The Merge updates, Polygon teams up with Starbucks - The Daily Gwei Refuel #445 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where you cap the latest news in the theorem ecosystem i'm your host dan the designer it has 12th of september 2022. all right everyone let's get into it so it is merge week we are merging this week less than three days to go now till the merge happens ttd is trucking along all well and good and as i'm sure you all saw over the weekend google now has a merge countdown timer so if you type in the merge or ethereum merge this nice little countdown timer pops up for you with some pandas here the current difficulty hash rate and merge difficulty so obviously that ttd number there and the cool thing is the pandas in the picture actually get closer together as time goes on as we get closer to ttd and i'm assuming that

it's going to event they're going to eventually merge into a an actual kind of like panda black and white um all over right so that's very cool to see that google did that so anyone googling the merge or ethereum merge will get front and center uh this kind of little countdown and obviously it links to further explanation about what it is so yeah i mean this week is is going to be big i think it's going to be a volatile week for sure i know it's funny we picked a hilarious week to do the the merge just from a market's perspective because this week the fresh inflation numbers for august come out are from the u.s which is obviously always a very volatile time in the markets when that happens and then we have the merge right and there's a bunch of other macro things happening as well i think so yeah

just a bunch of things to keep in mind and and keep on top of for sure but i guess from the technical point of view yeah this is just amazing like it's so so close to to happening now i'm so i'm very much looking forward to it and speaking of the pandas there is a uh going to be a um a panda nft which may already be live by the time you've watched this it'll it'll go live an hour after i post this video i i believe uh which is here so you can see the merge panda nft on zora the creator is xiaoweiwang who is a researcher at the ethereum foundation i'm i'm going to say this is the official merge nft you know how we had the erp-1559 nft well there are other merge nfts that i've talked about the

the new home of the heart that um i've talked about with regards to stateful works what they're doing that's live right now i think by the time this video goes out whereas this one uh is going live as i said an hour after this video goes out but it's going to be priced at 0.05 eth and this is obviously that uh panda fusion meme that i've been posting on twitter for a while not just me i think a lot of people have been posting it uh and i can't wait for that to that to kick off because i'm going to try my best to get the first one of this because it's an open edition so there's going to be you know as many additions as people want uh and and people can mint for obviously this price yeah and i believe all of the 50 of the revenue

will be going to protocol guild uh 10 percent uh would be will be uh of the revenue you'll be donated to non-profit animal welfare organizations and the rest the ten percent of uh shalway's allocation will be sent to get coin grants and shonen jump that's cool at sending it to shonen jump for those who don't know that's a very popular manga publisher i think the most popular manga publisher in in japan there uh so and the original illustration is going uh sorry the original illustrator of the of this of the pandas will get 25 percent of of the revenue here so very cool to see this you know this is obviously going to be funding uh a bunch of really cool things including core devs so yeah if you want to mint this i'll

link it in the youtube description below and you can go check that out uh and speaking of emerge uh i guess like more merch stuff here you can see that there's an awesome merge dashboard on alphaday here that you can go to at app.alphaday.comb merge i'll link this in the youtube description but it's basically got a bunch of relevant news such as the merge countdown some merge videos keep people to look at the road map all these sorts of stuff so definitely go check this out i'll link it in the youtube description for you to do so uh we got a new article about post merge validator returns from pintail over the weekend so there has been a lot of discussion about what the returns or i guess like the rewards rate the apr is going to be post-emerge

original estimates had it above 10 and that was because the fear revenue was really high now these days if you include fear from you and i think mev the estimates come down to i think it was like six point uh sorry seven point six percent in a high maybe scenario and six point one percent on the low mev scenario and the median return at about 6.8 percent so basically at that number i think i mentioned before six to seven percent including mev uh if it's actually that right six or seven percent which it looks like it will be at current fee revenue and current mev uh we're gonna see a lot of more eighth get staked like right now it's four percent obviously there's still a risk with staking ether and everything and obviously the merge is going to be a

