The Merge updates, DeversiFi now Rhino.fi and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #407 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily way refuel where we cup the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem I'm your host Anthony the 15th of July 2022 alright everyone let's get into it uh so actually before we get into it uh I've had a few people kind of comment and reach out to me saying that there's been some kind of like audio issues with the podcast lately they're saying that it's been quiet for them I'm not sure why that is I haven't really changed anything on my end um I think it's just Spotify users that maybe are kind of like suffering from this so I'm not sure what the problem is there but please do let me know if they continue I did tweak some settings today but I kind of like increase my mic gain here so hopefully that fixes the issue

but yeah I can't repeat it or I can't um uh uh what's what I'm looking for I can't replicate it on my end so I'm not sure what's going on there but yeah I've tweaked a few things hopefully this helps you you guys with everything um and hopefully the the volume issues are fixed here all right moving on to the biggest news of the last 24 hours which was some dates around the girl emerge and mainnet merge so I put out this tweet where I said girly the last public test net to run through the merge transition should do so around August 11th if everything goes well with Gurley we could see a mainnet merge around the week of September 19th the merge is coming now these dates weren't just out of thin air I pulled them from the consensus layer call I I remember I

mentioned to you guys that the dates were probably going to be discussed on that call and they were now these are soft dates they're not hard dates they are subject to change of course but this is basically what their core devs are aiming for at this stage and I don't want to kind of toot my horn too much here but I'm going to take a little bit of credit I did say that we should expect a uh kind of like girly merge amid to uh sorry early to mid August and a mainnet merge mid to late September so ah I was right on the money but anyway if you're paying attention if you're listening to the refuel you were right on the money too so there's there's that um but yeah this is super exciting because guys like just to contextualize this September 19th or the week of

September 19th is only you know five to six weeks away like it is so close it's it's insane right after so long and you know the girl emerged on August 11th is less than a month away so we are closer than we have ever been uh and it's just incredible that we're this close like after being in ethereum since early 2017 and listening to kind of everyone talk about proof of stake for so long and then obviously seeing proof of stake ethereum grow live with the beacon chain but now seeing the two networks merge together and finally ethereum becoming a foolproof of stake network is literally witnessing history that is going to go down in the history books for decades to come guys okay I can't describe how Monumental this occasion is for me personally but I'm sure it is for all of you as well so I am just super excited

this is almost upon us uh there will be a live stream for the girly uh kind of public test net transition I believe bankless is hosting that um kind of like with Eve Staker there so that's going to be a fun one hopefully it is scheduled for a time when I'm not asleep so I can join that live streaming and kind of like join in on the festivities there but just a reminder to everyone that he's a solo validator you need to be ready for the merge so there's a merge Readiness checklist that I've covered on the refill before you can Google that it's on the kind of ethereum foundation website I believe or or kind of like on a website that's managed by the ethereum foundation that'll get you ready for the merge the main thing you need to kind of like worry about is running an execution

layer client so essentially running a full node using either Geth never mind Basu and it's an Aragon in order to connect to your consensus layer node and validator uh obviously running one of the consensus layer kind of clients there so you must do this you can no longer Outsource your execution layer UH responsibilities to an inferior or to an Alchemy you need to be able to kind of talk to your own local neuro now what's cool about this is I think we're going to see the number of ethereum uh I guess like execution layer full nodes go up which because of the fact that it's basically forcing people that are staking or solo staking and obviously all the people running validators and running Beacon notes to do this so I'm curious to see what kind of uptick we

see there that's going to be very cool and I I that's just a reminder for everyone that's that's solo staking make sure that you do this before the merge because if you don't you are going to be kicked off the network you will not be validating and you'll be uh kind of like leaking eighth when you shouldn't be it's not hard to I guess uh sync a full node it's actually very easy it doesn't take too much time and there is uh obviously a variety of clients that you can choose from there and there's also a bunch of other things you can do like install Mev boost uh optionally that's not a requirement that's an optional uh thing there but the merge Readiness checklist covers all of this so I'm not going to rehash it here you can go check that out if you just Google that but

