Metaverse Index live, Layer 2 on fire and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #95 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where i recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 8th of april 2021 all right everyone a lot to cover as you can see from my tabs open here first i wanted to give a quick shout out to jake chavinsky who is the general counsel at compound finance he has created a new newsletter uh which will kind of be covering all of the legal regulatory and policy developments within crypto he jake is my favorite i guess crypto lawyer you could say by far he's always very measured in his analysis on different things uh he's been putting out great content on twitter for a while now and i'm really excited that he has a newsletter so if you're interested in following along with uh kind of the the regulatory side

of stuff definitely go subscribe to his newsletter if you if you haven't yet you may have already seen it um and his first piece is basically a a review of q1 which um you know i read through it earlier today and i really enjoyed it so definitely highly recommend going and checking that one out there the berlin hard fork is actually only a week away which is crazy because like it that really snuck up on me um i thought to myself wow a week away that means it's april 14th soon and then i like kind of like saw oh yeah it is and and i think it's gonna happen on april 15th actually here um and and stuff like that uh because uh you know it's always hard to give like an exact date because it's based on block times uh or a specific block uh mind you so if

you do have a if you are running an ethereum full node which i hope a lot of you are i definitely upgrade it to uh to berlin if you haven't yet 60 of the network is already ready which is really great to see but there is still a bunch missing i mean you can see in this kind of screenshot here there's about 33 percent of geth clients missing and 28 of open ethereum clients kind of missing so yeah if you run those or any of the other ones just make sure they're up to date all the clients are out and ready and you can go upgrade them now so diversify is offering uh 20 in usdt for anyone who makes their first deposit to app.diversify.com this is basically to make up for the gas fee that you'll pay having to deposit from ethereum layer 1 to

2 diversifies layer 2. and you know we've been seeing this kind of play out lately not just with the i guess layer two space but in general there's um there's a lot of i guess like rebates you could call them or like kind of like cash backs get being given out by protocols right now i know balance is doing it where they give battle tokens to people to make up for the gas fees and stuff like that i think there's a couple of other teams doing this and i think it's it's it's quite smart right you know the the tokens come out of like the protocol treasury and you know these treasuries are huge so i mean it's not like totally scalable right i don't think it can be done for like every single trade sort of thing but it can be it can be done in such a

way that it just helps the the kind of little guys right helps the people that you know aren't trading very much you know maybe a few hundred dollars and like a 50 transaction fee to trade is gonna eat into that basically a lot so you know getting a token in return is always good there so yeah really really cool to see this i think in particular the fact that it applies to kind of layer twos here is really important um because of the fact that uh you know we all want people to on board onto layer 2 but they still have to to kind of spend a kind of a gas a gas fee on layer one to get onto these layer twos at least until there's more infrastructure built out like exchange bridges and things like that so it's just really great to see that

diversifies kind of you know leading the charge here i think i'm not sure if blueprint has already done this in the past but you know i'm sure that they'll you know these other layer twos will follow suit as well here so yeah really really cool to see that from diversify so alan on twitter here uh basically has this uh spreadsheet that i i think i've covered before on the refuel but he updated it today and it basically compares all types of different nft marketplaces and has a bunch of different things that it compares like you know do they accept credit or debit cards uh well how is the content stored is it centralized or is it on ipfs or r weave um you know what are the the kind of like fees associated with the platforms what networks are they on all that sort of stuff so i think um

this is really really cool and very comprehensive and very detailed there's actually a um a doc you can go to here um i'll link it in the usual description of course uh that kind of has all this but you know it's it's fun to see that uh most of the platforms are actually using ipfs right now really great to see that and there's only three that are kind of i guess centralized and one that is uh you know i guess like a hybrid between ipfs and centralized here but if we kind of look and see what is the best across the board mint base looks pretty good like i'm just eyeing it right now um and kind of like i guess uh if we kind of look uh mintable and cargo you know in terms of like the worst offenders here i think uh something like i guess super

rare unfortunately you know that they are they do have their content on ipfs but um there's a lot of like i guess no's in in the kind of like row there same with that kind of foundation here so yeah i hope to see like a lot of these maybe go to all green um you know sooner rather than later but i do realize that a lot of these platforms are early stage right you know things like credit debit card um integration requires going through kind of i guess like the old regulatory traditional finance system um so that's a bit more difficult there so i totally understand that for some of these platforms uh in terms of like uh putting your your story sorry storing the content of the nfts onto ipfs or rwev that should be done like regardless i don't think that

um you know at this point in time there's an excuse for having centralized um kind of things here and you know as i said it's great to see most of the um the platforms are utilizing these these kind of decentralized networks right now uh and then yeah there's fees as well there's like um set initial sale fees you can see like they're pretty high on on the curated platforms like super rare and maker's place it's at 15 but unlike the open market places it's between 2 and 2.5 percent zora is zero percent right now i do not expect that to to last um you know that's not just sustainable as a business model sort of thing uh and you can see here that just only three of these platforms have a token right now but you can expect pretty much like all of these platforms to eventually have a

token i think in one way or another you know i mean i've said it before and i'll say it again if something doesn't have a token right now there's a high chance it will have a token at some point in the future so yeah good to consider that but great spreadsheet from alan here you can go check it out i'll link it in the youtube description below so i spoke about god's unchained uh launching on immutable x yesterday and i was saying you know i'm expecting it to launch imminently and it launched today in its like very earliest stages it was it basically launched as a i guess kind of an alpha stage but it's live so if you have god's unchained cards from the trial of the trial of the gods card pack so not the genesis cards the the kind of like trial of the gods

expansion pack then you're able to trade them at market.x.immutable.com right now as long as you linked your wallet um to the immutablex platform before april 6th so there's a few caveats there but the platform is live as i said it's built on starkware's technology it's it's gas free um it scales up to 9000 transactions per second right now and this is just like a massive massive improvement and i've been seeing comments i've been following along the discord things like that i've been seeing comments from various people around their experience and they're saying you know it's just amazing to be able to do this in a gas free way and you know because immutable x is a true layer too it inherits ethereum security so that is just like absolutely massive starkware is doing very well right now

i mean you know they had the the public launch of the diy dx l2 exchange yesterday they have diversify they announced their caspian uh kind of like hybrid uh i guess l2 l1 amm design the other day they have stock net um version three coming or i mean they have so many things coming right now it's just absolutely crazy uh you know and they don't really make much noise about it either they're quite they're kind of a quiet team they don't do too much marketing i think the marketing comes from the projects actually using their technology which i think is really really cool so yeah anyway if you linked your wallet here before april 6 and you have some trial of the gods cards definitely go check this out it applies to you you'll be able to experience what it's like to basically trade nfts on a layer 2

platform on ethereum and you'll see you know what i've been ranting and raving about for for months now about how layer twos are really going to solve a lot of the problems of of of kind of layer one not just gas fees but in terms of user experience as well because obviously you know it's kind of hard to estimate gas sometimes which one 559 is gonna uh kind of like address a lot of it as well but also the block times are longer for 15 seconds on on these kind of platforms it's it's basically instant uh on these layer two platforms so yeah definitely go check this out if you haven't yet so slingshot the decentralized exchange aggregator has completed what they call a liquidity expansion so they're basically our liquidity zone expansion they're basically deployed to

polygon here and it is live for the first 500 beta users uh obviously this enables very lightning fast trades very you know kind of i guess cheap transaction fees here and they've added 100 plus new tokens as well so you can sign up for access at slingshot.finance to the beta here uh and as i kind of just explained yesterday with um the kind of rv uh i guess like deploying to polygon i've said it before you know how polygon you know i mean i actually got into a debate with someone about this today about like you know what's a layer two what's a side chain you know what are the hybrids it actually goes so deep when you when you kind of look at it and think about it there's so many i guess like little little things you have to account for um but like from from kind of what i've

seen you know polygon isn't what people would consider a true l2 but i think the lines are kind of being blurred now between these things because polygon does commit itself to ethereum and it inherits some of ethereum's security properties and things like that so there's just trade-offs at the end of the day i i do want to do a more comprehensive video on this in the future but it's it's kind of hard right now because of the fact that these things are changing all the time like i'm asking different people what the diff you know what what they think about different kind of scaling solutions and i'm getting different answers so i mean i i would consider i mean a true l2 i guess like inherits all of ethereum security properties right it cannot exist without um i guess like the ethereum main chain it cannot be secured without it

whereas polygon obviously has its own validator set it for all intents of perp intents and purposes it is its own separate blockchain but it does commit itself to ethereum for that enhanced security there so yeah i think um you know just i i guess like that's very important to keep in mind as i said i want to do more kind of like more of a video on this in the future and kind of like talk more about this but still very good to see slingshot kind of i guess expand here um you know i think they're going to expand just like every other app i think they're all just gonna expand to every evm compatible chain you're gonna see them on layer twos like uh i guess uh starquest technology you're gonna see them on optimism and and arbitrary eventually as well and all that sort of stuff so

it's gonna be interesting to see how the i guess scalability landscape plays out over the next few months in the ethereum ecosystem because there is definitely not just going to be one winner and i've said this many many times so i won't hop on about it too much today but yeah definitely not going to be just one winner and i do really think that the bridges are going to be the big winners here like next the trustless kind of bridges and um and hot protocol and things like that which i've also said in the past of course but yeah really great to see this go sign up if you want beta access to slingshot on polygon here so yuri from starkware co-founder and ceo at starkware basically put out this tweet that uh in the in the i guess the less than 24 hours since dydx went

uh the dydx l2 exchange went live to public mainnet they did more than 10 million dollars in trading volume and this is just the first 24 hours which is insane that's that's awesome already 10 million dollars in the first 24 hours and i'm expecting this to just absolutely explode because perpetual products are very very popular but um they're very popular uh for uh for uh i guess like a variety of reasons and they require kind of order booked uh based exchanges to work properly and that obviously wasn't possible on ethereum layer one because of the scalability and gas issues now with uh with kind of like yuri here um you know saying that there's only there's been 10 million dollars done uh already in training volume the first 24 hours

is absolutely massive i think this is going to get even bigger uh much faster than people anticipate you know i reckon we could see a hundred million dollars in trading volume sooner rather than later because as i said this is on l2 gas free kind of instant i've played around with it is so smooth the the kind of like um i guess like experience is so so good and it's it's blown me away honestly so yeah i'm really excited to see this evolve further and you know as i've said in the past you know layer two is here it's just not evenly distributed yet and what i meant by that is that we have a lot of these kind of like apps going live um and you know going live in kind of alpha versions it's not really evenly distributed to anyone everyone where it's not like

public right we have like optimism with their private mainnet and things like that but as soon as it goes public as soon as it hits public mainnet the demand to use these platforms is extreme they're like pretty much it applies to everyone in the ecosystem even the whales right that can pay the gas fees they would rather just be on layer two and not have to pay the gas fees like why would you kind of be like oh you know i'm not gonna go to layer two just because i wanna pay the gas piece on layer one i you know even though they may not care about them as much as the smaller players do they're definitely gonna go to to layer two as well and not just the gas fees but the speed improvements too i mean and the experiences that just can't work on layer one as i said order book

exchanges have not worked on layer one because of the the scalability issues and that that means no matter how much money you have and no matter how much you don't care about the gas fees you're not going to get a a great perpetual pla experience perpetual exchange experience on layer 1 ethereum you will get that on layer 2 with diy dx and this is i guess goes back to a piece i wrote the other day about unconstrained innovation where layer 2 is going to unlock all of this innovation all these use cases that layer 1 just can't do and it's gonna inherit inherit the security of layer one which is just i think the best way to go about it so yeah really excited to see all this growth from i guess uh dydx in just the kind of first 24 hours of them being

public here so speaking of layer two uh the block has a new uh i guess like a bunch of different dashboards actually um on on their kind of website here they have a data section which is which is really cool i actually use it a lot when i cover things in the daily grade data pump i know i'm late on this month's epi or last month's episode of that that's going to be out this weekend so definitely keep an eye out for that but basically what this dashboard shows you is that uh the tvl in different ethereum layer 2 solutions so you can see the tvl here for plasma zk roll optimistic roll-ups and validium valydium is a type of zk roll up here but it is distinctly separate um but yeah you can kind of see the growth has been pretty massive in just like february march and

as i said a lot of this stuff is still in kind of like alpha phases right it has not been public uh you know diy decks only went public like a couple days ago there's a bunch of other things that are not publicly yet like optimism obviously as i just said so it's great to see that we're already up to like almost a billion dollars in tvl here just just for that um and you can see value locked in the different bridges as well which i mean i wouldn't consider an uh like a layer two kind of solution like the bridges are distinctly different so i mean maybe that's not the best place to put this this dashboard but you can see here obviously you know the bridge into bsc has a lot of value locked and there's xdi avalanche in here and stuff like that

and then down here you have a value locked of ethereum optimistic rollups now the majority of this value is in optimism and the majority of that value is just synthetics right now pretty much all of it it's just synthetics because that's the only app live on on optimism right now and then you have fuel which is another optimistic roll-up uh kind of solution that kind of like doesn't have much here but yeah i think i expect this to kind of like explode in growth over the next few months as optimism goes live to public maintenance and our trim comes online as well yeah and then finally you have value locked of ethereum zk roll up so loop rings obviously dominating here uh zk sync is is kind of like steady state here which is really cool as i said before zk sync is like a

payments network so i wouldn't expect value to stay there forever people like to i guess um get out and kind of cash out the fee and stuff like that especially because a lot a lot of the zk sync activity is from git coin and a lot of people who get their git coin donations just cash it out to fear i mean i i do that like for tax reasons specifically i had to kind of withdraw and cash it out the fiat there and then aztec and hermes are much newer you can't really see them on the chart here but i do expect them to grow over time as well so go check out this this dashboard if you want a deeper dive there's other there's other kind of like dashboards on there as well i'll link this in the youtube description for you to go check

out of course right so the last bit on scaling here and this isn't layer two scaling actually this is um uh basically layer one scaling uh vitalik put out a fresh post called why sharding is great demystifying the technical properties now this is a very technical post but there is a high level kind of description of everything that vitalik gives before diving into the technicals so i would say that half of it is very technical the other half is high level so if you know if you want to dive in and understand more about sharding i would still kind of highly recommend going and reading this it doesn't matter if you don't understand most of it i think the main takeaway from this is that sharding is hard but it is worth it um if we can

successfully scale ethereum via sharding which it looks like we will be able to and then just use the shards for for layer two to give layer two more scalability and then we will have created an extremely secure scalable layer one while also um creating an extremely secure and scalable layer two ecosystem too so yeah i definitely go recommend checking this out because this is obviously the main way that ethereum is scaling on layer one um and you know vitality goes through this thing called the scalability trilemma again gives a kind of refreshing here which basically says you can only pick one of these two scalable decentralized um one of these three sorry scalable decentralized or secure you know and solving this trilemma if you can get all three is the holy grail and that's what sharding tries to do

to do with ethereum's kind of i guess like proof-of-stake consensus it tries to be decentralized scalable and secure all at once now you know currently decentralized and secure are like bitcoin and ethereum and they are not scalable as layer ones right uh then you have like hype tps change which are scalable and secure but they're not decentralized right because of the fact that uh you know they basically sacrifice decentralization to achieve this kind of scalability and vitalik that defines it here i'm not gonna read this all out i mean just i guess like definitely go check out this blog post i i highly recommend it it is very it was very informative when i read it i had to read it a couple of times because obviously being you know on the technical side of things it takes a bit of time to kind of

i guess i grasp some of these concepts here but definitely still worth a read even if you're not very technical so the index co-op launched another big index product today called the metaverse index now what this does is it basically lets you invest in an indexed product that covers 15 different tokens within the metaverse now what is the metaverse the metaverse covers basically covers um the kind of like nft space in in the gaming space so think of like axi infinity and god's unchained all that sort of stuff right those are the kind of like and there's like a bunch of a bunch of others in here i mean if i actually go to the the kind of blog post here you'll be able to see which tokens are included here um there's heaps in here

there's like the nft platform tokens like rari uh like meme there are so even kind of like a hybrid social nft tokens like whale there's manner of decentraland there's sand there's audio which is um uh or rds the um decentralized kind of i guess um uh audio streaming platform engine of course i mean as i said 15 different tokens in here all uh tied to the metaverse uh which i think this is i mean i think i've seen other products like this but this is the first very compelling product that's come to market here i mean i'm biased because i obviously never advise at a set which kind of like has a heavy uh kind of uh involvement in index car but i think this is just really really cool and this is managed actually by community members it is not managed by

by set or anything like that um it's managed by two community members i can't remember where it was listed but i know one of them is called he's named the dark forest capital uh and there's another one in there as well i've forgotten the name now sorry sorry to that person for that but essentially um i just thought this was a really cool launch and you can basically go buy this now on on the token sets website here i'm not i won't show you too much on this but essentially you can go here you can check out kind of like the metaverse index its performance and everything like that the market caps are already at 1.7 mil which is which is cool to see there is a streaming fee 0.9 percent per cent which is basically a management fee that you'll pay but i think you know these fees are like

negligible in the crypto space because these things can go up like a lot right over time um they can go up like a hundred percent 200 300 in a year um and you know that means that that kind of like streaming fees negligible now of course these things can go down as well there's no guarantee it's going to go up um but yeah obviously like just the disclaimer there but really really cool to see this i i would recommend going and clicking on the thread that'll be linked in the youtube description to watch this video i thought it was just like a really cool hype video uh and congrats to the index coop for getting this out i know they've been working on this for quite a while now so sam macpherson uh who's a maker do our community member posted that basically ave ave not have an alva sorry

um the other team has proposed something called the direct deposit die module or d3m for short which is basically a way to closely join the maker and arvo protocols now what this would allow for is to make a protocol to to basically mean die directly into the rvdi market which is just super cool right i mean this means that like this is more of this kind of like i guess protocol to protocol uh i guess you could call it like partnerships going on you know we've seen it with the iron bank we've seen yearn with their partner program where they basically uh give like essentially referral fees to people with bringing tbl in and now we're seeing it between maker and rver where make it can essentially directly mean to die into

our markets that people can borrow and kind of that just generates more i guess like revenue for both platforms which is really really cool to see so yeah this is uh i mean there's a kind of a good description here where basically um this person says the d3m allows maker to expand the dye supply by incorporating others collateral liquidations in place of cdps in effect and allows maker to earn other interest makes sense to me though i remember discussing something similar in the summer with c dye that's you know a pretty pretty good uh i guess explanation there of what this essentially does it basically means that ave is the borrower right like just like you would be able to create like a cd pair and a vault yourself as

an individual so too will are there and they will pay um the kind of stability fees here um and i guess like and allows maker to earn the other interest as well so yeah really really cool uh uh a new thing out of maker and rv here i'm excited to see it uh uh be pro uh be implemented sorry for now it's just the proposal just the discussion but i don't see any pushback on this i think this is great for both protocols so yeah just more i guess protocol to pro protocol uh kind of um participation here which i think i remember saying a few months ago that we'll be seeing a lot more of this because it basically unlocks a lot of this capital that's locked within these systems which i think is just positive for the overall ecosystem so jason carver from the ethereum

foundation put out a carver sorry from the ethereum foundation put out this blog post basically saying that they're working on a way to sync the ethereum mainnet in 80 seconds so uh using company called meta witnesses now i'm not going to go through exactly what that is because i have i i i'm not going to do a very good job of explaining that but you can basically go into into here and and read this blog post here and you can also see the video demo of how they do it i think i mean anything that improves the syncing process for uh an ethereum kind of like client or ethereum full node is extremely good in my book i mean we've had kind of initiatives like turbo geth which got the sync time down for ethereum in

ethereum are kind of uh oh god i've lost the word here um there's full nodes and then there's archive nodes that's right so ethereum archive node sync times down dramatically with go ethereum and it also acts as a full node as well so we're seeing a ton of uh kind of things playing out here right where i guess uh when you kind of look at this there's a lot of improvements coming to the ethereum kind of layer one ecosystem uh through the kind of i guess protocol developments of all these different teams so yeah really really positive to see that and i'm i'm kind of curious to see this in the wild if this kind of gets put into uh you know clients i know that this is basically coming out of the trinity team so maybe this gets merged with uh different ethereum clients like geth and

open ethereum so really looking forward to seeing seeing how that plays out there so the last thing here i wanted to talk about today was uh light clients posted that they are working closely with the ef to audit eip 3704 now i've spoken about 3.074 uh before on on the refill but trdr is that it basically um what this eip does is it gets is it greatly improves the user experience by as i as i understand it getting rid of the uh approved transaction you know when you go to a new default app and you have to like approve a kind of like transaction and sorry approve a token and then do a transaction what this would do is it basically bundles it together so you do an approve and a swap at once so imagine going to

uni swap and and trading a new token and instead of having to basically uh approve the token for trading wait for that transaction to finish and then do the trade you can do both of those things in one transaction so yeah really really cool a ux improvement here and i've heard some rumors that this might make it into london so the upgrade going live in in july for eip1559 included in that um and if it did that'd be really really cool because after london we're going to be prioritizing the merge so if it doesn't go into london it will not go into i guess like the ethereum main net for quite a while so i'm hoping to see if uh see if this kind of plays out kind of as we want to and see uh i guess like how um how quickly the researchers developers can

kind of work to get this audited to make sure it's safe and to get this implemented all right that's it for today everyone thank you again for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet uh give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all tomorrow thanks everyone