Polygon teams up w/ Reddit, Aztec Connect live - The Daily Gwei Refuel #402 - Ethereum Updates

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the delegate refuel where i cap the latest news and ethereum ecosystem i'm your host anthony designer and today's 8th of july 2022 all right everyone let's get into it so fresh off the press as tim biko says here all core devs update number 12 is now ready for you to peruse so the tldr obviously are going over a few of the major updates of the last few months such as grey glacier sapolia merging and obviously gurley merging next some of the test nets being deprecated like kiln the robson and rink bee and the timing around that and also i focus on kind of like community calls with an an extra focus on eip4844 which of course is a proto-dank sharing now for those of you don't know uh you

probably hear about proto-dank sharing a lot there is actually a website dedicated to it called eip4844.com that you can go check out it has all the information here about prototype shouting and why it's so exciting and this upgrade will hopefully be going in to the network uh you know six to 12 months after the merge happens uh hopefully with the kind of like withdrawals but it may become like a separate thing depending on just the complexity of it but uh this is the one of the most exciting upgrades coming to ethereum because of the fact that it dramatically reduces the cost of call data which means layer 2's get cheaper to use so if a layer 2 costs 50 cents to do a swap today um well i mean it doesn't right now but just as an example um once this gets implemented the cost

savings are 50 to 100 x so it would cost one cent or less to do a transaction and you'd still be getting the exact same benefits you get today with roll-ups such as uh shared security with ethereum or inherent security of ethereum uh and and having all your core data and the proof posted to ethereum layer 1. so definitely check out the website here if you haven't yet for a comprehensive overview of exactly what proto-dank charting and dance shouting in general is and what erp 4844 entails as well uh and then if you want to read this kind of update that tim biker put together had the all-call devs update around all the things i just mentioned i highly recommend doing so uh i think you know mostly it's stuff that i've talked about on the refill before of course but if you want a recap of everything you want

a refresher this is definitely a good read so definitely go check that out i'll link it in the youtube description for you all right so shadow fork 9 or mainnet shadow fork 9 has been scheduled for july 14th at 2 p.m utc as i mentioned yesterday shadow forks will keep happening on a regular basis right up until the main net merge and they run like a really well-oiled machine these days right and the point of this shadow forks isn't to just run through the same merge transition every time it's to test various different things and there are kind of like things that are that are being tested on one shadow fork that may not be tested on another and we're just trying to get as much of uh of kind of like those um merge transitions run through as possible before maynet obviously and i spoke about how girl is

the next one uh coming up and that the the date for that will be announced on the core dev call in a couple of weeks and then obviously we'll have mainnet there so if you want to participate in shadow fork nine you can find all the details about it in the eighth r d discord channel and i believe it's in one of the merge related channels there uh parry uh kind of put together the um the message there and has links to all the relevant things you need if you want to get involved and obviously there's no obligation to but if you want to be just like really really involved in the bleeding edge of ethereum core development and and kind of helping them with the testing you should definitely go check that out uh and speaking of ethereum core development the ef research ama or the ethereum foundation

research ama has been completed there are a lot of good answer questions and answers in this ama i mentioned yesterday that you should definitely check it out i'm gonna remind you again today to go read it in case you haven't gotten around to it i mean you should do it like i can't think of a single better source of information that has come out in the last six months than this ama because you have a direct line of communication to the ethereum of foundation researchers who are on the very bleeding edge of ethereum upgrades and these upgrades could even be as far away as five or more years and they're being talked about today and and if you want to stay on the bleeding edge this is where you should do it so definitely go check it out read through the ama i've only gotten through a few questions myself

haven't had time to get through them all but the few that i have gotten through have been amazing like honestly i love the detailed answers that these researchers give it's not just like a quick one sentence or two sentence away and so it's a very detailed answer about things that i personally care about obviously core protocol work layer two stuff uh and everything that surrounds that but also other things um that maybe aren't related to that but are definitely related to ethereum so i'll link this in the youtube description and you can go check that one out all right so speaking of the mirror i just wanted to highlight here an image that uh nakul i believe hopefully i'm pronouncing that right shared on twitter of um excitement from for the merge transcends all borders so this was spotted in bangalore and this is like a

graphic that was put together by someone celebrating the merge now there are a few funny things about this graphic one is that i believe it says vitalik data or data buterin which is which is pretty funny uh and then in the bottom left you'll notice that there's um timbico.ethe with a picture of someone who is not tim by code which i found quite funny i was like oh did tim get a facelift um and yeah i just like i i thought this graphic was was cute i thought it was um pretty awesome that it you know it's basically seen out in the wild in in bangalore here and people are celebrating the sapolia merge uh going through so something that i guess is very insider baseball for the ethereum community this is not something that really the mainstream media kind of like covers too much they do i think there

has been a little bit of coverage of it but really it's not like the main net merge right so it's funny to see this and it's cool to see that there is a dedicated ethereum community in bangalore that goes to the effort to to kind of like put these things together i know so i i find it funny the people that they kind of like chose to put on the image here it's got a little bit random i guess um i think uh obviously the image of tim is wrong there but uh i guess tim um peter and and and dan crowd here makes sense nick used to be uh i guess core developer i don't think he does too much core development work these days he more focuses on ens uh but i just thought it was funny the kind of like um the whole thing all together so

just i wanted to highlight that there in case you didn't see it all right so i put out a tweet earlier today and this is also what today's delivery newsletter is about where i simply said build less c5 build more defy this is the way now obviously i put this out because of the fact that the last few months we have seen the shittiness of c5 just laid completely bare right i'm not just c5 but ce defy and just trad fire in general we've seen exactly why we are building d5 and i think it's just reinforced the need for d5 which i find extremely bullish for d5 generally but you know this is for a few reasons with c5 guys like it doesn't matter with c5 if it's if the the um the c5 service is

transparent with you and i'll explain why so with c5 you normally don't get transparency right like everything's opaque once you send funds there you don't actually know what's happening with them there's no way for you to verify for you to check they could be uh stolen they could be uh kind of like put into a yield farm and then that yield farm or a smart contract gets hacked and the funds are lost they could be lent out to three hours capital as voyager did right you just don't know what's happening with your funds when they're in that service and you do sign or at least agree to terms of use with these things that basically give these platforms uh free reign over kind of like using your funds um so obviously not a great thing there and then you have d5 which is on the other side of

the spectrum which gives you full transparency full auditability you know exactly where your money is at all times right um you can pick and choose which protocols you want to use but you are in complete control of your money no one else is in control of your money i mean i guess depending on which protocols you use sometimes the protocols can be in control of your money because you've put they put it in there and they're doing stuff with it but you know for the true d5 applications the one that are actually decentralized or something like uni swap this is not the case and even the ones that aren't decentralized you still get that transparency there you could even see in real time if someone's rugging you like this is a funny thing with c5 they were rugging people for months if not years they were like literally using

these funds to do not necessarily nefarious things but like things that they shouldn't be doing like risky things if that happens in d5 you know pretty much instantly right so like you get even better transparency into bad stuff happening not just being able to kind of like view your funds in the normal state but also view them in the bad stand now obviously that doesn't help you help you after the fact if for some reason the funds get stolen but it does help you in the case of if people are kind of like blowing the whistle here and say okay well this doesn't look right on chain sort of like what happened with terra you could pull your funds out and save yourself the hassle whereas something like a celsius i mean it didn't really come to bear there were people warning about celsius for for a

while but they didn't really have any definitive proof right but whereas it all came to bear only over the last couple of months and that was years into celsius's existence so that's a key difference there but one thing i really want to talk about and one thing i think trips a lot of people up is that they say oh can't cf just be transparent can't they just put together audit reports and publish these things periodically and let people know what they're doing with the funds and all these sorts of stuff and it's like they could but would you trust them to give you all of the facts would you trust them to be honest about it that's still the problem with these platforms it doesn't matter if they're putting out transparency reports how are you going to verify that like you don't have full transparency into

the operations you're just trusting what they say so this is where d5 has an even bigger advantage because we don't need to trust the d5 protocol we don't need to trust the chain we don't need to trust either scan we don't need to trust anyone to tell us we can go there and look at it and have relative certainty but we don't need to trust any of that because we can audit it ourselves we can run a full node so we can actually audit exactly what we're seeing and have extremely strong guarantees that that is the truth obviously you can't have 100 guarantees but you can have extremely strong guarantees that are that i'm just not possible in the c5 fire ecosystem it doesn't even matter if they sign contracts or that say this is truthful and if it's not truthful um you know we

will pay a penalty or we will do this we will do that it doesn't matter at all guys like the the the the key weakness there is humans so what we're doing is with defy is we're replacing humans with code we're making a trustless finance system where no one needs to trust anyone we just need to trust the code and the thing is is that we can trust the code because we can see it it's transparent it's auditable it's verifiable there's no need for us to trust anyone that's the meaning of trustless and that's the most powerful thing of defy to me is that the ability for anyone anywhere in the world on any internet connected device to do this like running an ethereum full node is not that intensive of a task obviously you probably can't run it on a smartphone or

but you can run it on a raspberry pi you can run it on lower end consumer grade hardware and it's getting easier and easier to run it all the time so the thing is is that you could be in the remotest of locations as long as you have a decent internet connection and a piece of hardware uh which which i guess like with things like elon musk's starlink and other such solutions is is getting more and more possible every day you can verify all of this uh and not just that d5 also gives us the ability to do anything anywhere in the world and have full visibility over it like i had to send an international wire a couple of days ago and i have absolutely zero visibility over it and neither does the bank like you just hope that the money gets to its

destination which is just the most insane system because for example if i wanted to send money over uh ethereum if i wanted to send some stable coins to someone over ethereum or some eth to someone over ethereum i have full traceability and auditability of the entire life cycle of that transaction usually the transaction gets confirmed within one ethereum block which is around 13 seconds but for while it's in the mempool i can see that either scan shows me that and i could even see it on my own node if i wanted to i could query it right so by doing that i have full visibility over everything there is no opaqueness here there is there is kind of a very transparent system the whole way through and then i can see the transaction get confirmed and then i can ask the counterparty just to make sure i

can be like hey did you get my funds and if they say no i didn't i and if they're lying to me i can say well no okay you did here's proof like here's proof that this went to the address that you gave me essentially so like this is the whole point again of a trustless system and this is what's so amazing and so innovative of not just ethereum but blockchains in general and that's what a lot of people miss and they take for granted is that we have this amazing innovation with defy that gets clouded by all this other crap that goes on even within default obviously d5 isn't isn't perfect but i'm talking about the actual true sustainable built-to-last default protocols such as unisop such as maker such as rv and compounds and curve and all these ones that have been around for a while and don't take shortcuts and

don't try to do like gen yield farming and don't try to be something like a terror being built on like shaky foundations these things are quite literally the future of finance simply because they are infinitely better than the existing system and it's actually scary how much better they are it's scary that we've used such a broken system for so long but we have a better system it's going to take a while to adopt guys it's not going to happen overnight it's going to take a while it's going to take decades but when we kind of like get to that point where most of the world is using d5 rails instead of the traditional rails uh i think that people will realize the massive benefit here and the narrative will change completely it i mean if you had to make an analogy you can with the internet very easily

there's a there's a world of difference between sending snail mail and sending an email because with snail mail right you have obviously no auditability over that letter if you send the letter from the us to australia for example where i am if you want to send me a letter right you have no auditability over a letter for example like maybe with parcels you do at different checkpoints right whenever they scan them but that's like a checkpoint system it's not exactly full auditability and there are there are constantly issues with that and constantly issues with passwords going missing all these sorts of stuff right but with like a letter with no tracking on it which is what most letters are because it's cheaper to do it that way you have basically zero visibility over that and you're just hoping it gets to your destination whereas with with an

email you do have more visibility but you also have the fact that it's instant so you can just ask the person how did you get my email if they say no well then you just send the email and then we take it a step further with ethereum with d5 where we can basically have full auditability and full traceability of the entire transaction life cycle which is just stupidly powerful and i'm going to stop gushing now over d5 but guys like as i said i think we take this for granted i think we take it for granted because we're so in the weeds with everything and d5 at this point for us is quote unquote boring because we're used to it but if you really dig down if we really dig deep and realize exactly what d5 is and what it's going to enable it just

it's mind-boggling that the world hasn't adopted this yet and obviously it's going to take time network effects take time to build out there is an incumbent or lots of incumbents that aren't going to go quietly but they will adopt this because it's simply better technology i believe in in the long run there anyway going to leave it at that bunch more updates to get through here so a big update from uh polygon today so reddit is actually going to be launching their nft marketplace on the polygon pos chain which is huge right i mean i've spoken before about how i think polygon has the best business development team in all of crypto and they keep proving that by partnering with big companies like reddit now i did a twitter spaces as part of the ssv network merge series that i'm doing with sandeep just before

actually it's been recorded you can go to ssv networks um twitter page and listen to the recording and we spoke a bit about they spoke a bit about business about business development here and there and and polygons approach to this and they they basically treat this as one of the most kind of like serious things within the company this is their guiding north star that they want to onboard as many people into web3 as possible and the quickest way to do that is by partnering with these already kind of like mega web 2 companies and that's exactly what they've been doing it's not just reddit it's so many others out there that they've been kind of partnering with and um sandeep also talked about like i know some people push back sometimes and go oh the polygon pos chain it's not a layer 2 you know who cares blah blah but

sandeep reiterated on the spaces i did that the end state of the pos chain is to become a rollup once they can kind of convert it to that and specifically a zk roll up once that happens it takes the entire network effect with it guys like we built and the thing is you can actually trust uh i know i just spoke about the fact that um uh we're building trustless systems so we don't have to trust anyone but obviously there's still an element of trust in all of this because there's humans involved but i do believe you can trust polygon as an ecosystem to stick to their word or polygon as a team as a company to stick to their word with regarding changing the pos chain to a layer two because of the fact that they've just been extremely value additive to ethereum they have so many

other kind of like projects that are working directly to improve ethereum um and also i mean you guys know i'm an advisor to polygon i'm i'm close to them i speak to them um quite regularly uh like i put my weight behind them like there's a reason i'm an advisor to them because i know that they are basically eat maxis like i am and i'm not saying like an ethmaxy in the bad sense but they want ethereum to win they think ethereum is our best shot at kind of like decentralizing the world and i joined as an advisor because i wanted to make that happen and i joined back in late 2019 guys like it wasn't a a thing that kind of um that kind of uh uh happened overnight here i i joined very early on as an advisor sorry i think that late late

2020 like late 20 uh 2019 there i joined very early on as an advisor back when they were still matic network um and then obviously they became polygon because i saw their vision i saw exactly what they wanted to do and i think they've just been executing on that but i'm not gonna gush too much about that polygon here but great to see them partnering with reddit for this nft marketplace i think this is a really great use case here all right so speaking of big news aztec connect is now live on mainnet i should quickly disclose that i am an angel investor in aztec here just want to get that out of the way but i think this is one of the coolest things to come to d5 in a very long time so what aztec connect is is it basically is a private

defy implementation on a zk roll up so how does it work well there is a great thread here from john who works at aztec going over exactly what you can do here so basically he gave an example he says i just used aztec connect to get some st on main net curve for 1.50 in fees with complete privacy so what aztec connect allows you to do is it allows you to do transactions on layer 2 using on on aztec layer 2 using layer 1 liquidity right and do it privately so not only do you get to tap into the incredible layer 1 network effects and liquidity that exists today you get to do it privately and yes it is not ultra cheap right it's a dollar 50 but that cost will come down with um general kind of like cost over

time but this is a fully private transaction this is not a normal transaction so the the the really cool things going on here is the fact that you can do a transaction from layer two talk to layer one and do it all privately and do it with some of the most popular applications on on on a kind of like ethereum today so i believe the initial support here uh with aztec connect i just want to scroll down i forgot exactly um who's kind of like being initially supported here they had it here i saw it somewhere i think it was avec compound liquidity index oh no those are the ones that coming soon i think it's lido element uh element finance today i believe and then there's more coming soon um and now obviously curve as well but uh yeah i mean they launched with some of the biggest kind

of like d5 protocols out there but this is just absolutely awesome like i've talked plenty of times about the fact that i think the two biggest things that ethereum needs to improve on is scale and privacy and we're doing both and we're doing both in kind of like tandem like this is a zk roll up guys this is not privacy on layer one this is privacy on layer two in a more scalable way that's why as john says here it's much cheaper like doing uh doing kind of like an st buy on main net curve and doing it on layer one and doing it privately would cost much more than a dollar fifty in fees guys like i i'm gonna say like at least 20 30 or something like that at current grade level just because private transactions are more heavy they use more gas and

obviously that pushes the cost up so from that perspective this is as i said one of the biggest innovations that i've seen come to d5 in a while now uh and it fits right in with my thesis that i think scaling and privacy is kind of like basically the two things that we need to get right over the next few years to onboard the world to ethereum i think that if we only had scaling it would be it would be pretty pretty bearish actually because scaling is not enough like we need privacy and i discussed this the other day there's no way in hell that the world is going to adopt a a system that shows everyone's transactions now you may be wondering i was just talking about transparency around transactions and how that's bullish for d5 the beautiful thing about privacy on blockchains and specifically

on ethereum is that you still have that transparency you still have that auditability because we're using zero knowledge proofs so for those if anyone who knows what a zealot knowledge proof is it basically allows us to know that something is true without having to actually see the work behind it that's the craziest about this and it's all verified and audited by the ethereum network as well even though it's a layer two it obviously settles down to ethereum and that's all auditable by us too so fully private transparent financial system with scale you know scaling to the world come on guys like how can you not be excited about that like that is to me one of the most exciting things within ethereum and i'm just super uh happy to

see aztec connect live and you can go play around with it like it's live on main there's not a test net thing you can go play around with it get all the benefits of it today you could start a new address and be and have like a complete fully private address and even if someone wants to dox that address and tie it back to you they wouldn't be able to see what you did if you kept it doing all aztec connect transactions how cool is that like that is the future we're barreling down towards and i can't wait to see more of these privacy and stable sorry scalability solutions are coming online over the coming years uh maybe even coming months all right so another big uh piece of news over the last 24 hours was are they announcing that they have created an arc

which is an rv request for comments for a new decentralized collateral backed stable coin native to the arba ecosystem known as gho which i think a lot of people pushed back on the name they thought it was uh it wasn't the greatest of names and i would have to concur there i'm sorry but that name just i mean that that ticker just doesn't really work do anything for me um but essentially uh yeah this is rv launching their own stable coin and it's they're claiming it's going to be decentralized it's going to be over collateralized by assets that continue to earn yields so over collateralized by assets in aveo protocol backed by multiple types of collateral available on the other protocol and governed by the other community of course so you may be wondering is this a competitor to die i think it is like i'm

not going to sugarcoat it guys like i think this is definitely a competitor to die this is a new stable coin using avere uh like as part of the ave ecosystem it's not just going to be exclusively on ave right it's going to be all throughout d5 but i think this is good there shouldn't just be one decentralized stable coin right we need a whole host of them and obviously there was terra that tried to do something that failed spectacularly and it was never really decentralized and then we have dye which people will say well it's not really decentralized because it's backed by usdc there is obviously a spectrum here i i i imagine that obvious stable coin is also going to be backed by centralized assets there's no way in hell that it's just going to be backed by eighth especially because that would just be detrimental

to the growing the stable coin and detrimental to growing uh to go on the ave ecosystem so there is a spectrum but the thing is is if we have a family of these things and they're relatively liquid and they've got network effects behind them and people are able to use them in various different ways then it's just good overall for the ecosystem i believe so if you want to read more about this kind of like stable coin here you can it's on this uh this arc as i mentioned there's a quite a lengthy summary here sorry lengthy post here on the forum with a bunch of discuss discussion around this as well so this is i think going to be an actual serious attempt at a new decentralized stable coin i am looking forward to seeing it play out uh and i'm looking forward to basically a d5 renaissance

guys i spoke about this a few weeks ago maybe a couple months ago now how i believe that a d5 renaissance was upon us because of all the c5 garbage that collapsed and people finally are coming to their centers and being like okay well maybe this d5 thing is actually you know much much better than c5 maybe we should just like go double down on this thing i'm i mean i personally i've never given up on d5 of course and i have remained bullish on it but i think people in the bull market especially because the money was so easy and everything was going up no one really cared about risk or security but now they definitely do and i hope that that culture continues i hope that by the time the next bull market rolls around we don't repeat the same mistakes as last year

we'll see like i am not that optimistic just because of the fact that i know that humans don't change especially humans that haven't stuck around like for example 90 plus percent of the ecosystem disappeared with the bull market ending um those people aren't learning any of these lessons they'll just come back and probably repeat the same mistakes so i'll have to see but i think that at the end of the day it really just matters that the developers are building these these sorts of resilient decentralized kind of like things here and also the hardcore users are promoting these sorts of things so that we can actually get people using things that are secure decentralized sustainable instead of the multitude of crap that we saw proliferate last year they're probably going to be another cycle of that eventually especially as the markets heat up again but i'm hoping that the um

kind of like um the things that are more sustainable uh continue growing and uh uh kind of continue dominating over time as well all right so starkware announced yesterday that starknet is preparing for a regenerative on ethereum mainnet now the term regenesis may ring a bell for you this is what optimism did back i believe last year they did a whole regenesis for ovm 2.0 um so starkware says here after many updates and changes to the system we'll be relaunching a more mature version of starknet which will be as lean and secure as possible so today stagnant exists as kind of like an alpha maybe a beta capacity where there's not really much activity on it just yet there's not really really many people using it just

yet and that's kind of by design because when you do a regenesis you basically have to start the chain again um and you don't want to be doing that if there's lots of people on there already there's lots of value on there already and it would require like coordinating all the apps and developers and users to migrate or to at least kind of like kind of like coordinate in a way that they don't lose their funds and lose their positions and things like that so this regeneration can be done relatively easily just like it would for optimism but once stucknet actually gets usage and has a lot of apps built on top of it that are on main nets then um every genesis would probably not be the best of ideas right but yeah this is happening you can get all the details in this kind of blog post that they put

together here which i'll link in the youtube description for you uh but yeah that's happening relatively soon i think all right so i just wanted to highlight quickly this thread from alec here about modular blockchains obviously that's the talk of the town pretty much everyone's talking about modular blockchains now it's pretty funny how polynomial came out of nowhere and just pioneered that terminology or at least popularized it i think some people were talking about it before especially in the cosmos ecosystem but uh i think polly now really popularized that terminology now everyone talks about it and i talk about it all the time on the refuel so this thread may not be an alpha pack thread for you guys like it like it is for maybe newer people but definitely check it out anyway because it nicely summarizes kind of like what modular blockchains are what the kind of like future will

look like and all the different platforms kind of like vying to be part of that future there all right finally here i just wanted to quickly mention this nft marketplace that hunter from arbitram mentioned on on twitter so this is an uh sorry an nft explorer not marketplace so this is an nft explorer called nft scan you can go to arbitrom.nftscan.com and you can basically uh i guess explore all the nft activity on arbitrary in a really nice familiar interface this reminds me of ether scan right so you can see here a bunch of different metrics like um uh volume ranking uh top mints gas trackers volume over the last kind of like i think 24 hours or something like that and there's probably a bit more analytics if i was

to click here yep you can get like a bigger breakdown here and discover new nfts and stuff like that so if you are someone who loves nfts and you are looking to get more involved with something like arbitrary mnfts well then you can definitely check out arbitram.nftscan.com to do that uh but i think on that note that's going to be it for today so thank everyone for listening and watching be sure to subscribe to the channel if you haven't yet give it a thumbs up subscribe to the newsletter join the discord channel and i'll catch you all next week thanks everyone