yeah guys like we are we are in the end game now we really are and I'm just so excited that we can get this out of the way because honestly as excited as I am about the merge I'm like probably just as excited about Proto dank sharding because it will allow us to get that real scalability going for layer twos and drop those transactions to pennies I've spoken about it before but that is you know the next thing that excites me the most in ethereum right now so yeah the mergers coming we're on the uh we're on the eve of the merge basically and I can't wait to see it happen all right so speaking of ethereum proof of stake and I guess things related to it just like put out an interesting tweet today our tweet thread today talking about the history of the deposit

contract now for those of you who don't know the deposit contract is a smart contract that lives on ethereum uh layer one or eth1 as it's called where people send their eth into in 32 eth chunks that gets basically burned there uh and and then kind of like issued on the beacon chain where people can obviously stake their eat now this deposit contract has a fun history about it and that's what Josh Stark's threat is it here so definitely go give this thread a read but the trdr is that it actually came to being uh through a kind of like funny process of the contract was um was deployed but no one knew who deployed it uh and it's not like uh we can't trust it because of the fact that the code was open source it was verified it all made sense so that just became the canonical

contract that everyone used as the deposit contract which was actually really cool originally people thought it was a um a fishing contract or a scam or something but it actually ended up being the canonical uh kind of contract for air staking so this contract will still be used post merge uh obviously the execution layout and or the eighth one we know today is still going to be the exact same as it is just with proof of stake instead of proof of work so all of this will remain the same post merge so it's good to like get up to speed on this history I thought it was like a fun little read and I'll link this kind of like thread in YouTube description for you to read it uh because it's it's not it's not that long but definitely some nugget some really cool negative

information in there all right so uh the Twitter account 100y.eath put together a modular blockchain stack of polygons so basically uh and a vision or I guess like in um this is how 100y envisions the polygon modular blockchain world and uh I think either them or someone else I think I've highlighted on the retail before that had a similar uh diagram to this where they kind of like Place different solutions in them but you can kind of see here I guess like my camera is cutting off the far left side here but you can kind of see where polygon Solutions fit in uh and they have a lot of solutions obviously so you've got their Roll-Ups polygon knightfall Hermes midon and xero which all talk to ethereum layer one and then you have the

polygon POS chain obviously which also talks to ethereum layer one but not as a kind of like Layer Two as we know it it just checkpoints itself there uh and then there are other things like on the bottom here you have solvent Roll-Ups that can talk to polygon Avail as their availability they are and still kind of post their proofs to ethereum layer one and then why camera is covering it but you have like an available lydium which is is kind of like what I was just describing there so this is cool this is a cool way of visualizing it because I know people get sometimes confused uh with all the solutions that polygon has right now because they have a lot of them and some people say you know uh what's the what's the use of them right what's the difference between them where do they

all fit well here it is like you even got details such as what technology they're using I mean you can see here that Nightfall is a private optimistic roller permaze is a decentralized ZK evm ZK roll up uh Maiden is a stark ZK roll up and zero is recursed uh the fastest recursive ZK roll-up so obviously a lot of uh kind of like research and development is going into each of these Solutions and you know it remains to be seen if they don't all just collapse into one Chronicle solution eventually or if they stay separate but uh I I think it's cool to have obviously so many people working on these Solutions in parallel I mean it makes it all uh it makes the kind of like hold better than kind of like just being a monolithic kind of architecture there now this

thread goes on for a little bit it's it's only a short thread with a kind of like links to some more uh I guess um information here so you should definitely check it out but I just thought it was an interesting graphic that really nicely um kind of visualize the polygon modular stack in how polygon Solutions all fit in with each other here all right so diversify has rebranded they're now known as rhinophy so you can go to rhino.fi to see their new branding and to see kind of like the new outlay of the of the website and everything and they've also uh kind of like changed what they are so they're saying we're no longer just the decks we're a frictionless layer 2 gateway to multi-chain defy this is the future of D5 let's grab it by the horns I like

that that's actually pretty funny there uh but yeah you can read this thread for kind of like um I'm not this thread sorry uh this one here for a kind of full breakdown of why they kind of change to Rhino fire and how they Envision the future uh and it's got all the details here but you can also visit the website to check out what they've got going how you can launch their app and launch into it I'm sure some of you guys have been using diversify or rhino5 for a while now I'm a user myself I'm also an investor just the disclosure there a disclosure there haven't been invested in them for a little while now but I think they're building a really amazing ecosystem here as they said they're not just the decks anymore they're basically a layer 2 gateway to multi chain defy and they're supporting

a number of different chains right now such as arbitrary and polygon ethereum and they have Moon pay as kind of like a frictionless onboarding there but I think they plan to support like as many chains as possible which I think is obviously a very interesting and and very cool because I've talked about how we need better gateways into D5 into layer twos into crypto in general before and that's exactly what Rhino fire is building here they want to be a One-Stop shop gateway to all of multi-chain they find not just D5 on ethereum layer one but also on the layer twos and also obviously other layer ones and side chains and things like that so I think that's a really great uh kind of like a strategy and I think their branding makes a lot more sense like this Diversified the problem so so the funny

thing about diversify is it kind of like used to be known as eth finax and then I think that was kind of like some nectar branding in there there's been a few iterations of their name over time but diversify I think funny enough the number one thing that had that was going against it was that it was hard to spell like no one knew how to spell it and there was always people misspelling it so obviously changing to Rhino Phi is a lot better and just just Rhino and I don't think anyone in crypto has the Rhino branding yet which is funny because you know obviously Rhino is not a ball but like you know he kind of like invokes the same emotions right like this aggressive kind of like uh uh big big animal that kind of just charges you um it kind of invokes the same kind of

thought so I I find it interesting maybe I missed it but I haven't seen something branded with a rhino before so I think this is really cool you should definitely check it out I'll link it in the YouTube description I'll link both of these threads you can go check out the website go check out the app and get started with using rhino5's multi-chain defy ecosystem all right so a new thread from pseudo Theos today talking about the ZK VM and why it is the next scalability step required to unlock worldwide adoption This Thread is not long so definitely go check it out I'm not gonna I'm not going to talk about it here uh but you know they let they named a bunch of teams working on ZK VM such as ZK sync scroll polygon 0 polygon Hermes and loop ring now ZK VM gets talked about a lot and

like a lot right there is no mainnet implementation live yet the race is on of course and as I said there are a bunch of teams working on this the reason why it is kind of like considered a Holy Grail is twofold one because obviously evm compatibility is huge it gets you absolutely really quickly gets your users really quickly it automatically works with everything that we're used to such as metamask and all the other infrastructure surrounding it so obviously that's a huge thing and that's why uh pretty much everything that has any sort of adoption in crypto except uh maybe a couple of other things is evm or evm compatible so that's the first thing thing the second thing is that a zkvm ZK Roll Up is basically um you know using ZK roll-up technology

which we know is the end game for ethereum scalability uh and and they kind of like just makes it just opens up a kind of a world of possibilities here now this is not an easy thing to do this is actually very hard people didn't expect it to come this quickly but generally it's very hard the first iterations of zke VMS will most likely be using untested uh cryptography untested um kind of like mechanisms and they will most likely be in a very limited State when they go live they're not going to be live in a production capacity anytime soon they'll be in alphas and betas and all that sort of stuff there um yeah I mean even the optimistic Roll-Ups the the evm compatible ones like up to and optimism is still considered to be beta software at this point in time because it's hard to build

this stuff securely like you can build it like a cowboy you could say oh well we built it it's fine go have fun but building it securely sustainably building it in such a way so it doesn't doesn't fall over is very very hard hard to do and people take this for granted how hard this is like it's actually a stroke of kind of like um a luck that ethereum layer one has never gone down um since Genesis and it almost has a few times but it's never actually gone offline or halted or stopped producing blocks um and that's an incredible feat like I don't think there's any other blockchain out there maybe not even Bitcoin that glue kind of like claim this I I can't remember exactly uh but there have been instances of Bitcoin early on where they had to kind of reverse transactions and

there was like an inflation bug but I can't remember if if it resulted in the chain halting but um other than that like you know very very very few chains have uh escaped a chain halt or escaped falling over or any of that sort of stuff and obviously you know there's been a bunch uh over the last few months obviously Solano is the perfect example here of something that just has fallen over a bunch of times so just getting that just that right being online all the time is extremely hard like ethereum technically has a 100 uptime which is crazy like some people like your semantics around this and say oh well you know technically doesn't because there was a Shanghai dos attacks which slowed the chain down and then you could count the difficulty bombs as the chain slowing down as well which it does

technically and you could say okay well that's a failure of uptime I don't know if you use the strict definition of uptime meaning that the chain never stopped producing blocks doesn't matter if it was a 15 second block or a 30 second block then you could say that ethereum has 100 uptime nothing that I know of can claim that in especially even in the web 2 world like the centralized world can't even claim that that is a Marvel right there so to get to that same level in an optimistic roll-up in a ZK roll-up or anything like that it's going to take a lot of engineering work it's going to take a lot of um kind of like focus on this sorts of stuff a lot of testing and a lot of um you know and some luck at the end of the day because like there are

things you can't plan for I mean as I said it's actually just like a stroke of luck that ethereum has not started producing blocks even though it's come close very uh lots of times in the past so there's all that that goes into it but once we get to a fully workable production grade ZK evm that is both scalable in terms of kind of like really really cheap fees and also uh fast in terms of very very fast transaction confirmations and sustainable well then yeah I mean like we're gonna have no so much scale we don't even know what to do with but even before that optimistic Roll-Ups post Proto dank sharding are going to have enough scale for that too so I really do think people are sleeping on this still they don't realize like I know I talk about it a lot but they

don't realize just how close we are to having more scale than we can than we know what to do with because at this point in time and Paulina talks about this and he's actually they've actually gotten a bit of heat for this lately but right now I mean the main use case and the main thing that's taking up all the block space is speculative activities on any network really so to move past that to move to things that require more scale but uh not speculative it's going to take a while it's going to take more people coming into the ecosystem more people adopting this stuff to get to that kind of like app non-step speculative killer app it's definitely going to take a while and I think it could come from the gaming area because gaming is is kind of like such a big thing just generally not obviously

within crypto but outside of crypto as well but it remains to it really does remain to be seen like how much uh kind of demand we have in the next 12 to 18 months because if we do get proto-dang shining early next year say even we get it in like April like will we have an app that will take advantage of that on these layer twos will these apps kind of um cause these layer twos to hit their limits now obviously arbitrim hit its limit with the Odyssey thing but I think that's an anomaly I think going forward there's not really going to be any uh any of that I think people will learn from arbitrary and be like okay well let's not do you know big things like this until we take these training wheels off until we take our limits off and we

can and of service this uh but it will be it will eventually become a cat and mouse game again where we'll catch up to the amount of scale that we've been able to produce and then we'll need more scale but that's the thing about and the beautiful thing about uh dank sharding is that you keep getting more scale as as time goes on you don't need to kind of like worry about um worry about scale because you can just keep adding it on there's no like a big change that needs to happen uh which I think is is just obviously really awesome and as I've explained before because of the way ethereum works the more uh the way the beginning chain works the more validate is the more decentralized the more scale that we have which is just crazy we've basically inverted the scalability trilemma so

yeah I mean I'm going to be keeping an eye on all the ZK VM stuff happening of course uh obviously I think you guys will as well it is the Holy Grail it's going to take a while to get there but in the meantime we do have other Solutions and those Solutions will get better post Proto dang sharding like much better like 100x better in terms of fees uh so I'm definitely looking forward to that as as well but yeah give pseudo theosis a little thread a read here I'll link it in the description all right last thread is from ethereum pools dot info where I covered them last week or the week before where they kind of went through ethereum rewards post merge and kind of like broke down each of the rewards here so now we have ethereum penalties post merge and breaking down each of these sorts of

things here so you can see here these are the main penalties so slashing and then there's kind of like uh sub penalties in within slashing inactivity penalty sync Community penalty and a testation penalty and basically This Thread breaks down which is what each of those things are so I'm not going to break it down myself here this thread does a really really great job of breaking it down and you know what this account has given so much Alpha lately I they deserve a follow I think um but uh but yeah definitely go I kind of read this thread I'll link in the YouTube description below but the funny thing is I kind of mentioned this last time the only things that really result in a kind of I guess Mass loss of eth is slashing like these things down the bottom don't result in a in a huge loss

of eat they're very slow burn kind of like and you have like ample opportunity to come back online whereas it's slashing if you get slashed you basically lose potentially a lot of Eid and you get kicked out of the validator set you don't get kicked out of the validator set if you're if you're offline until you leak out enough eth um to I think it's like 28 eighth and then you get kicked out but with uh with slashing you get kicked out immediately so very very different kind of like penalties here but the penalty for slashing is due to sorry if you get slashed it's the network thinks you're either trying to attack it or you've done something like double signing which can be an attack right even if you've done it accidentally it can be a form of an attack whereas in an activity penalty

of being offline if it's just you the network knows okay well this person just went offline it's not an attack or anything like that but if a lot of people go offline then the inactivity penalty actually gets kind of like um it gets higher and people start leaking e faster because it's a way to incentivize people to come back online because as you guys know if if 66 of the network or more is not validating we can't fight we can't finalize so if say 60 of the network is online and 40 is offline while the inactivity penalty if is going to be very very high because of the fact that we need to get these people back online to finalize and it's also high in order to kick out everyone that has gone offline faster so that we can kind of shrink the validator set so that we can

finalize again because it's based on the percentage of the active validators right so if you're kicked out due to being offline due to that inactivity penalty then the chain can kind of like normalize and start finalizing again because it's all about liveness for the beacon chain it's all about making sure the chain can finalize and that's what all these penalties are meant to do um well I mean that's what the kind of like bottom penalties are meant to do when it comes to slashing for you know potentially attacking the network that is is kind of like make ensuring the network is secure ensuring that you're punishing bad actors and unfortunately you can do it on accident and get caught in the crosshairs but there's really no way to tell if it's an accident or not the protocol doesn't have feelings there's no human behind it there's no

way to tell if you accidentally double signed or if you were doing it on purpose right so from that perspective that's just kind of like uh one unfortunate thing that happens but there is obviously a lot of reasoning behind it so so yeah anyway go check out this thread from ethereum pools.info I'll link it in the description below all right so General Jeremiah Leia the co-founder and CEO of circle published today uh a transparency and disclosure report around usdc uh and this is the first monthly breakdown of the usdc reserve assets by each and every treasury a bond and list of cash Reserve custodians so this is basically all of the I guess assets that are backing usdc uh and you you can basically see them itemized here now I've discussed this

before about how centralized companies and services can give attestations and can give uh kind of like transparency and and kind of like publish these things but at the end of the day you're still trusting that Circle has published this truthfully they're not mincing their words here they're not trying to kind of like sign up anyone um but still this is much better than what we get from most of the centralized entities in this space so I'm applauding Circle for this and I'm not trying to pick one Circle here or anything by saying that you know we're still trusting someone when they publish this right you're still trusting Circle and that's why we're building a trustless defy ecosystem so we don't have to trust anyone so that we can you know audit it ourselves and run a full note ourselves all we're doing right now is okay

circles put together this report we're trusting that it's all accurate that it all makes sense that it's all truthful but there's no way for us mere mortals that don't have access to circles out of accounts or Holdings to audit this ourselves and that is the beauty of a blockchain is that you do have access to audit things yourselves but again this is so much better than what we get from most of the centralized uh Services out there and centralized exchanges and things like that that we should be applauding and encouraging this and should be spreading the word here so that more of these centralized services at least publish this this is better than than kind of like nothing guys like miles better than nothing and there are also ways to to kind of like have relative certainty that these reports are at least you know somewhat truthful

or mostly truthful uh and kind of like um monitor it and kind of keep these companies and services accountable as well so I'll link this in the YouTube description you can go check out the kind of report for yourself uh just in case you can't see it on the video I was listening to the podcast here but yeah I thought this was very very cool so kudos to Circle for publishing this all right so last up here we have metamask that turns sixth today six years old I mean everyone's using metamask at this point it's hilarious how many people have used metamask and it's actually funny to think about there are people who have used metamask that have never used ethereum layer one because of the fact that metamask supports every single uh evm compatible chain doesn't matter if it's layer twos

on ethereum doesn't matter if it's the polygon POS chain doesn't matter if it's Avalanche C chain Phantom or any of that sorts of stuff if it's evm compatible it is it's going to work with metamask and you simply just have to change the network in your uh kind of um metamask client there and I've used metamask since basically day one of ethereum I think I think there was probably a brief period of a couple weeks when I first bought Ethan I was using some Mobile Wallet that basically wasn't even self-custodial it would send all the eth that it took into a kind of like um into a a wall that was controlled by I don't know who and then I quickly kind of was like oh no no I shouldn't do this like got to go to metamask and then after that obviously I've got my Hardware wallets as well uh

that hook into minimize which is the beauty of it but I mean everyone uses it whether it's on desktop or on mobile it's um it's something that I think everyone in crypto has used or anyone who's done anything on chain in crypto has used at least once in their life right so yeah huge uh kind of like congrats to them or happy birthday to them on their sixth anniversary which I find funny because their sixth birthday is a day before my birthday so my birthday is tomorrow I'm turning 30 tomorrow so yeah I mean I almost share a birthday with metamask that's that's kind of cool uh and and also ethereum's birthday is July 30th uh so it's going to be the what is it the eight yeah eighth birthday for ethereum uh or seventh birthday maybe I'm getting ahead of myself yeah I think it's a seventh

birthday this year uh for ethereum so uh yeah it's coming up right it's only 15 days away which is very very cool to see um but yeah I mean you can check out this thread uh it's only a small little thread here and there's also a origin story that consensus published for metamask for those of you who don't know metamask is um is part of consensus was born out of consensus is still part of consensus uh and it's been a long time that that they've been around for obviously six years they've been through all the ups and downs of ethereum they've been through basically everything which is which is obviously very very cool here but yeah you can go check that out I'll link you in the YouTube description um I got a couple of minutes here I just wanted to quickly uh say something I

know the markets lately have been the markets right um I think the last 24 hours have been quite positive but I want to data right to you guys I'm not trying to be bearish yet but I want to reiterate to you guys that try not to get ahead of yourselves again this is when this is what I'm gonna tell you guys to not get on Leverage because these things happen constantly you know there'll be a pump and then it'll just you know sell back down and it'll be a really big pump and you'll think oh my God the bull Market's back you'll ever drop and you'll be like oh yeah yeah and then you'll get blown up right I've seen too many friends do this that's why I always hop on about it but you know it is positive to see that the the market

is trying to find a bottom around here I don't know if this is the bottom but it is very positive to see that obviously we had that huge CPI print out of the US the other day 9.1 percent obviously everyone's like you know has inflation peaked hasn't it peaked and all that sort of stuff no one knows guys like it's it's it in the macro environment it's so hard to get insights into there's only very there's very few people in the world who actually have a good pulse on it so I wouldn't even bother trying to to reason about it uh but yeah I just wanted to kind of like warn against that again just stick just stay away from Leverage guys like I know you know you don't have to listen to me it's not investment advice but I just feel like reiterating it from time to

time because I want you guys to be safe I want you guys to make it and I want you guys to be on the journey with me with you know the ethereum community as we kind of build this thing out over the next decade but anyway on that note that is going to be it for today thank you everyone for uh watching uh be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give me a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the Discord Channel and I'll catch you all next week thanks everyone