de-risking event but we really are going to see a bump up in that staking uh in the amount of eighth being staked which is just amazing because as i've discussed in my bullish rant last week there is that ho obviously that huge issue introduction coming and it's basically going to zero for six to twelve months and then people saying well it's not just supply side it's also a demand side that matters and like oh yeah i mean we have a demand side right and we're going to be getting a bigger demand side because staking yields are going to go up and people are going to be like wow okay i'm going to stake my youth now because these yields are too juicy and it's kind of the the i guess like least risky yield on your 8th you can get i think i would actually consider it

the least risky yield you can get as well but if you want to read pinterest posty i'll link it in youtube description because it is quite lengthy it actually has a lot of data you can look at and goes through all the different scenarios and shows you what yields can be depending on you know much a bunch of different factors and variables so i've always enjoyed pintails posts you know i think pintail and cyrus unesc they i remember back in the day they were the first ones to actually write blogs about uni swap that made me understand what uni swap was because back then unisop seemed like this black magic no one knew no one understood how it worked and uh no one understood like what was going on how how it could work and there was all this debate around it but i remember uh

pintail and cyrus yunessi both of their posts really explained uh unisob to me so i've always read everything pintail wrote since then because they've just been great their blog is here if you haven't heard of them before pintail.xyz uh they talk about they they write long posts about everything ethereum related or a lot of important ethereum related things and this one i really enjoyed reading as well and just seeing how the rewards are going to be post merge and what factors are going to play into it so i'll link this in the youtube description below for you to check out we have a fresh update on ultrasound money over the weekend you can now watch the ultrasound barrier live on ultrasound.money so what i mean by this is that if you scroll down a little bit here

you can see the time this is only a one hour time frame right now i think they're going to extend this out but you can see over the last hour any of the orange dots here so anything above this line is a base fee that is above the ultrasound barrier which means that it's above the point it needs to be for eth to be deflationary uh post merge i believe i think this this doesn't include um proof of work issuance it's just proof of stake issuance alone so above 14.9 way at current stake deep amount means that will be deflationary and underneath the line there's blue dots here so this is obviously only an hour time frame i don't think you can actually change this yet i would love to see it over like you know one day seven day 30 days but it's good to have

like this raw number now available for us to go look at that 14.9 gray is that ultrasound barrier now this changes based on the amount of eat steak so for example less eat steak less gray base fee that we need to have be ultrasound right but obviously the more eat steak the more issuance there is the higher the ultrasound barrier needs to be but this is actually a really low barrier when you think about it right i mean i know gas has been in like the single digits for a little bit but that's because the market still is overall very quiet and i know there has been some movements in the market uh like in the price of btc and eth ethan and some other coins but that really is just bear market things i don't think that signifies a bull market at all so

when you really think about it we're still able to get over this barrier relatively easily in a very deep bear market so what happens when the activity comes back people will say oh well the activity is going to move to layer twos and then layer one fees are going to go down because it's actually cheap for layer twos to post their their data and their proofs to layer one and it's gonna become cheaper after proto dang shouting that's true but there's so much activity and liquidity on layer one still that is going to take a long time to migrate to layer two if it ever migrates i'm actually of the opinion that a lot of people will still stay on layer one but we'll just have a lot of people on boarding to layer two and just never touching layer one because there's a massive network effect on layer one that

has been built up for seven years now that is not going away anytime soon that means that the fees are going to spike i think and there are the fees are going to be above that ultrasound barrier a lot of the time uh and then if you know if we layer twos get as popular as we expect them to be eventually they're going to saturate block space too because like there's no such thing as infinite block space or infinite uh i guess scalability or anything like that there's always a limit there's always going to be a ceiling that gets reached and then we're going to have fees that kind of go up to match that in in the blockchain context so but yeah i mean i just thought this was really cool i wanted to highlight it the ultrasound money website is quickly becoming or has already become

my favorite website for tracking everything got to do with the eighth supply i mean they've got everything here you need look look what it's got all right we start from the top we have the merge ktd countdown here which is amazing right obviously in a couple of days it's not going to matter but it's it's here right then we've got the whole supply growth uh a little section here which shows the burn over any time frame you want to select yeah you can do five one hour five minutes one hour set one day seven days 30 days or all so if we do 30 days we can see the amount of burn over the 30 days the supply growth under proof of work and issuance right but then we can simulate merge and then we can see what it's like under proof of stake right

