that would have to have execution it just it's so limiting right and and this is

why like as a technologist i just don't pay much attention to bitcoin i get the view on bitcoin i get the bullish case for bitcoin i just don't think it's that bullish like i really think that ethereum is that goldilocks zone between being decentralized and secure not sacrificing that on the base layer but also scaling and also having an expressive base layer to the point that we can actually do much better scaling at layer two because of that expressiveness on on layer one so i have my technical reasons for being bearish on bitcoin it's not just because i don't like the bitcoin maximalists i think bitcoin is fine and i understand the bitcoin bull case but in a world where ethereum exists bitcoin looks like a pet rock at the end of the day and it's not just from a value perspective it's from

a technology perspective in my mind but i don't want to rag on bitcoin too much there but i think this just very much shows where ethereum diverged very like on the layer 2 front dramatically from bitcoin we didn't just stay with state channels could you imagine if we stayed with just state channels till today like i'd be so bearish on ethereum if the only scaling solution we had was limited state channels like i i would actually have moved on to something else to be honest because i i can see that they're not uh something that is workable for ethereum to scale like it just doesn't work you can't do smart contracts you can't do uh super express expressive stuff you can't do the same thing you can do on layer one compare that today to the optimism and arbitrary networks which a uh zk uh not zk which are evm

compatible slash equivalent and can basically do everything you can do on layer one ethereum like that's that's what we want that's exactly what we want that's what developers want that's what users want it at the end of the day like users don't want to just be able to send money back and forth they want to do d5 they want to do nfts they want to do dows they want to do everything they want to do web 3 right they want to do decentralized social media and and other things like sign in with ethereum at scale and stuff like that right so uh and digital identity and all that sort of stuff so like payment channels state channels they were just way too limiting i'm glad we moved past that but if we didn't i would have definitely moved on long ago uh that's for sure but

you can go give this whole thread a read i'll link it in the youtube description below for you to do so all right speaking of scaling starkware announced cairo version 1.0 which is cairo's biggest advancement today now those of you don't know cairo is the programming language that starknet uses they don't use solidity but they also have a transpiler that i've uh i've um talked about before called warp that the nether mind team is building where you can go from solidity to cairo but a 1.0 release is a big deal guys like i don't know how many of you guys know how software development works but essentially a 1.0 release is is basically the release right like obviously there's going to be other releases from here but uh the fact that it's gone to 1.0 uh means that cairo is in a very very good place so as i said

hiyakara 1.0 will enhance usability safety and convenience and it will support stocknet's permissionless network requirements and will simplify and secure the protocol and you can go give this a read uh this blog post to read if you're a developer you'll obviously get a lot of value out of this but this is the firs the tldr is that this is the first major release following the introduction of cairo two years ago so as i said guys 1.0 is a big deal uh and it really is a big deal for for developers so at the heart of cairo is a sierra which is an intermediary representation layer that promises greater long-term stability for carrier programs and sierra advances current to serve in a permissionless network protecting the network it allows for more robust dos protection which is always going to be an issue at layer 2

when you have cheap fees is that like the spam issue right and the dos kind of concerns and then you have protecting the user it allows ethereum grade censorship resistance which is obviously a huge benefit especially in a post tornado cash sanctions world so very very cool to see that cairo 1.0 is out on stockinette here and if you're a developer you should definitely go check this out i'll link it in the youtube description all right so just your friendly reminder that bitcoin grants uh is still ongoing uh you can go give you go donate and there is that discord channel uh in this delight discord server called public goods which has links to all of the different uh oh sorry no it's not called public goods i think it's called git coin uh grants actually if i go to yeah yeah it's called git coin grant so go

check out that channel it's got all the the grants that you would like to that um that are interesting there and there's also a lot more on the website that you can go check out for yourself and sort through and see which ones you want to actually pay attention to so you can go to getcoin.com check that out all right last up here just a quick reminder it was brought to my attention over the last couple days that someone is impersonating me on telegram and having weird conversations with people so please be aware of scammers guys like my telegram handle is the same as my twitter handle and i would never dm you randomly about anything like a good example of this is before in the discord channel someone wanted me to add them to that ethdos kind of list here and then i did but i

had to add them as a friend to dm them but before i did that i messaged them on um on the discord channel i said hey from from my actual account i said hey i added you as a friend right when i dm you first i'm going to do that i'm not going to just randomly damn you just and if you see like like these scammers say weird things as well like there's actually screenshots of of what was said so this is a screenshot here like apparently it's my job to keep the intros going and to attract suckers to make wales earn when do i ever talk like this like using some common sense make you know makes a lot of sense here right like and then uh someone says but if you don't believe in it yourself why are you doing it and then the scammer says i

have to do it i'm well paid for it but in fact i'm already sick of it my task is to raise the price of ethereum before the merge because then there will be a price collapse when have i ever talked about this and it doesn't even make sense right so please be vigilant of this sort of stuff and also this scammer isn't is a bit of a smart scanner because the handle that they're using on telegram is sassel 0x with an uppercase i in place of that l so the an uppercase i looks the same as a lowercase l so you can see they look exactly the same even though i actually used an uppercase i here when i first said it so please be careful just because it says that 0x doesn't mean it's actually me and i actually will never dm you first on telegram unless we

have correspondence somewhere else such as twitter dms from my actual account or discord uh and this is why i want twitter to verify me because there's so many scammers i have so many impersonators all the time so just be careful guys please because i i've said it before about leverage like the the thing that makes me the saddest is when i've seen friends blow themselves up on leverage and be out of a position to enjoy i guess when heath is going up or something like that um and enjoy like the ethereum ecosystem more but like the second worst thing is uh losing your money to scammers or probably an equivalent equivalently bad thing is losing your money to scammers and and thinking that it was me i'm never going to ask you for money ever like that for starters is the stupidest thing ever because you guys know me i don't ask for

money of anyone i'm never going to send you any random links i'm never going to do anything like that just be very very vigilant because the the reason why the scammers keep doing this is because it works like if it didn't work they'd stop doing it right and there's not just impersonators there's also a lot of scammers underneath my posts all the time and i'm sure you've seen them everywhere so if you just scroll down a bit you can see some of them if you go to like show more replies uh actually no they're actually gone here this is weird there's there's usually a lot of them are some some of these random ones here but there's usually a lot of them that say like you know why is no one talking about this right or why are the influencers ignoring this and then link to some

youtube video it's all scams it's all just pay attention to that sort of stuff guys because it really is uh obviously scammy and and once you kind of like train your brain for it you'll be able to spot it a lot better i mean obviously i've been trained on it because they're always following my posts they're always under my post there's bots everywhere it's so annoying like i'm sure you've seen the ones that have cz binances um founders picture on them on the twitter accounts and they just like spam like the crap out of people like they actually spam the crap out of elon musk's tweets as well because obviously ellen tweets about crypto so just be vigilant just be aware of these things just protect yourself uh and make sure that you don't uh ever interact with one of them that's

impersonating me because as i said i'm not gonna message you first i'm not going to um uh i'm not going to dm you random links i'm not going to ask you for money or anything like that but i think on that note i'm gonna cut this one a little bit short for today uh that's it so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give me a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone