Polygon growth, Core dev apprenticeships and more - The Daily Gwei Refuel #121​​ - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the daily gray refuel where recap the latest news in the ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony sosano and today is the 14th of may 2021 all right everyone let's get into it so i've had a few questions actually over the last few days since i did that uh did the refuel i think it was a couple of days ago where i was talking about a possible kind of fork that would happen uh a minor lead fork that would happen during the merge so the eighth one to e3 merge and people were asking me you know what would this mean does this mean i'd get full tokens or all these kinds of questions so i figured it was it'd probably be prudent to go through exactly what this would mean and you know how it would affect you uh what would happen you know what what

exchanges would likely do and things like that so i'm gonna do that just before i jump into that i will point out that there's this great blog post that was published all the way back in april of 2018 by alex vanderson an early ethereum developer called avoid evil twins every ethereum app pays the price of a chain split now this is essentially what i'm going to be talking about is ethereum's app layer and this is what this piece goes into in that forks on ethereum are much different to forks in like bitcoin and i'm talking like forks where the chain actually splits into and you have two you have two independent chains not forks like when you know we had the berlin hard fork to to upgrade and the um the previous chain dies off i'm talking about two chains you know work uh independent of each other and

and producing blocks so let's talk about that so i'll first use the example of bitcoin and bitcoin cash and what happened in 2017 or late 2017 there so essentially there was a disagreement over the block size bitcoin cash people wanted the block size to be larger than one megabyte bitcoin is we're like no we're not going to raise the the block size like that we're going to introduce segwit which you know is like a effectively a block size raise um a small one but that was the main disagreement over that so what ended up happening was that the bitcoin cash chain forked off of bitcoin on august 1 2017 and everyone who held btc at that time also was credited bch so essentially you got a new asset with a zero dollar cost basis um if you're thinking about

tax tax implications here um on this new chain and bitcoin cash started producing blocks and transaction and processing transactions independently of the bitcoin chain nice clean split right all good stuff i mean it wasn't clean in the fact that uh there was hash wars that went on because they both shared the same mining algorithm and there was also uh a lot of price volatility at the time as well so clean as in like once it was done it was done and everyone got their coins and everything like that um but in ethereum this is very different because ethereum isn't just like the ethy asset right ethereum is not just home to one asset and that's it ethereum is home to lots and lots of different apps lots of different smart contracts lots of different things that are all

interacting with each other that do different things so an ethereum split would actually like a a um a controversial split would actually be really bad um the only one that ethereum has had in the past has been the ethereum to ethereum classic split but that happened um you know in 2016 when there were barely any apps on ethereum it was all very uh very quiet you know there wasn't many people using the network so it was fine then um but today it is not fine today it is it would be very very very bad and i'll go through the reasons why so the reason why it would be bad is because it's it it becomes very hard to coordinate how you would uh basically react to this as an app developer now which chain do you pick well obviously you're going to pick the chain

that you know the rest of the people pick so the community the exchanges the infrastructure providers all that sort of stuff whatever chain they go with is going to be the the the canonical chain the chain that everyone refers to as ethereum right but if there is a split like as i was saying if there is a minor lead fork where they're like okay well you know you're getting rid of us and you're you know firing us essentially because you're moving from proof of work to proof of stake well we're just gonna fork um and basically continue the proof of work chain uh you know as it was now the problem with that is that once the merge happens everyone's going to go over to the e1 chain that is being uh validated by the proof of stake chain right all the app devs all the infrastructure all the

exchanges that's going to be the official chain there's no doubt about that so what happens to the apps on the fork chain what happens to make it down and compound and rv what happens with all the assets in there if usdc um sorry if if circle and coinbase the issuers of usdc say well the official usdc is on the eth2 ethereum then what happens to the usdc on the miner led fork it it becomes worthless because you cannot exchange it for um uh you cannot exchange it for uh usd uh usd through to whatever through exchanges or whatever like that and that doesn't just go for usdc it's all of these centralized assets wbtc tether tusd like there's lots of these things out there now

um and that's just the surface right think about the apps what would make a dow do like the make a dow wouldn't be backed by eighth anymore it would be backed by this forked earth now the forked value would would probably be much less than the eighth value so the outstanding outstanding die supply on that new fork of ethereum would actually be greater than the uh probably greater than the collateral so the diet price would probably fall um uh and then uh you know what if the mkr token holders want a voter to emergency shut down make a dow which means like just cancel out all the debt and everything um you know that would mean there wouldn't be a make it down there anymore and it would it would be very messy right just as an example here um and all of all of

the liquidity pools like on uni swap or sushi swap or whatever that had these assets like usdc and usdt paired against other assets they would all go to zero because you cannot redeem usdc for actual usd anymore so why would anyone be trading you know trading that essentially these are just some surface level things here so those are the considerations to make here and that's why a split like this for ethereum is much much more complicated and potentially much worse than it is for something like bitcoin now the second thing here is when people ask okay well if it forks would i get some forked eath on this new chain i'm like yes technically you would but it depends where your eat is if your eighth is sitting in a pool right uh

you know say your liquidity providing for either usdc well in that case your uh your there's gonna be like extreme volatility on that pair because usdc essentially goes to zero so what ends up happening is that you may not be able to get out exactly what you should like if you have a hundred eighth and you're expecting a hundred forked or maybe you don't get out that much because someone's come along and arbed all that away and maybe you get much less than that that's just one example another example would be if your atheism is being used as collateral to back up something right what if you've used just your ethos collateral to back up a usdc loan that you've taken from compound for example and the usdc that you now have on the fork chain is worthless you can't pay that loan back and you can't get your

eath back so you wouldn't have forked either then the only way you would have forked eath really at least i think for most most people would be just have it in your wallet you have to have it in your wallet essentially uh you have to have it um not in a default app under your own custody and just sitting there now does this mean that leading up to this this fork and i did say the other day i was speculating but i was saying that i think there's like 100 chance that there would be this minor lead fork because it makes no sense for them not to do this just from a pure profit maximalist perspective it doesn't make sense for miners not to do this uh i'm not saying that i have any special knowledge here i don't know if miners are going to do this miners

are generally not very um coordinated but all it takes is one pool one mining pool to say well we're gonna continue the ethereum chain as like this forked version and whatever and then and then like basically everyone on the the normal ethereum chain is gonna be fine right there's nothing to worry about there but the fork changes just i don't see how it even like works or survives because it would just go to like everything on it would just break down it would just implode essentially um so from that perspective i just don't see that kind of like playing out very nicely at all um and you know maybe it settles down eventually and the forked eight gets some kind of value and miners just continue mining it like they do with ethereum classic uh you know depending on what exchange is listed and stuff like that so maybe that

happens too but i think you know as the post says here this is highly illogical for uh for for miners to do for anything other than uh profit maximalist reasons and at the end of the day everyone's gonna know that this chain is just like a profit maxi chain you dump your forked eath and you get some more ethan and that's it right um no one uh that i know would uh would def would accept this chain as anything more than something to to get some more eat from so i hope that gives a bit more color around what would happen i i just went high level i didn't didn't dive deeper i mean i could dive deeper if i wanted to but there's so many variables you could consider like what if the miners fork off and then say oh well we don't care about the gas limit anymore so

we're going to raise the gas limit higher and we're going to attract people to our chain because now it's got more throughput than the normal ethereum chain has and we've got more scalability and then the fees will be less because there'll be less activity and all this sort of stuff you know maybe they lower the block times they can do anything they want essentially with it uh but in saying that you know the cleanest way to fork would just be to just continue the chain from the moment that it was basically forked over or at least merged over into eth2 but again as i said this is not a clean fork this would be very messy it would be very messy for exchanges exchanges aren't going to accept usdc from this forked chain they're not going to accept eth from this fork chain as e

they're gonna if they list it they'll accept like the forked eath right um so from that point of view i just don't see how it survives so there's a high level for you in terms of like how exchanges will treat a fork and stuff like that i mean if it actually survives they'll they'll probably credit you the forked eath right on um if you had eastern exchanges that'd be pretty straightforward but i don't know i don't know how exchangers will treat this because supporting a chain that is like incredibly in um unstable and incredibly volatile and literally basically you know by going there you're going into like the you're walking into fire essentially so in exchange supporting this would be quite weird but i can see some some of the smaller ones doing it just for some profit maximalism purposes which i mean whatever

that's fine um but in terms of like the ecosystem no and i'm not even talking about the ecosystem infrastructure providers like imagine what happens to all the daps once the graph and and infuria and you know uh uh and and other infrastructure providers stop providing support for that change right because they're not going to support it because they don't even know because why would they like it's just overhead for them to support some kind of dead chain that is essentially dead on arrival so even that would be even worse i mean you wouldn't be able to use half the apps on the front end you'd be able to use the smart contracts but then you'd manually have to go in and do it and there wouldn't be an ether scan for it either like unless the miners somehow get aether scanned to build them something

so or like that i have to build some kind of block explorer so from that perspective it would just be so pointless really at the end of the day it would be pointless it would be very short-lived i think i think it would lose a lot of um attention very quickly and you know your the forked ether you get may not even be worth very much so at the end of the day as much as i i believe that it's going to happen just because uh you know it doesn't make sense for it not to i don't think it's going to be something that's going to be around for very long i think it's going to be uh essentially you know for lack of a better term of pump and dump for miners at the end of the day so anyway i hope that provides more clarity there i'm

going to move on to some of the updates from the last 24 hours so trent van epps from the ethereum foundation announced today that there's a new core dev apprenticeship program which is basically a pilot project to get more people engaged with ethereum protocol work it's being headed up by piper miriam here who's been in ethereum core a developer for a very long time or at least been part of that sphere for a very long time the deadline to apply is may 31st and this apprenticeship program will run from mid-june to mid-september this is awesome i mean we need more core protocol devs it is not a easy job at the end of the day it is a hard drive it requires lots of specialized knowledge because the protocol level is the base of everything it is where everything gets built on it it needs to move incredibly um

not not slowly but it needs to move incredibly carefully so that uh you know we keep the base chain secure and we minimize the amount of bugs that can happen and also you know it's not just like the protocol work uh it's also the client work as well uh you know improving clients and all that good stuff there so if this is you if you are interested i mean i know this probably doesn't apply to to most of you it definitely doesn't apply to me but if you are someone who likes doing low-level uh protocol work or low-level programming or any of that sort of stuff or just wants to get involved definitely go check this out you can apply here the link will be in the youtube description below um definitely go check it out i couldn't think of anything more exciting to be a

part of uh if you were someone who had the skill set to do this so definitely go go have a look at this so justin drake uh put out a parody tweet today and and he was paroding elon musk who said uh elon musk's original tweet said working with those devs to improve system transaction efficiency potentially promising now i'm not going to comment too much about the doge kind of tweet here and elon's um you know affinity for doge which i don't really understand but it is what it is but justin drake basically parroted it at parry d'det by saying working with ethereum devs to improve system transaction efficiency potentially promising and then he followed it up with a tweet that says two that ethereum is going to have 10 000 times the power efficiency

from 10 gigawatt power to 1 megawatt pause so proof of work versus proof of stake and then 10 000 times scalability 100 times with sharding and 100 times with roll ups now this is the actual like true improvements to transaction efficiency and and kind of like energy and energy consumption as well dogecoin is essentially a dead project it has no devs it can of course be revived and if elon musk really wanted to he could hire developers to work on it but you know core developers are in very short supply as you can see there's an apprenticeship program that i just talked about they are not easy to come by good protocol devs for handling a network that handles you know billions of dollars of value which

dogecoin now does even harder to come by and getting people to stick around is even harder so i don't know what elon's going to do there i don't know what he what what system improvements he's going to bring to dogecoin i don't know i don't know people are saying oh they're going to add smart contracts to dogecoin and all this sort of stuff i'm like eh i mean technically you can but like like is those going to be another smart contract blockchain like who wants smart contracts on dogecoin like the network itself isn't even used for anything other than um arbitraging between exchanges and sometimes people tip each other like really it's hardly used as like a transactional network but anyway on to what justin drake said here i think people really underestimate the the energy gains we get from proof

of stake versus proof of work now as i said on the other day's refuel i'm not going to go into whether i think proof-of-wake energy is good or bad i'm not here to moralize i'm not here to impart my opinions on you on that but what i am here to do is compare the energy use right so proof of work obviously uses a lot of energy and i mean a lot of energy right and that's by design that is not a flaw that is a feature as as they say it is a feature not a bug whereas ethereum proof of stake it's one of its main features is that it uses considerably less energy and this is because it does not require specialized hardware you can run a validator on a raspberry pi at the end of the day so and that's a low power uh power usage kind of uh piece of

hardware but generally you want to run it on some kind of like i guess like if you want like some kind of a desktop pc like i've got here this my staking box right and that uses much much less power than the proof of work does i think you could say 99.9 less because think about it for proof of work you need to pay to keep these mining rigs on 24 7 and they suck power like no tomorrow like they're efficient for what they do in terms of like the efficiency per per kind of like kilowatt you get for mining bitcoin is very good but you know a lot of a lot of these um big mining shops run like massive warehouses full of them and and you know they use a lot of electricity right but also it's the waste that it produces too like a lot of these miners have to

get replaced like they either break or newer versions come out and all of that waste is just goes into landfill so that again is another you know impact on the environment and stuff like that and then on top of that you the the footprint of like these warehouses being in the physical environment and um you know people needing to maintain this it is a massive industry so it uses a lot of energy at the end of the day whereas proof of stake you know technically if everyone wanted to they could just take from their own home and and as i said the hardware required is very minimal here so it uses much much less energy it doesn't require massive data warehouses you know i could run on my little kind of like uh little staking box here i could run hundreds of validators if i

wanted to on there um because it's got the power to do so and as i said it's just like a desktop pc to run hundreds of miners you would need like i mean you could probably do it from home but it would require like a massive amount of um of room in your house and you'll be drawing a massive amount of power and you may not even be able to do it because the power company would say well you're in a residential area you you're drawing way too much power for that and you're you know you need to go to a commercial area to do this so you would probably be forced to rent out a warehouse anyway and on top of that one under-appreciated aspect of proof-of-stake from a security aspect and and this falls into its energy use is that it's a lot harder to track where

validators are because of the fact that with people of work you can actually find where the miners are just by their energy footprint right energy companies could easily find out who's mining because i think mining uses more energy you know in terms of like not not globally not in aggregate but if you were to look at the grid say and you're in a city and you say okay what's using the most energy here well the the the things that use the most energy are things like data centers um uh and and kind of like uh i guess like other kind of like power hungry things like that that are on 24 7 but like the something that would potentially use more energy than that would be a uh proof of work uh farm essentially so you'd be it's very easy to find that so it would be very easy

for government governments to find it and shut it down whereas with proof of stake it's much much harder to find where these things are because people can have them on their home pcs and there's no detectable energy signature here it would just look like you're running a um you know you're just a normal kind of like a electricity in a household and even if your electricity is above normal because your computer's on all the time well let's be honest most people's computers are on a lot like not maybe not all the time not 24 7 but people have like multiple electronic devices that suck all this power whether it be a pc a laptop charging their phones you know all the smart home stuff they have the tv all this sort of stuff and and and i mean just all of that like i think the the

the difference would be marginal so you wouldn't be able to track uh proof of stake validator like that at all and on okay so that's enough on the energy stuff now the scalability things the this is another under-appreciated aspect here is that everyone's talking about roll-ups and how they give us lots of scalability and that's fine like ethereum is is is roll-ups a roll-up centric future where uh we get to basically go on layer two with roll-ups and other solutions you know like like the polygon and things like that as well for sure which give us this 100 time scalability boost or throughput boost here but on top of that you can multiply this 100 times by sharding because sharding essentially gives us 64 new blockchains to work with and as i've explained before they act as data layers for rollups and four other

scalability solutions to tap into which means you multiply 100 by 100 and you get 10 000 times scalability here which is an absolutely massive improvement 10 000 times the current 15 transactions per second on average that ethereum does is 150 000 transactions per second and that's just in the first iterations of this technology so yeah massive gains across both like the energy use in terms of like reducing it and scalability here so this is really awesome and i just got done listening to justin drake's latest podcast on bankless as well which doesn't necessarily talk about this stuff but he does go through um you know i guess like as an aside in some of the points that he talks about this sort of stuff the the the episode's

mostly focused on like um eip1559 a proof-of-stake and what it means for ether as an asset uh but definitely um go listen to that anyway because it does have a bit to do with this as well so there is a bonus eddies down here or betty's a dow i'm hoping i'm saying that right some argentinian is going to call me out on that but anyway this was an introduced today which is basically a group of individuals um from argentina that have banded together to create a i guess like a syndicate of investors here so they're they've got a tweet thread here announcing what they are what they do who's involved so i'll link this in the youtube description for you to go check out but there are a lot of people here i mean uh some of you may recognize them some of you may not there's like

uh my good friend patricio without her here uh from from polap you'll definitely know what poep is uh definitely a few other people around here like sebastian from d5 pulse here another another good friend of mine i'm just going through the list here of names that i that i kind of recognize i maybe i don't recognize them because of the um the handles and things like that but there are a lot of people from a lot of the top projects in the space you can see the projects here like balancer graph open zeppelin um aetherium bonoziri's which is a meet up and stuff like that uh you know a poep as well cello uh cello cello and and mariano conti from make adele which i'm sure most of you uh know who he is as well he's very famous within the um the ethereum community and especially

within the argentinian community here but this is really cool to see i really do think dows are like the future of human coordination um even though they haven't been big lately i think in general we've seen this kind of play out more and more we've seen things like the flamingo dow come about which is another investment dow the layout which is like a legal dow uh we have uh please adele which was banded together to buy um i guess like uh people pleasers artwork for from uni swap uh and then i think they bought something else as well and now we have betty's dow here um which is obviously uh they call themselves an influencer syndicate uh from the bottom of the map so from argentina i think australia is low on the map than argentina i might have to check that but at the bottom i mean technically the

bottom of the map is oh man i don't know my geography very well but anyway i i know it's probably not iceland i don't know i'm not even going to try and guess but anyway obviously this is a investment syndicate so if you're interested in getting these people on board people who are very actively involved with this technology for uh you know very real reasons right as we all know the argentinian peso is uh currently undergoing it has been undergoing for quite a while hyperinflation so they are very involved in crypto because of this and especially very involved in ethereum so if you're uh if you want their support if you want them on board and want the geniuses you know a lot of these people are working some of the top projects here um if you want them on board uh definitely reach out to them i'm sure

they'd be very interested in funding your project and being a part of it and helping out with it as well so speaking of funding handle fi or handle finance a uh a a um sorry a forex uh protocol that's that's kind of building on ethereum here has closed uh strategic ground so they did their seed round a few weeks ago and now they've closed their strategic ground bringing on board a bunch of new investors here so you might recognize some of the names uh okay x ventures uh i think there's a few others here that you may you may recognize like qcp capital uh ld capital here uh you know i mean there's so many investors here uh that are on board and their previous investors included uh uh other investors like cms holdings and apollo capital from

from australia uh the lao as i just mentioned before the lao is another kind of dow that's going on in terms of investment dows here but yeah congrats to them on the race i'm really looking forward to this project going live for those of you who don't know just some background here this project is aiming to do non-usd stable coins so things like aud and jpy and the yet and um uh and uh and uh jpy sorry aud and other forex uh yeah so i'm really excited about that because as i've mentioned before on the refuel i can't really stay in usd for too long it fluctuates too much against the australian dollar it it gives me tax burdens and tax headaches and i just really don't like sitting in it so being able to sit in aud and possibly do yield funding with it

would be very nice because i have to pay my taxes and i have to pay my real life expenses in aud so i have to hold aud um so i would love to have an aud stable coin where i can do all this sort of stuff so yeah congrats to them on raising this strategic round i think they're pretty close to mainnet here uh from from what i've seen so yeah looking forward to this going live so speaking of things going live one inch is now live on polygon so just another project to be expanding to the polygon uh network yeah obviously a scalability solution for ethereum we all know and love polygon but i think you know more and more projects are now bridging over there and they're getting themselves a very nice ecosystem of projects because they have uh you know they have like arvo on there

now they have uh curve and m stable and one inch and sushi suave i mean there's so many on there now and once you have these core projects on there other projects want to come because there's liquidity there now right and there's like users i mean the usage has been exploding you know speaking of usage john lillich a fellow advisor to polygon with me basically put out this great uh summary thread here where we said over the past 90 days polygon growth has absolutely exploded ave went from 10 million to 4 billion number of daily transactions went from 100k to 300 million sorry 3 million so that's a huge jump there the tvl on the platform went from 100 million to 5 billion eth locked went from just 1.2k to 362k here

and exchange supply of matic tokens went down a lot as well if you're a matic holder which is really really cool to see i mean as i said i'm a polygon advisor here obviously compensated for my work so just the disclosure there but i mean i've spoken about polygon a lot before and i've spoken about why i love supporting them and how ethereum aligned they are as a scalability solution here yeah they're not i mean the polygon pos chain is not a roll up or or anything like that it is a commit chain and i've spoken about the benefits of that before and i've spoken about the benefits of having polygon on board as a politically and socially scalable ethereum scalability solution here so really really great to see the growth here and as i said really great to see more projects adopting it so uh kudos to

to i guess the polygon team for their amazing work yeah i mean as an advisor i get to see in the background what they're doing or at least a glimpse of it what they're doing they just work so hard honestly and they are so dedicated to their mission and what their mission is is basically scaling ethereum and i mean they every team that i talk to has basically spoken to polygon which i can't see say for every other team um so because polygon actually understands or the polygon team deeply understand the value of business development and and marketing and making sure that you you basically get yourselves across like every project in the ecosystem and that's why so many projects are deploying there so yeah i guess kudos to to the team for for grinding there i'm very happy

to be on board and helping them with this and just helping to get the word out so speaking of uh scalability projects i guess um you know uh loopering have uh put out an announcement here that they're calling all youtube content creators uh they put out a loop ring creator grants program where you can get paid for educating people and growing the loopering ecosystem so essentially if this is something you're interested in and something you're interested in creating definitely go check out this post which will be linked to the youtube description of course and you can earn i'm going to assume it's lrc tokens they didn't actually check here but there's basically yeah i am assuming it's going to be dominated in lrc tokens here but five thousand dollars in grants give um uh up for grabs uh with 2500 going to first place 1250 to second

place and 500 to third place so if that's you definitely go check this looping creator grants program out so alpha finance has relaunched their v2 on uh sorry uh their alpha homo v2 on the ethereum main net uh and now uh going live with a bunch of different integrations including cream unisop sushi swap curve and balancer the first set of leveraged yield farms on alpha hormone v2 include all of these pairs here i won't read them all out but obviously the popular pairs that everyone likes to yield fun with like the coin pairs you know eth uh wifi eth uni eat sushi and stuff like that as well uh there's also a competition uh running as well here i think so uh for uh there's a competition to

guess the launch time so for the first five winners who who guessed this launch time uh uh will will get reached out to by twitter uh sorry via twitter here i don't know what the prize is i don't think there's any any prize here but it's probably some something good maybe some some juicy alpha tokens there uh and then yeah the thread goes into exactly what's happening and what alpha homo v2 is so if you haven't checked this out yet definitely uh get get into it here they're one of the biggest d5 protocols and have been growing rapidly over the past few months here definitely one of my favorites in the uh the ethereum ecosystem and i'm really really uh great to see uh uh uh to see them go live with this alpha more v2 here so stanley's just leaking more alpha

again on twitter as he does he's basically put out a tweet today saying i am looking for product managers to be part of building three new protocols for their rv ecosystem what can he mean by this three new protocols for their rv ecosystem that's huge because a protocol is is bigger than just like an app feature or just like some new integration or whatever and i'm wondering if this means that he's going to deploy iver to three new networks or layer twos or actually creating three new protocols as part of their rv family i don't know maybe you'll know if you're a product manager definitely if that is something that you're interested in being or you're a product manager for a non-crypto company and you want to join crypto go uh reach out to stani here i'm pretty sure his dms are open uh and then you can go uh basically

potentially work for ave which is one of the best d5 teams obviously so yeah definitely go check that out that's interesting to you all right everyone that's it for today's episode thank you again for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give the video a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel actually join the discord channel because tomorrow at 11 p.m australian eastern standard time i'm not gonna do the time conversions you can just look that up i'm going to be doing an ama one to two hours where everyone can ask me anything they want about ethereum we're gonna keep it conversational like it's not just gonna be me talking everyone else can chime in and if you can't make it it's going to be recorded and uploaded to youtube so don't worry about that

but definitely uh you know check it out and come and come and join if you are interested in being part of the ama but on that note i'll catch you all for next week's refuel thanks everyone