and the issuance on the proof of stake as well then you have uh what i just showed you about the ultrasound barrier you have the current east supply updating in real time you have supply projections you can play around with these sliders uh based on on you know insurance rewards for stakers and burn rate and all that sort of stuff so as you can see here obviously the um you know the the more eat that steak so let's okay currently the 13.7 million each steak let's go to 20 million each so what would be the ultrasound barrier well this is the new ultrasound barrier here uh and i don't think there's a number on it yet but you can see how it adjusted right from from where it is today it went up because obviously with more each stake there's more issuance more burn needed to go ultrasound and

then you have uh something here that you can toggle as well such that the e-supply two-year projection so you've got the staking amount so let's go to it's taking about being 30 million eighth and the uh the base fee let's say the base phase 20 grey we can kind of like uh project out what the supply is going to be uh like in accounting contracts invalidators and total supply and then you have the burn by uh i guess like um uh sorry real time burn per block and also the burn leader board so you can see here over any time frame the same time frames as before the burn leaderboard burn total burn rates block all that good stuff there burn records uh and burn categories and then we've got another thing below that called total value secured

so the amount of value that the ethereum network is securing including erc20s and nfts then down here you have a whole section called monetary premium which shows things like the scarcity of eight so how much is locked in staking how much is in d5 how much uh has been burned you have uh annualized profits of eth and the growth profile like compared to other companies uh uh like uh intel google apple and all that and a monetary premium this is another slider you can play with here then you have validator rewards so where they're coming from right now so issuance tips mev estimate with a total and the total apr so these are all estimates here for validator awards issuance breakdown of where the issuance actually came from originally so from the ico which was the bitcoin crowd

sale proof of work ethereum foundation early contributors proof of stake flippings you can see here uh the the kind of way out of flipping for bitcoin gold and usd and then down the bottom you have a uh kind of visualization of everyone who's got the ultrasound bat signal in their twitter uh name uh and then even further down you can you can basically sign up here which i've done to join the ultrasound discord uh i haven't joined it yet that i've joined the queue and there's a q a so i just like went through all of that what's on this website there's so much like it's as i said it's quickly become my one of my favorite if not my favorite ways to keep up with all things eat supply related i think it is my favorite at this point in time so kudos to the

team for this kudos to old to justin drake for pioneering the ultrasound money meme he did a lot of great work there and so did bankless by giving him a platform to spread that meme uh but yeah i mean i'm sure you guys look at this side as much as i do but i wanted to run through it because i thought it was just an interesting exercise all right so we have a fresh research post from uh paradigm here today from joe shim new hopefully i said that name right i don't think i did but he posted something called goldfish a provably secure replacement for lmd ghost in proof of stake ethereum now this is a little bit technical you can go give the blog post a read but basically what it is is a uh proposed replacement for the current fork choice rule that ethereum

proof of stake uses called lmd ghost now this fork trace rule has been around for a while uh it has had its issues that have been rectified and it has had its uh it's kind of like been put through its paces since the beacon chain went live but it is still no not perfect right it is still not something that we should be happy with we should be iterating on it kind of like building better things around it and that's exactly what this blog post is talking about this thing called goldfish which uh they're calling a provably secure replacement for lmd ghost now this isn't replacing uh proof of stake itself which is uh casper ffg which is the friendly finality gadget uh this is replacing the lmd ghost section which is the fork choice rule so what i mean by that is that there is a rule in building the

protocol called the fork choice rule that basically uh lets validators know which chain is the canonical one that's like the tldr is the simplest explanation i can give there uh going deeper into it it basically um basically ensures that validators don't get lost i guess if you want to if you want to dive deeper but if you want to dive even deeper you can go read this blog post so definitely go do that and go read all about goldfish i'm not going to bother tldring it here because as i said it does get quite technical but it looks promising i did kind of like ask some researchers about this and they said it does look promising i don't expect it to happen anytime soon i i don't think it will happen anytime soon but it still looks promising and it's still something that uh i i think was

very interesting all right so uh alexa here posted a dashboard of ethereum client distribution over time on the execution layer side so you can see here on the left this is i believe 2021 uh sorry no i believe this goes all the way back to 2016 17 to 2022 now and you can see how client distribution has changed over time so basically we started off with geth and then open ethereum which was the original parity client which dominated for a while uh and then you have here a bunch of other clients entering the fray and then if we fast forward to today we can see that geth is still very dominant open ethereum got deprecated so it's off here uh we had

eragon take you know we're starting to to get a lot of share basu and other mind as well getting a lot of the share of the network too and this is zoomed in here to april 2021 to july 2022 and you can see this growth more so this is basically our execution layer client diversity with geth at about 80 which obviously we don't want to see we want to see get below that because uh client diversity and execution layer is as important as it is on the consensus layer post merge but eragon is still growing so is nethermine so is baysu and there's a bunch of other clients in there as well that are a bit smaller but yeah i mean it really puts into perspective how big of a lost open ethereum was and parity was for the ecosystem now for those of you who don't

know parity deprecated their client a while ago and then it got token taken over by noces as open ethereum and then it got deprecated and i believe gnosis is supporting the aragon effort uh as as a company now the reason why parody deprecated at least look they i think i can't remember the reason they gave but i don't think they explicitly said this but i mean it's pretty obvious they're working on polka dot right at competing layer one so why would they work on something that benefited ethereum plus at the same time it was probably a lot of overhead for them to work on it to keep it up to date so they just said well you know we're just gonna deprecate it and the reason why open ethereum was deprecated i think it was because gnosis wanted to focus their efforts on aragon because there was an

actual uh because aragon was doing different things they weren't just building another client they were trying to optimize the archive node uh layout of um of a full node of an ethereum node client so yeah but the good thing is is that like it's not a 100 guest i mean if i have to find a silver lining but post merge we really need to do a very big push i'm getting people to switch from guest to one of the other clients in order to get geth below that critical threshold of 66 just like on the consensus layer side all right so uh last thing about the merge i think this is the last to get last thing about the merge so this is another dashboard i came across that was shared to me by super fears at eth2 dot slash merge and you can just basically

see a bunch of different uh metrics and and kind of like tracking around the merged ttd and how close we are and where we are right now so definitely go check this out i'll link it in in the youtube description for you to do do so we're just another dashboard for you to watch and and see when the merge is coming because it is coming this week all right so tim biker shared a tweet over the weekend saying after the merge and with devcon coming we'll likely take a few weeks off from all core devs consensus layer calls that said we still want to make progress on planning shanghai which is the uh network upgrade coming to ethereum after the merge so this is the one that will hopefully have a bunch of upgrades in it that people are looking forward to such as erp 4488

uh protodank sharding and beacon chain withdrawals so you can go visit this forum post to get a breakdown of that and join in the conversation um but yeah i mean as tim says here i think for about a month or so after the merge the s core dev protocol layer stuff is going to be a lot slower than it has been because i think a lot of them are taking a break well deserved break a lot of them are going to be a in germany for the conferences there dabcon and eath berlin and then they're going to be going to bogota for devcon and all the events around that so i guess like it's a perfect time for them to take you know maybe four or five weeks off uh as a break and get amongst the community of course you know obviously we never take

a full break from crypto but still let them recharge because it doesn't end at the merge like as i've said before vitalik has mentioned that we're only 40 of the way through the ethereum roadmap uh at a time of the merge i believe or maybe that didn't include the merge but still we're not even halfway through just yet so once the merge happens let's give people a time to recharge and rest and then they can obviously definitely come back and start working on shanghai but as tim said he wants to get the conversation started before this and there is a lot of conversation in here already so you can go check this out uh i'll link in youtube description below but as i said there are um kind of a bunch of eips in the pipeline here but the ones that people are most excited

about i believe are vegan chain withdrawals and proto-dance shouting all right so at dabcon today uh uh proto lambda who works at optimism presented optimism bedrock and announced the release of the bedrock alpha test net uh and they're obviously eager for devs to test the infrastructure and dapps with the new network so bedrock is optimism's version of nitro like we obviously had arbitrary nitro go live and that was amazing but optimism is also coming out with a major upgrade called bedrock the as i said the alpha test net is now live this is expected to go live in q4 on optimism mainnet don't know when in q4 they just said q4 uh but that's it's going to bring with a host of upgrades similar to what nitro did uh

but it's cool to see that it is live in an alpha test net fashion right now and you can go read more about it in in this blog post here that's linked in this tweet thread as well and i've talked about it a lot in the past so i'm not going to rehash it here but cool to see that it's live on the alpha test net today all right and speaking of optimism as well and i spoke about this last week from ryan b who put out a tweet about how we should have like a really easy way people to spin up their own roll-ups right so mark here from optimism said optimism is building the cosmos sdk of evm equivalent roll-ups with bedrock so basically they you can see in the comment hirana reply to hazu you know hazu said as in other roll-ups we'll use

bedrock and mark says yes we want to make it as easy as possible for other roll-ups to use bedrock and build a network effect of credibility with many eyes on the code so cosmos sdk is probably the best thing that cosmos has going for it like i'm not going to say uh that actually you know it's funny like i don't have a strong opinion on cosmos but i know that the cosmos sdk is really good developers love it and it's a reason why people opt to spin up these app chains on cosmos so if we want that the same thing to happen on ethereum with layer twos we need to create something like the cosmos sdk for this now optimism is saying that with bedrock they are doing this which means that people will be able to spin up their own layer twos uh in a cosmos sdk like

fashion on ethereum using optimism's technology which is a huge win because as i said before i like app chains i think they're fine but i don't think that a sovereign app chain or a layer 1 app chain is the solution here i think that the app chains work best as layer 2s for a number of different reasons the main reason is economics at the end of the day like economic sustainability because and and security which i guess falls into that because at the end of the day you get ethereum security by just paying a small fee to ethereum the fee isn't even big like it's not like these layer twos are paying enormous layer one cost to secure themselves and if they were it would mean that they're doing a lot of activity so it's actually worth it for them to pay it so they don't have to

issue their own token as inflationary rewards to miners or validators right to secure the network whereas layer ones do uh because they have to spin up their own validator set whereas layer twos don't have to do that they you know they might wanna spin up more sequences and things like that but they don't have to spin up their own consensus engine and pay people to come to consensus on it because all they're doing is paying ethereum for that and they're not paying very much for that either so they're getting extreme bang for your buck so cool to see that optimism is working on a cosmos sdk like thing for rollups on ethereum i think it's sorely needed that's for sure right so another big partnership announcement out of polygon today starbucks is going to be working with polygon on something called starbucks

odyssey which is a unique experience that enables you to earn and buy digital collectible stamps and unlock new coveted coffee experiences so you can read more at the blog post here but cool to see another big company uh choosing a polygon to do their uh i guess like web 3 nft stuff on it makes a lot of sense of course and as i said before polygon has the best business development team in crypto and there's no surprise to me that they landed a company like starbucks and it's actually funny because i was thinking like how can i participate in this i'm pretty sure there's like one starbucks in melbourne because i think they tried to launch and then melbourne coffee is is so good and so varied with little cafes everywhere that starbucks wasn't very popular so i'm pretty sure there's like one in the

city maybe one at the airport or something so i don't think i'm gonna be taking advantage of this but obviously starbucks is absolutely massive in the us i don't know where else it's begin i i've been to the us and seen them everywhere so if you are a starbucks coffee drinker um you can definitely get around this and go check out all the details here but i think this is just a cool announcement from polygon altogether because at the end of the day we need to bring more of these companies into the ethereum family and polygon is doing the work to get that happening all right so i came across this uh twitter account called fire over the weekend and what fire is is a tool that makes web3 simple by showing you what happens at the smart contract level in a human readable format so basically you

know how on metamask when you're presented with a bunch of like weird characters and actions and things that you can't really read or weird information that you can't really read and you don't know what's happening with like your account or what what's happening on your um on your uh i know you're on your account on your interactions that you're doing with smart contracts well with fire they're actually making it easy for you to see what's happening so they're basically decoding that so i can't show you the video because it's small here but i'm going to try and get the image up on their website to show you what this looks like okay so this is what it looks like here you can see in the screenshot that there's an overview so when you've done a transaction to swap 0.18 for 100 die on the ethereum main

net you see a nice little table here of this is the how it affects your wallet you're going to be sending these assets out you're going to be sending your eighth out and then you're going to be sent you're the eighth out you want to swap and then you're going to be sending some eight out as gas and then the swap is going to this ethereum address which is a contract and then the gas is going to miners and then you can see what assets you're getting in is this amount of die uh from up from a swap and to your address if you were to look at this in metamask it's not going to show you this at all it's going to show you some some weird-ass data that you have no idea what you know how to interpret it but fire lets you do this now fire is

not live right now uh for like life publicly you can get early access by signing up here i signed up the other day and still haven't gotten mine so i don't know how long it's going to take but yeah i mean i think this is sorely needed i mean look at this this will actually warn you uh when you're transferring something uh in in like a an orange kind of like tinsha that basically says you know warning this will transfer your ape to this address right uh and it actually kind of pulls in exactly where it's transferring it to and you could imagine like taking this much further than this like token allowances you can have it so that there's like a community of people that are uh are submitting maybe a list of scam addresses and things like that so that it can pop up

in the wallet for people and say hey this address was flagged as a related to a fish or related to a scam you shouldn't interact with this at all go check here for more information like this is what we need to protect people and this is how web3 can go more mainstream and you can yeah you can see here malicious content you can block things that's just contract you can block different contracts and stuff like that this is is what we need uh because at the end of the day there are a lot of people that get scams very easily because they just can't read what they're doing they're essentially signing things without having any idea what they're signing and there's been plenty of examples of this happening across the ecosystem so i am super excited that someone is making this i'm gonna keep promoting it and highlighting it

hopefully i get early access soon you know i was in two minds about damning them and being like hey i really want early access to this because i want to show like you guys about it um but i kind of get weird about kind of doing that and using my using my name so to speak to get access to things but i think i'm going to do it because i want to show you guys how it works in real time on on my end as well but yeah you can go check this out for yourself go sign up for early access i'll link it in the youtube description below all right so last two things here there is now a legal defense fund that has been set up for virgil griffith you can go uh donate to a virgil defense fund dot eth now this is legit as it's coming

from eva bailin who is a fully dox known person in the cryptica system she is an executive i believe at graph protocol so you're not just sending the money into the ethos so to speak right it is actually going to be going to the right place here so yeah you can send it here if you want to fund virgil griffith it's legal defense fund uh if you don't you don't have to donate like no one's forcing you but yeah and then this is a way to do it with 8th rye uh usdc or die but i'm pretty sure they would expect they would accept any token that you set across maybe just don't send something like a dick but nft or something right or maybe do i mean that'll maybe a virgil will get a bit of a laugh out of that they'll probably tell him about

that but yeah if you want to support him definitely go donate to this fund all right lastly just wanted to quickly highlight that uh the protocol guild has a git coin grant spun up in uh on git coin of course you can go donate to that uh obviously the protocol guild is all about funding ethereum core developers so i put my full weight behind this is something that you should definitely donate to in saying that there is a new bitcoin grants channel in the discord in the daily grade discord channel that people have shared their grants in that you should definitely go check out i last week i did ask people to share their grants on discord or share ones that they thought to be funded well i created a channel for that so you can easily share everything in there and then people can go check it out and can

go donate to it if they want to so highly recommend you all go check out what's already been posted in there but if you have something that you think is underfunded or that you think should get more attention go post it in there and if there is a tweet associated with it as well uh that would be good to post in there as well so people can go and interact with it and retweet it and things like that uh but on that note that's gonna be it for today so thank you everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone